From "Reflections: Gnome Life Artists & Friends Cover Each Other"

Since 2005 Gnome Life Records has been steadily releasing outsider folk, dreamy psychedelia, spoken word, and deep listening records & tapes… all from a foggy mountaintop in Big Sur, California (unceded Esselen land). Reflections is a celebration of the West Coast, mystic-weirdo ecosystem that Gnome Life serves to nourish and champion.

Enshrined here, digitally and on magnetic tape, are eleven Gnome Life artists’ and friends’ fractal interpretations of one another’s works. Artists were assigned to each other “secret Santa style” and so toiled covertly in their respective bedrooms, studios, or caves – seeking out and refining the precious ore within their prescribed tune.

It is perhaps of little surprise that such a remarkable cohort of artists would dig deeply and create covers so wildly their own. Yet, we can still remark at the way entirely new arrangements are built from single ear-worms, menacing dissonance is culled from groovy riffs, and the subconscious is given voice throughout this collection.

Originally conceived to commemorate fifteen years of operation, this collection’s release was delayed by the Covid-19 Pandemic, and thus emerges in 2021 for Gnome Life’s sweet sixteen. Side A contains the eleven aforementioned covers. While the B-side presents the original recordings of each song, for your enjoyment and deeper reflection.

Little Wings - Buried on the Wind (Fletcher Tucker)

WIDE by BIRD BY SNOW

INTO THE ABYSS by THE RANGE OF LIGHT WILDERNESS

GOLD TEETH by LITTLE WINGS

from "Letters from the Forest of Nisene Marks" by Mountainhood. Gnome Life cassette exclusive for Cassette Store Day (9/27/14)!

Mountainhood - Mushroom Hunting (In the Rain)

GNOME LIFE THEME SONG by BIRD BY SNOW

from "True Prayer" deluxe LP/CD 3/24/15
http://gnomeliferecords.com/trueprayer.html

Santiparro - The Benefit Of Confrontation (feat. Will Oldham)

The Breathing Night

Born Back into the Earth

Lyrics:

Snapping dead branches to build a bonfire in the snow
Huddled close beside you steam rising from our soaking clothing
A Three days walk from the nearest road
This trail consuming storm holds us in stillness at the new center of the world
An ancient rite enacted, standing vigil through the night
Unbidden, ancestors gather to share in warmth and light 
Great grandmothers in rough spun nettle-cloth
Bright with the colors of their lands
Shades of fungi flowers and stones ground to dust
Great grandfather's so long ago forgotten
That the earth has utterly reclaimed them
Crowns of elder twigs and lichen mottled skin
All eyes calm and bright, deep and clear as days spent gathering water & wood
Unnamed household gods of your family and my own
Amassed together in this field of falling snow
Tending to our wild spontaneous hearth
And another singular flame of life still hidden and unknown
Our child waits out the night between us
Tiny in the world within you
Barely a spark
Yet burning 

Bound together at the threshold of the timeless
I hold your hands as the waters rise around us
A swelling continuum of mammalian experience
Rocking and moaning, eruptions of guttural entonement
Wordless prayers in the tongue of every birthing species
An altered state of total exhaustion and self-sacrifice
Held within the enormity of our love
Sustained by our love for our emergent child
As uncanny waves of pain tirelessly break upon you 
I see you tethered between worlds
Encreatured moonlight
A vessel for tides of salt water and blood
Gateway for Spirit
The sun warming forests
With a snap, her purple static face emerges
Eyes and mouth still sealed tight from the world within you
And in a single bawling breath, 
10,000 ancestors coalesce
To animate your perfect newborn body, 
You, my daughter
Exhausted from your journey
Slippery against my chest
Utterly at peace now, we behold each other
And my heart breaks open to reform around you
Resting, the three of us together for the first time
Adrift in the vastness of our mutual becoming
Life begins anew

To Light a Fire

Only Dancing

Pregnant Emptiness

Lyrics:
Pine-song fills the trail
Unborn child of wind and bough
Wild wordless dharma
Unveiled and veiled
Bitter mugwort  tea
Steeped on the howling, stony ridge
Snow-laden oak limb
Sweeping the ground bear in freezing wind
Shadeless switchbacks erase all thoughts
Footfalls on sun soaked duff

Soft, mossy stone receives my touch
Endless seeping and tumbling springs
Giving birth to deep ravines
Steep, green, folding mountain peaks beyond peaks
Bleached bones of the fallen oak
Calligraphic branches of madrone
Poison oak recalls my aimless, wandering mind 
A gray fox barks in the night
Delivering me to the starless dark
In the fire-lit treetops
Formlessness greets form

Incense gathered from rare fir trees on high
Burning from my altar in the night
Bobcat skull and acorns
From sacred trees to me
Seal tooth collected
In childhood at the beach
Feathers from owl, heron, hawk,
Vulture, filcker, condor, jay
Lichen topped white stone
From the ridge above my house
Woven basket holding seed
And rabbit bone
Picked from  mountain lion scat
On the trail
Prayers carried off as Cedar smoke unfurls
Great flowering mind
Of forebears never known
Ancestral  breath
On the embers of kinship

Brush piled in branches beside the river
Delivered by the surging, torrent rain swell
Still living, broken trees sprawled across the stream
A memory of winter lingering in spring
Half hidden boulders shiny with slime
The river is its own source of light
Steep gorge walls adorned with ferns
Clinging fast as the waterfall tears
Madrone reaching from cliff's edge
Arresting and alive
Small Gods of this precious wild place
Help me to awake

Great Flowering Mind

Lyrics:
With my face pressed to the fecund earth
Water dripping from juniper and birch
Crawling on my hands and knees along the unlit trail
Raven calling from a hollowed snag
Spirit lingering in the scooped out dirt
Moonlight stretches my shape across the hill
With a shadow tall as the forest now
I breathe the complete night into my lungs
Hold it there, until it forms a song 
A song like a river of wind
Flowing through pine boughs at dusk
Boulders churning in the storm swollen creek
Cicadas ringing bells from the canopy 
Standing at the edge of the black lake
Recalling banished spirits of place
Old ways abandoned and forgot
Rituals overgrown and lost
But in the clearing
In an empty house
I see a candle 
Burning low

A Candle

"Ever Present Calm" by Shay Roselip. LP/Cassette. February 9th, 2016. Gnome Life Records

SHAY ROSELIP beams his songs down from the Pleoades. Starlight masquerades as propulsive multi-layered guitars and woodwinds. Oceans of vintage synth tones spill out like the Milky Way. And a hushed and beautiful voice shines cool and clear, in the moonless night. This is cosmic pop for the newest age.

Ever Present Calm - Roselip’s first full-length release - is a pilgrimage through the infinitudes of outer and inner space. Deep, lugubrious bass lines, and emotionally open lyrics, cut a clear path for us to follow these complex tune-ways. Arpeggiating riffs and tonal cascades open like so many portals around us, begging the exploration of the extra dimensions that hide inside us and in these songs. 

Recorded in Bolinas, Big Sur and Inverness, Ever Present Calm is imbued with the etheric power and intoxicating beauty of California’s wild coast. This album was performed and composed by Roselip along with producer Jeremy Harris – current member of Vetiver, founder of new age music imprint Quest Coast Quarterly, and editor of the Inverness Almanac.

The first pressing of this release is limited to 220 hand-numbered copies on white vinyl, with deluxe letter-pressed jackets. The cassette edition is limited to 200 high fidelity tapes in silk-screened, cardboard tape boxes. And the album will be available via all major digital outlets.

Shay Roselip - Sorted World

from "Music Today" the debut LP by Fountainsun. Due out on Gnome Life, July 2015.

Fountainsun - Witness the Wonder

from "Music Today" the debut Fountainsun LP, due out in July on Gnome Life Records

Fountainsun - Old Pine Tree

"Light Green Leaves" by Little Wings (LP+Mp3)
Gnome Life Records
Release date: May 27th, 2016

For the last two decades Little Wings (Kyle Field) has been quietly building a kingdom of lyrically and melodically incomparable alt-folk songs. In a treasure trove of hundreds of songs and twelve unique albums, one Little Wings record sparkles with a particularly iridescent sheen… the drifter-pop, lo-fi masterpiece Light Green Leaves. 

In 2002, Kyle Field released Light Green Leaves on three formats (cassette, vinyl, CD). Each format bore different versions of the same songs in various states of refinement. The tape was solo demo recordings made on a hand-held recorder. The vinyl was loosey-goosey studio experimentation around the major themes. And the CD contained the polished precious stones. This latter, definitive version of Little Wings’ indie classic Light Green Leaves is now available on vinyl for the first time ever!

Light Green Leaves features spare and eclectic percussion, surfy electrics and sandy nylon strings, rolling bass lines, an occasional sci-fi keyboard, and Kyle Field singing along with himself in unpracticed harmonies. Compositions are assembled with care and playful intuition like tiny stick-and-leaf fairy houses. Shrink down, climb inside, and enter a fantastic inner world. 

A personal mythology unfolds in Light Green Leaves amidst naturalistic melodies and truly masterful wordplay. Whimsy is the lyrical modality of choice, but these song-poems are no less profound for their impish nature. The songs sometimes feel like nursery rhymes from another dimension populated entirely by Kyle Field. This album, and the man behind it are of the sand and surf. Just like Kyle, these tunes are open-hearted ramblers, with long sunny days tangled in their salty hair, and a constellation of roguish twinkles in their eyes.

Remastered for analog bliss by the mighty John Golden, Light Green Leaves has never sounded so lovely.

Little Wings - Look At What The Light Did Now

Little Wings - The Way I Deux

GOOD KING WINCESLAS by SEAN SMITH

Album: "Sweep the Temple" 
Artist: Fountainsun (Daniel Higgs & Fumie Ishii)
Format: LP/Mp3 
Label: Gnome Life Records
Release Date: December 2nd, 2016

On Fountainsun’s debut LP, Music Today, Daniel Higgs and Fumie Ishii served as guides on a multidimensional pilgrimage through the cosmos. We return, with their second album, to find our Dionysian duo not at journey’s end, but settled down within a many-chambered temple –contemplating matters of the heart and sprit; immersed in daily ritual both sacred and profane. 

As the title suggests, the central theme of "Sweep the Temple" is one of purification. Cleansing the inner and outer sanctum, primarily of limitation. Limits imposed upon us, and the Universe itself, by the very idea that we can fully comprehend the nature of reality. "Sweep the Temple" is a call to action, and an embodiment of that call. We must “sweep the temple free” each day from notions of duality, perceived separation, and the entanglements of socialized beliefs. 

Time-honored forms of expression (folk song, parable, ballad, rhapsody) populate this album but appear slightly out of phase with ordinary reality. Fountainsun employs many instruments to purify their anarchic sanctuary, including a 12-string banjo, vibraphone, marimba, guitars, drums, gongs, and even an actual broom. 

These songs coax and goad in equal measure, drawing us ever deeper into holy negotiations between sense and nonsense. Take the Dadaist deconstruction of Aesop’s Fables that comprise the lyrics of the track titled “Aesop”. In order to "Sweep the Temple" we must at times surrender narrative entirely and simply exist in marvelous uncertainty.

Aesop - Fountainsun

Album: "Sweep the Temple" 
Artist: Fountainsun (Daniel Higgs & Fumie Ishii)
Format: LP/Mp3 
Label: Gnome Life Records
Release Date: December 2nd, 2016

On Fountainsun’s debut LP, Music Today, Daniel Higgs and Fumie Ishii served as guides on a multidimensional pilgrimage through the cosmos. We return, with their second album, to find our Dionysian duo not at journey’s end, but settled down within a many-chambered temple –contemplating matters of the heart and sprit; immersed in daily ritual both sacred and profane.

As the title suggests, the central theme of "Sweep the Temple" is one of purification. Cleansing the inner and outer sanctum, primarily of limitation. Limits imposed upon us, and the Universe itself, by the very idea that we can fully comprehend the nature of reality. "Sweep the Temple" is a call to action, and an embodiment of that call. We must “sweep the temple free” each day from notions of duality, perceived separation, and the entanglements of socialized beliefs.

Time-honored forms of expression (folk song, parable, ballad, rhapsody) populate this album but appear slightly out of phase with ordinary reality. Fountainsun employs many instruments to purify their anarchic sanctuary, including a 12-string banjo, vibraphone, marimba, guitars, drums, gongs, and even an actual broom.

These songs coax and goad in equal measure, drawing us ever deeper into holy negotiations between sense and nonsense. Take the Dadaist deconstruction of Aesop’s Fables that comprise the lyrics of the track titled “Aesop”. In order to "Sweep the Temple" we must at times surrender narrative entirely and simply exist in marvelous uncertainty.

SWEEP THE TEMPLE

Sweep the Temple (excerpt) - Fountainsun

from "Cold Spring" LP/Cass/Digital - June 30th, 2017

Cold Spring

Fletcher Tucker - Dark Teaching

Fletcher Tucker - I Became Smoke

Womb of Light

Womb of Light - Fletcher Tucker

This is a digital EP which we were going to release as a 7" but just decided to start giving away. These songs are alternate universe recordings of two tunes from "Songbread/Another Ocean"; "Lovers on our Backs" and "If You Wait"... respectively.

Here's what Fletcher (aka Bird By Snow) has to say: "I like to record multiple versions of songs, it feels more like they have their own lives and energies."

Recorded on 8-track cassette at home in San Francisco... pretty far-out stuff.

HELPLESS by BIRD BY SNOW

Little Wings - Light Feeling

Mountainhood - Luna

Mountainhood - White Shroud

from "Visions of the Country" by Robbie Basho - LP+Mp3/FLAC reissue - Gnome Life Records
http://www.gnomeliferecords.com/visions_index.html

Available for the 1st time on vinyl for 35 years, and for the 1st time ever in high quality digital!

Robbie Basho - Blue Crystal Fire

From "Visions of the Country", originally released in 1978. Deluxe vinyl re-issue on Gnome Life Records. August 20th, 2013

Robbie Basho - Rodeo (30 sec. sample)

Fletcher Tucker - Summoning

from "Be Earth Now" by Joanna Macy & Anita Barrows

"I live my life in widening circles" – Joanna Macy

"How surely gravity's law" – Anita Barrows

Gnome Life Records produces analog, limited edition, and hand-made musical artifacts. Our headquarters and recording studio sit atop Partington Ridge in Big Sur, California. Nestled in an old growth oak and redwood forest, Gnome Life emanates from a wild and majestic landscape, rich in human and non-human history, overflowing with physical and non-physical power, ripe with mystery.

Gnome Life Records

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