{"title":"Home page","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"wv308","title":"Allison de Groot \u0026 Rich Ruth","description":"Allison de Groot is a clawhammer banjo player from Winnipeg, Canada whose work spans old-time, bluegrass, and folk traditions. A recipient of the Steve Martin Prize for Excellence in Banjo and an Americana Music Association Instrumentalist of the Year nominee, she is best known for her duo with fiddler Tatiana Hargreaves, whose two albums, a self-titled debut and Hurricane Clarice, earned recognition from the IBMA, the Canadian Folk Music Awards, and the JUNOs.\n\u003cbr\u003e\nRich Ruth is the recording project of Nashville multi-instrumentalist Michael Ruth. Across three albums, most recently 2024's Water Still Flows on Third Man Records, he has built immersive instrumental music from ambient, spiritual jazz, minimalism, and synth-driven post-rock, compositions that begin in solitude with loops and drones and open outward through collaboration. He is also a third of Shrunken Elvis, the Nashville trio he shares with pedal steel guitarist Spencer Cullum and guitarist Sean Thompson, whose well-received self-titled debut arrived in 2025.\n\u003cbr\u003e\nTheir collaboration began with a simpler plan: Ruth would produce a solo record for de Groot. Over roughly a year in his Nashville studio, the plan dissolved. The two started composing together, and the album that emerged belongs equally to both of them, shaped as much by space and process as by melody. De Groot's banjo runs through looping and delay, acting as the pulse at the center of the arrangements, its rolling figures gathering krautrock-like momentum before giving way to Ruth's synthesizers. Patrick M'Gonigle, who also contributed to writing several of the tracks, threads his violin and string arrangements through the record, and Shrunken Elvis bandmate Spencer Cullum adds pedal steel to several tracks, widening the album's atmospheric reach. The final push to complete the album came in the form of a deadline they set for themselves: a surprise live debut of the material at Big Ears Festival.\n\u003cbr\u003e\nAcross eight tracks, the album maintains a tangible sense of human touch and tenderness at the center of something cosmic: de Groot's banjo grounds the music while Ruth's soaring guitars and electronics blur the boundary between the earthly and the celestial. Passages of unadorned banjo and violin, distant birdsong, and fragments of radio sit alongside vibraphone and synths, all refracted through a psychedelic, cinematic lens. The result is two distinct musical voices arriving not at a meeting point but at a new, shared sound.","brand":"Allison de Groot \u0026 Rich Ruth","offers":[{"title":"Vinyl","offer_id":48332797018370,"sku":"WV308-VINYL","price":23.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"CD","offer_id":48332797051138,"sku":"WV308-CD","price":15.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0834\/3997\/6706\/files\/wv308.jpg?v=1786671586"},{"product_id":"wv302","title":"Begin Yr Singing","description":"\u003cp\u003eYr Knives began somewhere off to the side of itself. The Chicago composer and arranger Paul Karner had an idea he couldn't shake: he wanted two very different guitar voices, playing parts that seemed unrelated on paper, brought together on a recording of his own music. He asked Andrew Trim and Brian J Sulpizio. The two were already friends and collaborators, usually with Sulpizio engineering Trim's other projects, but they'd never played guitar together as equals. They practiced their parts separately, neither quite hearing how the pieces would fit. Then they sat down in a room together, and Karner's vision came into focus, along with a second realization: this was a band waiting to happen. That band's debut album is \u003ci\u003eBegin Yr Singing\u003c\/i\u003e.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThat first meeting happened just after the pandemic, a detail that matters to how the group thinks about itself. Sulpizio remembers being unsettled by how quickly the music world wanted to snap back to normal, as if nothing had happened. Yr Knives became, in part, a refusal of that, a reason not to simply pick up where things left off. The four players who eventually formed the band are deeply woven into Chicago's overlapping scenes. Trim is a jazz-trained guitarist who grew up in Nagano, Japan, now based in Milwaukee, who leads the groups Hanami and Retroreflector. Sulpizio is the constant behind Health\u0026amp;Beauty, a shapeshifting, seven-albums-deep project that has long doubled as an incubator for the city's talent. Anchoring them are bassist Douglas McCombs, a founding member of Tortoise and a fixture of Eleventh Dream Day, and drummer Quin Kirchner, one of Chicago's most sought-after players in both jazz and rock circles, whose 2020 LP The Shadows and the Light drew an 8.0 from Pitchfork. As Sulpizio frames the chemistry: two of them come up as rock and roll players, two as jazz players, and the music lives in how closely they listen across those languages.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe writing started around 2022, Trim and Sulpizio shaping pieces over occasional sessions before opening them up to McCombs and Kirchner. What emerged was a kind of mutual completion. A riff one of them had been carrying for years, strong on its own but missing a melody, never quite earning a place on a solo record, would suddenly resolve the moment the other heard it. New ideas came almost as fast. The centerpiece of the resulting sound is two overdriven guitars merging into something neither could produce alone: as Trim notes, play those same notes on a single instrument and the magic evaporates. Over a rhythm section that can lock a groove or let it drift, the music stays exploratory without losing its footing. Trim describes it as \"a searching music, asking questions\" and \"not always answering them,\" adventurous in how it varies from one performance to the next. Touchstones the band returns to include Sonny Sharrock, Neil Young and Crazy Horse, Albert Ayler, Erik Satie, and Television.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eBegin Yr Singing\u003c\/i\u003e was cut over a few days at Palisade in Chicago, a studio that has since closed, with Nick Broste engineering and the whole band tracking live in one room. They lined up in a single row to capture the spatial feel of a live set, six amps in all, and built each piece from full-take performances with only light editing where needed. \"Fear\u0026amp;Trimbling\" exists as a single take. Cooper Crain joined Sulpizio to mix, helping pull the record open again at a point where Sulpizio had lost his bearings on it. Karner, the friend whose idea set everything in motion, wrote the string arrangement for \"Fear\u0026amp;Trimbling,\" performed by Rachel Brown and Erin Rafferty. Other contributors thread through the sessions too: Trim's Hanami bandmates Jason Stein and Mai Sugimoto improvised horns on the sprawling closer \"White Gladys,\" a title supplied by McCombs's wife, Kiki Yablon.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe six tracks wear their collaborative wiring openly. \"Trimnopedie\" started as a sketch with a hint of Satie before the band remade it into something new; \"Double A (Start Yr Singing),\" a melody that arrived nearly whole, is harmonized across both guitars and dedicated to Albert Ayler; \"These Chords\" stayed unfinished until McCombs landed the melody that had escaped Trim and Sulpizio for months. For Sulpizio, who has always borne sole responsibility for the mood of a Health\u0026amp;Beauty record, Yr Knives feels different: brighter, less singular, a sound steered by four people at once rather than one. The band has already toured supporting The Messthetics, and the live setting is where its restlessness shows clearest: the same songs, never quite arriving the same way twice.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Yr Knives","offers":[{"title":"Vinyl","offer_id":48368103686402,"sku":"WV302-VINYL","price":23.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"CD","offer_id":48368103719170,"sku":"WV302-CD","price":15.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0834\/3997\/6706\/files\/wv302.jpg?v=1787439941"},{"product_id":"wv304","title":"Smoking the Bunny","description":"\u003cp\u003eSmoking the Bunny is the second in a planned trilogy of records by Brooklyn based avant-indie outfit Wilder Maker. It is sonically and conceptually ambitious, expansive, groovy, poetic, cinematic –– both strange and familiar. At times, this episodic record sidles alongside Broadcast or Oren Ambarchi or Tortoise, at others Ry Cooder or Paul Simon. Aesthetic juxtapositions are the order of the day but nothing here feels disjointed or without intention. And despite those aforementioned antecedents, Smoking the Bunny is the sole inhabitant of its own distinct universe, one characterized by an ambience of wonder and active questioning. It is a record that wanders endlessly but is never aimless.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e“I hope that ultimately this trilogy will be viewed as marking a time when I liberated myself from my influences and made something no one else would or could or should have made,” principle songwriter and vocalist Gabriel Birnbaum says. “I don’t even know if I should have made it.”\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eNot unlike with Talk Talk’s Spirit of Eden and Laughing Stock, the editing process was treated as a creative enterprise when making Smoking the Bunny.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eStarting mostly with full- or partial-band improvisations, Birnbaum then aggressively edited, condensed, and manipulated those recordings, dividing them “according to what time of night they felt like.” Among the players on this record are Birnbaum’s usual bandmates Nick Jost, Sean Mullins, and Adam Brisbin, as well as Birnbaum’s longest standing collaborator and Wilder Maker auxiliary member Katie Von Schleicher who acts as engineer, guitar and keyboard player and vocalist. Von Schleicher’s singing is notably sometimes performed directly and sometimes sampled, processed and looped by Birnbaum. This coaxing of multivalence is characteristic of Smoking the Bunny.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eExpanding the group in novel ways, Birnbaum invited a host of new collaborators including guitarist Chuck Johnson, saxophonist Joseph Shabason, trumpet player Cole Kamen-Green, composer-harpist Kitba (bec el-saleh), drummer Will Shore, avant garde percussionist Levy Lorenzo, and violinist Macie Stewart, who is known as half of FINOM, a member of Jeff Tweedy’s band, and for her collaborations with Lia Kohl, Ken Vandermark, Makaya McCraven and many others.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eAs with its predecessor, 2025’s The Streets Like Beds Still Warm, the initial sounds that populate this record were captured pristinely at Figure 8 Recordings in Brooklyn before Birnbaum ran much of it through tape machines and guitar pedals and then back into computers for further editing. While “collage” might be an accurate term for explaining how this work was made, the result is anything but patchwork. Instead, the listener is met with an extraordinarily vivid sense of narrative. Smoking the Bunny concerns the same character with whom we started the evening on The Streets Like Beds Still Warm. At this point, we follow him into the small hours of the night, into extreme drunkenness and blacking out and, through that vortex, into his own memories which are loosely arrayed in hotel rooms with numbers, which are reflected in the song titles, e.g. “Bachelor Garbage (Room 12)” and “No Lark (Room 9).” This hypnogogic tale of a man wandering drunk through hotel rooms is itself, of course, metaphor, as the lyrics ultimately grapple with concepts of identity, both positive and negative, and a running theme of confronting one’s own limitations in various forms of weakness, failure and death. “That may sound pessimistic,” Birnbaum says, “and maybe it is, but I see it as an inevitable correction for the infinity that is a part of young life. One can’t be disappointed without having first hoped for everything.” In this spirit, Birnbaum identifies Smoking the Bunny as a “midlife record” for its equally weighted forward- and backward-looking essence, for its reflections on family and mortality, frustration and failure. In fact Smoking the Bunny features a few field recordings, so-to-speak, of Birnbaum’s parents speaking, his father’s voice fragmented and haunted on the particularly stirring “A Drunkard of Days.”\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eWith the narrative generally in place from the start, after chopping up and reassembling the various sessions and improvisations, Birnbaum improvised with his voice, eventually comping together disparate vocal improvisations to form a final vocal melody, only then writing lyrics to those melodies, eventually adding the final vocal performances. This novel process seems to have ensured a deeply integrated and organic sense in the performances –– sung words that are equally representative of both sign and signified. This idea might be expanded to categorize the whole of Smoking the Bunny, a record overflowing with meaning and intention, overflowing with sounds that are themselves symbols and songs that constellate, fragmentary but consummate, very much like a year of dreaming.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Wilder Maker","offers":[{"title":"Vinyl","offer_id":48464167239938,"sku":"WV304-VINYL","price":23.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0834\/3997\/6706\/files\/WV304_WILDER_MAKER_SMOKING_THE_BUNNY_COVER_ART.jpg?v=1788922585"}],"url":"https:\/\/3skseq-pg.myshopify.com\/collections\/frontpage.oembed","provider":"Western Vinyl","version":"1.0","type":"link"}