Jon Collin - The Other Dead Sea LP

When a record arrives in the experimental racks titled “The Other Dead Sea,” you can’t help but wonder, is this Dead Sea different to the one that lies in the Middle East? Or is this other to the great noise rockers The Dead C? While it certainly isn’t as caterwauling and chaotic as the Aotearoa trio, maybe it’s somewhere in between??

Jon Collin has been one of the most subtly inventive guitarists of the last decade or so, combining a UK-leaning acoustic shred (a la Richard Thompson and Celtic folk - an American Primitivism from the other side of the Atlantic) with an array of prepared and bowed guitar techniques, both run through a kind of home-spun DIY approach to tape manipulation.

Originally released in 2022, The Other Dead Sea sees Collin working across all three of these modes. Enveloping waves of droning guitar tones clash into each other, punctuated by lyrical acoustic moments and dense and intricately detailed clouds of tape recorded fragments. This is a record that approaches ambient but is definitely not that, in the same way that Blue Divers operate. An album that you could live with and in for a hell of a long time.
—Mitch

FFO: Blue Divers, Troth, Bruce Langhorne, Richard Thompson, the Kranky catalogue

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2nd repress on Early Music with new sleeve - Gold riso-printed paste-on cover on kraft brown sleeves with handwritten titles, black-and-white insert and obi strip made of bookbinding paper

 2022 Jon Collin's LP release on Laboratorio Palestro. Repressed this year on Early Music. Colour risograph-printed paste-on cover on reverse-board white sleeves with handwritten titles, with black-and-white insert.