Purchase from label: paradiseofbachelors.com/shop/pob-023

Purchase from Bandcamp: gunoutfit.bandcamp.com/album/dream-all-over

Other options: lnk.to/PoB23

paradiseofbachelors.com/gun-outfit

On their most refined and ruefully elegant album, Gun Outfit perfect their incandescent sonic signature: a dusky, canyon-cult blues fueled by melodic dual-guitar weaving and seductive male/female incantations at zero hour. It’s the nocturnal sound of desert-damaged L.A. burnout, a soured American surrealism in rock and roll creole: white line fever, paint fume flashbacks, a stranger wading out alone into the black surf.

This album will be released on September 18, 2015.

Order from label: paradiseofbachelors.com/shop/pob-021/

Order from Bandcamp: jameselkingtonandnathansalsburg.bandcamp.com/album/ambsace

Other options: lnk.to/PoB21

Artist page: paradiseofbachelors.com/james-and-nathan

***

The second album of astonishing duets by guitarists James Elkington (who has toured and/or recorded with Jeff Tweedy, Richard Thompson, and Steve Gunn, among others) and Nathan Salsburg (an accomplished soloist deemed by NPR “one of those names we'll all associate with American folk guitar”) is a sublime suite of nimble, filigreed compositions by two singular stylists. Belying its title—ambsace is the lowest throw of dice; snake eyes—the record thrives on a gentle empathy and generosity of spirit, sitting sneakily protean original compositions alongside gorgeous arrangements of songs by Duke Ellington and The Smiths at the same big hand-hewn table.

"Their playing and guitar tones are so complementary, so perfectly wed, that I wouldn’t hesitate to put the duo up there with some of the very best acoustic guitar partnerships: Stefan Grossman and John Renbourn come immediately to mind, as does the work of Richard Crandell and Bill Bartels." - Work & Worry

This album will be released on September 18, 2015.

Order from label: paradiseofbachelors.com/shop/pob-021/

Order from Bandcamp: jameselkingtonandnathansalsburg.bandcamp.com/album/ambsace

Other options: lnk.to/PoB21

Artist page: paradiseofbachelors.com/james-and-nathan

The second album of astonishing duets by guitarists James Elkington (who has toured and/or recorded with Jeff Tweedy, Richard Thompson, and Steve Gunn, among others) and Nathan Salsburg (an accomplished soloist deemed by NPR “one of those names we'll all associate with American folk guitar”) is a sublime suite of nimble, filigreed compositions by two singular stylists. Belying its title—ambsace is the lowest throw of dice; snake eyes—the record thrives on a gentle empathy and generosity of spirit, sitting sneakily protean original compositions alongside gorgeous arrangements of songs by Duke Ellington and The Smiths at the same big hand-hewn table.

"Their playing and guitar tones are so complementary, so perfectly wed, that I wouldn’t hesitate to put the duo up there with some of the very best acoustic guitar partnerships: Stefan Grossman and John Renbourn come immediately to mind, as does the work of Richard Crandell and Bill Bartels." - Work & Worry

This album will be released on September 18, 2015.

Order from label: paradiseofbachelors.com/shop/pob-021/

Order from Bandcamp: jameselkingtonandnathansalsburg.bandcamp.com/album/ambsace

Other options: lnk.to/PoB21

Artist page: paradiseofbachelors.com/james-and-nathan

***

The second album of astonishing duets by guitarists James Elkington (who has toured and/or recorded with Jeff Tweedy, Richard Thompson, and Steve Gunn, among others) and Nathan Salsburg (an accomplished soloist deemed by NPR “one of those names we'll all associate with American folk guitar”) is a sublime suite of nimble, filigreed compositions by two singular stylists. Belying its title—ambsace is the lowest throw of dice; snake eyes—the record thrives on a gentle empathy and generosity of spirit, sitting sneakily protean original compositions alongside gorgeous arrangements of songs by Duke Ellington and The Smiths at the same big hand-hewn table.

"Their playing and guitar tones are so complementary, so perfectly wed, that I wouldn’t hesitate to put the duo up there with some of the very best acoustic guitar partnerships: Stefan Grossman and John Renbourn come immediately to mind, as does the work of Richard Crandell and Bill Bartels." - Work & Worry

http://www.paradiseofbachelors.com/pob-20

http://www.paradiseofbachelors.com/nap-eyes

Nova Scotia’s Nap Eyes is the greatest band you’ve never heard, and Whine of the Mystic is their first full-length album, a brilliant small-batch brew of crooked, literate guitar pop refracted through the gray Halifax rain. Recorded live to tape with no overdubs, it’s equal parts shambling and sophisticated, with one eye on the dirt and one trained on the starry firmament, inhabiting a skewed world where odes to NASA and the Earth’s magnetic field coexist easily with songs about insomnia and drinking too much.

RIYL The Only Ones/England’s Glory, Nikki Sudden/JacobitesThe Modern Lovers, The Clean, The Verlaines, The Go-Betweens, Bedhead, and all things Lou Reed.

The Weather Station's "Loyalty" will be released May 12, 2015 on Paradise of Bachelors.

Purchase from the label: www.paradiseofbachelors.com/pob-19

Purchase from iTunes: smarturl.it/PoB19iT

Purchase from Amazon: smarturl.it/PoB19Am

Purchase from Bandcamp: paradiseofbachelors.bandcamp.com/album/loyalty

www.paradiseofbachelors.com/pob-19

www.paradiseofbachelors.com/the-weather-station

The third and finest album yet by Toronto artist Tamara Lindeman, recorded in France with Afie Jurvanen (Bahamas) and Robbie Lackritz (Feist), Loyalty crystallizes her lapidary songcraft into eleven emotionally charged vignettes and intimate portraits, redolent of fellow Canadians Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, and David Wiffen, but utterly her own. A diaphanous eeriness and harmonic and rhythmic tension contributes to a pervading sense of clock-stopping bloom and smolder, recalling the spooky avant-soul of Terry Callier’s Occasional Rain.

She’s an extraordinary singer and instrumentalist—on Loyalty she plays guitar, banjo, and keys—but Lindeman has always been a songwriter’s songwriter, recognized for her intricate verse, filled with double meanings, ambiguities, and complex metaphors. Though more moving than ever, her writing here is almost clinical in its unflinchingly self-examining gaze and deliberate delivery, evoking similarly idiosyncratic songsters from Linda Perhacs to Bill Callahan. Lyrically, Loyalty inverts the language of confession, of regret, of our most private and muddled mental feelings, by externalizing those anxieties through exquisite observation of the things and people we accumulate, the modest meanings accreted during our most ostensibly mundane domestic moments. “Your trouble is like a lens,” she discerns in “I Mined,” “through which the whole world bends.”

+ The third and finest album yet by Toronto artist Tamara Lindeman, recorded with Afie Jurvanen (Bahamas) and Robbie Lackritz (Feist), Loyalty crystallizes her lapidary songcraft into eleven emotionally charged vignettes and intimate portraits, redolent of fellow Canadians Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, and David Wiffen, as well as past collaborators Doug Paisley and Daniel Romano.

+ Available on 150g virgin vinyl as an LP, with heavy-duty matte jacket, full-color inner sleeve, and full lyrics, as well as on gatefold CD and digital formats.

+ Vinyl edition includes digital download coupon.

Purchase from label: paradiseofbachelors.com/shop/pob-023

Purchase from Bandcamp: gunoutfit.bandcamp.com/album/dream-all-over

Other options: lnk.to/PoB23

paradiseofbachelors.com/gun-outfit

On their most refined and ruefully elegant album, Gun Outfit perfect their incandescent sonic signature: a dusky, canyon-cult blues fueled by melodic dual-guitar weaving and seductive male/female incantations at zero hour. It’s the nocturnal sound of desert-damaged L.A. burnout, a soured American surrealism in rock and roll creole: white line fever, paint fume flashbacks, a stranger wading out alone into the black surf.

Nova Scotia’s Nap Eyes is the greatest band you’ve never heard, and Whine of the Mystic is their first full-length album, a brilliant small-batch brew of crooked, literate guitar pop refracted through the gray Halifax rain. Recorded live to tape with no overdubs, it’s equal parts shambling and sophisticated, with one eye on the dirt and one trained on the starry firmament, inhabiting a skewed world where odes to NASA and the Earth’s magnetic field coexist easily with songs about insomnia and drinking too much.

The Weather Station's "Loyalty" will be released May 12, 2015 on Paradise of Bachelors.

Purchase from the label: http://www.paradiseofbachelors.com/pob-19

Purchase from iTunes: http://smarturl.it/PoB19iT

Purchase from Amazon: http://smarturl.it/PoB19Am

Purchase from Bandcamp: https://paradiseofbachelors.bandcamp.com/album/loyalty

http://www.paradiseofbachelors.com/pob-19

http://www.paradiseofbachelors.com/the-weather-station

The third and finest album yet by Toronto artist Tamara Lindeman, recorded in France with Afie Jurvanen (Bahamas) and Robbie Lackritz (Feist), Loyalty crystallizes her lapidary songcraft into eleven emotionally charged vignettes and intimate portraits, redolent of fellow Canadians Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, and David Wiffen, but utterly her own. A diaphanous eeriness and harmonic and rhythmic tension contributes to a pervading sense of clock-stopping bloom and smolder, recalling the spooky avant-soul of Terry Callier’s Occasional Rain.

She’s an extraordinary singer and instrumentalist—on Loyalty she plays guitar, banjo, and keys—but Lindeman has always been a songwriter’s songwriter, recognized for her intricate verse, filled with double meanings, ambiguities, and complex metaphors. Though more moving than ever, her writing here is almost clinical in its unflinchingly self-examining gaze and deliberate delivery, evoking similarly idiosyncratic songsters from Linda Perhacs to Bill Callahan. Lyrically, Loyalty inverts the language of confession, of regret, of our most private and muddled mental feelings, by externalizing those anxieties through exquisite observation of the things and people we accumulate, the modest meanings accreted during our most ostensibly mundane domestic moments. “Your trouble is like a lens,” she discerns in “I Mined,” “through which the whole world bends.”

+ The third and finest album yet by Toronto artist Tamara Lindeman, recorded with Afie Jurvanen (Bahamas) and Robbie Lackritz (Feist), Loyalty crystallizes her lapidary songcraft into eleven emotionally charged vignettes and intimate portraits, redolent of fellow Canadians Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, and David Wiffen, as well as past collaborators Doug Paisley and Daniel Romano.

+ Available on 150g virgin vinyl as an LP, with heavy-duty matte jacket, full-color inner sleeve, and full lyrics, as well as on gatefold CD and digital formats.

+ Vinyl edition includes digital download coupon.

www.paradiseofbachelors.com/pob-14

"Cooper was forging connections between folk and experimental musics long before America got New or Weird…"

- Keith Moliné of Pere Ubu, for The Wire

"Gorgeous, tender, moving… the opening of a musical world so wide that all boundaries between the music in his subsequent recordings would be erased completely…. The Machine Gun Co. was not simply an experiment that worked; it was a work of art that experimented with the idea of music being one vast universe with song being its poetic and foundational heart. This disc is easily Cooper's greatest musical achievement."

- Thom Jurek, Allmusic

Paradise of Bachelors is proud to present the first artist-sanctioned reissues—and first-ever vinyl reissues—of iconoclastic English-born, Rome-based folk and experimental music legend Mike Cooper’s classic trio of early 1970s avant-folk/rock records: Trout Steel (1970), Places I Know (1971), and The Machine Gun Co. with Mike Cooper (1972). The latter two titles are presented for the very first time as the definitive double album, as Cooper originally intended them to be released.

Listening to Cooper’s recordings retrospectively in sequence reveals a rangy narrative of perennial reinvention from document to document through a playful approach to the deconstruction of “folk” musics and all that gross genre signifier implies and denies. By the time the Rolling Stones invited him to join the band in the early ’60s, and he politely declined (true story; Brian Jones took the gig), he had already progressed far beyond the circumscribed bounds of their early, hip-histrionic Albionic blues. By the time he was rumored to have retired from music in the mid ’70s, disappearing from his home in Southern England into Southern Spain to become a fisherman (an amusing fiction; he suffers from seasickness), he had already moved beyond his heady homebrew of progressive, free jazz-framed songcraft into increasingly less conventionally structured frontiers of open improvisation and later, electronic composition.

The Machine Gun Co. band (named for the 1968 Peter Brötzmann album) coalesced around Cooper’s desire to continue the improvisatory path forged on Trout Steel in a more sustainable manner, with a steady core group of likeminded musicians able to buttress its daring, long-form improvisatory vaults with a bedrock foundation. Peter Eden (Donovan, Bill Fay, Clive Palmer) produced the historic sessions, which veered from the impeccable conceptual folk-rock artistry of Places I Know (as Cooper explains, “the secret of the title of this record is that it was meant as a kind of covers record, or an homage to some musicians and songwriters that I liked at the time, the ‘places’ in the title—I was interested in seeing if I could emulate some other people without actually sounding like them”) to the utterly singular “songmaking” deconstructions of the more radical The Machine Gun Co., wherein the band erects lapidary arrangements reminiscent of Tim Buckley, only to dismantle them into virtuosic passages of Beefheartian free-jazz scree and skronk. According to Cooper:

What was initially planned was a double album, with one record played by the Machine Gun Co. and the other with arrangements by Mike Gibbs and his orchestra. Those two records were conceived as a double album aimed at covering the wide range of music I was interested in and gently leading the listener from the more accessible Places I Know, with its Mike Gibbs arrangements, into the more (for the times) extreme areas of The Machine Gun Co. That never happened, and they were released as two separate records a year apart.

Places I Know/The Machine Gun Co. with Mike Cooper is Paradise of Bachelors’ attempt, two years in the making, to correct this historical oversight and offer this masterpiece as it was designed to be experienced, as an extraordinarily ambitious document spanning Cooper’s song-based and improvisation-based styles of the early 1970s.