{"title":"James Elkington","description":"\u003cp\u003eChicago-based British guitarist and singer.\u003c\/p\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"ever-roving-eye","title":"Ever-Roving Eye","description":"\u003cp\u003eChicago songwriter and guitarist James Elkington who has collaborated with everyone from Richard Thompson to Jeff Tweedy to Tortoise recorded his sophomore album at Wilco’s Loft, expanding upon his celebrated 2017 debut \u003ci\u003eWintres Woma\u003c\/i\u003e as well as his recent production and arrangement work for the likes of Steve Gunn, Nap Eyes, and Joan Shelley. Casting glances back to British folk traditions as well as toward avant-garde horizons, these brilliant new songs, as accessible as they are arcane, buttress Elkington’s brisk guitar figures and baritone poesy with strings, woodwinds, and backing vocals by Tamara Lindeman of the Weather Station.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWhere the first record was more firmly situated in the sonic tradition of England’s more interesting 1970s folk revivalists, Eye engages in a broader wrassle, roping in echoes of British library musics, horror-film soundtracks, demure psychedelia, and more rocking elements of folk-rock. The result is a record even more elaborate, shrewd, thoughtful and confessional than its predecessor. \u003ci\u003eEver-Roving Eye\u003c\/i\u003e is instead a sublime distillation of the humane wisdom of a dude who’ll never be; the dude who sings on the single, \u003ci\u003eNowhere Time\u003c\/i\u003e: “There’s a master plan somebody understands \/ And I wish that one was me.” It might well cast a pox on the concept of satisfaction altogether. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFor fans of Bert Jansch, Kevin Ayers, Richard Thompson, Joan Shelley, Steve Gunn, Michael Chapman, Mike Cooper, Ryley Walker, Scott Walker.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Paradise of Bachelors","offers":[{"title":"Green | LP","offer_id":50383942943051,"sku":"1086900","price":32.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"Black | LP","offer_id":50383943106891,"sku":"1086899","price":29.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"CD","offer_id":50383943303499,"sku":"1086898","price":14.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/9b8b7817-a434-4e4c-b0fe-d0e78884d758_thumbnail_4096.jpg?v=1726279774"},{"product_id":"me-neither","title":"Me Neither","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eMe Neither\u003c\/i\u003e is a 29 track double album of instrumental guitar music. While juggling a number of other projects James Elkington began writing \"music for which there was no purpose.\" It became a new way of working for him - waking up each morning and improvising and recording the first thing that came into his head. \"The only rules I gave myself were that I should make most of the sounds with a guitar, changing the speed or processing the recordings afterwards to get the effect I was looking for.\" Before long he had an albums worth of material. About mid-way through the second album Elkington had a liberating thought: he was making his own version of library music \"if you’re writing library music, you don’t have to know what it’s for - that can be someone else’s job.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"No Quarter","offers":[{"title":"Black LPx2","offer_id":50395916894539,"sku":"2165489","price":37.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"CD","offer_id":50395916370251,"sku":"2165488","price":14.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/Me_Neither_LP_1_ec61b527_thumbnail_4096.jpg?v=1726475479"},{"product_id":"wintres-woma","title":"Wintres Woma","description":"\u003cp\u003eSomewhere around 2011, James Elkington stopped writing songs. He had been the leader of a band called The Zincs; a partner in a band called The Horse’s Ha; and had released an album of guitar duets with his friend Nathan Salsburg, but the question of what this British-born-but-Chicago-based musician was going to do next loomed large, and he didn’t feel as if he had much to say. A change is as good as a rest and, being a natural collaborator, an immediate answer was to start playing in other people’s bands. As both musician and arranger he commenced to work with Richard Thompson, Jeff Tweedy, Steve Gunn, and Stereolab’s Laetitia Sadier and, after a few years, found that contributing his energies to the music of others had somehow returned to him the energy for his own. Part of that renewed creative vitality came from exploring the acoustic guitar in a new tuning (in which he wrote all the songs on \u003ci\u003eWintres Woma\u003c\/i\u003e) and, cashing in on downtime from his touring schedule, by working assiduously to hone both guitaristic and lyrical techniques. Wintres Woma is Old English for “the sound of winter,” a phrase that Elkington found appealing when he encountered it in a book about the historical English imagination. It seemed to resonate in both the sound of his new compositions - the icy limpidity of the arrangements, the snowy tumble of guitars and strings - and with his gnawing consideration of how much cultural upbringing brings to bear on one’s own creativity if given half a chance.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Paradise of Bachelors","offers":[{"title":"LP","offer_id":50495810863435,"sku":"1012281","price":27.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"CD","offer_id":50495813157195,"sku":"1012280","price":14.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/8a88f9c9-66f7-4095-9419-32945c397d29_thumbnail_4096.jpg?v=1727714866"},{"product_id":"pastel-de-nada","title":"Pastel De Nada","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cmeta charset=\"UTF-8\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eIn 2023 James Elkington released \u003cem\u003eMe Neither\u003c\/em\u003e, a double album of solo guitar improvisations and experiments. He ended up thinking of it as a wordless collection of library music. \u003cem\u003eLibrary music\u003c\/em\u003e is a trove of anonymously produced sound that can be plundered for any kind of use and Elkington, the Chicago based British guitarist, finds a freedom in this music that seems to come out nowhere.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eHe follows up \u003cem\u003eMe Neither\u003c\/em\u003e with \u003cem\u003ePastel De Nada\u003c\/em\u003e, a new 2xLP set where the 27 tracks amount to more of a toolkit than a library. Bright, optimistic strums like ‘The Lyre Concordia’, layered meditations like ‘Morny in the Earling’ and ‘The Caves at Aurangabad’, and tracks like ‘The Equal Spacing’ that tick and whir like little machines for generating joy. Elkington squares his guitars off against textures, atmospheres and whispers of percussion.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"No Quarter","offers":[{"title":"2LP - Black","offer_id":51268779082059,"sku":"2501304","price":32.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/13c35143-6d34-2f6c-1db5-c874b617f732.jpg?v=1739537801"}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/collections\/test_037c1bf4_thumbnail_4096_83751b16-2d59-43a4-8a9f-9f30e1d0f455.jpg?v=1726279739","url":"https:\/\/shop.roughtrade.com\/de\/collections\/james-elkington.oembed","provider":"Rough Trade","version":"1.0","type":"link"}