Hello, Blue Roses
The Portrait Is Finished & I have Failed To Capture Your Beauty
locust 106

The sweetheart duo of Dan Bejar (Destroyer, Swan Lake, New Pornographers) & Sydney Vermont (visual artist, former Toronto Children’s Choir kid singer) have tied the knot around an infectious readymade classic with their 14 track self titled debut. The Portait Is Finished folds the last few decades of pop music together, drawing on everything from an unabashed love of 80s AOR (Prefab Sprout & Kate Bush) to the cheery mysticism of young Scotland ( Orange Juice & Felt) to prime Aquarian age femme folk of the 60s & 70s (Bridget St. John, et. al.).

Eric Carbonara
Exodus Bulldornadius
locust 104 / Wooden Guitar CD

Exodus Bulldornadius is Philly multi-instrumentalist Eric Carbonara's contribution to Locust Music's ongoing Wooden Guitar series. Carbonara's playing draws on the rich musical styles from Andalusian Roma-Flamenco to Hindustani & North African folk to form a kind of exalted pidgin style of playing that covers a wide emotional terrain from meditative calm to restless unease 

Paul Metzger
Deliverance
locust103
CD / Gatefold 180 gram LP

Minnesota's Paul Metzger is an unsung hero of the unaccompanied string instrument and a master musician of an instrument of his own invention. On Deliverance - a real time performance on his overhauled 21 string banjo - you'll be treated to some of the most deeply satisfying & impulsive outer cosmos ragadelia you're ever likely to hear. Clocking in at nearly 60 colossal minutes, Deliverance is 3 tracks of unfiltered aural transcendence; a hypnotic raga epic that's by turns a slow burning meditation & an urgent mind / body duel.

Paul's playing may summon up the spirits of Sandy Bull's searching inventiveness, Billy Faier's out Tacoma sides, J.P. Pickens' tweaked Americana, Henry Flynt's searing harmonic drones or Big Jim Sullivan's psychedelic exotica, but at the end of the day, Metzger is no idolater and we're all a little luckier to have him around to occupy his own singular post in this post- Fahey world.

Available on CD and limited 180 gram virgin vinyl housed in a stunning gatefold jacket.

The Family Elan
Stare of Dawn
locust102
CD / 180 gram LP

"Given the deep complexity and beauty of the music, it seems unimaginable that this album would ever stop sounding fresh and exiting. On so many levels, this album is a precious gem worthy of careful listening and untold hours of enjoyment"

-10/10, foxy digitalis

There's no telling what happens when you leave a guy alone in a room with a turntable, the entire Ocora & Ethnic Folkways back catalog, pepper it with classic 60s british acid folk sides & leave him to his own devices with an odd instrument or two. our guess is that The Family Elan comes pretty close to one possible result. The Family Elan is the intuitive, devotional project of Glasgow's free wheeling folk dervish Chris Hladowski (Nalle, The One Ensemble, Scatter) built around Chris's gently lilting vocal offerings & the absorbing droning modal sounds of his long-necked lute. Stare of Dawn is one of those special little records - searchingly beautiful, seemingly effortless, deeply enchanting & completely hypnotic.

Elan draws on a vast array of folk musical traditions from the Greek Rebetes of the 1920s, the tanbur playing of the Kurdish Sufi mystic Ostad Elahi and Âshyq songs of the Azerbaijani sâz master Edalat Nasibov to revivalists offerings from Anne Briggs's bouzouki inventions, early Incredible String Band & Hungarian revivalists Muzsikás to name just a few points of reference.

Available on CD & limited 180 gram vinyl. 

Henry Flynt & Nova'Billy
Nova'Billy
locust101
CD / 2 x 180 Gram Vinyl  

"i want to be a rocker. everybody else has walked away from rock. i want to walk towards it." - Henry Flynt

Taste the magic! Nova’Billy is another edible audible from Henry Flynt's dusty lower Manhattan bunker and it stands as one of the fullest, most beauteous document of Flynt's tenure with a full working rock band to date. For less than one calendar year between 1974 and 1975, Henry Flynt's hard driving, heavy jamming agit country rock band, Nova'Billy embraced bareknuckled deep fried groove attacks, bearded hippie jam band workouts & a monstrous melange of blues, boogie and free jazz squeal into a musical soufflé that could only have come together with Flynt cooking up what was proven to be, time and again, an impossible vision within the confines of the SOHO art orbit of the 70s. After a couple performances at Anthology Film Archives and studio sessions in Richmond, Virginia and Manhattan, the band postered SOHO in a last ditch effort to get some traction with the hipsters that read, "Party on down to the Kitchen. Stoned country music for rock country". The gig, like all the others before it, was poorly attended. Nova'Billy played what would be their last live gig at the Kitchen on June 27, 1975.

Nova’Billy covers a damned fine and important moment in Henry Flynt's musical career. If the Insurrections laid the foundation for his anti war primitive garage rock sound, the emergence, nearly a decade later of Nova'billy is the realization of Henry's own vision of obtuse personal politics ( "I was a creep"), provocative leftwing posturing (check their version of the world communist anthem "the international!") and a gleefully recombinant spin on southern music. 13 cuts and 60 minutes of old glory!

Available on cd and gatefold 180 gram double vinyl.

Angelblood
Mambo Mange
locust95
180 gram LP