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Bad Timing
2024 Repress. LP version, originally released 1997, the first Jim O'Rourke album for Drag City. "Make no mistake, Bad Timing is not a pop album by any standards. But it is a musing on popular standards and uses much of the same instrumentation that many of our country's most popular records have. Yes, Bad Timing is a theme record, Jim O'Rourke's pop opera, just waiting for someone to come along and play with it. Based on John Fahey-esque 6-string acoustic guitar foundations, each of the three pi…
Insignificance
2024 Repress. Insignificance, Jim O'Rourke's third solo album for Drag City, reaffirms that he is not only a fine composer, arranger, and producer, but a gifted, creative songwriter as well. As with Eureka and the Halfway to a Threeway EP, O'Rourke continues to find as many possibilities in singing and songwriting as he does experiment with pure sound. However, this time O'Rourke adds a few twists to the formula he pioneered on those two efforts.
He sings on each of Insignificance's tracks, his…
Eureka
2024 repress; originally released in 1999. LP version. "Jim O'Rourke is doing for himself what he's more than generously done for other so-called musical talents. Everybody wants a little pop in their lives and the O'Rourke is no exception. There is no way to listen to Eureka without hearing the eccentricity, the progressive musical textures, the utter lack of anything like pop music, but at the same time it's magnificent in scale, pleasant to listen to, catchy and even reminiscent of other reco…
Ys
2024 stock. Double LP version; deluxe gatefold sleeve, with inserted 12"x12" booklet of lyrics. "Five songs, fifty-five minutes, what-an-album! Ys is to Joanna Newsom a dream collaboration between her voice and harp and a full orchestra -- a sound many of us fans have thought we were hearing when listening with closed eyes at her concert performances. Songs familiar to Joanna's following are a big part of Ys, having been performed in concert over the past year -- but not with the arrangements yo…
The Milk-Eyed Mender
2024 repress. "Drag City takes great pleasure in introducing to you a remarkable new musical singer, songwriter and all-around talent, Joanna Newsom. Joanna's music has more of an affinity with the folk revival of the 60s, or the bluegrass movement at present, than with most contemporary 'folk' (or 'anti-folk') scenes. Affinities aside, her style could hardly be called bluegrass; nor does it evoke the pastoral tonalities of 60s folk: she sings about whalebones, sleep, grammar, mollusks, accumula…
Blue
A peak album for Joni Mitchell and genuinely one of the greatest singer-singwriter albums of the '70s, of not ever, all the greater for the intimacy of the songs and beauty of her voice! Perfect isn't a word you want to throw around too often, but Joni Mitchell's Blue might be one of the rare perfect albums. They way personal storytelling soars as relatable poetry, the sparest acoustic backing feels a whole buzzing environment for her voice to soar over. It deserves every bit of praise it's gott…
Ladies of the Canyon
Ladies Of The Canyon was originally recorded between 1969 and 1970, and serves as a transition from her earlier folk inspired release to the more sophisticated albums Joni Mitchell would go on to release. Many of the songs feature lengthy instrumental passages, something would become fully realized on albums like Court And Spark. The flute and saxophone that appear on "For Free" and "Conversation" give a taste of the influence of jazz over many of Mitchell's subsequent recordings. The singer cov…
Gli Occhi Freddi Della Paura
New remastered reissue, the only credited soundtrack appearance of Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza, makes you wish Ennio Morricone had used his free improv unit for that purpose more often. Gli Occhi Fredda Della Paura, or Cold Eyes of Fear, is an Italian slasher (giallo) from 1971. The score has Il Gruppo augmented by a rhythm section and a fuzz-wah guitarist (most likely Alessandro Alessandroni). The results sound like a creepy take on 70s Miles Davis, with driving jazz beats a la C…
Black Beauty
Paradigmatic yet forward-looking township jazz from 1975. Braiding Wes Montgomery into Marabi, the legendary guitarist leads a stellar line-up of musicians including Kippie Moeketsi, Barney Rachabane, Gilbert Matthews, Dennis Mpale, and Sipho Gumede.The opener glances sideways at the commercial success of Abdullah Ibrahim’s recent Mannenberg — but the real magic follows on, when the players cut loose in their own, new directions.This is the first vinyl reissue. Sleevenotes by Kwanele Sosibo feat…
Second Hand Reading
* Limited edition of 300 copies * An art edition of this release including an original drawing by William Kentridge hand-signed by the artist is also available, exclusively from VF. Second-Hand Reading is composed of hundreds of drawings superimposed on pages from the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary and other lexicons and encyclopedias. Like figures on a stage, drawings of the artist, scenes from nature, geometric shapes and phrases dance to music by Neo Muyanga across a backdrop of definition…
Streaming Music, Streaming Capital
In Streaming Music, Streaming Capital, Eric Drott analyzes the political economy of online music streaming platforms. Attentive to the way streaming has reordered the production, circulation, and consumption of music, Drott examines key features of this new musical economy, including the roles played by data collection, playlisting, new methods of copyright enforcement, and the calculation of listening metrics. Yet because streaming underscores how uneasily music sits within existing regimes of …
The Voice in the Headphones
The voice in the headphones says, “you’re rolling” . . .
Good Night the Pleasure Was Ours
With Good night the pleasure was ours, David Grubbs melts down and recasts three decades of playing music on tour into a book-length poem, bringing to a close the trilogy that includes Now that the audience is assembled and The Voice in the Headphones. In Good night the pleasure was ours, the world outside the tour filters in with eccentric sparseness. From teenage punk bands to ensembles without fixed membership, and from solo performance to a group augmented by digital avatars, Grubbs presents…
A Most Valuable Medium: The Remediation of Oral Performance on Early Commercial Recordings
Between 1895 and 1920, the United States saw a sharp increase in commercial sound recording, the first mass medium of home entertainment. As companies sought to discover what kinds of records would appeal to consumers, they turned to performance forms already familiar to contemporary audiences—sales pitches, oratory, sermons, and stories. In A Most Valuable Medium, Richard Bauman explores the practical problems that producers and performers confronted when adapting familiar oral genres to this i…
Karma
Acoustic Sounds Series edition Karma is a jazz recording by the American tenor saxophonist Pharoah Sanders, released in May 1969 on the Impulse! label. A pioneering work of the "spiritual jazz" style, it has become Sanders' most popular and critically acclaimed album. It is among a number of spiritually-themed albums released on the Impulse! label in the late 1960s/early 1970s. The album's main piece is the 32-minute-long "The Creator Has a Master Plan," co-composed by Sanders with vocalist Leo…
Spectral Evolution
After a two-decade interlude, Jim O’Rourke’s Moikai returns with Spectral Evolution, a major new work by Rafael Toral. Making his name in the mid-1990s with influential guitar drone platters like "Sound Mind Sound Body" and "Wave Field" (both reissued by Drag City in recent years), Toral has never been one to rest on his laurels repeating his past glories. In the early years of the 21st century, Toral laid the guitar aside, along with the focus on extended tones that had defined much of his musi…
Evil Does Not Exist
Following their collaboration on 2021’s Oscar winning Drive My Car, Eiko Ishibashi & filmmaker Ryusuke Hamaguchi up the ante with a deeply inspired synergistic exchange: music for images, visuals for sounds. Eiko’s score initiated the project that has become his celebrated new film (Best Picture – BFI London Film Fest, Asian Film Awards, Silver Lion – Venice Film Fest, Best Score – Asia Film Awards). Every nuance mixed & mastered by Jim O’Rourke.
Second Time Around
2024 vinyl reissue. Blue color vinyl. "Returned from early '90s Japan are the holy sounds of Ghost. Their collective, clearly inspired by various forms of transcendental music throughout history, created a new syncretic psychedelia with these albums, mixing the texture and vibe of multinational forms of traditional music, with strummed antique stringed instruments and the haunting wail of a recorder on top of their heavy beats and guitars. The considerable depth of this approach was explored thr…
Ghost
Formed in 1984, Ghost burgeoned slowly, blowing open the gate in 1990 with their eponymous debut. Opening with a vast spirit plosion – shards of antique light and clouds of centuries-old, dust-laden airs escaping from a primeval tomb – they settle into the deep feeling. A variety of mostly acoustic instruments aids their projection of traditional sounds from space and time, troubadours of unknown, an enigma of eternal trippiness all about them.
We Have Dozens of Titles
The first release from Gastr del Sol in over 25 years is nigh! Like a bolt echoing back from the blue, We Have Dozens of Titles restrikes the iron of Gastr del Sol, plunging us back into the maelstrom of David Grubbs and Jim O’Rourke’s all too brief (but ultimately, long enough to change everything incisively) run together between 1993–1998. For We Have Dozens of Titles, Jim and David reconnected to assemble nearly an hour of previously unreleased live recordings — including their final performa…