New record pressing! Arms, the fifth full length LP from indie rock mainstays San Fermin, was written by bandleader Ellis Ludwig-Leone in the topsy-turvy months after the end of two relationships, one very long and one very short. To help navigate the ultraviolet days, he turned to longtime collaborator and vocalist Allen Tate, who helped channel the experience into a lean 9-track LP. Written from the multiple viewpoints characteristic of San Fermin’s previous albums, but with stripped back musical accompaniment that exposes the dissociation, humor, and regret of a life turned upside down, Arms is San Fermin’s most emotionally vulnerable album to date, and features some of its most potent songwriting.
New Record Pressing — Doctor Bionic is back on the airwaves. The newest album from Cincinnati-based executive producer Jason Grimez is an instrumental collection of classic soul, jazz, and hip-hop sounds. The first installment of a three-part series, Terrestrial Radio offers 37 minutes of carefully curated jams. Tune in to catch the vibe on 1/26/2024.
Jason Grimez is an engineer, executive producer, and the owner of Chiefdom Records. Growing up in the 90s, he fell in love with hip hop at an early age. He started scratching on a pair of 1200s and sampling records with an MPC 3000 in high school. Years of sampling, mixing, producing, and sharing his own music led him to where he is today. His independent label Chiefdom Records has released close to 30 albums in the last seven years. His studio persona Doctor Bionic was one of the first to see a release on the new imprint. The project features a rotating cast of incredibly talented session musicians. Jason is responsible for writing, recording, producing, mixing, and releasing the records.
Grimez sets the scene on track one of Terrestrial Radio, aptly titled “Time Continuum.” The listener is greeted with the scrubbing sound of a radio dial. We pause for a few seconds when the signal is strong enough to catch an ad-read from an old cereal commercial, or to gather an update from a sports announcer. Grimez takes the listener to a new era each time he spins the dial. Our search comes to an end on the channel where we’ll cruise through the next six songs, hand-picked by the Doctor himself.
Terrestrial Radio features some of Cincinnati’s best session musicians. “Keep Your Kids in School” highlights a killer rhythm section. Brian Batchelor-Glader recorded the organ over an effortlessly funky foundation formulated by Marvin Hawkins (drums) and Aaron Jacobs (bass). With an equally punchy bassline, funky guitar jabs, and thoughtful trumpet arrangements (Michael Mavridoglou), “Wire Fraud” is the perfect soundtrack for your next bank heist.
The remainder of the record offers everything from shuffling gospel grooves to head-nodding drum breaks. As Doctor Bionic, Jason Grimez has carved out a niche for a community of musicians to thrive in and build upon.
New high quality record pressing — Saxophonist Jerome Sabbagh is an old soul. He favors spontaneity between performers on the bandstand, prefers the feel of a swinging band to heady, over-wrought music, and likes the sound of analog over digital. When it came time to work on a new project, Sabbagh wanted to record an album that would sound like a set in a club, and felt ready to look back to early influences. On Vintage, his first album as a leader featuring piano, Sabbagh enlists the piano legend Kenny Barron in his all-star quartet to help make a recording that connects generations and makes tradition vital once again.
Back again for 2023, please find a list of some of our employee’s favorite frecords that we worked on this year. There is never enough time to really dig into every project, but this is a snapshot of some great vinyl records you should seek out via your favorite local record store or online store!
Employee Name: Mike Burrows
Fela Kuti – “Gentleman” (Knitting Factory) Cymande – “Second Time ‘Round” (Knitting Factory) Black Market Brass – “Hox” (Colemine) Ghost Funk Orchestra – “Brownout / Boneyard Baille” (Colemine) V/A _ “If There’s Hell Below” (Numero Group) Abdul Wadud – “By Myself” (Gotta Groove) Toots & the Maytals – “Sweet and Dandy” (Real Gone) The Donnas – “Early Singles 1995-1999” (Real Gone) The Donnas – “The Donnas” (Real Gone) The Donnas – “American Teenage Rock ‘n Roll Machine” (Real Gone) The Donnas – “Turn 21” (Real Gone) The Donnas – “Get Skintight” (Real Gone) Wet Specimens – “Over Pale Bodies” (Brain Slash) Hamza El Din – “Al Oud: Instrumental & Vocal Music of Nubia” (Real Gone) Carl Stone – “Electronic Music From the Eighties and Nineties” (Unseen Worlds) Carl Stone – “Electronic Music From 1972-2022” (Unseen Worlds) Ira Newborn – “The Naked Gun” Soundtrack (1984 Publishing) Fabio Frizzi – “Zombie: Composer’s Cut” (Cadabra) Pool-Pah – “The Flasher” (Real Gone) Rocky Gray _ “The Barn Pt. 2” Soundtrack (Lunaris Records Carlo Maria Cordio – “Troll 2” Soundtrack (Lunaris Records) Frankie Stein & His Ghouls – “Shock! Terror! Fear!” (Real Gone) Frankie Stein & His Ghouls – “Ghoul Music” (Real Gone)
Employee Name: Matt Earley
Abdul Wadud – By Myself Angel Corpus Christi – Bewitched: A Tribute to Luna Avett Brothers – The Seventh Avett Guild Beach Fossils – Clash The Truth Bela Fleck – Drive Black Moth Super Rainbow – Start A People Bonnie Raitt – Dig In Deep Brennen Leigh – Ain’t Through Honky Tonkin’ Yet Brothers Vanguard, Electriq – Dominoes Catfish Keith – Still I Long To Roam Chayla Hope – Damn, Feelings Clam City Cowboy Junkies – Lay It Down Circus Devils – Squeeze The Needle Cymande – Second Time Round Doctor Bionic – Spiritual Conquest The Du-Rites – Go Funk Me b/w Bucket Esme Patterson – Notes From Nowhere Fela Kuti – Gentleman Fela Kuti – Zombie GBV – Nowhere To Go But Up Girth Control – Life’s Too Short For Girth Control Grateful Dead – Dick’s Picks 2 (Columbus, Ohio 10-31-71) Gypsy Wizard Queen – S/T Hawk – African Day H.P. Lovecraft – Halloween In A Suburb Jalen Ngonda – Come Around And Love Me b/w What is Left To Do Jason Isbell – Southeastern 10th Anniversary John Moreland – In The Throes Johnny Ruiz & The Escapers – Sorry b/w Looking At The Prettiest Girl Joyful Noise Band – Let Jesus Be Seen Judee Sill – Heart Food Mothers Kendra Morris – I Am What I’m Waiting For LuSID – Guindado Lutalo – Again M. Ward – Transfiguration Of Vincent M. Ward – Duet for Guitars #2 Meat Puppets – Forbidden Places Medeski Martin & Wood – Friday Afternoon In The Universe Medeski Martin & Wood – Shack Man Medeski Martin & Wood – It’s A Jungle In Here Mike Clark – Kosen Rufu Mos Generator – Time//Wounds Peter Frampton – Frampton@50 1972-1975 Studio Albums Replacements – Nowhere Is My Home b/w Can’t Hardly Wait Reposado – Tequila Funk Say She She – Silver Scott Clark – Dawn & Dusk Silas Hite – Dawn Dusk Strapping Fieldhands – Gobs On The Midway Roge – Eu Gosta Dela Taylor McCall – Mellow War Tobin Sprout – Demos & Outtakes Two Video Age – Away From The Castle
Employee Name: Tyler Goubeaux
Ancient Filth – No More Hiding WMD – DELIQUESCE reynaldo jenkins and the teardrops – the short way up 7inch Surgeon – Petunia
Employee Name: Ren Harcar
Collate: Generative Systems The Donnas: American Teenage Rock n’ Roll Machine The Donnas: Get Skintight Fabio Frizzi: Zombie Fearing: Shadow Fela Kuti: Gentleman Say She She: Silver True Body: Heavenly Rhythms for the Uninitiated
Employee Name: Forrest James
O.R.P.H.A.N.S. – Occult Rituals, Psychedelic Hangups, And No Survivors BRIAN STRAW – BABY STARS/DEAD LANGUAGES BRIDGE CITY SINNERS – UNHOLY HYMNS Nick Shoulders – Armadillo Tail Presents: Nick Shoulders 2 SPIRAL STAIRCASE – VISIONS SHIFTING FORM
Employee Name: Dave Polster
Nesey Gallons – When I Was An Ice Skater Tobin Sprout – Demos and Outtakes Two Black Market Brass – Hox Toots and the Maytals – Sweet and Dandy Kendra Morris – I Am What I’m Waiting For Black Sun Ensemble – Black Sun Ensemble Vol. 2 Soul Low – Uneasy Minor Prophet Joel – The Tucker Family Groove Photon Band – Pure Photonic Matter Vol. 2 V/A – The Ooze Compilation Vol. 1 David Childers and The Serpents – Melancholy Angel Meat Puppets – Forbidden Places Jonah Tolchin – Dockside Willi Carlisle – Critterland Hopkins-Bradley – Tatooed Tree V/A – Black Jazz Records – The Complete Singles Extortionist- The Black Sheep Tom Mroczka & The Music Box – Paczki Polka 7”
Employee Name: Vince Slusarz (Sr)
Live in Anvers- Alex Chilton (Bar None) As All Get Out- Matthew Logan Vasquez (9 Mile) Ain’t Through Honky-Tonkin’-Brennan Leigh (Signature Sounds) Demos and Outtakes 2- Tobin Sprout Welcome to Struggleville- Bill Mallonee/Vigilantes of Love Sweet and Dandy- Toots and the Maytals (Real Gone) I Am What I’m Waiting For- Kendra Morris (Colemine) A Mercyland Christmas- Phil Madeira and Friends (Mercyland) Southeastern Deluxe set- Jason Isbell (30 Tigers) Nowhere To Go But Up- Guided By Voices (Rockathon) Dig It Up- Bonnie Raitt (WEA/ADA) S/T- Botttlerockets (Real Gone) Dockside- Jonah Tolchin (Clover Music) Blue Diamonds- Marcus Machado (Soul Step) Not Cool- Tim Easton (Black Mesa) Damn Feelings- Chayla Hope (Jestertainment) By Myself- Abdul Wadud (Gotta Groove Records) Where Did My World Come From?-Glass Harp (Peppermint) Melancholy Angel-David Childers and the Serpents (Ramseur) Twenty On High- Drayton Farley (30 Tigers) S/T- Judee Sill (Intervention) Pieces- Dojo Cuts (Colemine) Quiet Flame- Caitlin Canty 1988- Lori McKenna (30 Tigers) Get Behind the Wheel- Eileen Jewell (Signature Sounds) Domino- Ronnie and the Savoys 7” (Wicked Cool) Tears Fall/What Can I Say?- Lee Fields 7” (Daptone) The Seventh Avett Guild 7”- Avett Brothers (Ramseur) Help Me To Understand/Look Up- Aaron Frazier and The Harlem Gospel Travelers 7” (Colemine)
Employee Name: Giovanna Taylor
Corinne Bailey Rae – Black Rainbows Chris Acker – Good Kid Thee Scared Souls – Can I Call You Rose b/w Weak For Your Love Pale Jay – Bewilderment Toots and the Maytals – Sweet and Dandy Lutalo – Again Marty Robbins – Gunfighter Charlie Megira And Hefker Girl- S/T Brennen Leigh – Ain’t Through Honky Tonkin’ Yet Royal Headache – S/T The Glass Harp – Where Did My World Come From? BLOODbath64 – AESTHETICADELICA Isabelle Antena – En Cavale Witch – Zango Fela Kuti – Gentleman The South Side Movement- S/T Tomorrow’s Wish – On My Mind Replacements – Nowhere Is My Home/ Can’t Hardly Wait Chayla Hope – Damn, Feelings Doctor Bionic – Sacrifice Say She She – Silver
Employee Name: Tim Thornton
Black Jazz Records – The Complete Singles The Donnas – Reissues Hiroshi Yoshimura – Surround Larry Wish – The Mind Is The Builder Loris S. Sarid – Music For Tomato Plants Meat Puppets – Forbidden Places Tolerance – Anonym / Divin Toots And The Maytals – Sweet And Dandy
Employee Name: Jon Vesey
Blind Girls – “The Weight of Everything”
Black Market Brass – “Hox”
Various – “If There’s Hell Below…”
Say Hi – “Elocution Prattle”
LCD Soundsystem – “This Is Happening”
Voivod – “Nothingface” and “Angel Rat”
Cloud Catcher – “Return from the Cauldron”
Hekseblad – “The Fall of Cintra”
Ancient Days – “Sign of the Times”
Black Moth Super Rainbow – “Start a People”
Woodrot – “Ethics: A Relic”
Witch – “Zango”
Sarushibai – “Proud to Be Social Outcasts”
The Love & Terror Cult – “We Are You on Fire”
Peter Frampton – “Frampton @50”
Therion – “Siren of the Woods”
Voidtripper – “Dopefiend”
Fela Kuti – “Gentleman”
Satan’s Satyrs – “Quick Quiet Raid”
Mos Generator – “Heavy Sevens & Spaced Oddities”
Trampled by Turtles – “Life Is Good on the Open Road”
“ELO songs were always coming on the radio when I was growing up. They were a reliable source of pleasure and fascination (except for “Fire On High” which scared the heck out of me). With this album of covers I wanted to get my hands deep into some of the massive ‘70’s hits but I am also shining a light on some of the later work (“Ordinary Dream” from 2001’s “Zoom” album, “Secret Messages” and “’From The End Of The World”, both from the ‘80’s).
Thematically, I identify with the loneliness and alienation and the outerspace-iness in the songs I chose. (I have always felt like I am part alien, not fully belonging to or in this Earth world.) Sonically, ELO recordings are like an amusement park packed with fun musical games with layers and layers of varied, meticulous parts for your ears to explore; production curiosities; huge, gorgeous stacks of awe-inspiring vocal harmony puzzles. My task was to try and break all the things down and reconstruct them subtly until they felt like mine.
Overall, I stuck pretty close to the originals’ structures while figuring out new ways to express or reference the unique and beloved ELO string arrangements. An orchestra would have been difficult or impossible for me to manage to record, nor did I think there was any point in trying to copy those parts as they originally were. Why not try to reimagine them within my zone of limitations? In some cases, I transposed string parts onto guitars, or keyboards, and I even sung some of them (as in “Showdown” and “Bluebird Is Dead”).
Recording the album was a kind of complicated and drawn-out process since I was doing all of my tracks at home in my bedroom (drums and bass were done by Chris Anzalone and Ed Valauskas, respectively [in their own recording spaces]), and I kept running into technology problems that would frustrate me and slow me up. But eventually I got it all done. A labor of love.” -Juliana
Some of you out there may know the name Falcon Jane. Seen it on a glowing marquee at the club downtown. Heard it on a warm afternoon through a gently humming radio.
Some of you may even consider yourselves to be quite familiar with Falcon Jane—know the songs, the style, the “plez rock” they play.
So some of you have heard the silence of these long last few years. As the world closed up, Falcon Jane went dark.
Shelburne, Ontario. Population: 9,000. A town you drove through, not to.
Amongst the farmers’ fields, deep rivers, and roaring highway, we found Falcon Jane. And things are looking a little different now.
There’s something about living out in the sticks with your mama and your dog, missing the road, with a broken heart and broke down car.
Country music starts making a lot more sense. Available soon from Darling Recordings.
An award-winning singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, film composer, producer, and solo artist, Abby Posner is a multi-tasker at heart. She shines a light on the full spread of her creative abilities with Second Chances, an album that uses modern American roots music as a springboard for a bigger, bolder sound. Influenced by everything from punk/rock to electronic music, Second Chances is every bit as diverse as the artist who made it. Inspired by a life-changing breakup and the introspective soul-searching that followed, the album deals with themes like resilience, patience, acceptance, self-awareness, and rebuilding. Posner calls it “a queer love story,” but she clarifies that Second Chances is more about self-love than the affection we receive from others.
“I wrote the songs about my own journey,” she explains. “It’s less about the one who got away, and more about discovering there’s something better awaiting you. That’s why I called it Second Chances. I’m getting into the second act of my life, chasing down something new.” Something new, indeed. Second Chances carves out it’s own genre-fluid identity, funneling Posner’s influences into a sound that’s entirely her own. “Quiet on Sunset” begins as an acoustic folk ballad before moving into electronic territory. “If You Wanna Love” bridges the gap between Posner’s punk/rock past and Americana present. “Darkest Hours”-one of three songs to feature contributions from a full band-is a late-night soul song punctuated by bluesy fretwork. The indie-pop textures of “We’ve Come So Far” nod to modern influences like Phoebe Bridgers, while the hushed vocal harmonies in “Moving Back to Denver” evoke Elliot Smith’s iconic bedroom recordings.
Like Smith, Posner recorded the bulk of Second Chances at home, playing all of the instruments herself while pulling triple-duty as songwriter, performer, and producer. She also pieced together a band to perform three songs-“Darkest Hours,” “Night Train,” and “Simple Life”-during a short live-in-the-studio session. “I wanted to revisit the old-school mentality of capturing a song with one take, without any bells and whistles,” she says of the songs that feature other musicians. “Then I paired those full-band recordings with the rest of the record, where I’m exploring plug-ins, production techniques, and a wider canvas of sound by myself.” The eclectic career of Posner is reflected throughout Second Chances and Posner has never sounded so resolute. Dynamic, melodic, virtuosic, and proudly idiosyncratic, Second Chances reintroduces Abby Posner as a music industry veteran who’s still chasing down new horizons.
John William Polidori’s The Vampyre is the first English-language story written about the vampire as we know it, preceding Bram Stoker’s Dracula by nearly 80 years. Emanating from the same storytelling game at Lake Geneva which also produced Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Polidori’s tale bears the Romantic hallmarks of its Byronic influences, but stands wholly on its own despite drawing from Lord Byron’s own “Fragment of a Novel.”
Read here by Laurence R. Harvey and scored by Chris Bozzone, Cadabra Records‘s adaptation leans strongly into the modernity of this very British tale. While Stoker’s Dracula is wholly original in its epistolary form and construction, the elements extant in this early 19th century tale set the form for what would become the foundation of nearly every vampire story for the next two centuries. Lord Ruthven walks among the elite as one of them, not a mysterious figure in the shadows. None but the villagers suspect what’s going on. The vampire stalks young and lovely women, acting as much as a seducer as a monster, but a creature of the night no matter how you might perceive him.
New vinyl pressing – on Halloween 1971 night—captured on this three-sided double-LP—the Grateful Dead played the most ethereal, dreamy, and, yes, spooky version of “Dark Star” ever recorded; it’s almost as if Jerry Garcia was communing with his ancestors (and maybe John Coltrane) for the first seven minutes of his beautifully structured, contemplative and yearning solo. Then, after the vocal verse, Garcia, rhythm guitarist Bob Weir, and bassist Phil Lesh take turns suggesting a new improvisational theme before the band telepathically picks up on a two-note theme and Garcia launches into some of the most ecstatic guitar playing ever captured on tape anywhere (labeled by some the “Tighten Up” jam after the Archie Bell & the Drells song; others hear an embryonic “Eyes of the World”). The rest of the show keeps flying high; the whole band is on fire during “Sugar Magnolia,” a rare, early-‘70s performance of “St. Stephen” (the final live version until 1976) swaggers like it should, and a great “Not Fade Away”/ “Goin’ Down the Road Feeling Bad”/ “Not Fade Away” medley rounds out the show…a “hallowed” performance indeed.
