Notes from Left of the Dial: Nov. 29

HISS GOLDEN MESSENGER: BAD DEBT (PoB-11)

N.B.: This record releases on January 14, 2014. 
http://www.paradiseofbachelors.com/pob-11

M.C. Taylor recorded this spiritually devastating, austere antecedent to the widely celebrated Hiss Golden Messenger albums Haw (2013, PoB-06) and Poor Moon (2011, PoB-02) direct to a portable cassette recorder at the kitchen table of his pine-entwined home in rural Piedmont North Carolina in 2010. It was the dead of winter and the pit of the financial crisis, a moment when the dire ramifications of debt—in its economic, political, and personal senses—had assumed a rank immediacy and terror for many working people around the world, not least of all in the American South. Taylor, his one-year old boy Elijah sleeping in the next room, was compelled to chart the sacred valences of debt, doubt, and family in fresh ways, in the process stripping bare and reinventing his songwriting idiom. In his own words:

Bad Debt comes from ten dense acres of oak, cedar, and apple trees in Pittsboro, North Carolina, directly south of the Haw River. The house where it was made was built in the early 1970s by a hippie cohort that settled along Brooks Branch; though this may sound like some kind of brag, I offer this to explain just how cold it was during the fall and winter when this record was conceived. Most hippies—except for the most famous one, of course, and probably a few others—are shit carpenters. 

The record is about my God: that is, whether I have one, and whether there is a place for me in this world. I don’t go to church, and I am not saved. I can party too. I can do a saxophone now and again, bang the drum. Bad Debt was my revelation, and there are many for whom I’ll never make a record better than this one.

Ruminating on the riddle of faith, a firstborn son, and thorny existential questions large and small, the album laid the lyrical and compositional foundations for HGM's critically acclaimed releases to come. Half of these devotional songs appear elsewhere in the HGM discography in radically reinvented arrangements and permutations—Taylor’s writing practice revealed itself following Bad Debt as essentially iterative, the deliberate enunciation and re-articulation of koans—but they exist here in germinal, psalmic purity and economy, as unadorned and plain and perfectly ragged as the cedar floorboards in that Brooks Branch cabin. 

Three years after the destruction of much of the first, CD-only edition of the album in a warehouse fire during the London riots, this deluxe reissue, featuring the original gatefold artwork and a download coupon, restores the stark masterpiece to its intended full song sequence, including three additional songs, one of which, “Far Bright Star,” has never previously been released in any form. (In 2011 Taylor self-released three vinyl editions of 100 each, now collector’s items, on his Heaven and Earth Magic imprint.) This moving, intimate document, until now available only in limited numbers and difficult and dear to acquire in any format, is critical for fans and new listeners alike, providing a retrospective in advance of a new, full-band HGM album currently being recorded for release on Paradise of Bachelors later this year.  

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Taylor writes lucid, often heartbreaking songs about God and frailty and the passage of time. Bad Debt—rendered, as it was, in a drafty kitchen on a portable tape recorder—is vulnerable and immediate. There are times, listening to it, when I am splayed by its intimacies, made fully prostrate by them. Bad Debt feels like an apotheosis, almost. It is unadulterated in its portrayal of a person desperate for peace. - Amanda Petrusich, The Oxford American

North Carolina songwriter M.C. Taylor doesn’t describe faith as a safe place so much as the destination across some unbridgeable gulf. - The Washington Post

A thing of gentle charm & unmistakable cosmic American beauty. - The Independent (UK)

Bad Debt

Hiss Golden Messenger - Bad Debt (2010/2014, PoB-11): "Drum"

Track A2 from NNA069: Guerilla Toss "Gay Disco" LP
Available December 10th 2013 on Vinyl and Digital formats
nnatapes.com

Gay Disco

Guerilla Toss "Pink Elephant"

mp3 download: http://bit.ly/1iaLxuB
wav file download: http://bit.ly/1bAebjo

Glass Gang
"Sell It All"
Featuring Lizzy Plapinger


Produced by Glass Gang
Recorded/Mixed by Alexander Almgren
Mastered by Joe Lambert

gangglass@gmail.com

Sell It All

Mark McGuire "The Instinct"
Along The Way out on February 4, 2014 on Dead Oceans.

Mark McGuire - The Instinct

Sumie

Speed into

Sumie - Speed Into

'Wolf' from Marika Hackman's 'Sugar Blind' EP.
Available now on iTunes: po.st/T6kC14

Buy On iTunes

Marika Hackman - Wolf

This project was something special and I loved every minute of working on it. I wanted this album to show its full potential by sequencing all of the songs together and make it sound as a whole, like a big medley. And it turned out great, as it should considering the whole album is a masterpiece.

 I even worked on the cover art a bit, found the high quality photo from the channel Stereo Music (https://www.youtube.com/c/StereoMusic...), gave it some color, added the "full dimensional sound" logo, changed the letters to spell out CHiLD, like SMiLE and I think it looks better, and also I found a back cover with the track listing and "Brians Back!" written on I'm guessing literally Brian's back. I fixed that up and added my own track listing. I don't know if it's a legit picture of Brian since it was clearly from a bootleg, but I think it looks like him and I love how it looks. It works well with the humor within Brian's work and its just perfect, Brian's front in front, his back in the back, cracks me up thinking about it.

In my mind if this was released this way, I would imagine a timeline where Mike and maybe Al would finally back off and say "Okay Brian, you can have your way with your "big band and synth mumbo jumbo" on this album. We did this to you once and look how that turned out. Let's just get it over with shall we?" (Some people just never learn do they?)

 The other thing is I would imagine the record company (I'm not sure if its Brother Records or Reprise Records so I put both of their logos on seperate sides) doubling down on the "Brians Back" campaign, putting his name on almost every song as if it would be his own record, just featuring The Beach Boys (honestly looks that way) and let Brian go all out with this album. The only request the record would make is compose a few "appropriate and marketable" tracks and add them onto the album. Because of that they would work on more tracks and release it near the end of 1978, around when M.I.U. was released or in late October. Also I would think because of the length of each side, to preserve the tracks' quality they would use extended-play LP that could go up to 26 minutes, which works just fine. 

I cleared and mixed some of the tracks to make it sound more listenable. The sequencing of the tracks worked so well that it feels like this was always meant to be this way. I made some tempo changes that worked well and some pitch shifts that sort of didn't but I made them to make the transitions sound more cohesive so, little sacrifices had to be made.

And in the end of the alternate timeline I think it would be much more divisive than Love You, some hating it while others calling it "Brian's second chance at his magnum opus" and I think he sure nailed it. The first side of the album sounds more like Brian's "all out quirky and weird" tracks that sound amazing, and the second side being a more commercial side with more tracks about love and such [don't mind Hey Little Tomboy there ;)] and that side sounds amazing as well. And I added some vinyl crackling sounds to give it that "long lost album" vibes and I guess that could throw off some people but don't worry, I'm going to share a file with the sides without the cracking sounds and maybe with the cover arts after the premiere.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1PKlJrC_J_ageXdtpOuDbxvEP0rioNz5r/view?usp=sharing

A Quick Word: 0:00

SIDE 1

1) New English Waltz Pt. 1: 0:24
2) Life Is For The Living: 01:58
3) Baseball's On: 03:44
4) Calendar Girl: 06:18
5) Lines: 09:24
6) Shortenin' Bread: 10:55
7) Our Team: 13:44
8) Everybody Wants To Live: 16:14
9) On Broadway: 19:22
10) Deep Purple: 21:55

SIDE 2

1) New English Waltz Pt. 2: 24:47
2) H.E.L.P. Is On The Way: 25:32
3) Match Point Of Our Love: 27:51
4) Sweet Sunday Kinda Love: 31:01
5) Hey Little Tomboy: 33:43
6) Games Two Can Play: 36:06
7) My Diane: 38:04
8) It's Over Now: 40:44
9) Still I Dream Of It: 43:32
10) Winds Of Change: 46:59

ANNOUNCEMENT: 50:29

Adult/CHiLD

The Beach Boys - Adult/CHiLD: The Other Lost Masterpiece [1978 FULL ALBUM LP MIX]

The definitive, authorized, and first-ever biography of Terry Allen, the internationally acclaimed visual artist and iconoclastic songwriter who occupies an utterly unique position straddling the disparate, and usually distant, worlds of conceptual art and country music.    “People tell me it’s country music,” Terry Allen has joked, “and I ask, ‘Which country?’” For nearly sixty years, Allen’s inimitable art has explored the borderlands of memory, crossing boundaries between disciplines and audiences by conjuring indelible stories out of the howling West Texas wind.
 
In Truckload of Art, author Brendan Greaves exhaustively traces the influences that shaped Allen’s extraordinary life, from his childhood in Lubbock, Texas, spent ringside and sidestage at the wrestling matches and concerts his father promoted, to his formative art-school years in incendiary 1960s Los Angeles, and through subsequent decades doggedly pursuing his uncompromising artistic vision. With humor and critical acumen, Greaves deftly recounts how Allen built a career and cult following with pioneering independent records like Lubbock (on everything) (1979)—widely considered an archetype of alternative country—and multiyear, multimedia bodies of richly narrative, interconnected art and theatrical works, including JUAREZ (ongoing since 1968), hailed as among the most significant statements in the history of American vernacular music and conceptual art.
 
Drawing on hundreds of revealing interviews with Allen himself, his family members, and his many notable friends, colleagues, and collaborators—from musicians like David Byrne and Kurt Vile to artists such as Bruce Nauman and Kiki Smith—and informed by unprecedented access to the artist’s home, studio, journals, and archives, Greaves offers a poetic, deeply personal portrait of arguably the most singularly multivalent storyteller of the American West.

Truckload of Art By Brendan Greaves Read by Jason Culp, Brendan Greaves

ORDER LP/CD - http://wharfcatrecords.com/store/pre-order-joey-agresta-lets-not-talk-about-music
ORDER LP/CD ON BANDCAMP - https://wharfcatrecords.bandcamp.com/album/pre-order-lets-not-talk-about-music
ORDER ON APPLE MUSIC - https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/lets-not-talk-about-music/id1217572163

Joey Agresta is a former north New Jerseyan who now lives with his wife and cat above a Burlington Vermont junk shop (where he also works). Let's Not Talk About Music was created over the course of three years with Agresta arranging, performing, recording, and mixing it in the cozy confines of his bedroom studio. Though many devices were used in the recording of this album computers were completely avoided and the majority was done on the Akia MG-614 (1/8" cassette 4 track) and MG- 1214 (1/2" cassette 12 track).
Appreciators of the New England underground might know Joey from his days of recording bizarre songs on erase headless, multi layering, portable tape recorders under various, food themed, pseudonyms (Joey Pizza Slice, Son of Salami, Salami Junior, ect..) and his releases on the venerable Night People and Feeding Tube labels (as well as countless self released and custom, one-off cassettes). Agresta's songs have also been admired by some very above-ground acts over the years, among them Future Islands and The Parquet Courts -- the later split a 7" with Agresta in 2015.
Contained here are songs of a hopeful sadness that mirror the darkness of these times and the decaying heart of the songsmith. This is Agresta's most personal and sincere work thus far, sounding much more sonically refined than his grittier past exploits. But in a world filled with so much talk perhaps its best we say no more, as the title suggests, and let the music speak for itself.
JOEY AGRESTA PRESS
Stereogum Streams "I Feel Like Shit And I Want To Die" It's Friday, I can relate.
Ad Hoc Premieres "I Feel Like Shit And I Want To Die" It's one of the most accessible and relatable things Agresta has ever made; and one of the saddest too.

JOEY AGRESTA PAST PRESS
Tiny Mix Tapes Review of Bacon City ...the songwriting is as impeccable as you're likely to find anywhere else...
Pitchfork Announcement of Split 7" with Parquet Courts
Vice Creators Piece Brilliant and kind of scary at the same time.
Stereogum Announcement of Split 7" with Parquet Courts

BUY LP/CD

Joey Agresta - I Feel Like Shit And I Want To Die (from the Let's Not Talk About Music LP)

Robert Lax - Sea & Sky / Black & White

Readers : Robert Lax & Robert Wolf
Recorded in New York City (1974)

Released on Compact Cassette only (1981, exit & exempla, IT)

With permission of the Robert Lax Literary Trust.

Robert Lax - Sea & Sky / Black & White

I had Brendan Greaves, who runs the inimitable Paradise Of Bachelors label out of Chapel Hill, over for a chat about music, records, art, Philadelphia, Craig Kilborn and a host of other topics. 

Visit them at http://www.paradiseofbachelors.com/

Featured Song: "Have You Ever Seen Peaches Growing On A Sweet Potato Vine" by Jake Xerxes Fussell

Follow us here www.facebook.com/thepeopleonmyfloor/
Or subscribe on iTunes here apple.co/2tpZrng

Brendan Greaves of Paradise Of Bachelors - Ep. 5

Will Oldham is an enigmatic singer/songwriter who commonly performs under the name Bonnie "Prince" Billy. For decades, his music and lyrics have explored the human experience with great intensity and respect. With an ear finely tuned to history, Oldham speaks candidly about the role music plays in the past, present and future of our culture in this new interview.

(Season 2, Episode 07 - Revolutionary Writers)

2.07. The Songwriter: Bonnie "Prince" Billy

Exclusive all-vinyl mix from SONIDERO MIXTECO ahead of our homecoming Brooklyn show at Elsewhere (Hall) w/ Crumb & Caleb Giles on May 25.

Tickets: https://ticketf.ly/2HygY3g

Sonidero Mixteco: ELSEWHERE MIX

Jake Xerxes Fussell
Out of Sight
LP/CD/Digital
PoB-042
June 7, 2019

On his third and most finely wrought album yet, guitarist, singer, and master interpreter Fussell is joined for the first time by a full band featuring Nathan Bowles (drums), Casey Toll (bass), Nathan Golub (pedal steel), Libby Rodenbough (violin, vocals), and James Anthony Wallace (piano, organ). An utterly transporting selection of traditional narrative folksongs addressing the troubles and delights of love, work, and wine (i.e., the things that matter), collected from a myriad of obscure sources and deftly metamorphosed, Out of Sight contains, among other moving curiosities, a fishmonger’s cry that sounds like an astral lament (“The River St. Johns”); a cotton mill tune that humorously explores the unknown terrain of death and memory (“Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues”); and a fishermen’s shanty/gospel song equally concerned with terrestrial boozing and heavenly transcendence (“Drinking of the Wine”).

“In our house we’ve listened to more Jake Fussell than any other individual artist over the past year. Jake lives in music as a true time-artist, using the qualities of time itself as irreplaceable elements of content. As long as Jake Fussell is making records and playing shows, there is ample cause for optimism in this world.” – Bonnie “Prince” Billy

"Jake Xerxes Fussell is a national treasure.” – Aquarium Drunkard

“His burly, winking voice is made for storytelling.” – NPR

“Achingly beautiful. He has an uncanny ability to illuminate the present by propping up a window against the past.” – Uncut

“Jake understands that old songs weren’t always old. On his third album, he’s subtly shading his music with more instruments. It’s still uncluttered. Still melancholy. Still threaded through with that elegant, deceptively simple guitar—its tone like no other. This is a journey you need to share.” – Colin Escott, author of Hank Williams: The Biography

http://www.paradiseofbachelors.com/jake-xerxes-fussell/

Out of Sight

Buy LP/CD/DL/stream

Jake Xerxes Fussell: Out of Sight - "Jubilee" (2019, PoB-042)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XzY2ij_vL4

Ransom

Terry Allen and the Panhandle Mystery Band
Just Like Moby Dick
PoB-055
2xLP/CD/digital
January 24, 2020

www.paradiseofbachelors.com/shop/pob-055
www.paradiseofbachelors.com/terry-allen
http://lnk.to/PoB55

Iconic and iconoclastic Texan songwriter and visual artist Terry Allen’s heartbreaking, hilarious new album, his first set of new songs since 2013’s Bottom of the World, features the full Panhandle Mystery Band, including co-producer Charlie Sexton (Dylan, Bowie, Blaze), Shannon McNally, and Jo Harvey Allen; mainstays Bukka Allen, Richard Bowden, and Lloyd Maines; and co-writes with Joe Ely and Dave Alvin. The connections to Melville’s masterpiece are metaphorical and allusive, as elusive as the White Whale. The masterly spiritual successor to Lubbock (on everything), Just Like Moby Dick casts its net wide for wild stories, depicting, among other monstrous things, Houdini in existential crisis, the death of the last stripper in town, bloodthirsty pirates (in a pseudo-sequel to Brecht and Weill’s “Pirate Jenny”), the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (in the “American Childhood” suite), a vampire-infested circus, mudslides and burning mobile homes, and all manner of tragicomic disasters, abandonments, betrayals, bad memories, failures, and fare-thee-wells. 

The deluxe tip-on gatefold 2×LP package features lyrics, color labels, high-res Bandcamp download code, three sides of music, and a fourth side vinyl etching artwork by Allen.

Allen’s songs extract strangeness from the known world & use it as a means of acquiring greater knowledge ... which is as good definition of wisdom as any. – The New Yorker

He’s pretty close to a master lyricist. – The New York Times

Riveting. – NPR

Stunning. – Pitchfork

Aural brilliance. – The Wire

Uniformly eccentric & uncompromising, savage & beautiful, literate & guttural. – Rolling Stone 

Allen carries the dust of West Texas in his throat, with a voice like a coyote’s yip & a twang like wind-thrummed barbed wire. – Bandcamp Daily

There may be no greater maverick in all of country music. – AllMusic

A true legend & a hero. I love Terry’s music so much. – Kurt Vile

Just Like Moby Dick

2xLP/CD/DL/stream

Terry Allen & The Panhandle Mystery Band - "Harmony Two"

Paradise of Bachelors is a Record Label, Soundsystem, and Archive located in the North Carolina Piedmont and in the subluminal aether. We are dedicated to documenting, curating, and releasing under-recognized musics of the American vernacular, with an emphasis on the South, broadly defined. 

Paradise of Bachelors is available for licensing, disc-jockeying engagements, music supervision, folklife consultation, research and writing. We cheerily accept recordings, visual media, curatorial proposals, tips, comments, invitations to DJ, artist inquiries, research queries, recipes, and miscellaneous correspondence. 

info@paradiseofbachelors.com

PO Box 1402
Carrboro, NC 27510

Hiss Golden Messenger - Bad Debt (2010/2014, PoB-11): "Drum"

Paradise of Bachelors

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