2017 marked 10 years as a label for Unseen Worlds, responsible for reissues of material by Carl Stone, Lubomyr Melnyk and Elodie Lauten amongst others.
Perhaps the most celebrated of their releases to date was a 2012 reissue of Laurie Spiegel’s The Expanding Universe, which thrust the masterful work into the hands of many that had not discovered it previously. With their 11th year approaching, Unseen Worlds have shared a jam recorded in the late 1970s by Spiegel and Don Christensen of The Contortions and impLOG.
The recording, which you can hear above, features Spiegel on the Electrocomp 101 and Christensen playing drums. Unseen Worlds have plans to release the full recording, backed with an alternate version of Spiegel’s ‘Patchwork’, as part of a Kickstater-only 12" single.
"We created the Unseen Worlds label under the guiding principle that deeply-affecting, worldview-altering avant-garde music can come in the form of highly accessible records," writes label co-founder Tommy McCutchon on the label’s newly launched crowdfunding campaign.
He further explains that the label needs support in order to continue financing the lovingly-crafted reissues that they have been putting out over the last decade. "Typically, running the label strictly from our own profits, the occasional grant, and whatever we can scrape together from our modest day jobs makes [the transition from CD to vinyl] extremely slow, even though we keep an extremely lean overhead.
"The funds raised with this Kickstarter will help us gain momentum going into the new year, helping us make progress on the curve of our release schedule and growing production times and vinyl manufacturing costs."
McCutchon also explains that the support will go into financing reissues of more material from Spiegel and Carl Stone, as well as a reissue of Jacqueline Humbert and David Rosenboom’s J. Jasmine: My New Music, originally produced for the Ann Arbor Film Festival 1978.
You can find out more about the Kickstarter campaign, and Unseen Worlds’ plans for 2018 here.
