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.

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 MATT KREFTING FINER POINTS LP

BILL NACE MASAYO KOKETSU DUO LP

BILL NACE/EMILY ROBB SPIT LP

https://openmouthrecords.bandcamp.com/album/bill-nace-emily-robb-split

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

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$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

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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, taishōgoto. 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

                                             1 (sold)

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                                             8 (sold)

                                               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

OM68 Rick Myers Obstacle #79: MEMORY IS CURRENT SOLD OUT SOLD OUT SOLD OUT

 

SOLD OUT SOLD OUT SOLD OUT SOLD OUT
THANKS TO EVERYONE WHO ORDERED!!!
STILL AVAILABLE FROM FE, FUSETRON, TECHNIQUE STREET

ALSO CHECK OUT RICKS EXCELLENT LP ON CEJERO

https://cejero.bandcamp.com/album/obstacle-80-indices

OUT NOW! OM68

Rick Myers Obstacle #79: MEMORY IS CURRENT

SILKSCREENED SLEEVES SCREENED BY ALAN SHERRY

EDITION OF 250

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/obstacle-79-memory-is-current

Obstacle #79: MEMORY IS CURRENT offers a sequence of works for player piano, a device which captured Rick Myers’ imagination in 2017. Divining a method from mathematical measurements and intuitive drawing systems, Myers obstructed piano rolls using adhesive tape. Performed in this altered state on a player piano in the hallway of Easthampton Machine and Tool in Easthampton, Massachusetts, the music embedded in the rolls was extricated from its history and given fresh life. Restriction forged a pathway to expanse. Here are the enchanting results.

The workings of the machine are evident throughout, wistfully recalling music box fantasias, even as the tumbling notes confound expectations. The meticulously constructed scenarios invariably run amok, and in between chaos and melody, frustration and freedom, an impossible helix fashions its own celestial music. The sounds grumble against one another, summoning subterranean promises and unearthing unexpected delights.

As the tracks run into one another, Myers interposes spoken dispatches, detailing aspects of the story behind the record. Like the sounds of the piano, they transcend mere reportage. Increasingly obscured over the course of the two sides, these ghostly interjections are part of the sonic fabric, enhancing both the narrative and acousmatic aspects of the project.  

Rick Myers is an artist whose decades-long career has studiously disregarded the confines of medium – there are books, drawings, sculptures, installations, exhibitions, videos, performances, design projects, texts, and combinations thereof. Sound, as evidenced by his recent focus on recorded material, is but another potent arrow in his quiver. Plus, it’s nothing new – he cut his teeth as a DJ.

This record is an interior travelogue shot through with ecstatic truth. In furthering the process of obstruction by which the player piano makes its music possible, Myers is, in his own words, looking to “cast and dislodge time.” Like God or Loss or Love, Time is one of the bedeviling bottomless wells from which the most affecting art springs. This is the real thing.     

Rick Myers is not in search of lost time, he is attempting to lose it, and in so doing to chart the inevitable trajectory of that loss, of its apparent disappearance, its peculiar habit of hiding in plain sight

Matt Krefting

Holyoke, MA, 2022