ESSENTIAL TREMORS - 'THE VISITOR EP'

Formats

• TMR338 - 12"

Details

Essential Tremors is something of an anomaly in a city steeped in twang, bathed in sunshine and besieged with hootenannies. Code Knr, Miller, Read Only Memory, Tan, and Eerie Neighbor make up the group voted most likely to trigger a cold sweat, and we love them for it. In the past year, the band has made the charge away from guitar music with a quiet strategy of sporadic shows of crawly, four-track downer violence. During this metamorphosis, the band cut tracks with former Terrible Two and current Serration Pulse synth-lord and tone-boss Daniel Tomczak, crafting a crisp record that is globally exasperated and groovy against all odds: a nosedive into a cesspool of circuit-bent pollution with all the precision intact, notoriously tense, rife with white-knuckle paranoia and fog. Throw in well-placed pangs of electroclash, swirling synth, waterlogged bass lines, and dark-sided shit, and you have an important reminder that good times are not forever, which we are honored to bring to your turntable. This is music for strays. Do you have a home?

Tracks

1. The Visitor
2.MTA
SIDE B
1. Death Perception

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WILLIAM TYLER - 'LIVE AT THIRD MAN RECORDS'

Formats

• TMR288 - LP

  813547023148

Details

Recorded on July 18th, 2014, as the opening set for Peter Walker’s psychedelic guitar experience, William Tyler’s Live at Third Man Records LP was buried for far too long in our backlog of masters. To release it too soon would have been to unleash the secrets of the transcendent and acclaimed new record Modern Country (Merge, 2016) before they had a chance to incubate further. Too wait any longer would have been torture for us. Originally planned to be a live single, the full, 5-song performance was too truthy, too seamless, and too perfectly whole to be whittled down to two tracks. So, surprise! A live LP is born. For those unfamiliar with William Tyler, his story is Nashville legend... born into a songwriting family, Tyler was tapped by Kurt Wagner to become a member of Lambchop at age 19 (two decades younger than the other members), and quickly became the “architect of the band’s sound.” From there, Tyler went on to back up the Silver Jews, Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Charlie Louvin, and others... all the while writing songs for his configuration of choice: fingerpicking solo guitar. The daring simplicity and winsome melodies of his first two albums remains in his most recent effort (which he describes as “a love letter to what we’re losing in America. To what we’ve already lost”), and on this live LP, but Tyler is bringing more depth and more experimentation to his compositions of late. “Gone Clear,” which appears on both records, is a melting pot of ideas: a drone reminiscent of Hindustani classical music, a central melody that sounds distinctly Appalachian, a devolution into a kaleidoscope of colors and ideas that it’s hard to believe is being produced by a single musician. This layering of textures is Tyler’s trademark, and even more awe-inspiring live. We like to think that with the purposeful lack of smart phones, bars to saddle up to, and, of course, corners, concert-goers in the Blue Room tend to be more in-the-moment than in most performance venues. But it’s a rare artist who can take the already focused atmosphere in the room and quiet every last busy mind — Tyler did just that. This immortalization of the performance in all its transmundane glory will entrance you from first note.

Tracks

1. We Can?t Go Home Again
2. Terrace of the Leper King
3. Missionary Ridge
4. Going Clear
5. Tears and Saints

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COUPLER - 'THE BLUE ROOM SESSIONS'

Formats

• TMR359 - LP

  813547023087

Details

Back in January 2015, we had the pleasure of hosting Coupler in our Blue Room. The event came to life when these local acousticians and purveyors of deliberate ambience took the stage. It was twenty minutes of captivating and unhurried techno that sounded bucolic at first, then violent, then crumbling, but always with a deft momentum. You could feel it in your gut and in your skull. Coupler’s set was a twenty-minutes mega-moment of song, and we decided the live album needed an accompanying piece. We invited them back to record Side B in October with a full orchestra of nine friends and musicians, and it turned out to be a very special piece exploring the nether-regions where the organic collides with the electronic. However, this wasn’t our typical TMR show. We kept it a relatively intimate affair and only sold a handful of tickets to those interested in seeing a recording process become a performance making this our first installment in The Blue Room Sessions series.

Tracks

1. Invention 4: Silenzio (Sadak in Search of the Waters of Oblivion)
2. The Valley of the Elders
3. Invention 2: Pattern Recognition
4. Sunless

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PETER BRODERICK - 'PARTNERS'

Formats

• ERATP088CD - CD

  4050486111833

• ERATP088LP - LP

  4050486111826

Details

Veteran Erased Tapes recording artist Peter Broderick set to release new studio album Partners on 19th August 2016. For close to a decade, Portland’s Peter Broderick has cut his own unpredictable path through the world of contemporary music. So far, his wanderings have led him from solo works into the realms of film, dance and documentary scores, as well as art installations. Now Peter takes that unpredictability one step further. For his latest album, a series of voice and piano recordings, he experiments with chance, surrendering an entire song’s composition to the roll of dice. As he explains below in an email to Erased Tapes founder Robert Raths, it was John Cage’s tendency to remove himself from his music, to somehow automate his own process, which inspired the strange mechanics with which this record was created. In the words of Cage himself, ‘the world is teeming; anything can happen.’

Tracks

1. Partners
2. In A Landscape
3. Carried
4. Under The Bridge
5. Conspiraling
6. Up Niek Mountain
7. Sometimes

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BAD SPORTS - 'LIVING WITH SECRETS'

Formats

• ZZZ143 - 12"

  881970014316

Details

Bad Sports return with a jaw-dropping new 12-inch! While the band hasn’t released anything in a couple of years, the individual members have been anything but idle during that time. Orville Neely continues his slow takeover of the world with rock juggernauts OBN IIIs (who have released two albums in the past two years), while Daniel Fried and Gregory Rutherford’s band Video got signed to Jack White’s label Third Man Records, and has been touring ever since. The pair have also been touring a ton as one half of Radioactivity, who released the stunning Silent Kill on Dirtnap last year. Originally conceived as a series of three singles, the band and label realized that the individual seven songs worked as one piece. Living With Secrets is another step forward for Bad Sports—moving away from both the ebullient punk/power pop of 2011’s Kings Of The Weekend and the anything-goes grimy punk of 2014’s Bras, this EP is their darkest, most powerful, and weirdest. The lyrics are bleak and desperate, but the music is more dangerously catchy than ever.

Tracks

1. Don?t Get Your Hopes Up
2. Living With Secrets
3. Done To Death
4. Anymore
5. Pacify My Love
6. Where Are You?
7. Why Should I Care?

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STEVE ADAMYK BAND - 'GRACELAND'

Formats

• ZZZ142 - LP

  881970014217

Details

Blame Canada. Or for that matter, Ottawa. The Capital’s kings of punk-power-fuzz are back and better than ever. After a whack of records and worldwide touring, Graceland is Steve Adamyk Band’s most dynamic and cohesive record to date, without breaking the mould. Colleen Green (Hardly Art) sings on it, Mike Krol (Merge) croons on it and members of Sonic Avenues are now staples in the band. This time, the band bunkered down in Montreal with engineer Adrian Popivich (Solids, The Dears) to bring Graceland to life. In the meantime, scream along to “Through My Fingers” or get lost in the depths of “High Mile”—the choice is yours. Mr. Adamyk has been nothing but prolific since coming aboard the Dirtnap roster. This is already his fifth LP, with a sixth in the planning stage. The label finds his trademark brand of speedy, caffeinated, catchy-but-not-too-wimpy pop perfectly exemplifies their aesthetic. They’ll keep putting these out as long as he keeps makin’ ’em.

Tracks

1. Through My Fingers
2. Carry On
3. If I Wanted To
4. Swallow You Whole
5. Broken Arms
6. Die Dead Forever
7. False Teeth
8. Give It Away
9. Lose Control
10. Tell Me To Fall
11. Fallen Off
12. High Mile
13. She?s On My Mind

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