Hand-numbered edition of 425 copies beautifully presented solo album from this great string thinker with a paste-on sleeve and a vintage original photograph attached to each (every LP is different). A side sees Metzger generating complex note patterns from an amplified metallic-sounding banjo in a way that crosses Sun City Girls-style ethno-devotionals with a tougher take on the kind of nowhere zone previously explored by Sandy Bull. The A side is recorded live in 2002 while over on the flip there are two tracks from Minneapolis in 2008 that combine complex re-tuned psychedelic madrigals with knotty American Primitive breakdowns and sudden eruptions into travelling folk melodies. The first piece is particularly out, with Metzger using a modified acoustic guitar with a cymbal set into its face alongside ten steel strings.

Third in a great run of solo recordings, following on from Tenor and Soprano, from saxophonist Joe McPhee. It’s easy to forget that McPhee comes from the same generation as Archie Shepp and Albert Ayler, an original fire musician, even if he didn’t fully come to prominence till the 1990s. Alto was recorded live on May 4^th 2009 in NYC and further emphasises McPhee’s connection to the source, with a series of solo alto saxophone and alto clarinet performances that are perfectly poised between post-tongue ecstasy and soft, bruising blues, from boppy Ornette-ish tone-poems through Alyerised heavy metal gospel. Hand-numbered edition of 524 copies on 180g vinyl with silkscreen print on rice paper covers. 

The late Rodd Keith remains one of the greatest and most daring and inventive songwriters of the 20^th century. Primarily known as the most prodigious of song-poem stylists, he worked for some of the best known companies supplying customers with a service that would set their own lyrics to music. His discovery of psychedelics in the late 60s/early 70s succeeded in extending his vision even further, resulting in an unquantifiable corpus of work that is as goofy, surreal and quintessentially American as the lyrics he brought to life. Due to the nature of the business, Keith had to work fast and turn around his creations in no time at all and he developed a feel for speed-of-thought inspiration that is the equal of any great improviser. This is the second collection of work from Keith put together by Roaratorio and it is simply beautiful. All tracks are previously unreissued and they run the gamut of cracked real people vision, from the patriotism on pills of “Search Out Your Soul, American” through to low-rent gospel evangelising (“O Jesus My Saviour” – Keith has a brief parallel career as a musical evangelist), an inspired take on “Choo Choo Train”, beautiful 60s psych-pop (“Deep Velvet”), acid soul, weird suburban easy, hallucinatory folk rock... and that’s not to mention the uniformly bats lyrics, with Keith somehow squozing the clumsiest of couplets and oddest meters into impossibly concise shapes. Despite the cheap, commercial trappings of the biz Keith has a lot of soul and every performance feels valedictory. If you’re at all attuned to the very specific vibrations of the Real People genre and if you dig 20th century American culture at its most out-of-whack then you will swoon over this, another peerless collection of the works of one of the true American originals and a visionary musical talent. Can’t get enough of this. Comes with a free download and liner notes from song-poem vocalist Dick Kent. Highly recommended!