Welcome new followers — the rolls keep growing every week, and I’m excited that my words are seeing new eyes. Today I listened to these five releases intentionally in order, a disruptive pattern that would lead you into a zone of tradition without need or want for inclusion in a digital monolith, followed by three extreme and different documents of self-expression on a variable plane of existence, and a reminder of rock and roll that’s been made available to you again, easy as it comes. I think we can all agree that the events of the past weekend call for a national reset, and these five records show us what came before, what withers and remains during, and where we can go back to once we win back the battle for human decency and soul retrieval from the maws of the terrible.

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Here goes:

MOLASSES Ring of Fire LP (Tall Texan)

Tall Texan continues its mission to strip the digital underground of the choicest nugs, with a limited-to-100 pressing of this early 2025 release from Appalachian folk-noise Will Mullany, a native of the northern Piedmont and now a Richmond-area resident. Mullany builds electronics and noise devices as part of his arts practice, and ahead of scheduled neurosurgery taught himself how to play the fiddle and laid this down. Closest point of comparison would be Amps For Christ, right down to the bespoke gear he creates, but reeling away from Barnes’ influences straight into the music of the Virginia mountains Mullany came from. It’s a one-of-a-kind space blast of banjo, strings, pipe organ, field recordings and choral, some sort of cosmic miracle. It reminds me of the letter we received from Pelt’s Mike Gangloff, who sent their first opus Brown Cyclopaedia to my college radio station upon release, stating that he used to listen to the station, somehow, from a hilltop in his teenage years – a 100-watt terrestial signal hundreds of miles away. Such things can happen. I recall night spent with my parents’ multi-band Realistic radio, turning the dial carefully enough to find the creaking country-folk of WWVA’s Jamboree in the Hills in between local stations. When the space dust hits just so, you’ll know you landed. Mullany seems to have stripped his material from podcasts and platforms like Bandcamp and is using the artist-friendly NINA Protocol to host his works, sharing that terrain with Australian label If It’s New. Might be a good idea for more creators to consider that move.

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