Marc Barreca's 1986 album "The Sleeper Wakes". Originally released on cassette by the Seattle electronic ambient label, Intrepid. Vinyl Reissue on Scissor Tail Records May 14th. https://scissortail.bandcamp.com/album/the-sleeper-wakes

Marc Barreca has been creating and performing electronic music since the mid-1970s. His 1980 album, Twilight, reissued on vinyl in 2016, was one of the earliest releases on Palace Of Lights. Recent releases include Shadow Aesthetics (2018) and three collaborations with K. Leimer. Previous reissues include work on the acclaimed VOD box set American Cassette Culture, the Cherry Red compilation of seminal U.S. electronic music and the 1983 cassette, Music Works For Industry. His work is also included in the collection of The British Library."

The Sleeper Wakes has been out of print for many years and we are very happy to remaster and reissue this great work that was ahead of it's time, employing analog treatments of sampled sounds arranged in a very interesting and intuitive way.
credits
releases May 15, 2021

Marc Barreca - Akai 610 Sampler, Analog treatments

Marc Barreca - The Blue Gate (1986)

Tobacco City is about simplicity. Simple songs and melodies built around nostalgic and blue stories. Built out of a mutual love of classic and cosmic country, the members of Tobacco City bring their psychedelic and folk influences to the exploding genre. The result is a feel good sway that fits into modern urban modes and passes by the shrewdest of classic country heads. 

Quickly gaining traction in Chicago playing with new country icon Orville Peck and Psychedelic taste maker Ty Segall, Tobacco City seems to fit in wherever good music resides regardless of the genre. 

\\\PRESS///

“Hailing from Chicago, the musical project of Chris Coleslaw and Lexi Goddard leans ably into traditional country blues and honky-tonk shuffles. With a forthcoming Tobacco City full-length on the horizon, the group has shared two new tracks; the first of which is the amber-hued “Blue Raspberry,” a languid, steel guitar draped duet that recalls Emmylou Harris and Gram Parsons at their most incandescent. Hanging in the air and gleaming like a curtain drawn against the day, the B-side, “Never On My Mind,” finds Goddard front and center amidst a slow sashay of the prosaic. Another dollar for the juke after a long day’s work — drinking for one. - AQUARIUM DRUNKARD

Blue Raspberry

These four improvisations were recorded in 2016 in my living room with my longtime friend Joshua Massad. Josh is an indian classical musician living between Tulsa and India, studying tabla for many years under Zakir Hussain and recently studying sitar. We've been trying to capture some moments for the last 6 years and this is the first batch of songs to come out. - Dylan
https://joshuamassaddylanaycock.bandcamp.com/album/joshua-massad-dylan-aycock

2016

Dylan Aycock & Josh Massad (One)

A5 Sleeping Goddess

This is a very rare folk record made by Marc Emory in 1974-75. Marc played all guitars and did all of the vocals (but most tracks are instrumental). The original record was a private pressing of 200 copies, most he gave to friends and family. This album is a rare gem in solo guitar and we're happy to share it with the world.

LP available here: https://scissortail.bandcamp.com/album/listening-music-anfang

Marc Emory - Slow Evening (LP) Reissue 1974

Purchase Limited Edition | Clear Vinyl | Here: http://www.scissortailrecords.com/2013/08/st14-robin-allender-foxes-in-foyer-lp.html

Circular melodies adorned with simple samples and loops. Its charm makes a lot of sense given that Allender plays in film composer Yann Tiersen's live band - Lars Gotrich NPR

Music of heart and humanity, as fresh (and refreshing) as a spring lake. - Textura

Robin Allender certainly has prowess on his instrument but I found myself drawn to the more woe-some and winsome tracks that inter-weave amongst the track order, culminating with the prettiest song I have heard in a while. In fact, were there a Buddha Box with only the final track “An Uneven Lie” I probably would never leave the house again. - Field Hymns

Robin Allender - An Uneven Lie (Featuring Dylan Golden Aycock) "Foxes in the Foyer" LP

Title track from Nick Castell's new release "The Water Margin" out now.
Edition of 50 Pro Dubbed Cassettes. Hand Painted / Letterpressed Packaging
Order here: scissortail.bandcamp.com/album/the-water-margin

Nick Castell - "Water Margin" (C90) Out Now

Closing track on the LP 'Black Coral Sprig'  coming out on Scissor Tail Records May 12th 2023. 

Limited Edition of 200 copies.
https://scissortail.bandcamp.com/album/black-coral-sprig

Black Coral Sprig (Masters)

Talk West - Abode

Excerpt from side B of a new split cassette with Wes Tirey and Andrew Weathers. Out June 25th on Scissor Tail Editions. Pre Order Here: scissortail.bandcamp.com/album/split

Andrew Weathers - Side B (excerpt)

Album out on Scissor Tail Records in Fall of 2023. https://scissortail.bandcamp.com/album/beginnings-collected-pedal-steel-works

Gary Peters - The Beginning

Nicked Drake - Wraiths (by Gareth Dickson) Due Out Sept. 30th
www.scissortailrecords.com

Nicked Drake - Road (by Gareth Dickson) Excerpt from "Wraiths" CD/DL

Nick Storring - "Gardens" Ltd. Edition CD/DL due out Nov. 11th 2014
www.scissortailrecords.com

Gardens was composed, performed, recorded and mixed spring 2011-autumn 2013. All instruments performed by Nick Storring. 

Instrumentation: violin, cello, electric mandola, electric bass, guitalele, Strumstick, banjo, harpsicle, autoharp, esraj, kemence, rebab, ananda lahari, Hohner Pianet-T, Yamaha CP60M stage piano, glockenspiel, steel pan, thumb pianos, toy pianos, roto-toms, snare drum, djembe, khol, bells, thunder tubes, rainstick, woodblocks, cymbals, other found/ homemade percussion, jaw harps, melodicas, harmonicas (diatonic and chromatic), tuning reeds, harmonium, khêne, mey, hulosi, xaphoon, concert flute, bansuris, sulings, recorders (alto, soprano, sopranino), various other flutes, mijwiz, been, pan pipes, kazoo, found wind instruments, voice. 

Nick Storring -(Come To My) Thicket | Excerpt from "Gardens" CD/DL

Scott Tuma's first two solo albums 'Hard Again' and 'The River 1 2 3 4' released on double vinyl for the first time via Scissor Tail Records. 

Pre Order Here: https://scissortail.bandcamp.com/album/hard-again-the-river-1-2-3-4

Pitchfork...
"Souled American got the proverbial shaft. It's a well-known story, but one that bears repeating. Forming in Chicago in the late 80s, the band released four remarkable albums of howling roots-rock deconstruction before losing their stateside distribution when Rough Trade's American division went belly up. Anachronistic and difficult to classify, these four albums-- Fe, Flubber, Around the Horn, and Sonny (now back in print on tUMULt Records)-- were largely ignored at the time of their release, and the situation was not helped by infrequent touring and a lack of press savvy. More recently, the band has toiled in near obscurity, releasing two albums on German labels since the mid-90s. In the end, though, Souled American was probably just too arty for a genre that puts such a high value on "authenticity." Fortunately, the band seems to prefer its cult status.

Of course, it's hard not thinking about what might have been. The more or less contemporaneous Uncle Tupelo (which eventually split into Wilco and Son Volt) was handed the alt-country banner and basked in the spotlight while Souled American quietly pursued their craft in the darkness. "No Depression"-- the movement and the accompanying magazine-- could have just as easily been called "Feel Better" (the final track on Fe), if given a slightly different set of circumstances.

Now, more than a decade after that first Souled American album, the alt-country "movement" has become more of a twitch. Hype, always a fickle mistress, has left the No Depression magazine cold, and it's cheating heart has moved on to other lovers. For a while it was Britpop, then a drunken orgy with countless electronic artists, then a debauched evening with post-rock before moving on again.

Souled American's guitarist Scott Tuma decided to move on as well, parting with the band amicably after the 1996 release of Notes Campfire. Judging from the all-instrumental Hard Again, his first solo album, Tuma just wanted to move away from traditional song structure. Taking a more expressionistic approach-- using multi-generation guitar loops, organ drones, skittish percussion, and banjo so far removed from "fiery bluegrass breakdowns" that it almost sounds like traditional Japanese Koto music-- Hard Again sees Tuma teaming up with Dirty Three percussionist Jim White and Michael Krassner of the Boxhead Ensemble, two groups with which he shares an aural affinity.

Opening with the cold and distant "Beautiful Dreamer," Tuma eases you into the sound of Hard Again as if easing you into icy water-- that is, very, very slowly-- deliberately setting one guitar tone against another in an almost painterly fashion. And like many tracks on Hard Again, the song ends abruptly, suggesting it was born out of longer improvisational sessions.
"March" begins similarly, but builds to a thicker texture reminiscent of Robert Fripp and Brian Eno's collaborations, while the aptly titled "Jim White Drums" swirls droning guitar over what sounds like a sped up tape of Jim White assembling a drum kit rather than playing it. The title cut is the most song-oriented track here, with a definite beginning, middle, and end. But "Sermon," the closing song, best sums up the album's mood: meditative and austere, but majestic, as an otherworldly organ echoes through what sounds like a long-abandoned cathedral.


Anyone familiar with the latter-day, slow-as-molasses Souled American albums will see Hard Again as a natural extension, or at least as an abstract interpretation of where that band was heading. Fans of the above mentioned Dirty Three and Boxhead Ensemble-- as well as David Pajo or even Neil Young's Dead Man soundtrack-- will find solace within these ethereal sounds."

Scott Tuma - "First Spring" excerpt from Hard Again/The River (2xLP)

"Sarah Henson learned to play guitar and banjo at the foot of the black mountains in North Carolina. That's how the press text I've found, starts. Under the name Sarah Louise, she released two beautiful folk albums and especially her latest release Field Guide is first and foremost a great fingerstyle, solo guitar album. In some songs she sings, but it's all centered around 12 string solo guitar compositions. 

Her music is definitely colored by the land and the nature that surrounds her (at least that's what I know about Ashville, NC and the Blue Ridge Mountains). I imagine a creek that tumbles down the hills, glistening in the sun. That's what her guitar playing sounds like. That's probably why she named it Field Guide." -Dying For Bad Music. 

"Her new album Field Guide is coming out in the New Year on Scissor Tail Editions and it feels like a lost disc from Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music. Some of the tracks are inspired by old Appalachian hymns, while others have an almost far-Eastern meditative feel. It’s really, really good." - Wake The Deaf

Sarah Louise - The Day Is Past And Gone (Variations), Extended Instrumental

"The Farewell Before Candlestick Park" is an excerpt from Dibson T Hoffweiler's new album 'When I Went West' coming out May of 2015.

Dibson T Hoffweiler is a musician living in Oakland, California after an eight year tenure as a fixture in New York City’s anti-folk scene. He began his songwriting career on the scene as an engine to play guitar, and proceeded to fill the role of guitarist in more bands than he was able to manage. He served as lead guitarist in psych collective Huggabroomstik and rhythm guitarist in queer pop group Cheese On Bread. He founded folk-turned-pop group Urban Barnyard, and was the sort-of-leader of the intergalactic psych-folk cult Old Hat. Alongside these acts Dibs continued his guitar-based songwriting, but upon moving to Oakland he’s focused on the acoustic guitar as a solo instrument.

Dibson T Hoffweiler - The Farewell Before Candlestick Park

On Horses, the highly anticipated follow-up to their critically acclaimed debut, Tobacco City, USA, the band takes listeners on a nostalgic journey through the haze of youth, where time feels suspended and plans are nonexistent. The album’s lyrics conjure vivid images of small-town life—smoking schwag behind the grocery store, drinking cream from a gas station with your first love—capturing that carefree, uncertain time when the future felt distant. The music channels the spirit of '70s country with influences from legends like Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris, bringing a timeless, uplifting energy to each track. At the same time, the lyrics intersect with modern-day themes, blending the beauty and innocence of youth with the harsh realities of life. Horses feels like a contemporary take on classic country, merging a nostalgic past with the complex world of today, all while remaining undeniably authentic and heartfelt. This follow-up to Tobacco City, USA—which received high praise from NPR and Rolling Stone—cements the band's place at the forefront of a new wave of country-tinged Americana.

Tobacco City "Autumn" Pre Order LP

Nadia Reid - Listen To Formation, Look For The Signs comes out Nov. 27 on Scissor Tail (U.S.) and Spunk (New Zealand).

Pitchfork -
Love is sold on the promise that it's better than any solitary satisfaction, so you might as well bet everything on it, time and time again. On "Call the Days", New Zealand songwriter Nadia Reid cuts to the heart of this deception: "I was happy on my own," she sings in a plainspoken lilt. "I would call the days as they were known." Yet there's no trace of vengeance in her deep, capable voice, and the surface of her gorgeous song remains steady, as a raga-like drone anchors rolling acoustic guitar and languid cello. Instead, like Laura Marling or Joan Shelley, the self-assurance Reid had once cultivated acts as its own safe harbor, turning the event into a meditation rather than a rupture. For a new artist, her confident grace is all the more remarkable.

NPR - 
Love is knowing what's best for yourself. We grasp at straws trying understand what that is, but even in that knowledge, we betray our best intentions to get stupid about another person. On "Call the Days," New Zealand folk artist Nadia Reid sings, "I was happy on my own / I would call the days as they were known" with a knowing yip, against a droning backdrop of closely mic'd acoustic guitars and longing cello. It's a heartbroken song, but made self-assured by Reid's warm, marbled alto.

Phoebe Mackenzie and Emily Berryman direct this beautifully shot video for "Call the Days," as the characters Nadia and Ross travel through New Zealand roads, forests and countrysides. Its muted palette is in keeping with the song's calm, yet gray skies; they betray the days ahead.

Nadia Reid - "Call The Days" (album excerpt)

"...Chamber drone caught in perpetually Lynchian state of romantic, dream-fog rapture." - Spin 

Willamette is the project of Joseph Yonker and brothers Davin and Kevin Chong. The melancholic precision and restrain that has distinguished Willamette among other postclassical artists has been refined on the group’s third release, Diminished Composition. The preeminent ambient label Infraction Records released Willamette's gorgeous debut LP Echo Park in 2011, accompanied by some of the most beautiful packaging for a record Scissor Tail has ever seen. A score for the film All the Lines Flow Out by Charles Lim Yi Yong, Willamette’s stunning second album Always in Postscript saw release in 10” vinyl format the following year on Own Records.

Willamette - "At Length And Dead Horse" (LP Excerpt)

Debut from Allesandro Denti (Waswas) out on Scissor Tail, April 25th 2016. 

Waswas - Petropavlosk Kamchatksy (album excerpt)

Preview track from the forthcoming solo debut "Blue Rider Songs" by Scott Hirsch.  LP out August 19th 2016

After many years spent as a steadfast and inventive collaborator—not only playing bass and producing four albums with Hiss Golden Messenger, but in large part forging that band’s sonic signature—multi-instrumentalist, recordist, and audio engineer Scott Hirsch has finally made a solo album, and it’s called Blue Rider. The very notion of a “solo” album, and its associated emancipatory baggage, is a specious designation in this case, since music this quietly assured, this effortlessly unfolding, does not bloom in isolation or solipsism. Although Blue Rider articulates Hirsch’s singular aesthetic (more on that soon) more lucidly and forthrightly than any other album on which he has worked, it is also, like most good music, the alloyed fruit of long hours, and long travels, with other writers and players, and with other records, and books, and films. 

And indeed, these recordings feature notable, and notably subtle, contributions from Jade Hendrix (harmony vocals); Thomas Heyman (pedal steel), Hirsch’s old bandmate in the San Francisco group the Court and Spark; and HGM stalwarts Phil Cook (organ and harmonica) and Matt Douglas (saxophones), among others. But as a primarily single-artist vision and statement, it does speak to the way that back roads, detours away from or around one’s other, more high-profile creative pursuits, can lead lead to unexpected destinations arguably more compelling than anything the highways could provide. Sometimes, as William Least Heat-Moon demonstrates in Blue Highways, his classic travelogue of rural America (an admitted influence on this album), you have to leave the main roads to understand their contours and their worth. And as in “Sundown Highway,” that can be a slow, and heavy, journey; you might, like Lowell George, require “weed, whites, and wine.”

Blue Rider emerged from various personal contexts: a year of near-constant touring with Hiss Golden Messenger in 2015; a move with his family from Brooklyn to Ojai, California, and the launch of his new Echo Magic West studio there; and above all, the process of making the self-titled Golden Gunn album with longtime musical partner M.C. Taylor of Hiss Golden Messenger and their mutual friend Steve Gunn. Hirsch wrote much of the music on that album, and watching Taylor and Gunn set words and vocals to his instrumental productions proved the necessary catalyst to take his writing and recording into fresh territory under his own name. Hirsch even reinterprets Golden Gunn standout track “The Sun Comes up a Purple Diamond” here, repurposing Gunn’s lyrics, but attenuating the song into something even more heat-stricken and dilatory than the hazy original version—no mean feat...

Brendan Greaves
Chapel Hill, North Carolina
May 2016


Blue Rider Songs

Scott Hirsch - Loss Of Forgetfulness (album preview)

Track from the new Joseph Allred LP "Fire & Earth" out now on Scissor Tail Records.

Fire And Earth

Joseph Allred - Leitmotif (album excerpt)

Arkansas River is a track from the new LP by Dylan Golden Aycock titled "Church of Level Track" out now on Scissor Tail Records in edition of 500

Church of Level Track

Dylan Golden Aycock - Arkansas River (album excerpt)

Compiled by - Dylan Golden Aycock, Loren Connors, Suzanne Langille

Order 2xCD here: https://scissortail.bandcamp.com/album/the-hired-hands-a-tribute-to-bruce-langhorne

We would like to pay homage to one of the greatest and most infamous guitarists alive, Bruce Langhorne. His music has influenced and touched a lot of lives over the years, either through his soundtrack work with Peter Fonda or his studio work in the 1960’s as the go to hired hand for musicians such as Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Richie Havens, Odetta... and many others. If his name is new to you I suggest browsing his wikipedia page to acquaint yourself with the volume of work he accomplished throughout the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s. Scissor Tail Editions was lucky enough to release Bruce’s score to Peter Fonda’s 1971 anti-western “The Hired Hand”on vinyl in 2012.

The goal here was to ask artists to cover or reinterpret a song of their choice from the soundtrack. No rules on whether the music should be derivative of a certain song, if the soundtrack inspires a mood, then the artists use their intuition.

Bruce has come on hard times in recent years, having suffered a stroke that prevents him from playing the guitar. He’s currently in hospice care awaiting his final curtain call. A large percentage of profit go to Bruce and his family.

www.scissortailrecords.com

The Hired Hands - A Tribute to Bruce Langhorne

The Hired Hands: A Tribute to Bruce Langhorne

Steve Gunn - For Bruce (excerpt from The Hired Hands: A Tribute to Bruce Langhorne)

First Edition SOLD OUT http://www.scissortailrecords.com/
Boomkat- Gorgeous, individually numbered 180g vinyl edition of this hugely sought-after soundtrack full of hauntingly spectral desert soundscapes, as eerie as we've heard and highly recommended to lovers of everything from John Fahey to Boards Of Canada** It's always gratifying when something you've been after for a very long time makes an appearance - and this amazing soundtrack from Bruce Langhorne has been at the top of ourvinyl wants list for a good few years now. "The Hired Hand" was the film that marked Peter Fonda's directorial debut, and it also gave birth to one of the most sought-after and accomplished soundtracks of the 1970's.Bruce’s first solo album and Peter Fonda’s directoral debut. He’s been credited as working with Bob Dylan, Odetta, Joan Baez, Peter, Paul and Mary, Babatunde Olatunji, Richie Havens, Carolyn Hester, Peter LaFarge, Gordon Lightfoot, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Ramblin’ Jack Elliot...

The production of these recordings is incredibly effective, something made all the more remarkable by the fact that Langhorne assembled each piece alongside his girlfriend Natalie Mucyn, who with no prior mixing or editing experience multitracked the recording via some distinctly lo-fi tape dubbing. The fact that the recordings are so well balanced is barely short of a miracle, and perhaps it was this technique that makes certain elements of the soundtrack sound so bizarre and at times, mystical even. The harmonized flutes of 'Windmill' sound uncannily like something from Black Dice's first album, resembling some sort of otherworldly birdsong.

There are moments of sheer lyrical brilliance here too: 'Spring' is but a brief miniature for violin and acoustic guitar yet it provides a resolute, very tangible intimacy and the closing "Ending" is the longest, most complete track here, bringing many of the soundtrack's elements together for a final, harmonious flourish that was so ahead of its time it sounds uncannily like vintage Boards of Canada in interlude mode - in fact I'd be very surprised if this soundtrack didn't influence them in some way. Nothing short of a lost classic - we implore you to check this out immediately

"The Hired Hand" - Score by Bruce Langhorne (Album Preview)

www.scissortailrecords.com
American Independent Imprint started in 2010 as a cassette label. The label houses a private letterpress studio where much of the packaging is created for the releases in house. 
Willamette - Diminished Composition (LP)
Nadia Reid - Listen to Formation (LP)
Scott Tuma - Hard Again / The River (2xLP)
Chuck Johnson - Blood Moon Boulder(LP)
Robin Allender - Foxes in the Foyer (LP)
Bruce Langhorne - The Hired Hand OST (LP)
Dylan Golden Aycock - Rise And Shine (LP)
Padang Food Tigers / Lake Mary - split (7")



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