As a response to the deluxe presentation of Ritual and because Form Volume II wasn’t supposed to exist, Surachai decided to keep the theme of non-existence with the vinyl and artwork by calling it the Void Presentation. Firstly: there is no artwork. The vinyl is clear and with no center sticker making it an entirely transparent vinyl record. The transparent information card was manufactured by Offbeat Press and the reference I gave them was the winning ticket to Fhloston Paradise from The Fifth Element. The clear jacket is also clear and originally intended for picture discs. If you’re not looking for this album, you’re not going to find it – basically its a marketing nightmare.  Limited to 250 units.

William Elliot Whitmore’s The Early Years box set includes “Hymns for the Hopeless”, “Ashes to Dust”, and “Song of the Blackbird” each on 180 gram vinyl, re-recorded and re-mastered as faithfully as possible for your listening pleasure. The set includes download codes for all 3 albums and a signed post card.  You can purchase it from William Elliot Whitmore’s website now!

Playing For Change is a multimedia movement created to inspire, connect, and bring peace to the world through music.

The album features performances from Keith Richards, Sara Bareilles, Andres Calamaro, Toots Hibbert from Toots & The Maytals, Cesar Rosas and David Hidalgo of Los Lobos, Preservation Hall Jazz Band, Keb Mo, and Taj Mahal in addition to a song produced by Jackson Browne.  The very limited edition vinyl version includes vinyl-only bonus tracks “Clandestino” featuring Manu Chao and “United”.  Don’t wait too long to order, because it is very limited.

If you are out and about this weekend (Black Friday / Small Business Saturday), be sure to hit up your local indie record store to grab some of these titles pressed at GGR for RSD/Black Friday this year!  Happy Thanksgiving!

Velvet Underground — Live MCMXCIII

Afghan Whigs — Gentlemen At 21

 Jade — Faces of Jade

Prawn – Settled 7 inch

Faces of Jade is a tough-to-find Cincinnati-area nugget from 1971. It is one of the most highly sought-after “Beatles-Impact” records among psych, power-pop and Beatles collectors. After a bit of sleuthing we tracked down the members and are proud to give a proper and awesome-sounding vinyl reissue of their sole pop-psych / Revolver-esque classic. The initial press of 500 will be pressed on “Jade Green” wax. The LP will be available from Shake-It Records starting Black Friday Nov. 28th, and we will start shipping the following week.

Brian Laidlaw is a poet and songwriter from San Francisco. He studied Creative Writing as an undergraduate at Stanford, at which point he began setting his own poems to music; after graduating in 2005 he toured and rambled throughout the country for several years as a solo folksinger.

In 2008, Brian moved to Minneapolis to earn an M.F.A. in poetry at the University of Minnesota. In the last year he has received awards and honors from the Loft Literary Center, the Weisman Art Museum, and the Jerome Foundation. His lyrics have been featured in American Songwriter Magazine and his poems have appeared or are forthcoming in New American Writing, FIELD, VOLT, Quarter After Eight, The Iowa Review, and elsewhere.

His new LP, Amoratorium, shipped out to Hymies Vintage Records, and will be available for sale at his 318 Club performance in Excelsior, MN on 11/23/14.

Alpenglow began in a small Vermont town when founding members Peter Coccoma, Graeme Daubert, Elori Kramer, and Kenneth Root shared songs in an old stone mill. Over the next two years, after adding bassist Colin Weeks, Alpenglow transformed original songs rooted in the folk tradition into a collection of finely crafted arrangements that are sprawling, moody, and wholly their own. Their music has been described as “swooning, harmony-laden stuff… laced with arcing fiddle, shimmering keys and healthy doses of ringing guitar punch.”

After years of walking past a hilltop chapel in the town they lived in, Alpenglow decided to play a show inside. The result was transformative: a chapel brimming with people smiling, swaying, and dancing together under the music’s effortless melodies and grooving rhythms. The spirit that night inspired Alpenglow to return to the chapel to record an album. The result is their appropriately titled new EP, Chapel, which is an effort to capture the spirit of a night, a place, and a time in the band’s life. The new collection of songs acts as a meditation on loss and the modern condition while at the same time stepping out of its reverent tone with moments of excitement and joy that ease the wayward soul.

During the coldest days of January 2014, Brooklyn duo Mark Rogers & Mary Byrne recorded their debut, I Line My Days Along Your Weight, as a true duet: facing each other inches apart, intent upon listening.  They wove together archaic instruments – baritone acoustic, tricone resonator, golden-era flattop, space-age lap steel, upright piano, and hundred-year-old mandolin – into a vibrant new strain. 

All the songs were recorded live to two-inch analog tape, the studio equivalent of tightrope-walking without a net.  Mark and Mary later added minimal touches of lap steel, piano, and electric guitar, but essentially what you hear is what they performed together, start to finish.  With Mark’s deeply expressive, contextual fingerstyle and Mary’s emphatic, unaffected singing, this striking debut invites listeners into a space most intimate, and most human.

On October 14, 2014, Massachusetts-based Important Records (Diane Cluck, Jozef Van Wissem & Jim Jarmusch, Marisa Anderson, many others) will release I Line My Days Along Your Weight.