practice is Jason Calhoun’s fourth release on Lily Tapes & Discs, and his second of 2019 (following better to give, released this past April by Gertrude Tapes), but the first under his own name. And while there may not be an immediately noticeable change in style or texture from Jason’s recent work as naps, there is a deeply felt shift in energy, one that takes root and reveals itself slowly. It is an assured step forward from behind the curtain, an open invitation. practice is as much an album to listen to as a room to inhabit – the details are all right in front of you, but you take them in differently as the world turns, as the light on the wall shifts and fades. Are we speeding up or slowing down? Doesn’t matter, they’re the same thing.
Music by Jason Calhoun. Artwork by Sarah Jurkofsky. Mastered by A.F. Jones at Laminal Audio.
Greyon Greene’s music glows with the familiar simplicity of neon green text against a terminal window, leaving tracers like a burned in CRT monitor. The shadowy Brooklyn-based musician specializes in drawing out details from negative space – press play and feel the scenery start to change, but look at it head-on and it disappears. Following last year’s excellent Advanced Cloud Watching, released by Solid Melts, Belong to It is a soundtrack to the second wind, for waking up from a late afternoon nap at sunset. For leaving the house without your phone or wallet and walking to the highest point in the neighborhood to watch while everyone else goes to sleep. Meanwhile, you’re already dreaming.
Music and artwork by Greyon Greene. Mixdown to tape Mike Corrado. Mastered by Andrew Nerviano. Recorded at Scully’s Den.
Though new to Lily Tapes & Discs, The Spookfish is a name that should spark a warm familiarity for an inestimable number of folks who have passed through New York’s Hudson Valley. For years, the human behind the project, Dan Goldberg, has organized the Mountain Shows, a series of outings where participants spend a day hiking together, stopping for musical performances at scenic points along the trail. Anyone who has had the opportunity to join one will no doubt have fond memories of friendships developed and favorite artists discovered on the mountain. Following 2017’s Black Hole, released by Fire Talk Records, Pumpkin Beats 2 is similarly a testament to Dan’s unique talent for tethering music to a time and place, in a way that invites participation and fosters community. The tracks on display here each have a distinct color and shape, but still echo against each other as if in conversation. They’re a collection of character introductions, a slow tour through a haunted house just before the sunrise. Both approachable and unknowable, the trail changes every time you walk it.
Music by Dan Goldberg. Painting by Christopher Santiago. Mastered by Andrew Nerviano.
The result of a long-distance collaboration between Jason Calhoun and Egor Klochikhin, aka Foresteppe, Pieces of Death grew out of a collection of field recordings captured in Klochikhin’s native Russia, with the expectation that Jason would selectively edit the recordings and use them as a starting point for new compositions. Jason instead chose to use the recordings in full, elevating them from background texture to lead instrument, both musicians now serving as accompanists to the sounds of otherwise unremarkable days. The finished work is one of both broad scope and close attention, an ode to the subtle shifts yielded by life’s cycles and repetitions as they phase in and out of one another towards a conclusion, infinite in their combinations but finite in outcomes. As longtime fans of all artists involved, Lily Tapes & Discs is proud to be wrapping up 2020 and welcoming the winter solstice with this masterwork of deep listening.
Following previous releases on Dear Life Records, JR Samuels (Friendship, 2nd Grade) delivers SPASM, a work of solo improvisation in keeping with the theme of our autumn 2022 batch. An attempt to render unfiltered thought into an uncanny sound palate both alien and welcoming, SPASM captures output from the wandering mind as articulated through non-idiomatic acoustic guitar playing and tethered MIDI expression, yielding a dense interior portrait, defiant in its strangeness, but disarming in its immediacy. Unrehearsed performance reframed as an ongoing quest for salvation from – and exorcism of – pain both physical and communal, as an act of sensemaking against an endless stream of nonsense input and violent compulsion. What better to counter a dulled and overwhelmed set of senses than something wholly other? And where better to find it than within? Venture with us further into the unlit corners of the self, in search of new sound.
As part of our autumn 2022 batch, Lily Tapes & Discs is pleased to present a new solo offering from Michael Cormier-O’Leary, songwriter and guitarist of Hour, whose 2018 album Anemone Red returns to consistent rotation each autumn here at Lily Tapes HQ, still revealing more of its secrets at every turn. In contrast to Anemone Red’s stories told through carefully mapped intricacies and delicate arrangements, Heard From the Next Room is a diaristic collection of spontaneous composition for solo piano, recorded one blustery day in early 2022. Within, Cormier-O’Leary’s tendency toward considered restraint gives way to the unshielded joy of exploration and discovery. Framed as a surreptitious capture of a personal exercise, Heard From the Next Room is a reflection on the moments that bring us closer in spirit when we’re already nearby. An intimate depiction of the joys of sharing personal moments with loved ones, gently, inadvertently, through the walls, day by day, as we settle in and lower our guards.
Arguably the National Park Service’s most personal work, a massive statement built of meditations from the brink of parenthood, being given the physical release it deserves. The original release page on NPS’s Bandcamp page reads “probably best to just let this one speak for itself” – so we’ll do the same.
Originally released digitally in Spring 2019, tape edition Spring 2023.
Some artists make work to communicate solid, pre-existing ideas—to give voice to thoughts contemplated extensively ahead of time. Others create to reveal something to themselves—to learn through the process and let the listener in on it. The artists that have released music on the Rochester-based label Lily Tapes & Discs during its decade of existence tend toward the latter approach. Their catalogs are littered with experiments, weird imperfections, and happy accidents; their compositions define their own hermetic internal logic. Labelhead Ben Lovell cites Phil Elverum as an artist of this type, whose self-determination spoke to him during his formative years.
“I realized that you can work outside of conventions to try to achieve something that’s personally desirable—that isn’t dictated by some larger directive or system,” Lovell explained. “It’s freeing to realize that I can mess with a tape recorder and it can sound broken. That isn’t just okay—that’s part of what makes it mine.”
Lovell’s own music as Lung Cycles exemplifies this polyglottish, unselfconscious ideal, vacillating between experimental instrumental work, manipulated field recordings, and more traditional song-based projects. When he began to release other people’s projects under the Lily Tapes & Discs name in 2012, he hoped to build a label that would embody this ethos as well.
Since its inception, Lily has yielded an interconnected network of releases that function as a kind of personal musical lexicon for Lovell. Operating out of his home, Lily specializes in hand-assembled cassettes that frequently feature Lovell’s own art or design, and its discography includes everything from electroacoustic collages, experimental folk and country, to emo-informed indie rock. However, the lovingly curated anniversary compilation Window: 10 Years of Lily Tapes & Discs reveals a curious kind of aesthetic unity to Lily’s disparate crew of alums. The near-two-hour long compendium features new and unreleased material from nearly everyone who has released music on Lily—including Adeline Hotel, Jason Calhoun, The National Park Service, Michael Cormier-O’Leary, and Lovell himself—coalescing into a dream-like, immersive longform listening experience.
Rather accepting a specific release based on its suitability for some kind of label house sound, Lovell has always viewed Lily as a platform for friends to showcase whatever mode they were working in at the time. (This could be anything from a labor-of-love full-length, a smaller split release, or a stray experiment outside of their normal wheelhouse.) With Window, then, Lovell wanted to see where each member of LT&D’s roster has ended up artistically in 2023, instead of providing a scrapbook of their past work on the label. By his own account, Lily has always been a way for Lovell to connect with people he respected and got along with on a deeper level; therefore, it was also an excuse to catch up with collaborators he hadn’t talked to in years.
Many Lily Tapes & Discs releases sound like happening into the middle of a private musical conversation, or observing a ritual that has been going unobserved for some time. Lovell’s recordings on the compilation as Lung Cycles exemplify this feeling—patiently sketching a restless chord progression over rustling natural sounds in “Field” and luxuriating in distortion and percolating synth harmonies on “Asbury.” On his contributions, Philly-based ambient music vet Jason Calhoun thrusts us into a vortex of downsampled noise, with shards of melody sporadically cutting through. Reminiscent of the serrated sounds of Low and William Basinski, Cla-ras’ “C is for Cricket”—the handiwork of Jeremy Ferris, an illustrator and printmaker who has helped define Lily’s visual language—compellingly draws attention to its means of production. Wind shudders into a mic; synths and samples accumulate speed and density, culminating in patches of blown-out static that cause the entire track to short out.
Out of these soundscapes, solid edifices of song emerge. Adeline Hotel’s entry “How Did I Get So Lucky?” combines the methodology of bandleader Dan Knishkowy’s elliptical ambient instrumental LPs with his psych-folk songwriting in one four-minute piece. It serves as a fitting opening for the compilation, touching on the stylistic modes that Lily Tapes & Discs encompasses within one piece, from small, barely perceptible sonic rustlings to fully-fledged singer-songwriter exegeses. (Window features a slew of stark, impassioned rock tracks in the latter category, courtesy of Ocean Charter of Values, Ylayali, and others.)
“Lily’s motto is ‘purveyors of good shit’, and I think that sums it up,” Adeline’s Dan Knishkowy, who has known and collaborated with Lovell for over a decade, has of the label. “Ben has given artists a home to experiment and grow within their expanding community.”
Michael Cormier-O’Leary—solo artist, Friendship drummer, and Dear Life Records co-founder—appears twice here, with some carefully constructed non-ambient instrumental compositions. One is a slowly generative demo from his instrumental collective Hour; the other, a catchy tropicalia-informed instrumental under his own name. “[Ben releases] music for nesting in small spaces,” Cormier-O’Leary says, characterizing the quintessential LT&D sound. “It’s defined by a hushed, unwavering intensity that encourages us to hear the sounds between the warble as the tape degrades.”
In the economically tenuous modern musical landscape, a small label putting a stamp of approval on an artist’s release is, as much as anything, a way of dignifying it as being worth music fans’ attention. In Lovell’s mind, if making the music felt meaningful for the artist—whether it was improvised or crafted laboriously for years—then it is worth an audience’s time. Lily Tapes & Discs artists’ releases snapshot a moment in an ongoing process—capturing them in the midst of refining their craft and pushing themselves. Far from an odds-and-ends collection, Window provides an impressive and exhaustive document of a loosely interconnected crew of iconoclastic musical minds, each functioning at their highest level, and exemplifies everything Lily Tapes & Discs does best: expert curation done with taste and humility.
T-shirt designed and printed by Jeremy Ferris to celebrate Lily Tapes & Discs’ 10th (ish) year of operations. 2-sided print on heather gray union-made Bayside pocket tees.
As cliche as it is to comment on, it’s an undeniably declarative move when an already-established artist releases a self-titled album. For German Error Message, the album in question arrives two decades into the project’s lifespan, exuding the comfort of a long overdue homecoming. Those who have been following in the meantime will instantly recognize the familiar warmth of Paul Kintzing’s songwriting and production, but where previous albums may have built insular and hermetic worlds with their hushed delivery, German Error Message sprawls outwards, unfolding as a series of nested home-recording experiments disguised as folk songs. Not quite a summary of nor a full departure from the sound Kintzing has spent years slowly building on, German Error Message is both strange and familiar, akin to reconnecting with a friend you’d lost touch with, and missed more than you realized. You compare the disparities of your shared memories over and over, well into the night, reacquainting yourself with the feelings you thought you’d grown distant from – they’re still inside you, just buried a little deeper than before. The reward is in the digging.
Written and recorded 2020-2023 by Paul Kintzing.
Artwork printed using a Risograph SF9450 and size 24pt Freehand metal type on a Vandercook No. 4 press at Flower City Arts Center in Rochester, NY.
