As we wrote about a few weeks back, we have now started up our own in-house label called Round Bale Recordings. Everything has now arrived and the first release from the group Tilth is now ready and available to order. Please feel free to get in touch if you have any questions.

Pleased to announce the inaugural release on Round Bale Recordings, a private press record label associated with the Free Form Freakout podcast series (a.k.a. The FFFoxy Podcast) that will focus on small edition releases across various physical formats. This first LP comes from the group Tilth and their long-awaited sophomore album. Initially the duo of Cody Yantis and Nathan McLaughlin, whose debut Angular Music came out on Soft Abuse in 2012, Tilth’s new trio incarnation includes long-time collaborator Joe Houpert, who has worked with McLaughlin in Loud & Sad and with both on the superb Line Drawings release out on Desire Path Recordings last year. Each of these musician’s solo and collaborative works have been featured regularly throughout the history of the Free Form Freakout podcast series. In fact, Tilth performed their very first live outing in a show that we arranged here in Mankato, Minnesota a few years ago. It was quite an exhilarating performance filled with clashes of tape drift, stringed dissonance, free jazz eruptions and the occasional verbal prodding amongst the group members to push towards some next level catharsis. It was a rather compelling live show that opened the door to new possibilities only hinted at on their debut release.

After several months of planning and collaboration, we couldn’t be more pleased to finally offer Country Music, an album that captures the bound-up tension and breezy release of that memorable first performance. It’s country music not in style, but music conceived during a time and place marked by rural living and relative isolation. McLaughlin’s reel-to-reel textures and Yantis’ resonant guitar work are still present, but the sonic palette has been noticeably widened with Houpert’s skittering percussion and dissonant violin scrapes adding new rhythm and color as the album unfolds. There’s much more to it: nuance, space, breath, and grit. Ah, yes, it’s indeed Country Music!

This first LP release comes in a numbered edition of 150 copies with hand-printed artwork by Casey Deming. The album was mastered by Sean McCann. The first 50 orders through the Free Form Freakout website will get a bonus CD-R called Backwoods Runoff that contains five (or is it six?) extra tracks featuring a mixture of rehearsal material recorded on the eve of that first live performance and brand new exclusive material recorded over the past few months. The CD-R comes with full-color artwork and was mastered for release by Seth Chrisman. (*Update: The copies with the bonus CD-R are now sold out).

Country Music is also being stocked at these fine places: Tune Town (Mankato), Treehouse Records (Minneapolis), Experimedia (U.S.), Crisis of Taste (U.S.), and Fusetron (U.S.)

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