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.