Imprints Of Import: Vin Du Select Qualitite
With the glut of music available to the world with a few mouse clicks, and everyone wanting to prove their mettle as purveyors of good taste, there seems to be more record labels than ever starting up these days. But you’ll find few that know what they are doing as well as Plastic Records/Swingset Magazine head Steve Lowenthal. He has taken a curator’s approach to both of those products, hand-selecting content and releases that speaks to his love of the far-reaching, the arcane, and the sublime in music.
He is now training his eye on an even more narrowly focused project: a new label called Vin Du Select Qualitite that only releases music made on acoustic guitars, and only releases them on vinyl. Those are both ideas that are hardly new to this world but Lowenthal is able to transcend the rabble thanks to his overstuffed Rolodex. His initial trio of releases included a solo effort by Emeralds guitarist Mark McGuire and one of the great unheralded geniuses of the guitar, Chris Brokaw, who has played with Thurston Moore, Come, and many, many others.
This year will see another trio of vinyl releases, each one a glorious celebration of the possibilities still available to those willing to study guitar playing with depth of purpose and a serious mind. The one you’ll likely be hearing the most about is the solo effort by Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore. The all-instrumental disc was created using a 12-string acoustic, and written in tribute to the late, great Jack Rose. Like almost everything else Moore touches, it resonates with emotion and with the colorful tones that we’ve come to recognize from this giant of the avant garde world.
If you’ve never heard the name Allen Karpinski, you will at least have likely heard of his band Six Parts Seven. You’ll recognize a similar rustic calm that rides underneath the surface of his solo effort for VDSQ, but it is layered over with healthy doses of buzzing noise and a restlessness that allows him to move the 13-minute closing track “The Midwest_Great Plains, The Rust Belt, and Great Lakes” in ever widening circles from noisy to ruminative to playful.
The last release is by someone whose name you might never have come across, but is one that you should familiarize yourself with soon. Matthew Mullane is an artist and musician from Ohio who has been quietly releasing albums of ambient electronics and creating sound art for the past decade. Here he records straight to tape, with no overdubs, a series of acoustic instrumentals that are just stunning. Reminiscent of the work of the late John Fahey in its ability to wrench the folk/blues argot into new shapes and dimensions. His volume only features three tracks, but each one carries more weight than the full-length discs of lesser players.
None of this albums are available to the general public yet, but do visit VDSQ website to look for release dates and to snap them up when they do get released and before they go out of print, which considering the glorious sounds on each one, won’t take very long at all.
