Strange Attractors Audio House

Updated 4/27/12                                                             JOIN OUR MAILING LIST

MP3s
NEW:
Yair Yona "It's Not the Heat (It's the Humidity) (from World Behind Curtains CD/LP/MP3, out 02.14.12)
Chuck Johnson "The Flying Spire Don't Have No Mercy" (from A Struggle Not a Thought CD/LP/MP3)
Sean Smith "The Real" (from Huge Fluid Freedom CD/LP/MP3)
Arborea "Careless Love" (from Red Planet CD/LP/MP3)
SYCH "Hermetic Mosaic" (from Lunar Roulette CD/LP/MP3)
Sharron Kraus - "Evergreen Sisters" (from The Woody Nightshade CD/LP/MP3)
Primordial Undermind - "Time Being" (from Last Worldly Bond LP/MP3)
Yair Yona - "Brave Walls" (from Remember CD/LP/MP3)
My Education - "Oars" (from Sunrise CD/LP/MP3)

NEWS:

CHUCK JOHNSON

Composer and musician Chuck Johnson was a member of Spatula, Idyll Swords, and Shark Quest - influential bands in the Chapel Hill independent music scene of the 1990's and early 2000's, and his early influences of North Carolina Piedmont blues and the "American Primitive" approach are widely evident. A Struggle Not a Thought is Johnson's full length debut, an album brimming with sparkling fingerstyle compositions that are just as forward-thinking and jaw-dropping as any revered documents by the steel-string compositional masters, both past and present. A Struggle Not A Thought comes as a CD housed in a cardstock gatefold sleeve and and LP + Download. FIRST 100 LP MAILORDER COPIES PRESSED ON WHITE VINYL.

SEAN SMITH

Instrumental musician, experimental composer, and widely acclaimed producer of the Berkeley Guitar and Beyond Berkely Guitar compilations Sean Smith conjures fire and sweat, dew and ash through his medium - the guitar. Huge Fluid Freedom is his 4th solo album and a marked departure from strictly solo guitar ventures into stell string-informed rock overtures backed by a full band. The album represents a much wider scope of collaboration than Smith's previous works, resulting in a moving sonic experience ranging from straight up solo acoustic exploration to breathtaking cinematic rock soundscapes. Epic firewalking. Huge Fluid Freedom CD comes in a cardstock gatefold sleeve; LP is housed in a gatefold sleeve with download. FIRST 100 MAILORDER COPIES ARE PRESSED ON CLEAR VINYL.

ARBOREA

We are thrilled to welcome Arborea to the Strange Attractors family! Arborea have received near-universal acclaim with each outing, displaying a steady evolution of their folk-dappled style into shimmering sound pools which, collectively, convey the feel of minimalist film soundtracks. Arborea have come into their own with their fantastic 4th album Red Planet, absolutely the most finely distilled and focused display of their resonant sonic-acoustic vision to date. Buck Curran's atmospheric guitar style echoes softly throughout, like elegies for forgotten souls or lands laid barren by time. The spotlight, however, is awash on Shanti Curran and her otherworldly and sonorous voice, sounding like a ghostly marriage of Tim Buckley and Hope Sandoval as it elevates high above the fragile acoustic terrain. Helena Espvall of Philadelphia acid-folk explorers Espers made a special trek up to Maine in the summer of 2010 to collaborate with Arborea, and her inimitable, instinctive harmonizing cello style provides key textural contributions. Red Planet documents an astounding achievement by Arborea - two artists who have effortlessly melded their life experiences into one pure and distinct vision.

SYCH

SYCH is both an acronym for the dream-team avant jazz quartet of Wally Shoup/C. Spencer Yeh/Chris Corsano/Bill Horist, and the heady, buzzing state of mind achieved while immersed in their glorious fire-ringed soundpools. The players' combined resume reads as a borderline hyperbolic who's who of contemporary experimental and improvised music: Shoup is a free jazz veteran from Seattle, WA who leads his Wally Shoup Trio and Project W, and has collaborated with Nels Cline (Wilco etc), Thurston Moore (Sonic Youth etc), and Paul Flaherty; Yeh is most known for leading Burning Star Core and boasts countless live and recorded collaborations in his own right; Corsano is a shining light in avant music, most recently as a member of Rangda (with Sir Richard Bishop and Ben Chasny/Six Organs of Admittance) and is a tremendously in-demand and diverse percussionist, performing with people that range (literally) from Bjork to Jandek, and on recordings with Six Organs of Admittance, Nels Cline and dozens more; Horist is a West Coast signature guitarist, composer and improviser, with scores of recordings and collaborations alongside such names as Bill Frisell, Eugene Chadbourne, and Steve Fisk. The sum of the individual parts is staggering as displayed on Lunar Roulette, an astonishing album brimming with ecstatic excursions into the outer regions of free music. Lunar Roulette is out now as a cardstock 4-panel CD, Ltd Edition LP + Download, and Album MP3.

GLENN JONES SIGNS TO THRILL JOCKEY
Glenn Jones, whose three solo albums, DVD with Jack Rose, and four Cul de Sac releases helped shape and define Strange Attractors in countless ways, has signed to the amazing Thrill Jockey label. Glenn has mentored and directed many artists to Strange Attractors - it is Glenn who helped us discover Steffen Basho-Junghans, Sean Smith, Charlie Schmidt, and Yair Yona. His Cul de Sac recordings and his solo albums can be pointed to as the purest representation of the two yin-yang sides of the SAAH catalog and overall musical vision. He is truly the Grand Poobah of the label and we love him deeply.

First up for Thrill Jockey is a split 12" with The Black Twig Pickers with Charlie Parr, recorded exclusively for Record Store Day (4.16.11). Glenn's Thrill Jockey full length debut is due in August 2011. We wish him the best and hope the new partnership helps spread his musical gospel to the furthest reaches of the universe. Look for a reissue of Glenn Jones' solo debut This is the Wind that Blows it Out on vinyl sometime this fall on Strange Attractors (CD out of print - digital version available) Browse our catalog to find his many solo releases, DVD, and Cul de Sac recordings

PRIMORDIAL UNDERMIND
Last Worldly Bond is the new triumph from Primordial Undermind, recorded live in the studio in front of a very fortunate audience in Vienna, Austria. This special recording is ltd to 500 copies on vinyl and comes with a download card. Instant download w/purchase of LP from our secure shopping cart (Paypal customers, please leave note in order requesting instant download).

SHARRON KRAUS

Sharron Kraus receives a lovely 7.4 review on Pitchfork for her latest opus The Woody Nightshade!

Sharron Kraus is a UK-based singer, musician and songwriter whose craft defiantly recasts yet tenderly cherishes the folk traditions of England and Appalachia. With a tableau of critically-acclaimed albums, collaborations and projects across the past decade, Kraus has forged a musical path bewtiched by the dark side of folk music and its traditions while lifting its veil to the sunlight of modern times. The Woody Nightshade is the newest entry into Kraus' canon, a body of work that is her finest and most ambitious to date - and, notably, the least overtly "folky" of the bunch. Gone are the traditional folk tools of the trade, such as the familiar use of banjo and fiddles, in favor of drums, electric guitar and bass. While that may sound as though Kraus has "gone electric", she uses this foray into broader instrumentation as texture and color, wrapping coarse velvet and splashing subtle earth tones over her songs. The result is a much more folk-inspired album than folk-saturated. Timely and timeless, The Woody Nightshade is a triumph by one of the most original and innovative artists presiding over today's new folk idiom. The Woody Nightshade is out now on CD/LP + Download/MP3. Read what writer Grayson Currin has to say in Pitchfork, where The Woody Nightshade received a glowing 7.4 review.

YAIR YONA

Israel isn't exactly known as a hotbed for acoustic steel-string guitar music, but guitarist/instrumentalist and all-around sonic ambassador Yair Yona seems determined to change all of that. From his headquarters in Tel Aviv, Yona is composing some of the most genre-bending music for solo steel-string heard since Sandy Bull opened up all the possibilities around the idiom in the 60's. Remember, Yona's astonishing debut solo album, is a celebration of the Takoma Records school coarsely filtered through a multi-hued prism of sound, resulting in an intelligent collection of compositions delivered in a fully-formed and strikingly singular voice. Strange Attractors Resurrection Series, Vol. 7; re-released in direct collaboration with Anova Music.

MY EDUCATION
For the past ten years, Austin, TX instrumentalists My Education have splashed their cinematic sound all over the great silver screen of the Central Texas sky, painting their stories using feedback-laden guitars, swirling melodic viola, rhythm section storm clouds, and flourishes of vibraphone, bells, strings and horns. Comprised of pieces from the band's original score for F.W. Murnau's 1927 silent masterpiece Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, My Education has discovered the perfect forum for which to flex their compositional muscles, achieving ever-transcendent musical heights in the process. This original score was perfected over the last two years through live scoring to the film, performed at sold out shows throughout the USA. Finding parallels with the timeless soundtracks-as-albums Popol Vuh composed for a number of Werner Herzog's films, Sunrise leaps onto celluloid with confident grace, distinguishing itself as My Education's most diverse and mature release yet.

Check out the new video by My Education for "Sunrise", the title track from their new album composed as a live soundtrack accompaniment to the F.W. Murnau silent classic film.

Video for "A Man Alone" from Sunrise, directed by Wiley Wiggins:

SEAN SMITH
Sean Smith is Berkeley, CA's preeminent steel-string slinger. Albums for Isota, the Berkeley Guitar 3-way split (a-la the Fahey/Kottke/Lang classic platter for Takoma Records) on Tompkins Square, and as current co-lead guitarist for Bay Area 'Zep III revivalists / Dead Oceans recordings artists Citay comprise a portion of a very impressive resume. Eternal finds Smith in peak compositional form, coaxing sensory-enhancing textures from an ensemble of players. His erstwhile acoustic guitar providing the anchor, Smith provides common links with Eastern and Middle Eastern folk music, folk-rock, Appalachian stomp, and Robbie Basho-esque "American Raga" that bobs and weaves but never ribbons itself away from its common tether. Especially reminiscent of the tilaka-adorned works of Sandy Bull and Peter Walker, with nods towards the Eastern influenced albums of John Fahey (The Great San Bernardino Birthday Party, Fare Forward Voyagers), Smith has arrived with an elaborately adorned and introspective offering. Softly psychedelic, spiritual, beautiful…Eternal is eternal.

JACK ROSE / GLENN JONES
The Things That We Used to Do is a very special, intimate performance DVD of Jack Rose and Glenn Jones, each artist playing solo and together. The footage was shot expressly for this project in a loft in Brooklyn, NY. The takes are live, but the performances are not in front of an audience, but rather in front of the camera, resulting in both a crucial document and a total celebration of two artists, collaborators, best of friends whose art serves to illuminate the breadth of solo guitar, from its roots to where it is today, and how the tradition is being carried forward on into the future. Includes a lengthy interview of each player together by Byron Coley and bonus live footage shot in concert in Philadelphia, March 2009. A one of a kind, remarkable document of the two leading lights of solo acoustic steel string guitar in their prime. Total DVD running time: 2:27:04.

Here's a clip of Jack Rose & Glenn Jones Performing a duet of "Miss May's Place", from The Things That We Used to Do DVD. Original Jack Rose composition found on Dr. Ragtime and His Pals.

The Things That We Used to Do long-form trailer:

SUBARACHNOID SPACE
Eight Bells is the new stunning album by SubArachnoid Space, exploring further depths into acid guitar-saturated leftfield metal. Limited edition 800 LP is housed in a gatefold sleeve featuring astounding original art by Stephen Kasner, and comes complete with a download card of the entire album in MP3 format. CD released by the fine folks at Crucial Blast.

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