From the album 'In Search Of Light' released on the Students Of Decay label on LP/download (2011).

Orbits - for John Patrick Mckenzie

Borneo cicadas

 	                  Don Bikoff - Celestial Explosion

Don Bikoff released one lone, rare solo album, 'Celestial Explosion', on Keyboard Records in 1968, now reissued on LP/CD/DL by Tompkins Square. Watch the YouTube video of Bikoff playing on the Ted Mack Amateur Hour, taped May 12, 1968. You'll see the sheepish, long-haired, mustachioed musician spinning gold in a style (still?) so foreign to the mainstream listener. The befuddled host concludes after Don's performance, "That's unusual to say the least." A kid from Oyster Bay, LI, Bikoff got his start in Greenwich Village, annoying Dave Van Ronk and playing the folk/blues circuit where he met Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee, Jesse Fuller and Mississippi John Hurt. The comparisons to John Fahey's and Robbie Basho's work stated in the LP liner notes touched a nerve with Fahey himself at the time. Today, those comparisons are still inevitable, however they are for lazy ears. Bikoff has his own approach. 

Celestial Explosion

ORDER LP : http://www.tompkinssquare.com/deitrick1.html

Tompkins Square is proud to release two solo acoustic guitar albums by Rick Deitrick, out August 25th. Gentle Wilderness was released as a private press LP in 1978. River Sun River Moon consists of previously unreleased recordings from the same time period. Deitrick came to our attention via Brooks Rice and Michael Klausman, who compiled Imaginational Anthem Vol 8 : The Private Press, which features Rick's "Missy Christa" from Gentle Wilderness.

Ohio-born Rick Deitrick took up the guitar at 16 and decided to approach his playing as if he was the only guy on an island and the instrument had just washed ashore one day.  According to Rick, “I completely divorced my playing from any formal music knowledge, but it was very important to me to use original tuning. During those years, the sixties/seventies, there was a lot of acoustic guitar playing, often using open tuning as a base. I wanted to create whole tones without de-tuning and keep access to the complex sounds stock tuning provided.”

Rick pressed 500 copies of his tranquil solo guitar record, Gentle Wilderness, in 1978 on Niodrara Records, and sold many at performances and directly to music shops who would pay for them.  He gave copies to various libraries and left a few albums in the middle of the wilderness, next to trails, “so people would find them.” Rick sought inspiration in nature and in particular the various rivers scattered around the Western United States, often composing songs seated beside them —and even occasionally perched on boulders in them. He never played the songs the same way twice and did two passes on each composition in studio. Rick would sometimes literally come straight out of the mountains and rush to the studio to record the ideas he’d gathered. "Missy Christa" was recorded at Mount Olympus studio in Hollywood and was named after Rick’s daughter; it was originally composed right next to the Big Sur River where he had been camping.

Rick currently resides in Los Angeles, “still strumming, waiting for the other shoe to drop.” 

TSQ 5456 River Sun River Moon
TSQ 5432 Gentle Wilderness

Gentle Widerness

Gentle Wilderness

At Morning by Rick Deitrick

8-8-17

Roger Eno - "This Floating World" LP/ with CD - out November 10th, 2017
www.recitalprogram.com/this-floating-world
www.recitalprogram.com/purchase

This Floating World

Purchase

Roger Eno - "Silk" from This Floating World (R38)

Aquila

TRACKLISTING / INTERVIEW:
self-titledmag.com/2018/09/21/geographic-north-label-of-the-month-feature/

FURTHER READING:
getcentered.io/2018/09/21/alva-noto-ryuichi-sakamoto-vrioon-review/

Label of the Month: Geographic North

This is an excerpt from a 36 minute piece for the Longform Editions label, a collective for deep listening. Came out a few weeks ago. 
------------------------
Artist notes: 

This piece is the result of nearly a month spent in the Canadian city of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan during Autumn. I was in Saskatoon to develop a new work and much of my time was spent wandering around this city, which I discovered was also referred to as the 'city of bridges' recording various bridges, as well as streetscapes, the South Saskatchewan River, and people vibrating various structures in Saskatoon, raised pavements, the bridges themselves, and this very cool and narrow pedestrian and train bridge. I have been interested for quite a while now in the ways people contribute sonically to the making of particular spaces, and so this was my focus here. In this recording you will also hear various recordings from cafes I visited in Saskatoon, and the soundtracks I encountered there, I should hat tip The Underground Cafe where I went almost every day. There is also the bass throb from one guy's car who stopped to pump out some thrash metal-ish sounding music, but from the outside all I could hear was this muffled thump, which I found quite hilarious and excellent and also there is a sample from the Saskatoon-based band Waitress, who are a very excellent band I met while there and who allowed me to use a snippet of one of their tracks for this piece. Apart from some very minor edits this piece was performed as it is live in my studio in Brixton, London using field recordings from Saskatoon alongside vibrating wires, strings, squeaking magnetic tape, a zither, shakers, a gong and an owl horn. It is based loosely on the performance I gave in Saskatoon for the Sounds Like Festival in October, 2018.

City Of Bridges (excerpt) out now on Longform Editions

Waves arise naturally on the surface of the vast ocean without troubling its depth. This meditation is an invitation to make your mind like the vast ocean.

Mind Like Ocean - Jack Kornfield

Danny Paul Grody is a solo musician and  founding member of San Francisco based bands Tarentel, The Drift, and Moholy-Nagy. He is a self taught guitarist, and the melodies at the core of Danny’s songwriting bring to mind his love of West African kora, Tacoma style fingerpicking and all things minimal, repetitive & hypnotic.
His first solo album Fountain was released in 2010 on Root Strata followed up by In Search Of Light on the Students Of Decay label in 2011. He's contributed tracks to the Three Lobed 2012 record store day LP Eight Trails, One Path as well as to Vol. 5 of the excellent Tompkins Square guitar soli series, Imaginational Anthem. His most recent and third solo album "Between Two Worlds" was released on August 20th 2013 on the venerable Three Lobed Recordings.  