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viewing 1 To 22 of 22 items
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SCTR 068LP
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"For the first time this century, two missed masterpieces are coming available on vinyl. The band Souled American formed in Chicago in 1986 and recorded a total of sixty-six songs between 1988 and 1996. Though not ever popular themselves, their evolving hybrid of roots/rock music heavily influenced many more popular bands to come, among them Wilco, The Jayhawks, The Feelies, Califone, Counting Crows, The Mountain Goats, and Cracker. Their records became legendary, unavailable for decades. Some got to the Internet in 2023. Their last two albums Frozen and Notes Campfire are now re-issued in limited, hand-crafted, 30th Anniversary Editions with a fresh abundance of stories, technical information, musician credits, and cartoons that detail the unexpected origins surrounding these two early classics of 'ambient Americana.' These records sound at once both old and new with brilliant melodies and profound performances stacked in unusual patterns like soft-hued bricks."
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SCTR 067LP
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"For the first time this century, two missed masterpieces are coming available on vinyl. The band Souled American formed in Chicago in 1986 and recorded a total of sixty-six songs between 1988 and 1996. Though not ever popular themselves, their evolving hybrid of roots/rock music heavily influenced many more popular bands to come, among them Wilco, The Jayhawks, The Feelies, Califone, Counting Crows, The Mountain Goats, and Cracker. Their records became legendary, unavailable for decades. Some got to the Internet in 2023. Their last two albums Frozen and Notes Campfire are now re-issued in limited, hand-crafted, 30th Anniversary Editions with a fresh abundance of stories, technical information, musician credits, and cartoons that detail the unexpected origins surrounding these two early classics of 'ambient Americana.' These records sound at once both old and new with brilliant melodies and profound performances stacked in unusual patterns like soft-hued bricks."
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SCTR 065LP
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"The first full length LP by Joshua Massad and Dylan Aycock. Massad is a tabla player living in India and studying under Zakir Hussain. Massad and Aycock came together in Tulsa to record live at the legendary Church Studio which was founded by Leon Russell in the '70s. Over a few nights they captured some moments in the studio before it came under new ownership and just before Joshua moved to India. From Aquarium Drunkard: 'Aycock improvising on 12-string with Massad accompanying tabla and sitar. A flowing river of sound, a meeting of the minds. The little touches that Dylan's brother Jesse Aycock adds (bits of synth) really sweeten the deal as well.'"
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SCTR 064LP
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"Beginnings: Collected Pedal Steel Guitar Works, is the first full length album by UK-based pedal steel guitarist and improviser Gary Peters. As there seems to be a slew of pedal steel guitar albums coming out in the last five years, this one is unlike any one has heard. There's no use of reverb pedals or ambient swells, yet it still has so much atmosphere and emotion. The majority of the compositions and improvisations are solo pedal steel guitar, but there are a couple tracks with accompaniment by upright bassist Christopher Williams and pianist Veryan Weston. Gary Peters has been quietly and prolifically releasing recordings over the years. This grouping of songs Scissor Tail Editions spent about a year working towards narrowing down and mixing and are very honored to present this album of collected pedal steel guitar works."
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SCTR 062LP
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"Talk West is the project of Dylan Aycock. Aycock has forged a small series of intriguing and beautiful missives through the cassette underground with his explorations on guitar and pedal steel. On Black Coral Sprig, Aycock negotiates the terrain between stately and homely by stretching a ringing country tone into an all-encompassing atmosphere, much like the ambient realms of Stars of the Lid. His unhurried, gentle playing style comes to reveal understated textures that weave into a whole alternately spirited, warming and often haunting." --Preservation "Serene shades of Loren Connors and Bruce Langhorne's The Hired Hand in Dylan Aycock's (Talk West) Black Coral Sprig" --MOJO
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SCTR 059LP
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"Barely saved from obscurity by a series of chance events, John Fizer's only recorded album Treasure Man will finally see the light of day. Forty-five years in the making, while for the last twenty-nine years Fizer has been 'living rough' couch surfing, sleeping in play structures, friend's backyards and more recently his old Volvo station wagon. Fizer is currently residing in a nursing facility in Northern California. Below is the story of how this never before heard album came to Scissor Tail's attention. I used to walk my daughter to school and passed the original Peet's coffee every day. Across the street was Berkeley's beloved John 'Treasure Man' Fizer playing chess, doing crosswords and waiting next to the treasure tree which he had filled with gemstones and various magical trinkets. To this day any child passing by is welcome to choose a treasure. Over many stops with my daughter, I got to know John, a fountain of love, intelligence and humor and as quirky and feisty as can be. We became friends. Eventually he showed me a few old cassettes of cassettes of cassettes in poor condition of him performing and asked if I could make them sound better. I agreed to take a listen. Such amazing songs! So I proceeded to remaster the cassettes while continuing to ask John at least four times over several months if he had the original master studio recordings. The answer was always no. About the time I finally had his cassette sourced recordings sounding as good as they could be and he popped up with a 15 inches per second 1/4' half track, state of the art analog master reel-to-reel recorded at the legendary Mountain Ears recording studio in 1977 with some very fine studio musicians including Ray Bonneville, Brad 'Honeyboy' Hayes, Erik 'Bobo' Johnson and Brian 'Sluggo' Brown. John had found the original reel! It had been residing for decades in the bowels of John's old 1980 Volvo station wagon, which also serves as his home, and was covered in strangely beautiful mold but that was the day I knew the world would hear John's music the way it was meant to be be... big, fat, analog. The next few years were spent cleaning and remastering the album with some of the world's finest restoration specialists." --James Johnson (producer)
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SCTR 057LP
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"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 tastemaker Ty Segall, Tobacco City seems to fit in wherever good music resides regardless of the genre."
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SCTR 056LP
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"Scissor Tail presents the first vinyl issue of Marc Barreca's 1986 album The Sleeper Wakes, originally only released on cassette by the Seattle electronic ambient label Intrepid. 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 Scissor Tail is 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."
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SCTR 045LP
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"More or less known for his projects Bronze Horse and The Dove Azima, which cloaked his name on his three past albums, Zachary Hay is finally releasing a self-titled LP. When Scissor Tail Editions first discovered his music, they were floored by his stream-of-consciousness approach to acoustic guitar. A very playful, innocent and intuitive flow of ideas created some incredibly poignant songs, feeling as if they already existed and rose from oblivion -- preformed. This album, like his others, would fit nicely alongside Willie Lane, Jandek, MV & EE, Tashi Dorji and Loren Connors. Or imagine if John Fahey and Jack Rose were stripped of their deep knowledge of blues music and were distilled down to pure melody and feel, they may have made similar choices on the guitar as Zachary Hay here. This album is the most sincere album of contemporary guitar music Scissor Tail has heard. His perfect, simple technique adds a timelessness to each song that could be vaguely described as 'American Primitive' -- a tradition that includes Charalambides, Christina Carter, and Scott Tuma, as much as Fahey and his contemporaries."
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CD
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SCTR 052CD
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"Well-known bluesman and one-time Oklahoman Bill Homans, known in the blues world as 'Watermelon Slim' and known by '70s rare psychedelic vinyl collectors as Merry Airbrakes found work as forklift driver, funeral officiator, small-time criminal, newspaper reporter, saw miller, and truck driver for industrial waste among others. In 1979, Slim and a friend came to Oklahoma and wound up in Pushmataha County, where he bought a piece of land and took up watermelon farming. That vocation didn't last, but the nickname he got doing it did. It was in Vietnam, while laid up by an extended illness at a Cam Ranh Bay hospital, that Homans negotiated in French the five-dollar purchase of his first guitar from a 'papasan' in a tiny commissary on the hospital grounds. 'It was the nastiest old guitar you ever saw, but it did have all six strings on it,' he said. There, with a Zippo lighter and a broken shard of a coffee can top, he began to teach himself to play his unique, backwards style of bottleneck slide. After returning stateside he would join the ranks of Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), and in 1973 recorded with his brother and friends an LP titled Merry Airbrakes, a protest album he categorized as 'psychedelic folk.' A cut from that record eventually appeared on a Country Joe McDonald compilation of music by Vietnam veterans. However, his music career would soon tank. A brief career in petty crime ensued, which he would forsake by 1978. What is an underground album? Some people would say that it is one which has been produced outside, or in spite, of the music industry, whether or not it has prospered. This album, Merry Airbrakes, has incontrovertible underground credentials. This may be one of the only albums one can hear by a Vietnam veteran, and aside from certain American bluesmen, John Prine, and a literal handful of others, American music has never addressed the Vietnam War and its effects. Certainly it is the only place one can ever hear a song from the Vietnamese point of view."
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SCTR 052LP
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LP version. "Well-known bluesman and one-time Oklahoman Bill Homans, known in the blues world as 'Watermelon Slim' and known by '70s rare psychedelic vinyl collectors as Merry Airbrakes found work as forklift driver, funeral officiator, small-time criminal, newspaper reporter, saw miller, and truck driver for industrial waste among others. In 1979, Slim and a friend came to Oklahoma and wound up in Pushmataha County, where he bought a piece of land and took up watermelon farming. That vocation didn't last, but the nickname he got doing it did. It was in Vietnam, while laid up by an extended illness at a Cam Ranh Bay hospital, that Homans negotiated in French the five-dollar purchase of his first guitar from a 'papasan' in a tiny commissary on the hospital grounds. 'It was the nastiest old guitar you ever saw, but it did have all six strings on it,' he said. There, with a Zippo lighter and a broken shard of a coffee can top, he began to teach himself to play his unique, backwards style of bottleneck slide. After returning stateside he would join the ranks of Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), and in 1973 recorded with his brother and friends an LP titled Merry Airbrakes, a protest album he categorized as 'psychedelic folk.' A cut from that record eventually appeared on a Country Joe McDonald compilation of music by Vietnam veterans. However, his music career would soon tank. A brief career in petty crime ensued, which he would forsake by 1978. What is an underground album? Some people would say that it is one which has been produced outside, or in spite, of the music industry, whether or not it has prospered. This album, Merry Airbrakes, has incontrovertible underground credentials. This may be one of the only albums one can hear by a Vietnam veteran, and aside from certain American bluesmen, John Prine, and a literal handful of others, American music has never addressed the Vietnam War and its effects. Certainly it is the only place one can ever hear a song from the Vietnamese point of view."
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SCTR 029LP
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"Chuck Johnson's impact on the contemporary guitar world continues to be felt. His first two solo records signaled the arrival of a unique player, steeped in various forms of playing and influence, yet distinctly modern. Johnson eschews a weathered traditionalism for the wide-scope expanse of 21st Century Americana. On his third album, Blood Moon Boulder, Johnson reaches a compositional peak in a nod to the picturesque naturalism of the American landscape. The dynamics of his range can be felt on this singular record, a soundtrack-like listen that rewards the ear with rich detail. His precision and tone recall the heights of Ry Cooder's Paris, Texas on the extended opening track 'Corvid Tactics.' Notably, the guitarist duels with a phantom Chinese radio signal that slips through the silences during the recording session. One can hear the ghostly sounds peek through at moments as Johnson bends his strings. 'Medicine Map' delivers a melodic melancholy, with an every-note-perfectly-placed aesthetic. Rather than ramble or evoke some kind of outdated nostalgia, Johnson lets his cinematic instincts take lead. Perhaps most evocative of this approach is 'Private Violence,' a meditative composition with gorgeous pedal steel played on top of electric six-string, ending in a sustained tonal minimalism that could easily stretch into a whole LP of its own. Blood Moon Boulder contains a lyricism, an exactitude and emotional arc all its own. And that's worth playing again and again." --Steve Lowenthal
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SCTR 051CD
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"Songwriter and multi-instrumentalist / producer Scott Hirsch has recorded a follow up to his critically acclaimed 2016 record, Blue Rider Songs. On Lost Time Behind The Moon, Hirsch chronicles confronting ghosts of the past, acknowledging that darkness rides alongside the light, and avoiding the pitfalls of regret. The record was recorded and produced by Hirsch with the help of Mike Coykendall (M Ward), and features musical guests William Tyler, Mikael Jorgensen (Wilco), Orpheo McCord (Edward Sharpe), Jimmy Calire (America) and Jesse Siebenberg (Lukas Nelson, Supertramp). Scott Hirsch's name is one you'll find lurking in the liner notes of many admired recordings from the late 1990s to the present. As a founding member of Hiss Golden Messenger, he was integral to the band's first five records, lending his sonic imprint on their productions, as well as shaping the sound of the live outfit, having toured heavily through the formative years of the band. Much of this work is reflected on the forthcoming Merge Records box set entitled Devotion: Songs About Rivers And Spirits And Children. Along the way he produced and played on records by Kim Krans' Family Band, as well as recording a Grammy-nominated record by the legendary folksinger Alice Gerrard. Having stepped off the demanding tour schedule of Hiss in 2016, new pathways opened up for Hirsch to fully engage in the craft of songwriting. On this second record, his production tones and songwriting talents are in full bloom."
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SCTR 051LP
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LP version. "Songwriter and multi-instrumentalist / producer Scott Hirsch has recorded a follow up to his critically acclaimed 2016 record, Blue Rider Songs. On Lost Time Behind The Moon, Hirsch chronicles confronting ghosts of the past, acknowledging that darkness rides alongside the light, and avoiding the pitfalls of regret. The record was recorded and produced by Hirsch with the help of Mike Coykendall (M Ward), and features musical guests William Tyler, Mikael Jorgensen (Wilco), Orpheo McCord (Edward Sharpe), Jimmy Calire (America) and Jesse Siebenberg (Lukas Nelson, Supertramp). Scott Hirsch's name is one you'll find lurking in the liner notes of many admired recordings from the late 1990s to the present. As a founding member of Hiss Golden Messenger, he was integral to the band's first five records, lending his sonic imprint on their productions, as well as shaping the sound of the live outfit, having toured heavily through the formative years of the band. Much of this work is reflected on the forthcoming Merge Records box set entitled Devotion: Songs About Rivers And Spirits And Children. Along the way he produced and played on records by Kim Krans' Family Band, as well as recording a Grammy-nominated record by the legendary folksinger Alice Gerrard. Having stepped off the demanding tour schedule of Hiss in 2016, new pathways opened up for Hirsch to fully engage in the craft of songwriting. On this second record, his production tones and songwriting talents are in full bloom."
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SCTR 046LP
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LP version. "Philly-based musician Rosali (Long Hots, Wandering Shade) wrote the songs for her second album, Trouble Anyway, seeking empowerment by sharing openly on love, power, aging, suffering, confusion, self-doubt, and anger. The result is a full-bodied record that is at once sweeping and intimate - a vulnerable and powerful exploration of emotional narratives. With a band including Rosali's close friends Charlie Hall (War On Drugs), Paul Sukeena (Angel Olsen), Mary Lattimore, Mike Polizze (Purling Hiss), Nathan Bowles (Steve Gunn, Black Twig Pickers) and Dan Provenzano (Purling Hiss, Writhing Squares), this album is a cohesive collection of lush, intimate rock songs, featuring Rosali's warm, natural vocals and powerful riffing and rhythm guitar."
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SCTR 046CD
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"Philly-based musician Rosali (Long Hots, Wandering Shade) wrote the songs for her second album, Trouble Anyway, seeking empowerment by sharing openly on love, power, aging, suffering, confusion, self-doubt, and anger. The result is a full-bodied record that is at once sweeping and intimate - a vulnerable and powerful exploration of emotional narratives. With a band including Rosali's close friends Charlie Hall (War On Drugs), Paul Sukeena (Angel Olsen), Mary Lattimore, Mike Polizze (Purling Hiss), Nathan Bowles (Steve Gunn, Black Twig Pickers) and Dan Provenzano (Purling Hiss, Writhing Squares), this album is a cohesive collection of lush, intimate rock songs, featuring Rosali's warm, natural vocals and powerful riffing and rhythm guitar."
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SCTR 025LP
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"This is a vinyl reissue of the quickly sold-out cassette by North Carolina based 12-string guitarist and multi-instrumentalist Sarah Louise. Field Guide is her first solo record before releasing a solo record on VDSQ and her debut duo album with Sally Anne Morgan (Black Twig Pickers) as House And Land on Thrill Jockey."
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SCTR 007LP
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2023 repress. "Classic 1971 Peter Fonda film soundtrack from Dylan side-man & folk scene impresario. Beautifully melancholy score performed with guitars, tonal effects, fiddle, banjo, sitar, and more that evokes high plains drifting, lonesome cowpokes. 'It's The West seen as Purgatory, its characters endlessly moving on, but Langhorne conjures beauty from the pain." -- The Wire.
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2CD
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SCTR 043CD
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"Compiled by Dylan Golden Aycock, Loren Connors, and Suzanne Langille, The Hired Hands is an 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 1960s as the go-to hired hand for Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Richie Havens, Odetta, and many others. Browsing his wikipedia page, one is informed of the volume of work he accomplished throughout the '50s, '60s and '70s. Scissor Tail Editions was lucky enough to release Langhorne's score to Peter Fonda's 1971 anti-western The Hired Hand on vinyl in 2012. Artists were asked to cover or reinterpret a song of their choice from the soundtrack. No rules were made on whether the music should be derivative of a certain song -- if the soundtrack inspired a mood, than the artist could use their intuition. Langhorne has come on hard times in recent years, having suffered a stroke that prevents him from playing the guitar. A large percentage of the profits for this tribute go to Langhorne and his family."
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SCTR 043LP
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"Joseph Allred fits the Guitar Soli realm perfectly, fully embodying the guitar loner typecast -- he falls in line with Robbie Basho not only in his 12-string playing that has a leaning towards Eastern musical traditions and droning free form raga, but also in his educational background in philosophy and religious studies. Scissor Tail Editions decided to put out Fire And Earth after hearing only thirty seconds of the track 'Leitmotif' -- there's a sincerity in Allred's music and way of life that has been missing from the modern age for a long time. Allred has been quietly releasing records for years, painstakingly designing and hand-printing most of the packaging, never promoting any of them. He hand-painted the covers for Fire And Earth and letterpressed the back covers of Dylan Golden Aycock's latest. Now inhabiting land that's been in his family for two hundred years, he says he's trying to find a place in the family legacy. In Fire And Earth, there is a searching and spiritual quality to the music, and also integrity."
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SCTR 042LP
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"On Black Wind, songwriter/guitarist Wes Tirey makes the case for quality over quantity. After a stream of well received cassettes, he assembled a reserved trio and laid down the soft law on a single night. Whereas his previous releases were turned inward, this album opens out like Terrence Malick meditating on prairie grass. The arrangements are spacious, simple structures of voice and acoustic guitar, with sparse backing from a telecaster and a trap kit. In addition to this fine album on Scissor Tail Records is a thematically linked book to be released by Cabin Floor Esoterica. Titled Melodrama Blues: Selected Lyrics of Wes Tirey, it collects writings from Black Wind and three past albums, all related via Tirey's feel for a mythological Americana, the threads of surrealist biblical imagery that underlie our cultural cosmos."
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SCTR 040LP
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"Dylan Golden Aycock is part of the new generation of guitar pickers young enough to first have been influenced by early volumes of Tompkins Square Records' Imaginational Anthem series and then to be anthologized on a later one. The Oklahoma native is on Volume 7, should you feel like looking, playing an early version of 'Red Bud Valley,' which sits in the middle of the B-side of the LP under consideration here. Aycock's composing on Church Of Level Track offers evidence that he's well studied in a lineage of American Primitive pickers that stretches back decades before he was born. 'Lord It Over' puts it right out there by opening with a double-thumbed bass line right out of John Fahey's bag of tricks. But this quotation is merely an opening gambit, and one that is quickly followed by moves that prove Aycock is no parrot but a bird with his own song to sing. The steel guitar that sails in over his picking evokes first the bucolic playfulness of Jim O'Rourke's Bad Timing and then keeps going back into the deep back shelves of country-rock lyricism. At the same time a virtual band (Aycock plays everything on the track and nearly everything on the LP) sets up a subtle undertow of entropic drumming and echo-laden feedback. . . ." --Bill Meyer (Dusted Magazine, Chicago Reader)
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