Category: catalog

  • Distant Reader – Place of Words Now Gone

    Catalog number: LTD049
    Release date: November 8, 2024
    Format: CD
    Edition size: 150

    Distant Reader, a project helmed by writer and musician Emmerich Anklam, returns to Lily Tapes & Discs following 2017’s beloved Home Power with a new collection of similarly disarming and captivating music. Building on previous releases, such as 2019’s self-released Sea Level, which experimented with various narrative structures on a song-by-song basis, Place of Words Now Gone is a fully-realized narrative suite: It describes an eerie spell of silence that spreads through a remote community, leaving pain and desperation in its wake. The story, which gestated over a series of long train rides through the continental US, comes across as an open-ended fable, one that holds space both for grief and—even in times when words fail us—for repair. Around the margins, lush accompaniment and production by Andrew Weathers (whose curatorial work under the Full Spectrum Records banner is a consistent source of wonder and inspiration here at LTD Headquarters) serves as a form of text painting, bolstering the contours of Emmerich Anklam’s vivid storytelling and heartfelt delivery. Akin to the feeling of curling up with a great novel, Place of Words Now Gone is both comforting and exhilarating, offering up new details with each revisit. Turn on the radio, and let the static fade in.

    Recorded at Wind Tide, Littlefield, TX, September 22–23, 2023.
    Engineered, produced, mixed, and mastered by Andrew Weathers.

    EA: Voice, guitar, synths, and pianos; paper and scissors on 5.

    AW: Lap steel on 1, 3, 4, and 7; synths on 1 and 7; field recordings on 1 (from Austin) and 4 (from Dublin); guitar on 3; saxophone on 4 and 6; percussion on 7.

    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.

  • Cla-ras – Let’s get this circle going

    Catalog number: LTD048
    Release date: November 8, 2024
    Format: Cassette
    Edition size: 100

    Let’s get this circle going is the latest collection from Cla-ras, the recording project of multidisciplinary artist and perennial Lily Tapes & Discs collaborator Jeremy Ferris, following a string of excellent releases including Five Clusters in 2021, also released by Lily Tapes, and a self-released split tape this past summer with fellow LTD mainstay Jason Calhoun. Where Five Clusters reached deep through the roots of the American Northeast in search of decay and rewilding, Let’s get this circle going reaches further back and farther away. Inspired by a trip to the North Frisian Island of Föhr, where Jeremy’s great-grandmother Clara was born, and recognition of the ways it mirrored the landscape of his own upbringing, the album channels the eerie sensation of marveling at a wide expanse while something – maybe everything – is churning away just over the horizon. A call to action loaded simultaneously with both joyful abandon and labored focus, Let’s get this circle going invites us to meditate on the power that land holds over its stewards, how that power transmutes across time and distance, and the strange beauty we can intuit from it.

    Jeremy played and recorded acoustic guitar, digital piano, effects, electric guitar, glockenspiel, lap harp, mandolin, mountain dulcimer, synthesizer, and tape loops.

    Mastered by M Deetz.

    Michael Bullister at Microscopic Sounds recorded and mixed the tracks “Cythelm resje” and “O hloendy chring.”

    Cover painting by Noah Frase.

    Artwork printed using size 24pt Freehand metal type on a Vandercook No. 4 press at Flower City Arts Center in Rochester, NY.

  • The National Park Service – Rescuers’ Loops

    Catalog number: LTD038
    Release date: July 1, 2022
    Format: Cassette
    Edition size: 75

    Lily Tapes & Discs is pleased to be sharing our first new release by The National Park Service in 6 years, a welcome visit from a longtime member of our musical family. Resurrected from an early working title for 2013’s I Was Flying, one of our earliest (and still favorite) releases, Rescuers’ Loops is a personal meditation on repetition and return, summoning all of the familiar soaring grooves and breezy textures we love about NPS, but enriched with a newfound warmth and personal clarity. Its music spreads like a rich neighborhood grid of deep colors and patterns, emerging slowly and then suddenly converging all at once, like the blooms of early summer framing the houses along your daily walk, nudging your perception day by day across the seasonal threshold. Both a response and a contribution to cycles of work, parenthood, and life on a small scale, Rescuers’ Loops will weave its way through your summer like condensation through a cold glass of water when you get home – joints aching, sitting still, taking it all in.

  • jason calhoun – ben c, this is for you

    1st Edition
    Catalog number: LTD037
    Release date: July 1, 2022
    Format: Cassette
    Edition size: 75

    2nd Edition
    Catalog number: LTD042
    Release date: April 14, 2023
    Format: Cassette
    Edition size: 100

    Few artists in the Lily Tapes & Discs orbit have been as prolific as Jason Calhoun, returning with his first solo release on the label since 2019’s practice. Following 2020’s monolithic pieces of death, a collaboration with Russian sound artist Foresteppe, ben c, this is for you is another long-distance collaboration of sorts, though the distances travelled here are temporal rather than geographical. Written and recorded during a transitional period living at home with family, ben c, this is for you finds Jason reaching far back through layers of dust and memories, pulling remnants of the past back into the present. The result is a densely layered and intensely felt quilt of brief hauntings, punctuated by anxious pangs of remembrance and disarmingly abrasive bursts of emotional clarity. Embracing both the discomfort and catharsis of deep introspection and its inciting factors, ben c, this is for you is a striking new peak from one of our long-time favorites.

    Music by Jason Calhoun.
    Mastered by AF Jones.
    Artwork by Jeremy Ferris.
    Tape initially released Summer 2022, then reissued Spring 2023 with altered artwork.

  • Cla-ras – Five Clusters

    Catalog number: LTD036
    Release date: November 19, 2021
    Format: Cassette with zine
    Edition size: 75

    Arriving fully formed, like a creature of unknown origin washed up on the river bank, revealed by the parting mist, Lily Tapes & Discs is proud to present Five clusters by Cla-ras. Following a 2019 split tape with Lung cycles and a handful of digital releases, this is the first full-length physical release from the project helmed by multidisciplinary artist Jeremy Ferris. Drawing inspiration from the native botany of the northeast and its slow reabsorption of industrial decay, Five clusters is a map measuring time and recollection rather than distance alone. Its sections parse like chapters of the land’s memory projected upwards, smeared and earthy, the bodily sensations of a murky late autumn excursion captured on tape. Back inside, the murmurs continue to sneak in like automatic writing through a cracked window as the blood and feeling slowly returns to our cheeks. We’re not sure where it’s coming from. Walk with us into the morning dew to search for more.

    Written, performed and recorded winter and spring 2021 by Jeremy Ferris unless otherwise noted.
    Mastered by M Deetz.

    “Wood sorrel” contains audio from “They Remain” dir. Philip Gelatt (2018)
    “Don’t be” contains additional vocals by Becci Davis, Angela Diveglia, Janaya Kizzie, Benjamin Lovell, and Emme Williamson
    “Ground soaked with celestial dew” contains audio from “Willy O’Winsbury” as recorded by the Pentangle (1972)

  • vierzig skizzen – screening

    Catalog number: LTD051
    Release date: March 20, 2025
    Format: Cassette
    Edition size: 100

    Returning to Lily Tapes & Discs following 2018’s “travels in public” and a long string of fascinating self-released projects in the interim, vierzig skizzen brings us “screening,” a new album drawing on several years’ worth of recording experiments reflecting on ways that sensations of motion and time contribute to a sense of place. As hinted at by its title, “screening” pulls inspiration from the visual language of cinema, as well as from the aural storytelling of mid-century musique concrète – the album seats our mind’s eye in front of a projector, not to play soundtrack to an imaginary film, but to serve as the imaginary film itself. An unbroken chain of scenes, each emptying into the next, narrative in the same way as a long walk through and around adjoining neighborhoods of an unfamiliar city, each detail contributing another segment of a mental map. True to its namesake, “screening” magnifies and draws the listener’s attention closer and closer, slowly filling the entire sensory field. At its conclusion, we exit slowly, squinting as we readjust to our surroundings, somehow both centered and disoriented in equal measure.

    Music and imagery by Daniel Stuhr.

    Mastered by Andrew Weathers.

    Artwork printed using a Risograph SF9450 and size 18pt Spartan Medium Condensed metal type on a Vandercook No. 4 press at Flower City Arts Center in Rochester, NY.

  • I-SM – Split Image

    Catalog number: LTD050
    Release date: March 20, 2025
    Format: Cassette
    Edition size: 100

    Split Image is I-SM’s first public release since 2019, and first with Lily Tapes & Discs, composed over several years in his hometown in Central New York. The album and its title serve as a reflection on a number of distinct-but-related dualities – memory and forgetting, flight and return, observation and experience – not as conflicting phenomena, but as complementary processes contributing to one’s sense of self. Perhaps most importantly, Split Image appeals to the act of forgetting as an integral step in the process of becoming, as a means to defining the essence of memory and grief. Similarly, I-SM’s patient and restrained patchworks of field recordings and synthesis amplify the energy that trauma, poverty, and addiction can embed within a place with intense precision and focus. Much like memory, we exist within the art we make, and also as observers of it. With Split Image, I-SM invites us to share in that process of becoming with striking empathy and clarity.

    Music and photography by Ian Sherlock Molloy.

    Artwork printed using a Risograph SF9450 and size 24pt Lydian metal type on a Vandercook No. 4 press at Flower City Arts Center in Rochester, NY.