Never Records is a combination recording studio and record shop, setting up in locales throughout the world. The sole proprietor, interior decorator, and engineer is New York-based artist Ted Riederer. Inspired by his own redemptive education at a young age inside the walls of a local record store i…
Never Records Radio EP 135 by Never Records Podcasts
https://www.neverrecords.store/product-page/10-years-of-never-records
Episode 134 features music and poetry by Mark Thorp, Bobby Wattlington, Diver, and Dizzy SenZe. http://www.littlemisswhiskeys.com https://www.flickr.com/photos/142654005@N07/ https://werediver.bandcamp.com/releases https://www.instagram.com/feelingdizzy.wav/?hl=en
Never Records Radio EP133 by Never Records Podcasts
Episode 132 features Dr. Mark Cranford, Hex Windham, Jonathan Toscano, and Ryan Radecki. https://markcranford.com https://hexwindham.bandcamp.com https://www.jonathantoscano.com https://www.facebook.com/ryan.radecki.98 Image by Hex Windham.
EP 131 features Julie Bennet Hume, Paddy Mulloy with the Mad Mulligans, and King Hutch Downes. visit http://www.secretshape.com for more information and links picture by Julie Bennet Hume. https://www.juliebennetthume.com https://kingpussyface.bandcamp.com/album/king-pussy-face-2 https://soundcloud.com/user-429424545-591293332
Episode 130 features music by Ellie Fallon, Timothy Lalonde, and Brent Houzenga and Meghan Hensley. https://www.instagram.com/shelinorfallon/ http://www.houzenga.com https://unmarried.bandcamp.com IMAGE: A PAINTING BY BRENT HOUZENGA
Episode 129 Features the music of Connor O'Kane, James McArthur and the Head Gardeners, and James Rose. https://teknopeasant.bandcamp.com/album/the-raw-deal http://jamesmcarthurmusic.co.uk https://jamesrose.bandcamp.com Picture of James Rose by James Rose.
Episode 128 features the work of Jose Luis Jacome Guerrero an artist, musician, and curator from Abato Ecuador. Check out https://dogmacentral.wordpress.com
Episode 127 features the sound piece Colored Pathways Red by Shawn Hansen which was made to accompany a joint exhibition with Laurel Sparks at the KnockDown Center that was canceled due to the pandemic. https://shawnedwardhansen.bandcamp.com
Features Dimension Bill Edwards, Clarekes in Space with Fiddle Betse, and Sarah Galvin. http://www.secretshape.com for more info Photo: Dimension Bill Edwards at Winfield by the amazing RHR Photo.
Episode 125 features Micah McKee and the Lonesome Wild, The Non Essential Workers, and Gary Roth. For more info visit http://www.secretshape.com
This episode features Mark Garry, Helen Gillet, and SJ Downes. http://www.markgarrystudio.com http://www.helengillet.com https://sjdownes.bandcamp.com/album/lions-path-e-p-mellowtone-records-2020
Features Jenna Rae, Anna Page, and Kevin Comarda of The Self Help Tapes. Visit http://www.secretshape.com and http://www.neverrecords.net.
Features Joe Reyna, Jermaine Thompson, Icebitch, and Tommo.
Features Christina Anna, The Band With the Screaming Brain, and Connor O'Kane. For more music from Apocalypse Anthems visit http://www.secretshape.com
Features the music of Kelly Hunt, Siobhan Shiels, and Seamus Harahan with Thomas McCarthy.
Episode 119 features Zach Wilkerson, Stephanie Gross, and Bethany Jacobsen with Steven Taylor.
Never Records Radio Ep118 by Never Records Podcasts
Beloved Never Records family, I will not add another jeremiad about the state of the world to your bandwidth. Like you, we have suffered setbacks and inconveniences, austerity, and isolation. Like you, we are outraged by racial injustice and inequality and the divisiveness of our age. It is enough to stifle creative impulse, to find ourselves trapped in a feedback loop of negativity. The truth is, aside from being unemployed, I feel immeasurably lucky. My son is a perpetual joy machine, my wife a constant source of humor and good nature. My family is healthy. I also have Never Records and its regenerative soundtrack. I have your sounds to bolster me when I falter. It's been 10 years since this all began, 10 or so cities, and 1000's of artists. I never thought I'd be doing this for a decade, it seemed like a one-off art project, but I felt so inspired by you that now I think I'll do this for the rest of my life. Send me your apocalypse anthems, your reflections on this now infamous time. It could be a song, a poem, or a sound. At the height of the pandemic the distant sounds of ambulances in New York was a constant reminder of the sick and the dead. I know many of you do not traffic in the didactic. I'm not asking for anything that you are not willing to give, but I am asking for a measure of what we are all going through. If its a cheery pop song so be it, but I ask you is this how you will mark this time 10 years from now? a hundred years from now? Your sounds are testimony. How will you testify? Now I know many of you have songs recorded that you'd like on vinyl. This is not the time for duplication, this is the time for creation! Record on a cassette and send me the tape! Record with me live over the internet! If you don't have a way to record reach out to me and together we'll figure out a way! And of course if you are in New York come to my studio, my sanctuary, and we'll record and cut live!
We’re nearing the end of the Brooklyn episodes. It’s not for lack of material, I have more tracks left to play, including not one, but two Christmas tracks which is a first for Never Records, but I’m going to need to step back from the show tofocus on the Newest iteration of Never Records which launches in a week. I’m going to cap the tenth anniversary of Never Records year with a special project called Never Records: Apocalypse Anthems. I’m asking participants from past Never Records around the world to write songs, poems, and send sounds that capture the zeitgeist of this moment in time. Etched sonically forever into vinyl, for both participants and posterity, these recordings will telegraph the sounds of our time into a future which seems so fragile and unsure. I’m hoping to share these recording with you early next year. Back to todays episode. I want to build on last week’s poetry episode and play some BAM recordings that begin to blur the lines between poetry and theater.
When I recorded in the UK and Ireland I was really happy to discover veins of progressive rock in the geology of the contemporary music scenes in these regions. It’s as if the half-life of bands like Soft Machine and Can could still send Geiger counters flittering. I find prog rock fascinating from a lyrical stand-point. as if Tolkien, Kenneth Graham, and Lewis Carol formed a band. Existentially earnest songs about primrose heaths, fun fairs, and haughty hearths with some calico toadstools thrown in for good measure. It’s the literary influences that make progressive rock so meaty as if the music is composed like a well-crafted complex sentence. Songs are well wrought and travel well beyond straight rock’s limits.
When someone signs up for a Never Records session they get a brief list of frequently asked questions. This document explains a bit about the project, lists available equipment, as well as session guidelines which include a 10-minute time limit for the performance to be recorded. When it comes to art rules are made to be broken, but for the most part I restrict the length of the recordings to be cut to vinyl to 10 minutes or less. It’s a formula that’s worked for over 500 recordings across three continents. As you can imagine, participants approach this time limit in many different ways. Some record a 3-minute pop song and leave it at that, others try to sneak in a second song by adding a musical bridge between compositions(you can’t fool me), and others just ignore the time limit altogether which is quite rare. We’re going to do something a little different on today’s episode and feature two tracks from Never Records BAM that are longer improvisations that I’m going to play back to back so we’ll get a nice long set of music. I’ll limit commentary to before and after. Both tracks are instrumentals one acoustic one electric and I think you’ll agree they sound amazing together.
Two weeks ago I sent a message 150 years into the future. I made a vinyl record time capsule, comprised 17 hand cut records containing tone pictures of our time from 2017-2019 encased in a wooden box made by my cousin Michael from a slab of Silver Maple.. I placed the box between aluminum studs in the yet to be built walls of the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s new Rudin Family Gallery, an exhibition space attached to the Harvey Theater in downtown Brooklyn. Upon completion of the gallery a plaque will be hung inside the lobby of the theater that reads, “This vinyl record time capsule, titled Persistent Echoes uses tone pictures to capture and frame a moment in our lives that we all share, whether knowingly or unknowingly. Through conscientiously selected and recorded sounds, with selected sounds from the artist’s life and the BAM Hamm archives, Riederer believes he can telegraph a crystallization of this moment to future generations. Placed in the Rudin Family Gallery’s wall, Persistent Echoes becomes a time capsule for a century and beyond. "
“You can’t play your own band on your radio show.”, my co-worker scolded me in response to last week’s episode about the band I was in in the nineties called Thumper. She’s absolutely right, I really shouldn’t play my own music, but after our reunion show on July 12th, I was so giddy that I wanted to share what was once such an enormous part of my life in the hopes it would further illuminate how Never Records originated. So at the risk of further breaking the rules of radio propriety, today’s episode about a another band I was in in the early 2000s, a band called The New You. Featuring: The New You Homesteads The New You Memorial Day The New You Silver Foil The New You Too Much Earth
This past week, a band I was in Thumper reunited to play a club called The Beachcomber in Wellfleet on Cape Cod. Formed in the early nineties at Tufts University in Boston, Thumper went on to release 4 albums and tour the United States and Canada. The band has been described as part of the Third Wave of Ska music but as you are about to hear ska was just one of an eclectic number of influences that included punk, hardcore, metal, and reggae. We were misfits, irreverent, satirical, theatrical and mischievous. We deliberately tried to evade description, but above all we took our music very seriously. At times its virtuosic and at other times hard to listen to. In spite of ourselves we sold over 20,000 records and often played to audiences that numbered well into the hundreds. Featuring: Thumper Holy Roller Thumper Burn Baby Burn Thumper All Fall Down Thumper Backstabber
This past week, my old friend Damon Locks asked me to cut records for a project he was working on. Damon and I met over 30 years ago at ART CENTER, a Summer magnet program for art students in the Washington DC area. Damon went on to become the singer of one of my favorite Chicago bands, Trenchmouth, and has since had a very successful art and music career. As an artist in residence at a high school in a neighborhood in the Southwest Side of Chicago, Damon had recently coached students to create a series of radio dramas that were based on sci-fi visions of the future. As I’m working on a time capsule to send vinyl records into the future the timing couldn’t have been more perfect. I asked Damon to introduce himself and the project. Featuring: Future Radio Plays From the Students of Sarah E Goode Stem Academy, Chicago
This past week I had what could best described as a Back To the Future moment. A temporal deja-vuz where I found myself reliving a resonant moment that bridged a thirty-year gap. Back in the 1980s I was in a band called The Reply, and what started as a bunch of 14 year olds playing dress up and posing in front of mirros turned into a way of life, an ethic of seeing and experiencing the world. Feat: The Reply Razor Sharp The Reply All Good Things The Reply Billy The Reply Remember
Never Records allows me to completely immerse myself in a place like Kansas City and feel what it is truly like to live there. I can’t tell you what a gift it was to cycle familiar streets, to be a local at Los Alamos Market Y Cocina, to run into friends at Town Topic at 2 in the morning, to got my favorite laundromat which was decorated with vinyl record decals, to share in the songs and stories of hundreds of talented people, and to feel the gratitude and warmth from everyone who came through Never Records. There we were that Sunday evening in Kansas City. We came together to celebrate the end of a project that brought us together as friends, collaborators, and fellow artists. As I sat on the rented peacock embroidered couch I had tears in my eyes as a string of performers payed tribute to the spirit of Never Records. I’ll never forget that night. Artists Featured: Jenna and Martin and friends Closing Night Performance Lorna Kay’s One Night Stand Closing Night Performance Kelly Hunt Closing Night Performance Conor O’Kane Crossroads
After 5 months of episodes, we are nearing the end of dispatches from Kansas City. There are still many recordings to share, but I’m feeling the urge to end this chapter in the story of Never Records. I dedicated last week’s show to bluegrass. While the traditional scene is flourishing, I didn’t want to leave you, dear listener, thinking that this was all Kansas City had to offer. As I’ve shared before, this town is experiencing a renaissance of sorts and I discovered a diversity in the music scene that would rival a city two and three times it’s size. Music Featured: (w)Omen-Potion Mysterious Clouds-Lunar Duel Ryan Radecki-Ocean State Jason Buice-Spaceship
KANSAS CITY: I recently saw a cool video from KC on one of my social media feeds of a music shop full of fiddle players jamming while a luthier cleaned and restored a double bass. This video epitomizes Kansas City to me, an open jam in a remarkable space. The roots music scene so open, so welcoming and supportive to musicians of all abilities and ages. Artists Featured: Grassfed - Sometimes The Silence Chris Devictor - Honey Come Back Home Tiny Flowers - untitled Under the Big Oak Tree - Honey Bee
KANSAS CITY: In Kansas City I discovered humble and modest songs that spoke about the trials of life in a very direct and poignant way. Today’s episode is dedicated to four musicians who inspired me through their poetry and music. Artists Featured: Julie Bennet Hume - Garden Steve Sterner - 43 Days Joy Zimmerman - How Long Mark Valladares - Indian Made
KANSAS CITY: I turn to music as I so often do in these moments for solace and inspiration and beauty. And so I’ve put together a lovely set of music for you today. Three women songwriters and singers who will help further enchant this Spring. Through their voices we will be redeemed in the magic way that song has to uplift our lives. Esther Rose - Without You Arabella Arabella - Jealous Guy Lily B Moonflower - Midnight Song
KANSAS CITY: In Kansas City I hosted five live shows and today I’m going to play one of these gigs for you. The experimental composer, radio dj, and piano repair expert Shawn Hansen, proposed that I host the touring musician Tashi Dorji. I jumped at the chance for Tashi Dorji has an amazing reputation as an international experimental guitarist.
KANSAS CITY: Perhaps the best source of performers across the 9 year history of Never Records has been word of mouth. This is how I was able to meet and record the legendary Kansas City yodeler, Gary Kirkland.
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