Overlooked a 25 count box of Branches
Paypal $30 to billnace@gmail.com for a copy (friends and family if yr comfortable with that) and include mailing address
Thanks!
B
THROUGH A ROOM ART EDITIONS
THROUGH A ROOM (DRAG CITY) ART EDITIONSMY SOLO LP Through A Room on Drag City Records with origianl art by me on each sleeve (paint/collage/drawing/paint marker)Signed/Un-numbered in Japanese Resealable Outer Sleeve$75 each(I'll just pick a cover at random)paypal to billnace@gmail.com Friends and Familymake sure to include yr mailing address in paypal payment$80 ppd in USA$100 ppd Canada$105 ppd R.O.W.
OM70 OLD GLOW SOLD OUT SOLD OUT SOLD OUT
SOLD OUT OUT NOW! OM70 SOLD OUT SOLD OUT SOLD OUT
Wheatie Mattiasich OLD GLOW LP
EDITION OF 200
paypal to billnace@gmail.com
$25 ppd in usa
$45 ppd canada
$50 ppd r.o.w.
(PLEASE MAKE SURE MAILING ADDRESS IS INCLUDED IN PAYPAL PAYMENT)
(send as Friend/Family..add address in notes...don't give paypal yr money ;)
or buy from BANDCAMP page
https://openmouthrecords.bandcamp.com/album/old-glow
The first time I heard Wheatie’s music was at a basement show in Philadelphia, and I was entranced. I’ve felt similarly when watching videos of the French singer Barbara as she concentrates on a corner of the room, her eyes big warm coins, singing “La solitude” about a loneliness that “rolls around the hips” and demands that the door is opened. It’s Barbara’s self-possession that haunts me, her willingness to do publicly what I can only find alone. It’s not so much sound but a spirit that Barbara and Wheatie share: Both make music that is as gorgeous as it’s eerie and says a good deal about the workings of their own minds—and by that, I don’t mean that they reveal their psychology—but they take us deep into their peculiarities as musicians.
After Wheatie’s set, I asked where I could get a record, and assumed there must be one—surely, I’m late here—because I wasn’t alone. Everyone at that show was visibly mesmerized. It’s been a few years since then, but I haven’t forgotten it, couldn’t, and have waited for Wheatie’s debut, Old Glow, which captures and renews the hypnotic mystery of her set that night. For Old Glow, Wheatie has collaborated with Stephen Santillan, who plays keyboard and guitar, while she’s on the keyboard and dulcimer, and of course, her distinct vocals.
Wheatie and Santillan’s album includes “Blue,” which feels like a lyrical invocation that I can imagine under a canticle’s heightened rubric, requiring the congregation to stand as it’s being sung. This song also establishes the harmonium dream-weaving, and a natural pull toward minor scales, which will take us through most of the album—a sound that can be gloomy, but Wheatie’s voice is a luminescent top coat. It comes to us from a long time ago, a voice used for medieval incantations, traditional ballads, and ancient and supernatural myths about solitude, played through the drainpipe.
Old Glow contains a private, condensed language that can only be built by solitude and a willingness to forego readymade forms. The problem with language is that, in order to speak, write lyrics, write about them, you must translate the peculiarity of the self into material script. When the heart is inarticulate. When literary language is often too precise. We’re too trained up in it. There is a version of this kind of music that goes the route of slick pop, or becomes lazy because it's beautiful, but Wheatie’s music is distinguished by an elemental weirdness, a plaintive and wonky carnival way off in the distance—this is what it sounds like to submit the self to itself. On the track “Low,” she ululates, “It’s OK to be low. It’s OK to be low.” And because Wheatie has an uncanny ability to make something strange out of the familiar, it feels like a singular utterance. I have not heard it before. As if an old well could talk.
There are also several moments of spontaneity in Old Glow. “Canyon” brings more rock, and the harmonium gets country in “Rose.” These turns make the album feel complex, like an epic about connection, loss, the inevitability of our being alone. Nico’s nightmarish Desertshore also moves along a similar queasy spiral—its emotional locus is precise, even though the music is impenetrable. Death and despair in Desertshore, like solitude in Old Glow, is palpable. They can’t help but continuously return to it.
One of this album’s many strengths, to my mind, is its willingness to find a language, a mode, and not interfere with it too much. These songs are built by slow accretion. They’re purposeful. I think of a ceaseless fabric, reminiscent of Wilburn Burchette’s Psychic Meditation Music—listening to this music can render you gummy, stir you into putty, spackle you in the cracks. It would be a mistake to believe that it is simple because it seems as if it could go on forever.---Chelsea Hogue Ohlman IL 2022
After Wheatie’s set, I asked where I could get a record, and assumed there must be one—surely, I’m late here—because I wasn’t alone. Everyone at that show was visibly mesmerized. It’s been a few years since then, but I haven’t forgotten it, couldn’t, and have waited for Wheatie’s debut, Old Glow, which captures and renews the hypnotic mystery of her set that night. For Old Glow, Wheatie has collaborated with Stephen Santillan, who plays keyboard and guitar, while she’s on the keyboard and dulcimer, and of course, her distinct vocals.
Wheatie and Santillan’s album includes “Blue,” which feels like a lyrical invocation that I can imagine under a canticle’s heightened rubric, requiring the congregation to stand as it’s being sung. This song also establishes the harmonium dream-weaving, and a natural pull toward minor scales, which will take us through most of the album—a sound that can be gloomy, but Wheatie’s voice is a luminescent top coat. It comes to us from a long time ago, a voice used for medieval incantations, traditional ballads, and ancient and supernatural myths about solitude, played through the drainpipe.
Old Glow contains a private, condensed language that can only be built by solitude and a willingness to forego readymade forms. The problem with language is that, in order to speak, write lyrics, write about them, you must translate the peculiarity of the self into material script. When the heart is inarticulate. When literary language is often too precise. We’re too trained up in it. There is a version of this kind of music that goes the route of slick pop, or becomes lazy because it's beautiful, but Wheatie’s music is distinguished by an elemental weirdness, a plaintive and wonky carnival way off in the distance—this is what it sounds like to submit the self to itself. On the track “Low,” she ululates, “It’s OK to be low. It’s OK to be low.” And because Wheatie has an uncanny ability to make something strange out of the familiar, it feels like a singular utterance. I have not heard it before. As if an old well could talk.
There are also several moments of spontaneity in Old Glow. “Canyon” brings more rock, and the harmonium gets country in “Rose.” These turns make the album feel complex, like an epic about connection, loss, the inevitability of our being alone. Nico’s nightmarish Desertshore also moves along a similar queasy spiral—its emotional locus is precise, even though the music is impenetrable. Death and despair in Desertshore, like solitude in Old Glow, is palpable. They can’t help but continuously return to it.
One of this album’s many strengths, to my mind, is its willingness to find a language, a mode, and not interfere with it too much. These songs are built by slow accretion. They’re purposeful. I think of a ceaseless fabric, reminiscent of Wilburn Burchette’s Psychic Meditation Music—listening to this music can render you gummy, stir you into putty, spackle you in the cracks. It would be a mistake to believe that it is simple because it seems as if it could go on forever.---Chelsea Hogue Ohlman IL 2022
license
BILL NACE THROUGH A ROOM
Hey Everyone!
I have some copies of my new LP Through a Room for sale
It was released last week on Drag City
Thanks for looking!
BN
$30 ppd in usa
$50 ppd canada
$55 ppd r.o.w.
paypal to billnace@gmail.com
(PLEASE MAKE SURE MAILING ADDRESS IS INCLUDED IN PAYPAL PAYMENT)
(send as Friend/Family..add address in notes...don't give paypal yr money ;)
Bill Nace’s Through a Room represents a seismic progression from Both, his startling 2020 debut solo LP
for Drag City. Nace’s career has been defined by a relentless probing of ways to frame the complex
menu of human emotions, and that the guitar has been his primary tool for exploring this terrain is of
little consequence. On this new release, he also employs tapes, hurdy gurdy, doughnut pipe, quelle est
belle, as well as his latest instrument of choice, taishÅgoto. This is also, ultimately, insignificant.
What matters is the discerning spirit which animates his work. The tracks are carefully built from loops
and phrases that talk to each other, subsume one another, overlapping and crashing and diving and
expanding and emerging into unimagined vistas. On the whole, the record offers a fascinating and
engrossing chronicle – a sequence of interrelated stories told by a temporally dislodged narrator. You
think you’re here, then you’re there, and then you go through trapdoors and along tunnels, into cellars
and secret rooms, and you find that actually you’re back where you started. But it’s not hard to follow.
Trust me. Nothing this enticing can be hard to follow.
The record was recorded and edited in Philadelphia during the uncertain summer of 2021 with engineer
and co-producer Cooper Crain. Where Both was a chiseling down of spontaneous live performance,
Through a Room, while obviously the work of the same artist, treats its sounds as building blocks,
combining them to mesmerizing effect. What’s striking is the poise, the degree of authorial intensity.
The false dichotomy of composition and improvisation is thoroughly and rightfully abolished.
Bill’s interests range from post-punk to post-industrial to hip-hop to free jazz to avant-garde
composition, and every area between such unhelpful labels. From the inscrutable, evocative track titles
to the enticingly baffling cover art by his longtime compatriot Daniel Higgs, Nace is guided by an
ineffable, internal muse, a persistently personal stormcloud of ideas that, ultimately, comprise that
thing we call art. Here’s the real deal.
- Matt Krefting, Holyoke, 2022
OM68 Rick Myers Memory is Current TEST PRESS ART EDITIONS SOLD OUT SOLD OUT SOLD OUT
9 (sold)
SOLD OUT SOLD OUT SOLD OUT ALL EDITIONS SOLD OUT THANKS TO EVERYONE WHO ORDERED!!!!
Test Pressing Editions of OM68 Rick Myers Obstacle #79: MEMORY IS CURRENT made in an edition of 9
Signed and Numbered with Original Collage by Bill Nace on front
$100 ppd in USA (R.O.W. add $25 for shipping)
paypal to billnace@gmail.com
please put address in payment, send friends and family if you can and indicate which # cover you want
thanks for looking!!
bn
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