Honeysuckle Tendrals

VINYL FORMAT. Limited to 400 copies! Honeysuckle Tendrals is a lost recording. It resides within a canon of musical output by a singer/songwriter no one has heard of, from a place that the world has almost entirely written off. Recorded in 1999 in New Bedford, Massachusetts, Honeysuckle Tendrals was Carl Simmons' second effort at a full length recording. He released it into the world in a miniscule edition of cassette tapes on his own Unconscious Piano Productions imprint. To say it was poorly distributed is an understate¬ment. It was handed out to friends, and perhaps sold at vari¬ous open mic nights, where he would sometimes pass off his own songs as Bob Dylan tunes to an unsuspecting audience. Incorporating numerous collage elements - and very few gui¬tar strings - Honeysuckle Tendrals weaves in and out of song in a spacey wash of psychedelic imagery by way of nursery rhymes and fairytales. Owing influence to writers like Lewis Carroll, and filmmakers like Herzog and Lynch, as much as any musical influence, Carl's music can have something of a cinematic feel. Though perhaps best classified under the floppy umbrella of "outsider" music, Honeysuckle Tendrals displays remarkably complex arrangements utilizing a stag¬geringly simple arsenal of instruments: a broken guitar, sound collage, and heavily layered vocal tracks filtered through an array of effects. Think Peter Grudzien reading mother goose, The Cheshire Cat conducting the Langley School Music Project, or Bob Dylan singing unknown lullabies with a head full of helium.

2009 marks the ten year anniversary of the recording of Honeysuckle Tendrals, and we at Sacred Bones are proud to give it a proper audience after so many years. The LP is an ed¬ited and slightly re-sequenced presentation; carefully curated, re-mastered for vinyl, and housed in a handmade jacket in the Folkways tradition. It includes a bonus 7-inch EP including two alternate takes from the LP and two outstanding and completely exclusive non-album tracks. We hope you enjoy it as much as we do.