Scanning the Recital Program
Exploring the catalog of a singular experimental label
In honor of their three excellent new releases, I dedicated a full episode of Seasonal Work Radio to the Recital label this week. You can listen to the episode, and browse some new and old personal favorites from their catalog, below.
LISTEN TO THE EPISODE
I’ve been trying to watch my hyperbole lately, but I honestly can’t think of another record label in the past decade and a half or so that has had a more precise vision and aesthetic, a wider range of expression within that aesthetic, or a more consistent track record of putting out fascinating and beautiful releases, both new and archival.
Revisiting the Recital catalogue over the past few weeks, I sometimes had the feeling that I was tuning in to a radio station from an existential post-apocalypse, a Waiting for Godot or Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead kind of world, with shards and fragments of culture just lying around amongst the ruins, waiting to be artfully rearranged.
Derek Baron - The Holy Restaurant
A simply beautiful new album by Derek Baron, their second for the Recital label. As described by the label, “The album is built from years of miniature transcriptions of improvisations . . . Half-thoughts and mistakes are revisited, gilded, and illuminated.”
If that sounds a bit academic, the result is quite the opposite. Like Baron’s previous Recital outing,
Curtain
, the musical content feels collaged or embroidered, the edges frayed like the gorgeous scraps that adorn the cover art and accompanying booklet. Like all things handmade, the music has a worn-in coziness, which is deepened and complicated this time around by a wider range of domestic and found sounds: clatter, chat, the earnest banality of the TV set. These things mostly hang in the background, but occasionally come to the fore, as in the interview with humble casket makers that runs throughout “Our Lady of the Mississippi” or the slightly out-of-sync chorus of speaking voices on “The Holy Restaurant” reading an unassuming text written by Baron’s grandfather.
It’s honestly a bit disorienting to encounter music both this modest and well-crafted. I’ve played it back a bunch of times and still find myself picking at the stitches, marveling at the craft of it. Perhaps it’s better just to settle in. Drape it over the back of the couch; it doesn’t have to be too neat—you’ll be reaching for it frequently.
Sean McCann - The Leopard
Recital number 114 is label head Sean McCann’s first opera (or radio play), and it brings together many of his abiding interests—avant-garde performance art, spoken word, collaboration, and, musically, a constant tension between an ornate, sometimes old-fashioned, but nonetheless overwhelming beauty, and frequent rufflings and complications of that beauty, sometimes coming out in sounds that are bizarre, profane, or downright frightening. (The dyspeptic vocalizations often favored in sound poetry, for instance, or the blood-curdling scream—or leopard’s cry?—that inaugurates the “Overture.”)
There’s a kind of story here, largely about a mummy who lops off, cooks, and eats parts of himself. The plot is supported by startlingly realistic foley art, and you can follow along in the gorgeous 88-page libretto book, which will answer some questions, raise others, and provide its own wrong paths and misdirections.
It’s just a guess, but I can imagine McCann getting deep into archival audio recordings of sound poetry and experimental performance art and becoming increasingly intrigued by the piece that’s missing—the stage picture unseen, the context lost, the impossibility of knowing for certain whether the strangeness you’re experiencing would be any less strange if you were properly seated. And so here’s an opera that has
never
been performed (at least not yet), the missing context a constituent piece of it, an auto-cannibalistic feast for the imagination.
It’s probably not as God intended, but I’ve found that, while this rewards close listening, it’s almost
more
intriguing when I put it on in the background, puttering around, doing dishes, surrendering to my inability to track the story and letting each strange moment wash over me as its own encounter. However you come at this, there’s a whole lot to sink your teeth into. It’s an artifact destined to baffle the curious for years to come.
Iris Our - Victual Vittle Bottle Cunt
Kiera Mulhern and Sydney Spann provide the dankest entry in the latest batch of Recital editions as Iris Our, a foggy set of minimal sound design and concrete poems pulsing across the stereo field in alternating voices. The duo have a gimlet eye for the surreal nested in the mundane—as they write: “the obscene impossibility of having a mouth that sucks, eats and speaks, and of a voice that commands, soothes, and curses.” Wild little compact disc.
Autumn Fair - Autumn Fair
The 100th release on Recital showcases everything I love about the label: pretty enough, weird enough, classical enough, contemporary enough, art-world enough, homemade enough, dreamy enough, earthy enough, timeless enough, seasonal enough—with a who’s-who of contributors and a numbered ticket to the Autumn Fair.
Aki Onda - Nam June's Spirit Was Speaking To Me
One of the wildest records on Recital, a seance with the departed artist Nam June Paik conducted through chance encounters with radio waves. Onda mostly surfs the in-between frequencies, ghostly voices flickering in and out amidst static and interference that’s so rhythmic at times it’s hard to believe it was barely edited.
Matthew Sullivan - Matthew
A dreamy travelogue of field recordings from a regular contributor to the Recital label. As label head Sean McCann describes it, “Matthew is nailed together with driftwood from around the world. The waters of Italy, the pubs of London, birds of Japan, a phone call in Los Angeles. ” More than the sum of its parts & then some.
Karla Borecky - The Still Life
Solo piano from a founding member of the longstanding underground Western Mass. institution Idea Fire Company. By turns playful, childlike, ruminative, tender, angular, & mechanistic—sometimes dreaming & melting into the wallpaper, sometimes skittering off like a wind-up toy with a beating heart—always with some tape grain & a certain sensibility.
Buy NowSimple Affections - Simple Affections
“I corralled a dream LP that I would want to listen to. Too smelly, too sweet.” That pretty well sums up Sean McCann’s approach to curating the singular Recital label. This one, Recital 44, brings together a notable list of contributors to craft a psychogenic concert program that seems to be grounded in a church—quite beautiful indeed, until surreal avant-garde hijinks increasingly run riot in the foreground. Great entrée to this world apart.
Idea Fire Company - Lost at Sea
The stalwart Western Mass. avant-gardists were among the first contributors to the Recital label. They share a quasi-theatrical approach exemplified by this one, which “imagines the Idea Fire Company as the bar band on a small cruise ship.” The crowd is small & inattentive. Still, IFCO offers stately piano, hoarse trumpet, plaintive synth, & radio waves. Something is a little off, and something is a little on. Distinctive features. Plain strangeness.