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LP
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PP 065LP
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$29.50
PREORDER
RELEASE DATE: 6/6/2025
Dan Melchior has a wild history, brain and catalogue. Penultimate Press adds to it. This is Melchior's first piano recording. The reverb is natural, as the piano sits in a large, mostly empty room. Hill Country Piano is the result of a human music box mind brimming with many a corner somehow aligning with chambers still being told. Melchior does not play the piano in any formal way, as you can probably tell. He played and recorded the piano, with simple repetitive parts, whilst listening to previous recordings on headphones. Then the magic happens. The gentle introduction of a banjo on "
"Sparrow Song" paints the reality of an America now lost. The percussion on the self-titled track unravels a psychedelic gamelan piano duo residing in the now. It didn't start out that way, it never does, but this slow burning trip around a mind/world happened to come into formulation just as an interest in Pascal Comelade was coming into play. All original piano was recorded in Austin. Dan Melchior is from London, England. He has lived in various cities in the USA for the last 24 years. Melchior's resume is as unique as it is exciting and diverse. Having cut his teeth in the land of garage rock as a collaborator with Billy Childish and Holly Golightly his vision takes sharp twists landing on Graham Lambkin's strange and beautiful experimental label Kye with two records which broke not only the mold of himself but that of the song itself. Melchoir is a musician with a voluminous discography which embraces many different forms of expression, from song-based rock to pure textural explorations. His music has evolved significantly, to become a distant entity from some of his earlier blues-based work, showing a definite influence of more experimental bands such as The Homosexuals and The Fall, and some absurdist elements which have led to comparisons to compatriot exponents of that genre, Vivian Stanshall and Syd Barrett. Always experimenting with form in an original manner avoiding any inherent genre anchor. Blues is referenced and extended, musique concrete is found embedded in the song.
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Book
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97980987998700
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"Hooke + Line Press is excited to announce its first title, Titans of Modern Music: Paintings 2021-2022 by Dan Melchior. TOMM is a selection of 36 portraits from his series of paintings of seminal music figures spanning multiple genres." "As an unrepentant renaissance man, Dan Melchior has long trucked in blood unfit for pudding. He is a master of endurance over abidance whether it be as a singer of songs, a writer of poems or taster of pies, there are no half measures. Add to that list a painter of peoples, and Titans of Modern Music is a testament to his keen eye & deft stroke. And as a recording artist known for a voluminous body of work, portraiture is the perfect medium for his restive creativity. The subjects are infinite. Please note these are no mere, Sharpie's-in-the-park renderings. Gently run your hand across the rawness of the paper and you can feel the exertion of acrylic and oils. The style is playful yet sincere. The attention to detail, uncanny. Gazing through this select volume, I am reminded of the work of Horace Pippin & Philip Guston at once. Dan says he would like to paint like Lucian Freud. That's funny. So would I." --Tom Lax, Philadelphia, PA, 2023 40 pp; 15.25x22.75cm; color printing.
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LP
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FTR 626LP
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"One of the great joys of the ever-evolving catalog of Dan Melchior is hearing where in the spectrum of styles that he has mastered each record falls. From studio recordings to lo-fidelity home experiments, full band rockers or plaintive solo excursions, fans never know what they are going to get until the needle drops. Those of us who have followed Dan on his prolific pathways are ready for anything but always assured that the spirit of the artist himself, one unique enough to be its own in any form, will deliver and somehow deal with the ramifications of an increasingly maddening world. Dan's first full length of 2021, CB Odyssey, (co-released by the Feeding Tube/Sophomore Lounge) continues in his fine tradition of excellence, this time finding the middle ground of his stylistic extremes. A master of modern song-craft, Melchior returns with CB Odyssey to deliver a further treatise on the agonizing futility of contemporary life. Neither pandering to sentimentality nor cultural trends, Melchior embraces the crass absurdity of modern existence, delivering a multi-faceted view of the everyday. These scenes offer illuminations into the hilarious, the macabre, the pointlessly hip, and most elegantly, the details of the normalcy that few writers of our time seem to be able to capture. The cast of characters on CB Odyssey range from middle-aged self-satisfied artists who have never courted popularity to woke millennials trying to teach mosquitos that it's not nice to bite. The listener is taken to vistas never before traveled such as encounters at the only Wendy's in North America that employs a real live sloth who can grow a beard while you wait for your fries. Melchior delivers these psychedelic visions, not ones of utopia or escapism but of a painfully blinding truth. And such is a truth that can only really be delivered in such a voice by Dan Melchior and CB Odyssey is among his finest examples of his craft. There will most assuredly be more. That is if the mosquitoes don't be the death of him." --Steve Lowenthal, 2022
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LP
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KYE 041LP
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"Kye is proud to present Home of the Blues, the latest LP by Dan Melchior, and his sophomore effort for the label following 2012's now legendary Excerpts (& Half-Speeds). For Home of the Blues Dan agreed to undergo a series of exercises aimed not only at destabilizing his natural songwriting process, but also testing the durability of the blues idiom when placed under stress. As one would expect, Dan met the challenge with aplomb, hoisting the project beyond some one-dimensional art-school prank, toward a sincere and multi-faceted presentation of damage and survival as sound. Home of the Blues arrives in a full color, high gloss sleeve featuring original artwork by Dan, with an accompanying 18" x 24" foldout poster, in an edition of 400 copies."
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7"
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VDSQ 013EP
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2015 release. Four tracks of instrumental acoustic guitar from the master songwriter. Silkscreened sleeve.
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