Loren Connors
Loren Connors’ music speaks of a loneliness that’s almost devastating in its purity. At its best, Connors’ music works at a cellular level, as though the fundamental nature of the piece is implicit in the very first note played: a flower just ready to bloom. But while Connors’ music often comes across as gentle and fragile, sometimes edging close to the vacuum of silence, there is great confidence and courage at its heart.
Loren Connors’ music speaks of a loneliness that’s almost devastating in its purity. At its best, Connors’ music works at a cellular level, as though the fundamental nature of the piece is implicit in the very first note played: a flower just ready to bloom. But while Connors’ music often comes across as gentle and fragile, sometimes edging close to the vacuum of silence, there is great confidence and courage at its heart.
Unaccompanied Acoustic Guitar Vol. 2
Here is the second volume of protean solo improvisations recorded by Loren Connors in his artist's garret in New Haven, Connecticut. Like the first volume, it was committed to tape and pressed to vinyl in 1979. Never having seen a copy of this record, and having pressed it before we discovered a master cassette exists, this is as good a transfer as can be had for the nonce. Loren's chair creaks like rusty crow and the amount of random tapping and thumping during the original session just about d…
Evening Air
Evening Air is the result of Loren Connors and David Grubbs’s first trip to the recording studio in the two decades since their first duo album, Arborvitae (Häpna). Arborvitae stood out for its spellbinding, utterly unhurried meshing of electric guitar (Connors) and piano (Grubbs). With this long-awaited return, Connors and Grubbs take turns trading off on piano and guitar, with Grubbs at the keyboard for the two gently expansive pieces on the first side and Connors taking over the instrument fo…
The Blue Hour
Totally beautiful and rare piano performance from Loren Connors, joined on guitar by long time collaborator Alan Licht.
Let The Darkness Fall
Recital is pleased to publish the first vinyl edition of Let the Darkness Fall, a forgotten corner from the vast discography of Suzanne Langille & Loren Connors. Joined here by David Daniell and Andrew Burnes (of the Atlanta-based group San Agustin), Darkness was recorded in the summer of 1998 on a Tascam Porta-5 in Loren and Suzanne’s Brooklyn living room, and issued the following year as a limited CD by Secretly Canadian.
The tender gloom of Let the Darkness Fall sounds like a broadcast of som…
Night of Rain
*Limited edition of 200 hand-numbered copies. 100 color pages.* Night of Rain is the second art book by musician and artist Loren Connors, following last year's Wildweeds (Recital, 2021). The book is composed of two parts: 'Night of Rain,' which Loren describes as "seascapes, or expressions of the sea and shore. [They are] about the power of rain and the sea, lagoons, bays, tides." Taken from small pencil and black ink drawings enlarged again and again at a copy store. The pieces would often be …
Autumn Fair
Limited edition of 350 copies. Sold out at source To celebrate the 10th anniversary of Recital, we present Autumn Fair. A group LP comprised of 44 guest players (full list below), curated and edited together by Sean McCann. Autumn Fair aptly embodies the feeling of Recital as a record label; the infusion of abstract sound art and sentimental beauty – performed by both younger and older generations of artists. Oren Ambarchi - guitar, Ed Atkins - paper shredder, Jason Bannon - family, Derek Baron …
Airs
*2022 repress. Limited edition of 600 copies.* Over the 23 years since Loren Connors’ Airs was first published, it has drawn a thick circle of fans. Gently recorded to cassette tape in 1999, (with wonderfully subtle multi-tracking), Airs is comprised of a series of brief electronic guitar poems. Intimately composed with the patience and purposeful hesitation we have reverently come to expect from Connors. Lyrical melodies recur in different forms throughout the LP, as shifting figures in a dream…
Leone
*2022 stock.* Leone is the first meeting of electric guitarists Loren Connors and Oren Ambarchi. It’s somewhat surprising it’s taken this long as these two are connected by ongoing collaborators, like Jim O’Rourke and Keiji Haino. Connors, for more than 40 years, has continued to develop an iconic sound tethered to radical permutations of the blues. Ambarchi’s own multi-decade transfiguration of the guitar inhabits a rarefied realm of abstracted tones and dissonance pitched between improvisation…
Portrait of a Soul (2x10")
Beautiful reissue of the 2000 album on FBWL, guitar ballads about Day, Evening, Night and Dawn. Remastered in 2014 by Taylor Deupree at 12k.
At Issue (LP)
A unique live performance at Issue Project Room gathered the former Sonic Youth member and artist Kim Gordon and the legendary minimal blues master and artist Loren Connors in 2014. In December 2014, the Issue Project Room venue in New York City offered the first-time duo with the legendary Brooklyn- based guitarist Loren Connors and the rock icon Kim Gordon. From this almost 1 1⁄2 hour set, Kim and Loren decided to archive their favourite movement on a physical record which is a 12” vinyl now …
Wildweeds (Book)
* 9″ x 12″ perfect soft bound, 120 pages First edition of 150, hand-numbered * Wildweeds is the first art book by musician Loren Connors. Following a series of LPs on Recital showcasing Loren’s haunting guitar playing, I am pleased to present a proper collection of his Wildweed drawings. Connors’ visual art has occasionally been included as little prints and pamphlets inside his LPs and CDs; though, always explored in a shade, an appendage to his music. Combusted bulbs of purple and yellow fl…
Untitled
Tom Carter and Loren Connors are a pairing so obvious, it’s a mystery how it took this long to happen. Each has traversed the American underground on their own unique path. Carter co-founded acid-folk improvisers Charalambides in 1991 and Connors has been redefining his singular vision of the blues since the late 1970s. On this debut non-titled LP, these guitar masters conjure a stunning, and at times labyrinthine, six-string tableau. Carter’s high-contrast spiral melodies sear through Connors’…
Arborvitae
This is the first LP release on Loren Connors’ and David Grubbs’ Arborvitae, originally released on CD by the Swedish label Häpna in 2003. Loren Connors and David Grubbs first performed as a duo on May 30, 2003 at the Green-Wood Cemetery Chapel in Brooklyn, N.Y. Green-Wood Cemetery is one of Brooklyn’s landmarks—it’s the highest natural point in the borough, and an unexpected expanse of tranquility in the midst of the city. The stone interior of the chapel makes the quietest of sounds audible, a…
Unaccompanied Acoustic Guitar Vol. 1
Edition of 500. "Here is the first volume of protean solo improvisations recorded by Loren Connors in his artist's garret in New Haven, Connecticut. It was committed to tape on February 20, 1979 and pressed to vinyl soon after. As with the two earlier LPs on Loren's Daggett label, singer/recorder-player Kath Bloom also appears on this record, although only on the second side. Those prior LPs were both issued in 1978, The first was Acoustic Guitar/Gifts a split LP with Loren solo on one side and …
The Only Way To Go Is Straight Through
On this Record Store Day exclusive release, entitled The Only Way To Go Is Straight Through, Thurston Moore and Loren Connors fearlessly dive into a hot, dark pool and enter a world of surging sound and faint lights. They can’t see each other. They can only hear each other’s searing notes in the heat. But it is enough to take them through.
The material on The Only Way To Go Is Straight Through was compiled from two live recordings. Side A was captured at The Stone in Manhattan, where Moore and C…
Moonlight
The extraordinary creative partnership of New Haven, CT duo Kath Bloom and Loren Connors has haunted psych-folk fans since the early 80s. Kath taught herself guitar during shifts as a janitor at a New Haven cemetery, while Loren’s free-form idiosyncratic style had been developing since the late 60s. Between 1981 and 1984, the duo recorded two live and four studio albums, mostly self-released in tiny quantities.Early on, their music mixed folk and blues traditionals with a handful of Kath’s vulne…
Sand In My Shoe
The extraordinary creative partnership of New Haven, CT duo Kath Bloom and Loren Connors has haunted psych-folk fans since the early 80s. Kath taught herself guitar during shifts as a janitor at a New Haven cemetery, while Loren’s free-form idiosyncratic style had been developing since the late 60s. Between 1981 and 1984, the duo recorded two live and four studio albums, mostly self-released in tiny quantities.Early on, their music mixed folk and blues traditionals with a handful of Kath’s vulne…
Autumn\'s Sun
One of the world’s most singular guitarists, Loren Connors is among few living musicians whose prolific body of work can be said to be wholly justified in its plenitude. On more than 100 records across almost four decades, Connors has wrung distinct shades of ephemeral blues from his guitar, its sound ever-shifting while remaining unmistakably his own. From his early, splintered take on the Delta bottleneck style through his song-based albums with Suzanne Langille and on to the painterly abstrac…
The Departing of a Dream, Vol. VII
The Departing of a Dream, Vol. VII is the debut collaboration between two giants of the New York avant-garde — guitarist Loren Connors and saxophonist/trumpeter Daniel Carter. It's a gorgeous, languorous soundscape distilled from the darkest reaches of blues and jazz. For nearly 17 years Connors has used the Departing series to continue his meditation on Miles Davis' epic "He Loved Him Madly" and expand his efforts to create disappearing music. The duo does just that, vanishing behind decaying …