“I’m the only one who plays on the streets all year round. I don’t do it for money. Most people ignore me but some people come by and toss a $5 bill and say, they’ve been listening for years and that I should keep it up.

"I’ve lived an impoverished life. I’m just playing for people to listen. I must have composed 4,000 songs.

"I am a Polish gypsy, a member of the on-going wolf tribe. I can play music from the Stone Age. I maintain music of the twilight.” -- Little Howlin' Wolf, 1980.

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. 

Darin Gray and Tyler Damon are hitting the road for a few days in May in support of their debut bass/drum collab entitled ...Oninbo. These two began playing together in 2012 and have found an anchorless dialogue of continuous expansion and unspooling of sound. This is pretty much unlike anything we've released by longtime pal Gray -- and it salaciously sticks to our ribs in a satisfying way. The release is limited to 100 pro-duplicated hi-bias Chrome+ cassettes on Taylor's Yoke imprint. Downloads will be active when the cassette is gone.

• May 1 The Artifex Guild, Bloomington, IN
• May 2 The Spot Tavern,  Lafayette, IN
• May 3 Institute 4 Creativity,  Champaign, IL
• May 4 William A Kerr Foundation,  St. Louis, MO

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.