{"title":"Blue Chopsticks","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBlue Chopsticks is an affiliated label founded and run by David Grubbs. With a strong connection to Drag City, this label has established itself as a prominent player in the music industry. Known for its diverse range of artists and performers, Blue Chopsticks offers a unique blend of genres that appeals to music lovers of all kinds.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eUnder the guidance of David Grubbs, Blue Chopsticks has become synonymous with quality and innovation. The label prides itself on discovering and nurturing talented musicians, providing them with a platform to showcase their creativity. From avant-garde experimental sounds to indie rock anthems, Blue Chopsticks delivers an eclectic mix of musical styles that captivates audiences worldwide.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eWith a reputation for releasing groundbreaking albums, Blue Chopsticks continues to push boundaries and challenge conventions within the music industry. Its commitment to artistic integrity sets it apart from other labels, ensuring that every release is carefully curated and thoughtfully produced. Whether you're an avid collector or simply searching for your next favorite artist, Blue Chopsticks offers an unparalleled selection of *musical gems* that will leave you wanting more.\u003c\/p\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"in-the-merry-month-of-may-3","title":"In The Merry Month of May","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eIn the Merry Month of May\u003c\/i\u003e is the final studio recording of the late, great Tony Conrad, and the first duo release with Jennifer Walshe, one of Conrad’s most important collaborators in the final decade of his life. Befitting these two absurdly gifted hell-raisers, this is a wild, improvisatory flaying of song, with Walshe’s clarion voice at the heart of the enterprise.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Blue Chopsticks","offers":[{"title":"Black LP","offer_id":50417939185995,"sku":"2197336","price":32.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/In_the_Merry_Month_of_May_27c5cca6_thumbnail_4096.jpg?v=1726737773"},{"product_id":"concordance","title":"Concordance","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eConcordance\u003c\/i\u003e is Susan Howe’s and David Grubbs’s fifth album in the fifteen years of their unexpected and richly satisfying collaboration. Here they’ve pared down their materials to voice and piano, aspiring to the hushed intensity of their live performances. What had previously resulted from Grubbs’s recomposition of recorded materials now arrives as unadorned duo performance.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Blue Chopsticks","offers":[{"title":"LP","offer_id":50459594522955,"sku":"1129303","price":27.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/3f7b834e-1571-4841-a964-738c2d989798_thumbnail_4096.jpg?v=1727224992"},{"product_id":"lacrau","title":"Lacrau","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eLacrau\u003c\/i\u003e is the first US release of music featuring the legendary Portuguese guitarist’s guitarist Manuel Mota. Mota’s mysterious, uncompromising, resolutely personal approach to the instrument has most often been captured on solo recordings - and typically of an immersive length, such as \u003ci\u003eRck\u003c\/i\u003e, a 5CD release from 2013. \u003ci\u003eLacrau\u003c\/i\u003e captures the ambience of a warm Sunday afternoon in late autumn in Lisbon when longtime friends Mota and David Grubbs sat down for this waking dream of a first duo performance. The session unfolds with a realtime, documentary feel in which athematic, non-repeating musical gestures are rendered with an extreme sensitivity to microscopic soundworlds brought about by fingertips, strings and tube amplifiers. These explorations are as apt to find emotional weight in the solitary note in all its fret-buzzing glory as they are in unexpected turns of phrase briefly referencing blues and jazz. \u003ci\u003eLacrau\u003c\/i\u003e is an older Portuguese word for ‘scorpion’ (predating ‘escorpião’), as well as the name of a good, cheap restaurant in Manuel’s hometown of Ericeira, on the west coast of Portugal. Its quality of being out of time, its rough texture and its multiplicity of meanings make it as good a name as any - and better than some - for this beautifully unconventional and unconventionally beautiful album, one that occupies a unique place among the recordings of Mota and Grubbs. Apart from his solo performances and recordings, Manuel Mota is known for his collaborations with a range of musicians including Phill Niblock, Noel Akchoté, Margarida Garcia, David Maranha, Okkyung Lee, Tetuzi Akiyama and Toshimaru Nakamura. David Grubbs has played in Gastr del Sol, The Red Krayola and Squirrel Bait and performed with Tony Conrad, Susan Howe, Pauline Oliveros, Eli Keszler and many others.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Blue Chopsticks","offers":[{"title":"LP","offer_id":50497842807115,"sku":"1037474","price":22.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/ccc8708d-5343-423d-849a-9502eb56a82f_thumbnail_4096.jpg?v=1727733944"},{"product_id":"konata-kanata","title":"Konata Kanata","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eKonata Kanata\u003c\/i\u003e is the Tokyo-based trio Hontatedori's second release, following their self-titled debut LP from 2013 on the Japanese Compare Notes label. Taku Unami, Moe Kamura and Tetuzi Akiyama are better known as solo performers and in their numerous collaborations than they are in this unique, lovely trio - at least until now. Hontatedori places Kamura’s wonderfully delicate voice amidst the mercurial two-guitar landscape of Unami and Akiyama in crystalline settings of aphoristic song. The group describes their pieces as originating in monophonic compositions by Unami that gesture eccentrically toward medieval plainchant: “Originally their music sounded like covert and whispering folk music, however, they’ve come to the sound of quiet funkiness and cold psychedelia.” Some listeners might liken them to a dialed-back, considerably more reserved version of various Dagmar Krause-led groups such as Slapp Happy and the Art Bears given their erasure of separation between art and pop song. The eighteen exquisite minutes of \u003ci\u003eKonata Kanata\u003c\/i\u003e (\u003ci\u003eHere There\u003c\/i\u003e, in a slightly antiquated Japanese word choice) hearken back to the golden age of unclassifiable post-punk 12” EPs, in which at a certain point all that you might know of a particular group consists of rigorously vetted representative pieces (see \u003ci\u003eA Taste of DNA,\u003c\/i\u003e etc.), but also to miniatures - tantalizing scraps of song - that are one of the legacies of musical modernism.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Blue Chopsticks","offers":[{"title":"LP","offer_id":50498083881291,"sku":"1039157","price":19.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/08be5d5f-fcdc-4100-9682-a0b07cae03be_thumbnail_4096.jpg?v=1727738869"},{"product_id":"instant-opaque-evening","title":"Instant Opaque Evening","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eInstant Opaque Evening\u003c\/i\u003e is an epic offering from The Underflow, the new trio of Mats Gustafsson, David Grubbs and Rob Mazurek. 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That tour was a revelation for all three members, experienced as they are, with this still-new group’s freedom to walk onstage each night determined to surprise one another, moving from long instrumental improvisations into and out of songs and covering a terrific amount of ground at each of these concerts.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eInstant Opaque Evening \u003c\/i\u003econveys this broad sweep, from the full-tilt electronics of ‘Self-Portrait As Interference Pattern’ and the climax of the seventeen-minute ‘Instant Opaque Evening’ to the inspired, alternate universe chamber music of ‘Planks’ and ‘A Thin Eternity’ and the group’s spontaneous arrangements of three previously recorded songs by Grubbs, ‘Gethsemani Night’, ‘An Optimist Declines’ and ‘Cooler Side Of The Pillow’.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Blue Chopsticks","offers":[{"title":"LP","offer_id":50499880714571,"sku":"1110883","price":32.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/dd195996-3d3e-494d-9432-4bdefa85ca75_thumbnail_4096.jpg?v=1727774682"},{"product_id":"creep-mission","title":"Creep Mission","description":"\u003cp\u003eYour Creep Mission, should you choose to accept it: bi-composed \/ improvised guitar instrumentals featuring Grubbs and Primrose collaborator Eli Kenzler, with Nate Wooley and Jan St Werner. File under: melancholy raga, sludge-rock, pointalistic electroacoustics and nylon string minatures.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Blue Chopsticks","offers":[{"title":"LP","offer_id":51007273271627,"sku":"1015434","price":19.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/6632ad0c-c4de-4faa-bfdd-79aca49a3fbc_thumbnail_4096.jpg?v=1735048714"},{"product_id":"bright-madness","title":"Bright Madness","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eBright Madness\u003c\/em\u003e is the third album from the improvising trio of \u003cstrong\u003eWendy Eisenberg\u003c\/strong\u003e, \u003cstrong\u003eDavid Grubbs\u003c\/strong\u003e and \u003cstrong\u003eBonner Kramer\u003c\/strong\u003e, a glorious afternoon’s worth of instant compositions laid down in Asheville, NC, in early spring 2025.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThe sound of \u003cstrong\u003eEisenberg\u003c\/strong\u003e, \u003cstrong\u003eGrubbs\u003c\/strong\u003e and \u003cstrong\u003eKramer\u003c\/strong\u003e doing their damnedest to dazzle one another is encompassing, flowing from shell-game sleights of hand to effortless beauty in the flicker of an ear.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eA lyrical group sound, it has an insistent, vivid and immediate feel.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Blue Chopsticks","offers":[{"title":"LP - Black","offer_id":58300422226251,"sku":"R3811-2410","price":24.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/2000x2000bb_88876389-f231-4ea7-849d-6b76acb6bfe7.jpg?v=1788036028"}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/collections\/test_31e1ec5a_thumbnail_4096_89a5157f-85e5-43ef-afde-613e78a044a7.jpg?v=1726737752","url":"https:\/\/shop.roughtrade.com\/collections\/blue-chopsticks.oembed","provider":"Rough Trade","version":"1.0","type":"link"}