New record pressing — Nick Dunston – Colla Voce, courtesy of Out Of Your Head Records.

What if the blue that I see is different from the blue that you see? This question is an infrastructure for my Afro-Surrealist Anti-Opera, COLLA VOCE. Often, when we think of Surrealism, we think of subconscious mental states, dreams, nightmares-those unexplored corners of our psyche. But Afro-Surrealism protests: what if that which one calls a ‘dream’ is a nightmare to another? What if that which one calls ‘rational’ is completely baseless to another? And surely, we must have varying ideas of what is ‘normal’. While many would consider the work of the great Frida Kahlo to be Surrealist, she herself said that she was simply painting her own reality. So who or what gets to determine the measuring stick for verisimilitude?

‘Anti-Opera’ is not an outright rejection of a particular medium, but an audacity to confront it, and when necessary, to subvert and turn it inside-out. ‘colla voce’-literally, ‘with the voice’. Moving with the voice, breathing with the voice, working together with the voice-all voices. Perhaps no other instrument is simultaneously understood and misunderstood as much as this one. There are four practitioners of it to whom I must express gratitude for the opportunity to work with directly: Cansu, Sofia, Isabel, and Friede- who not only (literally) breathed life into this work, but they being hyperpersonal creators in their own rights, immediately established themselves as the strands of DNA around which this music is built. Further gratitude goes to Tal, Maria, Anil, and Moritz-powerful instrumentalists, using their own inner voices to establish the necessary energy and tendons to bind together the overlap of cords and chords, both those in the larynx and those bound by wood. To JACK Quartet, who enabled me to cross even further into other dimensions by not simply adding, but exponentially multiplying resonance and mass, developing a sense of time that can be described as anything but linear, and entirely tangible. And to Weston, the producer of COLLA VOCE who sees the same blue that I see, entirely present in this province of collaboration since before I had even composed anything; no words can qualify their hand in shaping this work.

COLLA VOCE is a warped narrative of sorts, hurtling from acoustic universe to electric universe, string to scream, raw to produced, New York to Berlin, and of course: real to surreal. As a beckoning towards the libretto, it is largely inspired by writers: Octavia Butler, Toni Morrison, Ted Chiang, Richard Hugo, and Gabriel García Márques. Their works are fictitious, poetic, folkloric; genres that tend to uncover a potent emotional veracity. I continue to ask myself, how can we achieve this in the world of organized sound and noise, which is endless, diverse, and on beautiful occasions, Afro-Surreal? In other words-how is the Blues that I hear different from Blues that you hear?

-Nick Dunston, Chicago, January 8th, 2024

(Gotta Groove Records offers vinyl record pressing and EcoRecord manufacturing for independent labels, musicians, and artists – this post features one of the many records pressed at Gotta Groove in the past month).

New record pressing – Sam Moss – Swimming:

There’s a photograph of Sam Moss taken several years ago through an elaborate stained-glass window of a 170-year-old church turned venue in the Catskills. Sam’s on stage and framed by the corner of the lower half of the window, which is open on a tilt. It renders him diminutive and slightly out of focus, but the eye seeks and finds him, fixing him in view.

I can’t hear Sam’s music without this photograph coming to mind. (I admit that I took it.) He’s an excellent guitarist, a serious and thoughtful songwriter, and a confident, at times daring, singer. Yet all of Sam’s records—and most of all his newest, the exquisite ‘Swimming’—have succeeded in constructing deft and effective settings for rigorously searching songs—reckonings and wrestlings with awe and wonder, dread and despair, fragility and endurance— that manage to expand well beyond the frame of Sam Moss without losing him to the landscape. He can give the uncanny impression that he’s inhabiting his records at some remove, even though it’s his performances of his compositions that are, obviously, the central axis around which they turn. Sam can—Sam does—sing “I held…,” “I heard…,” “I hope…,” “I try…,” “I dance…,” etc., but that I-ness—the songwriter-singer’s stock-in-trade, which so often grows tiresome with its cul-de-sac insistence on itself—goes a little fuzzy, slipping off to the periphery while still commanding (but not demanding) attention. If this seems a doubtful virtue, consider how a singer of songs—even a good singer of good songs—can become wearisome company; their I can become, if I may speak for myself in the words of Ed McClanahan, “too many for me.”

But I can listen to Sam’s records over and over. They don’t wear out their welcome. He’s a modest and very hospitable host. I’m inclined to attribute this at least partially to his Yankeedom—New England-born, although he resides in Virginia now—and the particular, peculiar granite reserve that comes with that territory, though I’m also on guard against demeaning his abilities with place-based romanticism. I imagine I hear that, like Emerson, Moss’ “music’s in the hills,” but those would be as much Central Appalachia as Monadnock: redolent of rarer air in general. So it’s not site-specific, it’s Sam-specific. He’s a writer of generous songs and a maker of gracious records. As it happens, the songs are terrific. So are the records. ‘Swimming’ is his best yet.

– Nathan Salsburg 

(Gotta Groove Records offers vinyl record pressing and EcoRecord manufacturing for independent labels, musicians, and artists – this post features one of the many records pressed at Gotta Groove in the past month).

On 13 new songs Erik Jekabson’s Breakthrough weaves together amazing arrangements and beautiful compositions all under his mesmerizing trumpet. You would be hard pressed to find better musicianship; many of the players along side Erik are artists themselves or have impressive symphony credentials. All around a wonderful work sure to inspire a Breakthough.

Erik Jekabson is a freelance trumpet player, composer, arranger and educator living in the San Francisco Bay Area.

He has toured with Illinois Jacquet, John Mayer, Galactic, and has performed on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno and Late Night with David Letterman. Erik has several solo albums on Wide Hive Records “One Note at a time” (2020) “Erik Jekabson Sextet” (2018) and “Erik Jekabson Quintet” (2016).

Eric is equally busy playing and composing for different bands, leading his own groups, (the Erik Jekabson Sextet, the String-tet and the Electric Squeezebox Orchestra) teaching a wide variety of students and running the Young Musicians Program at the California Jazz Conservatory.

Available January 17, 2025 courtesy of Wide Hive Records.

(Gotta Groove Records offers vinyl record pressing and EcoRecord manufacturing for independent labels, musicians, and artists – this post features one of the many records pressed at Gotta Groove in the past month).

New record pressing — Hammock – From The Void.

“There are four songs we were considering for ‘Love in the Void’ that weren’t fully fleshed out. Listening to them again, we decided they deserved to be brought to life because of how they made us feel. In addition, we decided to create four new pieces inspired by LITV. Adding these pieces and pulling them from the void creates what we think is a bridge between LITV and our next LP, as well as a nice stand-alone document of music.” -Marc Byrd

Available now.

(Gotta Groove Records offers vinyl record pressing and EcoRecord manufacturing for independent labels, musicians, and artists – this post features one of the many records pressed at Gotta Groove in the past month)

New record pressing – Little Freddie King – Things I Used To Do:

The legendary Little Freddie King returns to Newvelle Records with a stripped down – and decidedly different – sound. The blues titan appears here just a few years following his acclaimed release Going Upstairs but now in raw, unadorned form. Paul DeFiglia on upright bass and Bobby Lewis on harp give a little structure for Little Freddie to expound from. Like a private conversation with a legend. A front porch record.

Here, Little Freddie plays classic works, many of which he first learned as an eight-yeard-old on a jury-rigged cigar box guitar in Mississippi. These are the songs he loves – from Lightnin’ Hopkins, John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon,and Sister Rosetta Tharpe – and transformed in hands shaped by eight decades of living.

Available courtesy of Newvelle Records.

(Gotta Groove Records offers vinyl record pressing and EcoRecord manufacturing for independent labels, musicians, and artists – this post features one of the many records pressed at Gotta Groove in the past month).

New Record Pressing – Devon Goldberg’s Original Motion Picture Soundtrack, performed by MORRICONE YOUTH, to the 2024 horror film Eight Eyes — the debut feature-length of director Austin Jennings (director/co-writer of Shudder’s “The Last Drive-In with Joe Bob Briggs”) which world premiered at the 2023 Fantasia Film Festival in Montreal, shot on 16mm and Super 8 on location in Serbia and Macedonia and starring Scream Queen Emily Sweet (V/H/S ‘99). The film is co-produced by Vinegar Syndrome as the Blu-ray reissue label’s first entirely original production and distributed by Shudder in North America and Donau Film in Europe. 11-Track LP (42 minutes) with 21-Track Digital Download Card (56 minutes).

Available October 31, 2024.

(Gotta Groove Records offers vinyl record pressing and EcoRecord manufacturing for independent labels, musicians, and artists – this post features one of the many records pressed at Gotta Groove in the past month).

New record pressing — Eilen Jewell – Butcher Holler, A Tribute To Loretta Lynn.

Butcher Holler is named for the little Kentucky town where Loretta Lynn was raised – On the tribute album of the same name, acclaimed singer-songwriter Eilen Jewell pays homage to Lynn’s humble roots and timeless, hard-hitting writing and performance style – For the first time, Butcher Holler is now available on vinyl, remastered and expanded with three brand new tracks. Jewell writes, “And so, a toast: to the woman with more banned songs than anyone can count; to that voice that reaches the very grain of the theater walls around her; to our national treasure. Gratitude is not enough, so I sing these songs for any who will listen.” The Boston Globe praised, “There’s an irresistible snap to these songs- they’re tight, deliciously twangy and rendered without orchestrated frills… [a] deft tribute.”

Available October 11, 2024 courtesy of Signature Sounds.