By day, Elephant Micah’s Joseph O'Connell works as a folklorist, documenting the local culture of southern Indiana and other Midwest regions. Not surprisingly, his songs seem to emerge from habits of travel and observation. Their account of the phenomenal world is as vivid as it is mysterious, equal parts ethnographic fact and fable.

For the past 14 years, O'Connell has quietly self-released his work on CD-R and limited LP, sometimes collaborating with the psych-folk imprint Time-Lag Records or other very small labels. Despite the project’s almost secretive status, Elephant Micah has repeatedly caught the attention of NPR, and has been championed by an impressive cohort of like-minded artists, including Jason Molina, Patterson Hood (Drive-By Truckers), Hiss Golden Messenger, and Dark Dark Dark.

Over time, O’Connell’s songwriting has grown in confidence and intensity, while maintaining its signature restraint. Where in Our Woods, the 12th Elephant Micah album and the first for Western Vinyl, is the fruit of this long-term creative progress. It will see release on January 20th, 2015. 

A painstaking work of minimalism, Where in Our Woods is defined by its limited palette. The arrangements foreground nylon-string guitar and an antique portable pump organ. A stripped down-drum set (played by Matthew O’Connell, Joe’s brother), a baritone ukulele, a toy recorder, and harmony vocals (sung by Will Oldham, a friend of and key influence on O’Connell) round out the sound. This sparse ensemble leaves O’Connell’s voice room to breathe, while elevating and magnifying the poetry of his songs. Throughout the album, O'Connell deftly transforms the stuff of everyday American life into a series of entrancing meditations on culture, nature, religion, and modernity.

ELEPHANT MICAH TOUR DATES

Sat. Dec. 6 – Raleigh, NC @ King’s w/ Centro-Matic
Sun. Dec. 7 – Washington, DC @ DC9 w/ Centro-Matic
Tue. Dec. 9 – Philadelphia, PA @ Boot and Saddle w/ Centro-Matic
Thu. Dec. 11 – Brooklyn, NY @ Rough Trade w/ Centro-Matic

"This record might be his best yet. Beautiful and haunting. "
- Patterson Hood (Drive-By Truckers). 

"...unavoidable and real…these songs have a way of bringing one back down to earth and re-revealing what's always been there, what's old to be discovered, revisited, embraced."
– Angel Olsen

LP/CD PRE-ORDER: http://westernvinyl.com/shop/

Pre-Order on iTunes

Elephant Micah - "By the Canal"

Simon Joyner
Grass, Branch & Bone
Woodsist076
LP / Digital
Release date: March 31, 2015

SIMON JOYNER - You Got Under My Skin

Cover version of Johnny Thunders' classic.  Recorded by Iban Perez at Terraforma Estudio. Cangas, Spain.  August 2014

You Can't Put Your Arms Around A Memory (J. Thunders Cover)

Zachary Cale "Sundowner"

Zachary Cale "Blue Moth"

Crashing DEMO

Lyrics:
Same faces, same places
So nothing ever changes
And tomorrow more sorrow comes crashing down
But tonight, dear, let's find here
A wall to set on fire
It's so enticing when lightening comes crashing down
And tonight, dear, if you're sincere
I'll show it off in high gear
And in the morning your daddy's warning comes crashing down

Heartbreaker, hit maker, soul shaker
Come on I'll race ya
So far, to the stars
Oh they're gonna know who we are
Love maker, trail blazer, my saviour come on I'll race ya
So far, to the stars
Oh they're gonna know who we are

An old wasteland, a new rock band
In a city where nothing withstands
All tomorrows, and more heroes come crashing down
But tonight dear, let's be clear and set the world on fire
It's so exciting when a reckoning comes to town

Risk taker, dream shaper, my favorite
Come on I'll race ya
So far, to the stars
Oh they're gonna know who we are
Rule breaker, earth quaker, my maker
Come on I'll race ya
So far, to the stars
Oh they're gonna know who we are

Heartbreaker, hit maker, soul shaker
Come on I'll race ya
So far, to the stars
Oh they're gonna know who we are
Love maker, trail blazer, my saviour 
Come on I'll race ya
So far, to the stars
Oh they'll never know who we are

All rights reserved.


Crashing

Caput Mortem DEMO

Lyrics:
There's something on your mind
You're sending out a sign
You're turning on the spanish eyes
Such a fine disguise and you won't deny them
A certain attitude
Another lazy groove
You walk across the crowed room
In a modern suit and a vintage smile

Went to the disco
Way down in Frisco
With all the lights low
And all the boys go la di da di da
Went to the tower
Way after hours
Oh just to show her
How all the boys go la di da di da

You only say goodbye
To no one at the door
You know they all feign surprise
When they hear your name and your latest score
A certain c'est la vie
Another killing spree
You waltz across the open sea like a modern suit on a vintage whore

Went to the disco...

All rights reserved.


Caput Mortem

A Dirty Demo...Here are the lyrics:
Something's on your mind, a lonely time, your only dime/ They avoid your eyes with lovely lies on overdrive/ While away your heart, Talk is cheap and Voices dark/ Dominate your Art In your Life, in your Mind/ Won't you write your own concluding lines with overtones sweeter than the Wine in your Life, in your Mind

Dandy Candy

MIKE WEXLER - SYNTROPY
http://www.three-four.net/releases/TFR037

Having made a reputation for hypnotic and darkly enveloping songs, Brooklyn’s Mike Wexler has persisted through several waves of contemporary folk music without ever being fully absorbed by any of them. Syntropy – his third full length – is the first to convey the entrancing intimacy of his live performances. In a landscape of Americana and ‘American Primitive’-derived guitar music, Syntropy offers the possibility of an alternative strain more attuned to global influence and open to cross-pollination from other genres, disciplines, and art-forms. The deft and singular guitar work on display here borrows as much from the school of Bert Jansch as from the rhythms and chord voicings of Brazilian masters and the rapid, mantric repetitions of minimalism, while the lyrics eschew storytelling in favor of a deeply personal metaphysics. It’s a record preoccupied with ecology, biology, utopian politics, and the through lines that traverse and connect the parallel unfoldings of nature and culture in time, from the earliest organic molecule to the furthest inhabitable world – a grand narrative rendered human by the strangely resonant texture of one of the most unique voices in music.

Enlisting the same core players as 2012's Dispossession (Brent Cordero of Psychic Ills, Jordi Wheeler of Amen Dunes among them), Syntropy was recorded at Guilford Sound – a solar-powered studio on a wooded property near Brattleboro, Vermont. The Vermont woods in summer were the real-world analogue to the record’s imaginary landscape. Acoustic instruments are foregrounded – guitars, piano, conga. Situated within this framework is the continuous sound generated by a host of analogue synthesizers, and on the record’s two instrumental cuts, a Mellotron. Drone here is a passing cloud seen through the intricate branchings of guitar and piano. The music owes as much to Nelson Angelo & Joyce and Thomas Mera Gartz as it does to to Eno, Charlemagne Palestine, Rolf Julius, Annea Lockwood, and the David Behrman of On the Other Ocean. But all of these leanings lean together into something familiar yet strange.

Syntropy – a word that, although it’s had its champions (Buckminster Fuller for one), never quite graduated into scientific parlance. It implies a force at work in the universe that is equal and opposite to entropy, the thermodynamic law according to which everything breaks down, exhausts its energy, tends toward disorder, equilibrium and ultimately, death. There’s a simple reason for this lack of acceptance: there is no such force. No such physical force, anyway. The phenomenon of life, though consistent with entropy, suggests there may be something else here at work.

Syntropy

Mike Wexler - Transfer

DFS Instrumental I 

Solo Compositions 

driftlessrecordings.com

Zachary Cale - Guitar

Subscribe to the Portal to Palmyra for this and many other exclusives from Elephant Micah.
portaltopalmyra.bandcamp.com

"Fall Again" written by Kath Bloom

Elephant Micah - Fall Again

Zachary Cale is a NYC based songwriter/musician.

For the past decade Cale has been releasing records under his own name via a number of labels. His latest album 'False Spring' was released in 2020 on All Hands Electric to critical acclaim. 

Discography:

False Spring - LP/Digital (2020)
Duskland - LP/CD/Digital (2015)
Low Light Roughs - CS/Digital (2014)
Blue Rider - LP/CD/Digital (2013)
Love Everlasting - 7" Single/Digital (2012)
Noise of Welcome - LP/CD/Digital (2011)
Come Quietly - 7" Single/Digital (2010)
Walking Papers - LP/CD/Digital (2008)
Outlander Sessions - LP/CD/Digital (2005)