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Loren Connors

Suzanne Langille and Loren Connors celebrate their October birthdays — and the forth-coming release of the Suzanne Langille Songbook 2xCD (Family Vineyard / Feeding Tube) with a night of friends and collaborators. including Alan Licht, Angela Jaeger, Alessandra Novaga, Andrew Burnes, Bill Nace, Byron Coley, Daniel Carter, David Daniell, John Kolodij, Jane Hesser, Laura Ortman, Lin Culbertson, Neel Murgai, Ras Moshe Burnett, Tom Carter, Tom Surgal, Gabriel Martinez, Ronnie Yates, and William Hooker.

Friday Oct. 4 event at Artists Space, NYC will also include a tribute to guitarist Dean Roberts, who had planned to travel from Lisbon to be part of this event but recently passed away. Performance produced by Blank Forms.

It’s finally happening, Loren Connors in Chicago, again.

It was November 1996 the last time Loren was in Chicago for the Yttrium festival organized by Table of the Elements. John Fahey, Tony Conrad, Jim O'Rourke, Keiji Haino and others shared the Empty Bottle stage over three nights.

Fahey left us is 2001, but his paintings hang with Loren's art for the gallery show I Listen to the Worn Out Rain at Soccer Club Club. It opens Aug. 30 with a 7 p.m. reception — Loren plays solo and with Michael Vallera. The show continues through Oct. 4.

Acclaimed guitar duo Loren Connors and Alan Licht celebrate their 30-year collaboration in 2023 with the release of their eighth album — At The Top Of The Stairs —and a series of performances. The duo will hold a two-night residence at Café OTO in London on May 5 and 6.

The album is available on streaming applications April 29, followed by LP release on June 9. 

Loren Connors' fantastic "A Coming to Shore" gallery exhibit is now open at Blank Forms through March 25 at the Brooklyn gallery. Seven recent large- and small-scale works are on display. 

"Much like his guitar playing, Connors’s visual works are always slowly transforming: when he runs out of canvas space, the artist paints over 'finished' pieces and starts again, this ritualistic layering contributing to what Aki Onda has described as their 'mystical quality.' Diagnosed with Parkinsons in 1991, Connors’s strength and range of movement are in decline, yet he paints every afternoon, committed to visualizing the intangible. The works on view 'have the feeling of horizon, but not all of them depict horizons,' Connors has said. With gestural swathes of black, gray, yellow, and green, the paintings in 'A Coming to Shore' limn boundaries, the spaces between what is 'beneath, behind, above, below, and within' which have occupied Connors for nearly half a century." — Blank Forms

Leone is the first meeting of electric guitarists Loren Connors and Oren Ambarchi. This album, like its title, is a sum of parts: solo performances by Connors and Ambarchi bookend a duo. Features floral illustrations by Marissa Huber. 

LP and digital out Friday, January 29.

Loren Connors will perform solo this Sunday, October 25 at 4-6 pm (Eastern) as part of Elysium Furnace Works' 2020 season at the Howland Cultural Center in Beacon, NY. Anyone in the world can watch the live performance.

Tickets for the live stream are $15 and may be purchased here or at Howland Cultural Center.

In physical record stores now...

Loren Connors’ Beautiful Dreamer 10-inch, a two-part suite dedicated to Steve Dalachinsky... and...

Suzanne Langille & Neel Murgai’s Come When The Raven Calls LP — blood rich, blues testimonies communicated from vocals, overtone singing and daf.

Both were released digitally in June as we looked for hope and strength during the lockdown.  Now both records are making the way to your favorite shop globally via Secretly Distribution. Get your mask on and go see your record shop clerk -- they miss you!

This past November marked 20 years since Family Vineyard’s first releases. Thank you! It's been a long journey we've all been on.

We like to think back to the very kind words of John Darnielle who captured the whole ethos of the label.

"... Family Vineyard occupy a particular corner of the music universe, serving up equal parts talent, ambition and pretension from people who don't shrink from the word 'artist' and who make honest, blood-leaking efforts to be worthy of the name." (from "Last Plane to Jakarta" fanzine).

Throughout 2020 we’ll be sharing more about the past two decades and celebrating with new and archival releases.

Those first two releases in 1999 were: Bruce Anderson & Dale SophiaStrict (FV1) and Loren MazzaCane Connors & Darin GrayThe Lost Mariner (FV2) — both compact discs and still available in very limited quantities.

To show our thanks to for sticking with us, this week we are offering 25% off all purchases -- physical and digital. Use the code FV20SALE at checkout. The sale is good through Sunday, Jan. 12.

Loren Connors' first solo painting exhibit Wild Weeds opens Oct. 2 and continues through Oct. 7 at Blank Forms in New York City. 

"Wild Weeds features a series of new paintings and a selection of recent drawings. All of the works continue an ongoing series of flower images, drawn or painted in the past few years with an economical hand, a quality not unlike the impressionistic character of Connors’ guitar playing. Connors has explicitly considered the relationship between the paintbrush and the guitar throughout his career, on albums such as Blues: The “Dark Paintings” of Mark Rothko (1990), a musical response to the late painter’s final works, and by creating album artwork—often by hand, even since being diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease in 1992—for his own, limited-release recordings....

"Wild Weeds is presented in conjunction with the release of Connors’ Unaccompanied Acoustic Guitar Improvisations Vol. 10, by Blank Forms Editions. The album, featuring archival material recorded at the Creative Music Studio in 1980..." -- Blank Forms

The exhibit closes with a performance by Loren and Tom and Christina Carter as Charalambides on Oct. 7 at 8 p.m.

Fantastic collection of Mary Mazzacane's vocal recordings 1948-1974, out now on Recital Program -- edition of 115 LPs. Loren Connors' major, unheard influence. We released a brief piece of Mary's on the Night Through set in 2006. This collection is "seven haunting pieces, remastered from their original sources and published here for the first time. Trace the musical connection between mother and son, for the same grace and passion carries in their blood."

Some say "it's 'bout damn time..." but we just smile.

Loren Connors graces the cover of The Wire for a fantastic, indepth feature by Kurt Gottschalk that is teased as: "The pioneering free blues guitarist has more than six strongs to his bow, as demonstrated by his debut release as a pianist." Suzanne Langille makes a co-staring role as Gottschalk examines Loren's recent bout of Family Vineyard releases. 

That debut release is, of course, The Red Painting 7-inch (just a few more copies of it left...).

Finally -- Loren Connors & Clint Heidorn's debut Light is out this week. It's quite a package to match the music: a one-sided, clear vinyl 12” packaged with two pieces of Connors’ art -- a detail of a recontextualized Matisse painting. One piece is transparent plastic, the other paper. Together, the opaque block of 11-inch x 11-inch sheets are intended to be hung in your window so the light can illuminate the hidden colors.

As for the music -- it sounds just like that. 

Only 300 copies of this record were made and only a few remain today. 

It's been awhile since Loren Connors & Suzanne Langille released anything as a duo -- sure, there was the Haunted House band album from a few years ago, but, that's a totally different dynamic. Now, thankfully, the Belgium label Tanuki just issued the "Strong & Foolish Heart" b/w "Blue Ghost Blues" 7-inch single. It was recorded live at the 2013 Counterflows Festival in Glasgow, Scotland and sounds fantastic. Loren's contemporary abstraction style gives a different feel to these familiar songs as Suzanne's always powerful, soulful bellow anchors each. But we've never heard a version of "Blue Ghost Blues" (aka Lonnie Johnson's "Haunted House" from 1960) like this. Loren's hair-raising replication of fluttering bat wings, as heard first on In Pittsburgh (1989), is transformed here into a slab of scree and feedback. Just 250 copies with three cover variations -- get at it.

Loren Connors will perform in front of Rothko's "Four Darks in Red" at the Whitney Museum of American Art on August 29th: 

Loren Connors, composer and musician, will address Four Darks in Red, 1958 by Mark Rothko (1903–1970). Named in honor of the Whitney’s new address, 99 Gansevoort Street, 99 Objects is a series of in-gallery programs focusing on individual works of art from the Museum’s collection on view in America Is Hard to See. Speakers include artists, writers, Whitney curators and educators, and an interdisciplinary group of scholars. Programs take place daily.

We are so pleased to finally release Blues: The Dark Paintings of Mark Rothko -- Loren Connors' masterpiece of six-string ambience and lyricism. It's been 25 years since the LP first came out, and really, back then hardly anyone heard it. Today, pretty much anyone can now grab ahold -- or at least hear via quality bitrates -- this album. A lot has been writen about this album so far, but we'd like to share one insight from Grayson Haver Currin:

These seven instrumentals represent Connors' responses to a posthumous exhibition of the "Dark Paintings" of Mark Rothko, a major ideological and technical influence he's long acknowledged. Rothko finished these works just before committing suicide in 1970. Connors' responses, then, seem like an attempt to live among those same bleak grays and blacks but to not languish in them—that is, to survive by singing about the sadness, not drowning in it. The anguish so apparent in the hand-wringing chords of "No. 1" sublimate into a kind of contemplative beauty by the end of "No. 7".

The LP is available now. Order here. 

Snap from Loren Connors performing in Portland, OR last night at Yale Union. Photo from Evan P. Cordes. This was Loren's first performance in the Northwest since 1998.

Wish we could have made it: return of Haunted House (Loren Connors, Suzanne Langille, Andrew Burnes and Neel Murgai) last night in lower Manhattan at Sugarcube as part of Northern Spy's five-year anniversary celebration. Those lucky to attend reported "Frankie and Johnny" and "Blue Ghost Blues" were, as expected, monstrous live. Photo by Erstwhile Records' Jon Abbey.

As we wrote last month, Light, the stunning debut of the Loren Connors & Clint Heidorn duo, was delayed due to defects found in copies of the one-sided clear 12". New stampers were made and the record was repressed, so we expected Light would be ready for release still this year. Well, the second pressing arrived and the vinyl is again corrupted with clicks and skips created during the manufacturing process. When will Light finally shine through and get in the hands of all those who pre-ordered? We're not sure, but we guarantee the record will be pressed flawlessly and worth the wait.

Light is here... and then it wasn't. After many delays with the fabulous Loren Connors and Clint Heidorn debut collaboration, the crystal-clear, one-sided LPs finally arrived. We were ecstatic. Then we played a copy and the record skipped. So we played another -- and then the needle jumped out of the groove. And on and on... each copy of the LP had some type of defect in the first few rotations. The record is being repressed -- which is great, of course -- but it will be another delay before Light is finally complete. The release date has been adjusted to Dec. 2.

Above is a photo of how the finished record will look. The artwork is two pieces of Connors’ art -- a detail of a recontextualized Matisse painting. One piece is transparent plastic, the other paper. Together, the opaque block of 11-inch x 11-inch sheets are intended to be hung in your window so the light can illuminate the hidden colors. A full-color postcard of Connors' full piece is also included.

It will be worth the wait... 

On November 11th Loren Connors and Keiji Haino will perform a live, improvised soundtrack to The Passion of Joan of Arc -- Carl Theodor Dreyer's 1928 masterpiece. The event is at Shibuya in Tokyo, Japan. But Loren won't be traveling to Japan. Instead he will perform in New York City via a slightly delayed Internet hook-up with Keiji in Tokyo. 

According to the Google translation of the Japanese concert announcement: "This time, do not dare to be invited Connors be dangerous to the long-distance movement suffers from Parkinson's disease, experimental performance center of local Brooklyn Issue Project Room in, you get to play in the movie is screened. Then send out sound and video using the Internet, avant-garde blues guitarist true of another person, Keiji Haino will Mukaeuchi the sound of Connors and movie in Tokyo.

"It will be a slight delay will occur in the synchronization of the Brooklyn / Tokyo between, but including the delay time difference and two people would be "playing". In order to accurately as possible and synchronization!? Whether there for anything such as the Internet if you did not used to this, you will digital screening rather than a film, but at 20 frames / sec worth is said to screening rate of silent film era in screenings, I pull the video representation of the original. Japanese / English subtitles."

The darkness is nearly passed... Light, the long-delayed debut collaboration of guitarists Loren Connors and Clint Heidorn, is almost ready to shine...

City scapes were a hallmark of Loren Connors early 1990s work -- his guitar offten telling the stories of New York City past and present. My Brooklyn is a return, of sorts, in vein. Released by the  Japanese label Analogpath, the 500-edition CD collects two live performances: The Stone (1/7/12) and Zebulon (2/26/12). It is available here. 

From our friends at Flannelgraph Records, who have been releasing the benefit album The Holidays Don't Have to be so Rotten for the past four years. The 4th volume is out now -- and so is this:

It is our honor to be releasing a limited edition of 7" records featuring the song that Loren Connors contributed to last year's instrumental holiday benefit compilation.

• ** original cover artwork by Loren himself
• ** limited to 500 hand-numbered copies
• ** B-side features the raw transfer of "Christmas Day," original recorded on VHS cassette tape
• ** all profits will again go to charity, this year's being Amethyst House, an addiction recovery center in Bloomington, Indiana
•  ** Order at Flannelgraph Records

A fine duo, if there ever was one: Loren Connors and Tom Carter at Issue Project Room, Brooklyn, Oct. 20, 2013. Photo lifted from thepalaceat4am.

The ultimate Loren Connors overview has been written and compiled by the fine gents at The Out Door column over at Pitchfork. It is epic, beautiful and covers Loren's four decades as an artist and musician. It's got it all, from a summary of his many albums -- including many on FV -- and interviews with Suzanne Langille, Darin Gray, Alan Licht, Jim O'Rourke, some guy named Jandek and few others. Please, spend some time with this one. 

Mr. Loren Connors: "Well… NY Times critic Ben Ratliff says I play notes so slowly it makes you wonder if I’m losing my way. I think this comment was said as a joke, or with a light heart. But I like to think about slowness. The same kind of thing was said about Billie Holliday, Lester Young, Miles Davis, Chet Baker, and on and on. The truth here lies in the fact that a person ages internally. The fast-paced, technically strong youthfulness gives way to a deeper concern. Look at Beethoven’s last quartets, op. 131 and others. Look at Chopin’s last nocturnes. And other great composers. They all offer us their slower, deeper sound in their final days. Like Ebenezer’s spirits, the spirit of Music past and Music present and even Music future is gonna haunt you. It sure will. And when you do get older, if it’s truth you’re after, you play like the man or woman that you’ve grown to become and you leave all the youthful techniques behind. At 63, I play like the man I’ve become, not the boy I once was."

Also, after some delay, we're proud to release a remastered, LP version of Loren's classic The Departing of a Dream. This is a gorgeous reissue of the 2002 CD, now with corrected cover photography and enhanced audio. There are only 700 copies, so it won't be around for long.

Loren Connors during sound check at Rothko Chapel in Houston, Texas, June 1, 2007. Photo by Yuko Zama.

After many delays, the Loren Connors'  A Fire one-sided LP is completed! This 350-edition, 180-gram record captures Loren at a performance in Philadelphia in 2010. Features jacket cover and insert of Connors' cut/paste remodeling of photos -- both are handscreened by Alan Sherry at Siwa. Many copies have been pre-ordered and already spoken for. We only have about 100 left as of today -- so act quick.

Our pals over at Northern Spy in Brooklyn have released Loren Connors & Suzanne Langille's I Wish I Didn't Dream -- their first proper duo album in 14 years. It's 14 new studio tracks inspired by the Brooklyn outsider, impressionistic artist M P Landis. The package comes in a lovely digipak with a 20 page tip-in art book featuring all 14 M P Landis paintings along with lyrics by Suzanne. All tracks were improvised live during a four hour session -- a rare feat as most Loren's albums are cut on stage or at home.