EVERLOVING
WFMU Sessions

“DEMOLISH SERIOUS CULTURE.”

Some 60-odd years ago, in gestures of solitary antiheroism, provocateur Henry Flynt deployed a sardonic agitprop Americana, These were not appropriations. They were assertions, derisive snorts of grit and gusto, hybridized sounds that drilled red-hot through contrarian pop stylings and erupted above classifications. Yet within them lurked an ache of the unobtainable—and an implicit challenge. 

Today, in a spirit of affirmation and exaltation, the combative “supergroup” Everloving accepts Flynt’s call to action. However, this is no mere tribute act in which the covers smother. In the ebullient hustle of Everloving, the hot fuss ’n’ bother of yesteryear is churned at a vigorous 45 RPM to a jukebox-lubricating essence. 

The careers of these various artists unwind with kudzu-tendriled resolve. Like Flynt before him, Jonathan Kane promulgates the physicality and spirit of the blues in irony-free romps that have energized 20th-century minimalism via collaborations with La Monte Young, Rhys Chatham, and Swans. 

Peter Kerlin and Jim McHugh fueled Sunwatchers, whose anarchic psychedelia trampled various barricades with abandon. Dave Soldier has renounced classicism in collaborations with Guided By Voices, author Kurt Vonnegut, Talking Heads’ David Byrne, and the Velvet Underground’s John Cale.

Everloving is a triumphant singalong and clangorous Huzzah! from a like-minded gathering of pickers, fiddlers, and tub-thumpers who each reject designations, ossifications, and highfalutin encapsulation. In celebrating the essence of Henry Flynt, they assert collective agency with the low-down, hoe-down abandon that our tumultuous era demands.

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Sunwatchers:

“Music Is Victory Over Time, like so much of the Sunwatchers catalog, creates the mindset in which revolutionary impulses and ideas can flourish—one driven by patience and passion in equal measure. Their music is a leaderless, collective shout of defiance, each element working in tandem to rethink how music moves and how it moves the listener.”
—Pitchfork

Jonathan Kane with La Monte Young:

“You can hear the same blue-note pitch swerves that have been the poetry in motion of guitarists from Son House to Jimi Hendrix. The locomotive chug of Young's playing also swells with the Chicago rent-party exuberance of Jimmy Yancey and Little Richard's barrelhouse hammering."
—Rolling Stone

Jonathan Kane:

“Kane underpins these drones with a deceptively simple, forcefully executed shuffle. His swinging opuses exude bright, earthy euphoniousness instead of dark, cerebral dissonance … Rarely does the avant-garde rock this hard."
—Time Out New York

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Everloving
WFMU Sessions
2025
Table of the Elements
[Oganesson] 116
EOE-000
Phono 12” LP +  7” single, 180g vinyl, gatefold jacket, booklet

David Grubbs
Banana Cabbage, Potato Letttuce, Onion Orange

Table of the Elements, 1996: For those with grit, it was a ride in the whirlwind. Behind was the Atlanta Manganese festival, a trailhead at which Tony Conrad initiated the greenhorns, an unknown Jim O’Rourke was introduced to Sonic Youth, and where Keiji Haino, Faust, and Dead C’s Michael Morley were first coaxed to tread American soil. Ahead was the Chicago Yttrium festival, a defiant, post-genre crossroads of 20th-century aural resolve. In between, Tony Conrad recorded, toured, and recorded again with Gastr del Sol; the label introduced O’Rourke to John Fahey, then Fahey to Loren Connors, and then reintroduced Fahey to the world—a flash in which all dizzying currents converged.

Serenely in the eye stood David Grubbs—observer, participant, and facilitator — and from that stance emerged his solo debut, Banana Cabbage, Potato Lettuce, Onion Orange (awarded “Best Title of 1997” by The Wire). The original tagline waggishly declared, “…in which a solo record = record of solos and less is not MOR.” True. At no hour does Grubbs traffic in noodly, middle-of-the-road equivocation. These are deliberate and thoughtful excursions, charted with mindful, patient authority and executed in a spirit of comradely challenge.

While comparisons to Morton Feldman were tolerable on release, present-day ears will discern a wry and roiling phraseology that flows from Squirrel Bait through a subsequent and vast creative output. Many of those works appear on Grubbs’s Blue Chopsticks label and its patron Drag City, which has also preserved several of his TotE recordings with Gastr del Sol. But it's Banana Cabbage, Potato Lettuce, and Onion Orange that christens the launch of Table of the Elements Archive, informing the nucleus of an inspiringly tempestuous past and an explosive, radiant future. 

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“If you wanted to, you could describe him as highly postmodern. Either way, he is one of the most adventurous, uncompromising and thoughtful figures on the experimental side of American composition.”
—The Quietus

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Gastr del Sol

“Though their music began with two carefully intertwined acoustic guitars, it stretched to encompass orchestral fantasias, electronic abstraction and collage sensibilities imported from the avant-garde. Grubbs’s image-rich writing felt poetic and detached. In an era of plangent indie rock, they were the studied, intricate eccentrics.”
— Grayson Haver Currin, New York Times

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David Grubbs
Banana Cabbage, Potato Lettuce, Onion Orange
1996/2025
Table of the Elements Archive
[Zinc] 30
EOE-030
Phono 12” LP, 180g vinyl, booklet

Matthew Welch
The Library of Babel

The soaring exaltation of the bagpipe rejects timid spirits. Pitched high, the skirl of the chanter seeds clouds that rain harmonics, while on the low end… there’s the drone. That drone, that tectonic, guttural roar of fearsome euphoria, a deep, terraformational Om that pummels you in the sporran. And from the clutches of master piper Mattew Welch, glories emanate. He expertly inverts genre and convention, from Indonesian gamelan and experimental sound composition to rock, improvisation, and Highland classical, and through myriad exchanges with artists including Anthony Braxton, Alvin Lucier, Ikue Mori, Zeena Parkins, John Zorn, and members of Bang a Can and Yeah Yeah Yeahs.

Here, Matthew Welch resonates within a free-form, extended-duration power trio. As a founding member of the electric guitar quartet Dither, Brendon Randall-Meyers has performed works by minimalist pioneers Laurie Spiegel, Steve Reich, and Phill Niblock. In auditory tints and ombrés, that aesthetic seeps and saturates. Electroacoustic composer and drummer Brian Chase is both the weave of a basket and the serpent within, voicing slow-predation menace. Churning the infinities of its Borgesian namesake, The Library of Babel sprawls to a shuddering, heaving climax of near-ultrasonic highs and infrasonic lows, registering awe in the Ur-language of sound.

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“Most music nowadays is some kind of cultural hybrid, but rarely is someone as all over the map as Matthew Welch. Welch’s music is the by-product of an unlikely blend—Indonesian gamelan, Scottish bagpipes, and indie rock. While these types of music might initially seem completely unrelated, Welch has found his compositional voice in their common ground.”
—Frank J. Oteri, NewMusicBox

“… Exquisitely ethereal, made up of delicate, transparent textures that hum with expressive tension. If Mr. Welch were a chef, he’d be the kind who pushes the boundaries of molecular gastronomy, transforming earthy ingredients into translucent beads of pure flavor.”
— New York Times

“Pushing the bagpipes to their limit, Welch creates icy sheets of black metal distortion and feedback … his exploration of the bagpipes’ sonic potential is thrilling.”
—The Wire

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Matthew Welch
The Library of Babel
2025
Table of the Elements
[Nitrogen] 7
EOE-007
Phono 12” LP, 180g vinyl