Rocket Summer Sale (25% Off) + Roxy Gordon TV
Rocket Summer 2023 (cf. our recent reissue of Mike Cooper’s Life and Death in Paradise) is nearing its sweltering end. To celebrate the seasonal change—and Labor Day—use coupon code ROCKET through September 8 on the PoB webstore or Bandcamp for 25% off most everything (the coupon does not apply to any items already on sale).
To add further incentive, tomorrow, September 1, is Bandcamp Friday, when that righteous platform waives its fee to pass along all revenues directly to artists and labels. Help us make room in our stacks for several upcoming releases—beginning with Setting’s Shone a Rainbow Light On and continuing with records from more PoB veterans and favorites, to be announced soon.
As a treat, we’re also sharing the first of our unearthed archival clips of the inimitable, legendary Roxy Gordon. Watch Roxy, reluctantly promoting his new 1988 album Crazy Horse Never Died and discussing his background as a “genuine breed” artist, mystify, baffle, outwit, and just barely tolerate the confused and under informed young hosts of a Dallas TV talkshow.
HOST: “Do you have a favorite poem you can recite for us?”
ROXY: “No.”
2023 IN PARADISE
Roxy Gordon: Crazy Horse Never Died
Arrestingly singular and deeply moving, this 1988 album by Choctaw, Assiniboine, and Texan poet, journalist, artist, activist, and musician Roxy Gordon (First Coyote Boy) (1945–2000)—whose long out-of-print work has been acclaimed by friends such as Townes Van Zandt, Leonard Cohen, and Terry Allen—sets his cold-blooded, bone-lean reflections on the complexities and contradictions of American Indian (and American) history and identity to atmospheric, synth-damaged country-rock that skirts ambient textures and postpunk deconstructions.
Purchase LP/CD/chapbook/digital
$9.00 – $37.00
Other Options (physical/digital/international)
Mike Cooper: Life and Death in Paradise + Milan Live Acoustic 2018
Mike Cooper wrote his final songwriter record, a suite of gloaming glam-rock anthems performed with a spiritual jazz trio, while living on the Costa Tropical of Granada, Spain, an era when he was considering retiring from music altogether. A chance encounter and a last-ditch record deal convinced him to make one last album, which he recorded in 1974 at Pathway Studios in London, with “The Greatest Rock and Roll Band in the World,” featuring the inventive South African jazz rhythm section of Louis Moholo and Harry Miller with UK saxophonist Mike Osborne.
This first-ever reissue includes a bonus CD of Milan Live Acoustic 2018, a previously unreleased solo set that represents Cooper’s return, after forty-four years pursuing free improvisation and electronics, to a new, deconstructed approach to singing, steel guitar, and songcraft.
Purchase LP+CD/2xCD/digital
$11.00 – $27.00
Other Options (physical/digital/international)
Setting: Shone a Rainbow Light On (September 29)
The debut recording by Setting, a trio comprising Nathan Bowles (solo/trio, Pelt, Black Twig Pickers) on strings, keys, and percussion; Jaime Fennelly (Mind Over Mirrors, Peeesseye) on harmoniums, synthesizers, and piano zither; and Joe Westerlund (solo, Califone, Sylvan Esso, Jake Xerxes Fussell) on drums, percussion, and metallophones, Shone a Rainbow Light On traverses textural, phosphorescent topography with a certified organic folk-engine. Fueled by a vibratory hybrid of acoustic and electronic instrumentation, these four stately longform pieces sound like a UFO slowly sinking into a peat bog.
Pre-order LP/CD
$9.00 – $30.00