Beat Hollow Records was born in 2014, and so it seems fitting that they reissued Fognode’s 2011 album Beat Hollow. The record is available as a 100-copy limited hand-numbered pressing now, so be sure to act fast if you want it!
Gotta Groove Records
The Artist's Preferred Pressing Plant.
Record Highlight — Matthew Mullane
VDSQ Records is proud to release the second album by Matthew Mullane — Hut Variations. Among the more revelatory contemporary guitarists, Mullane’s new album is a further progression in terms of technique, composition and performance. Limited edition of 500 copies in heavy stock, spot-gloss jackets. Order now from Vin Du Select Qualitite.
Record Highlight — Playing For Change 3
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.
Record Highlight — Sungod
Sungod approach their work with a purposeful disregard for chronological and geographic borders alike, devoid of any fixed time or point of origin. Touching on the modern and the classic, Sungod‘s five expansive tracks offer a series of portals into the past while maintaining a contemporary progressive sound. With a new line-up of auxiliary musicians contributing to the exploration of a full-spectrum of sonic planes, Sungod covers enough ground to hold a mirror up to infinity and find the inner frontiers of the self in its reflection. The Austin duo’s eponymous LP perpetuates the timeless elements of many experimental musics while further refining a craft that is wholly their own.
The core of Sungod is made up of Michael Sharp and Braden Balentine, who record out of their shared home studio with a rotating cast of like minded musicians from Austin’s fertile underground music scene. While incorporating an ever-broadening inventory of influences, the band’s methodical arrangements and layers of meditative repetition hearken back to 70’s Krautrock, which serves as a solid foundation for further ventures into both burgeoning and antiquated realms. Polyrhythmic drums and arpeggiated synthesizers propel much of Sungod‘s procession forward, sitting in total harmony with acoustically-oriented pieces that concisely imbue a compensatory calm to the album’s potent, high velocity moments. Initially composed around an awe-inspiring single-take drum performance by Michael Sharp, Shiftless en Nkawkaw is supported with additional vocals by a pair of Sharp’s coworkers who jumped onto an impromptu recording session after a shift together, chorusing between psychoactivated guitar solos and fully engrossing flute melodies. Ample contributions from flutist Kristine Reaume as well as bassist Alex Hughes help to make Sungod’s latest LP an exponent in this era of the band’s cosmology. However, the epic closing track L’âme de toute étoile strips back down to Sharp and Balentine, proficiently exhibiting their command of drums, guitar, and synth in one of their most elemental works to date.
Happy Thanksgiving!
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
Record Highlight — Faces of Jade
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.
Holiday Message
Thank you.
As we close out our 5th year in business, we want first and foremost to extend this message of THANKS to our customers. It’s hard to believe that only five years ago we struggled to ship our first order of 100 records out over the course of several weeks, and now we are processing 60-70,000 records per month. We could not have grown to this degree without the continued support of our independent minded customer base, and we are sincerely thankful for your business.
Speaking of growth, as we are sure you have heard through other sources, worldwide demand for vinyl records continues to increase. Each month we are pressing many new records for musicians who have never before released vinyl; and most of our regular customers who have been with us since our early days order nearly double the quantities they were pressing just four years ago. The increase in consumer interest for vinyl is great for all musicians/labels/record stores; but it also creates challenges for everyone in the supply chain.
In the past 12-18 months, we have continued to augment our operation to increase capacity:
- Our record plating operation started about one year ago, and continues to handle more of our plating needs; with plans on nearly doubling its capacity in early 2015.
- We added another 12” pressing machine to our operation in early 2014, and are in the early planning stages of building a “new” pressing machine to add to our operation.
- We switched to a new black vinyl formula (manufactured in the U.S.A.) in early 2014, which yields more consistent pressing results.
- We are in the midst of construction, increasing our factory and assembly space by approximately 30 percent.
- Clint Holley, our resident lacquer engineer, has added a second lathe and moved to a much larger studio space in town.
While we have plans to continue the expansion of our operation and the services we offer, the demand for vinyl continues to exceed the realistic rate at which growth in capacity can continue without sacrificing quality control and/or drastically increasing prices.
This year, our backlog is nearly 100,000 records higher than it was one year ago today. Many of our customers are wisely planning releases farther and farther in advance, and we strongly encourage everyone looking to press records in 2015 to do the same. While we certainly would like to be able to ship more records at a faster rate, we continue striving to be realistic in our turnaround time estimates, and we publish and update these estimates on our website. We encourage you to bookmark our turnaround/scheduling webpage, and feel free to call or email us with your plans, however tentative they may be, to co-plan your release dates with us.
In closing, we want to emphasize our gratitude for the business you bring to us. The records you have released, the jobs you have created, and the fun you have generated for folks like us leave an indelible mark in this vinyl world we live in. Please always feel free to call/email us with feedback and/or just to say “hi”. We look forward to keeping it independent with you for many more years to come.
NOW, FOR OUR ANNUAL FUN:
Check out our Employee Picks of 2014 – some of our favorite records pressed at GGR this year.
Holiday Specials 2014 – come and get ‘em!
Record Highlight — Brian Laidlaw
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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.
Record Highlight — Alpenglow
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.
Record Highlight — Mark Rogers & Mary Byrne
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.
