Fabio Viola
This album makes you feel like a better world is possible and somewhat close at hand. It isn't, clearly, we're stuck in dystopia, but it's so beautiful to dream.
Favorite track: A River's Breadth.
keithworldpeace
If incense smoke made noise, it would sound like this. Not just any incense, though. The sound of the stream of smoke from a stick of aloeswood from a mountaintop monastery.
Favorite track: Branchwork.
Admo
Quite simply one of the most calming, absorbing, and transcendent improvisational works I've heard in a very long time. Matt is a true voyager.
Favorite track: A River's Breadth.
Lars Gotrich
The shape of these single-take guitar loops feel more three-dimensional, as acoustic strums and melodies swirl around its psychedelic goblet.
Favorite track: Everlasting Spring.
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Limited to 300! Black vinyl with two-tone center labels, held in classic rice paper inner sleeve, pro-printed full-color jackets, and hand-numbered to 300.
Includes unlimited streaming of Everlasting Spring
via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
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Limited Edition Chrome Hi Bias Cassette + Seashell Chip Package
Cassette + Digital Album
Limited to 50! Home-dubbed Chrome Hi Bias (Type II) c52 with off-white shell, individually typed and signed green labels on the A-side, and hand-stamped B-side. Held in clear polybox with pro-printed wraparound tip-on cover, hand-numbered to 50, and includes a small seashell chip collected by ML at a beach a few miles from where the album was recorded.
Includes unlimited streaming of Everlasting Spring
via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
Sold Out
Limited Art Edition 12" Black Vinyl with Exclusive Bonus Cassette, Signed Art Print, and Tip-On/Screenprinted Jackets
Record/Vinyl + Digital Album
Strictly limited to 100! Black 12" vinyl with two-tone center labels, held in rice paper inner sleeve. Exclusive full-color tip-on cover art and back cover silkscreen print on heavyweight kraft jacket, hand-numbered to 100. Includes signed 5" x 7" art print of ML's "Cycle (#10)"--the central image of the Everlasting Spring cover art--as well as the exclusive bonus cassette "Beyond Separation: A New Becoming".
Includes unlimited streaming of Everlasting Spring
via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
Selected as a standout 2020 album by Beyond the Pond, Börneblogger, Dusted, Fast 'n' Bulbous, Raven Sings the Blues, Riffs & Rhymes, RowJimmy (Brokedown Podcast) and more.
"The gorgeous new Everlasting Spring [...] feels like an afternoon by a slow-moving creek, surface reflections peacefully changing with the light. Across four one-take improvisations on 10-string acoustic guitar run through a delay loop pedal and reverb, LaJoie’s extended pieces ripple and cascade, grow intricate, and thin out again. Not only does LaJoie display commanding technique on Everlasting Spring, he also evolves his creative voice. There’s nothing raw or folkie about Everlasting Spring—it might be more accurate to file LaJoie’s solo playing under American Progressivist. It’s celestial without being sleepy, and rarely stays still. And while Everlasting Spring is atmospheric, it’s not necessarily background music. It’s proper foreground company, an album to hang out with and fill the room like any other. As blissed-out as Flower Room’s total output is, it changes session by session, moving somewhere between mountain and ocean, with a long way yet to go." - Jesse Jarnow, Pitchfork
"The album baptizes guitar in the crystal clear waters of the Kosmiche spring and we all come out born anew because of it. Matt sets the songs adrift on waves of repeated phrasing, mulling figures in circular sway, letting the listener lose themselves in the cascades of notes that fall all around. While this is gorgeous in the room, the headphones hold even more power as they lock the world away outside of the binaural bliss that seems to surround from all sides. Each note holds onto the listener with a subtle comfort, like hands on shoulders in times of pain. In the same regard it only serves to give shelter, shade, and understanding. Lajoie’s creations build a sanctuary of sound that doesn’t feel the need to push or pull with strong arms. Instead the movement of the record is measured in millimeters, but each tiny breeze he stirs up guides the fairest hairs on the skin towards a more enlightened existence by the time the record whispers to a close. Matt’s created a beacon of hope, lighting the path away from the malaise and malign of modern times. Should we all find ourselves inside its beam, we might just make it out, or at the very least make it through another day.." - Andy French, Raven Sings The Blues
"A spiritual follow-up to The Center and The Fringe, which appeared on a list of my favorite guitar music from 2019. The method is the same, but the shape of these single-take guitar loops feels more three-dimensional, as acoustic strums and melodies swirl around its psychedelic goblet." - Lars Gotrich, NPR Music
*****
Last January, Maine multi-instrumentalist and experimental-psych lifer Matt LaJoie capped his then-15-year career of performing and releasing music under an avalanche of solo aliases (Cursillistas, Endless Caverns, ML Wah) and involvement in groups such as Herbcraft, Starbirthed, Ash & Herb, and MV & EE's Golden Road, with The Center and The Fringe - a wide-ranging instrumental collection of longform electric and 10-string acoustic guitar meditations and ambient soundscapes that was the first record ever released under his own name. Shining a finer light on LaJoie's improvisational method of creation he has dubbed "automatic composition", the album was essentially a live album that showed his process of building finished pieces of music note-by-note, in real time, using just one guitar played through a looping pedal. With only a single live solo performance in the books since the release of The Center and The Fringe (bootlegged and released as the "Full Service Station" cassette this past summer), LaJoie returns in 2020 with a brand new album of solo guitar instrumentals and intentions to hit the road throughout the year, sharing the process live and in the flesh.
Recorded live at home in much the same fashion as his debut--an afternoon's improvisation, presented with minimal edits and zero overdubs--the whole of LaJoie's new LP Everlasting Spring creates its bouquet of color from an even more minimalist palette, utilizing only a single guitar in one tuning for its entire three-quarter-hour runtime. Though the Les Paul stays in its case this time around, Everlasting Spring doesn't entirely sound or feel like an "acoustic guitar record" - thanks in part to the live-looping DL4 pedal and Holy Grail Reverb, which LaJoie uses to manipulate very simple elements into rich, vibrating fields of abstract ambient sound.
In LaJoie's hands, swirling, celestial loops begin as single plucked and bowed notes; as the drops fall into place and form a shimmering aura, improvised lead lines and free-ranging solos sound magnetized by the mist surrounding them, condensing a cloud of possibilities into tactile form. The opening title track and first single is perhaps the greatest distillation of this technique, intention, and inspiration that LaJoie has captured to-date, winding and floating effortlessly through streams of spontaneously arising melody and texture.
The glowing comparisons to kosmische idols Popol Vuh and Ashra garnered by The Center and The Fringe are likely to resurface, though it's clear on Everlasting Spring that LaJoie is soundtracking an experience more pastoral and earthbound than the extraterrestrial ballrooms dreamed up on its predecessor. From the atmospheric electrical fields shifting and parting the storm winds of "Showers Over Birch Point" to the stately orchestral glide of "Branchwork" and the gentle, slow-motion, silver-stringed massage of concluding 16-plus-minute opus "A River's Breadth", an inviting warmth permeates each pluck and strum. Melodies arise gently, slowly transformed by the current and carried away to new tributaries. On a mission to inspire and expand the boundaries of both ambient/new age and 21st century solo guitar music, Everlasting Spring is an open invitation for listeners to hear and participate in the latent symphonies seeking expression in every moment.
𓈖⊗𓈖
"As I was considering the cover art for my new album, I kept returning to the water imagery that I've used to describe the way I make improvised music from a receptive, intuitive, Yin space. The image of a cosmic waterwheel ("Cycle [#10]") that I created as a glyph representation of the Wheel of Fortune placed itself at the front of my mind and revealed its connotation: I was as a waterwheel. This has become a powerful meditation for me - dipping into the stream of inspiration and possibility to take just what's needed, directing that energy toward a new creative purpose, and then returning the runoff back to the source at the end of the cycle. Nothing is actually taken or lost, and yet something new has been created in the process. This is the Everlasting Spring." - ML
credits
released February 28, 2020
Matt LaJoie: 10-string Seagull acoustic guitar, DL4, Holy Grail Reverb
Recorded, produced, and mastered by Matt LaJoie. Vinyl mastering and lacquer cut by Carl Saff.
Cover art, text, and layout by ML. Back cover portrait by Ash Brooks.
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