For the Record: January 10, 2025.
A conversation with Kory Reeder about all things Sawyer and Wandelweiser, plus noteworthy new arrivals and future releases.
For the Record is a weekly column that rounds up details about new and pending recordings of interest to the new-music community – contemporary classical music and jazz, electronic and electroacoustic music, and idioms for which no clever genre name has been coined – on CD, vinyl LP, cassette, digital-only formats… you name it.
This list of release dates is culled from press releases, Amazon, Bandcamp, and other internet stores and sources, social-media posts, and online resources such as Discogs. Dates cited typically correspond to initial U.S. release, and are subject to change. (Links to Amazon, used when all else fails, do not imply endorsement.)
These listings are not comprehensive—nor could they be! If you’d like to submit a forthcoming recording for consideration, please email information to nightafternight@icloud.com. (Streams and downloads preferred.)
All opinions expressed herein are solely my own, and do not reflect the views of my employer.
Interview: Kory Reeder.
I first got to know the music of Kory Reeder, a composer and bassist raised in Nebraska and now based in Texas, in late 2019 or thereabouts, when love songs/duets, his exquisite debut CD, arrived on Edition Wandelweiser. Like most composers affiliated with that label – operated by Dutch composer Antoine Beuger, a co-founder of the Wandelweiser Group – Reeder wrote music that tended to be slow and minimal in instrumentation and gesture, yet subtly suffused with emotional undercurrents.
Soon after, through music he released independently on Bandcamp, Reeder also showed an interest in extreme duration. That’s something I noted in a brief article that appeared in the Summer 2024 issue of Chamber Music, which appeared not long after Reeder, interdisciplinary artist Hannah Baskin, and a handful of colleagues mounted the premiere of Vespers, a chamber work 24 continuous hours in duration.
In addition to composing, performing, touring, and teaching, Reeder also owns and operates two consistently fascinating record labels: Sawyer Editions, which focuses on contemporary composed music, and Sawyer Spaces, which documents field recordings and sound art. While Reeder has released his own work on both imprints, most of the music on his labels is by other composers, with worthy newcomers appearing side-by-side with established names like James Romig, Nomi Epstein, and Sarah Hennies.
The newest batch of Sawyer Editions releases is the label’s most wide-ranging to date: composer portraits for Kari Watson and Ben Richter, a recital by pianist Ashlee Mack, a mesmerizing session by Insub Meta Orchestra, and an ear-opening mix of works by 17th century Scottish composer Tobias Hume and New York minimalist/maximalist Morton Feldman.
Were that not enough, on January 31 Reeder begins an extensive process of posting the Edition Wandelweiser catalog on Bandcamp. Working in close collaboration with Beuger, Reeder plans to release 10 titles per month in catalog order, on the last Friday of every month.
Reeder and I didn’t get to talk much about his label activity in our Chamber Music story, so this new rush of activity provided a perfect opportunity to pick up that thread. This interview was conducted by email, and appears almost uncut and unaltered apart from minor formatting adjustments.
STEVE SMITH: There were plenty of record labels already documenting contemporary music when you launched Sawyer Editions in 2022. What made you decide to start a new label?
KORY REEDER: I moved to Denton, Texas, in 2018 to do my PhD at the University of North Texas, where I had access to a ton of gear and a ton of people. If you’ve seen the Texas series on my own Bandcamp page, I was able to record a lot of my own music while I was there, and I guess the idea started to form that I could do something a little bigger.
After releasing my first album with Edition Wandelweiser and working with Simon [Reynell] on my Another Timbre album, I sort of realized that this was something I could do to some capacity as well: I love recording and performing and listening and just living a musical life, but I also have the know-how to get these projects off the ground as well as do the recordings and the technical side of things. At the same time, I started getting approached by deeply predatory labels that I never found appealing; labels which have more of a spirit of “people fund their albums with grants for CV lines”—which is a world I have absolutely no interest in, and one I find deeply problematic in addition to being artistically vapid.
Part of starting Sawyer Editions comes from my interest in making things and having objects in the world, and a lot of it comes from a DIY ethos: if something does not exist and you want it to exist, you need to do it yourself. I grew up in the punk/hardcore scene in the middle of Nebraska: if we didn’t make a scene for ourselves, there wouldn’t be one at all.
You said “plenty,” but so many labels (my own included) are missing so much great music, and there’s plenty of music by my friends or folks I find online that needs to be shared in the world. I would find it deeply frustrating when I find a fantastic piece by a young or unknown artist and there wasn’t a platform or a good space to find more of their work. So having a space to curate the music I love was really important to me. And even if I’m not releasing my own music – and even when Sawyer Editions takes me away from composing and performing – it is an essential part of my creative practice.
Even so, I wanted it to be a platform to share the work of others, rather than have a label for my own work alone or have a label as a capital enterprise. There isn’t much money to be made in contemporary or experimental music, so that was a non-starter, but our biggest asset is mutual aid—and in many ways mutual aid is all we have. Sometimes that mutual aid comes from small things like sharing a link or going to a show, but starting a label felt like something I knew I could do that would foster an artistic dynamic and a creative space as a reflection of the world I want to see.
I don’t really make money off Sawyer, and I give the vast majority of money back to the artists. Maybe one day a new situation will work out where I can make this my job, but the music has always been the most important thing anyway and I’m not really interested in social capital. I’m just a guy who wants to make music with his friends, and Sawyer Editions provides an amazing space to work with amazing people doing amazing things.
How would you define the musical territory Sawyer Editions is intended to document?
Of course, there is some crossover between the music I release and the music released on other labels: folks have told me that Sawyer is adjacent to Wandelweiser, Another Timbre, Elsewhere, Erstwhile, Cold Blue, Cantaloupe, Irritable Hedgehog, among others. But all of these labels have a different flavor, different interests, different aesthetics; my taste and interests are inherently going to differ from that of someone else. The nice thing is that it is up to me, and my taste leans toward slow music, quiet music, especially chamber music from a post-Cagean, post-post-minimal perspective, maybe with a more sentimental leaning, sometimes with a more “romantic” bend. But I’m not monolithic about it, and I find this definition of genre/style a bit tedious anyway. Some albums fall outside of that zone; some are smack-dab in the middle of it.
The page says: “especially of new and unreleased artists.” This will always be an essential and critical part of Sawyer Editions. While some batches have had releases by established artist, it’s extremely important that Sawyer Editions be a platform for folks to have their first release. I had a difficult time navigating my first release, and there was so much about releasing music I didn’t know back then, so I want Sawyer Editions to be a place where folks can have their first release right next to well-known artists.
How did you choose the initial batch of releases? Has your process changed since then?
Look to your friends! I did not want Sawyer Editions to be a label for my music, so doing a single album for the first release of just my own music felt kind of weird. I wanted to have a few albums on Day 1, so doing the batch idea made sense—I actually got the batch idea from how Simon does the Another Timbre releases.
I’m also just “some guy in Texas”—I didn’t know if folks would be willing to go with me on this project if they didn’t really know me, so asking my friends whose music really resonated with me to do an album made the most sense. Still, it was really important to me that at least one album was from someone I didn’t know personally, and Aaron Michael Butler – who recorded Anthony Donofrio’s Meditation on the Eve of John Cage’s 100th Birthday on their release – told me about Darcy Copeland and introduced us via email. Darcy was really enthusiastic about the project, and had a new piece for Aaron, so it was a perfect fit!
I recorded a lot of the music in the first batch, or organized recordings with folks elsewhere. An initial plan was to get my friends together and record every album every time and have an ensemble and a label, but things went in another direction—this is still something I want to do, but that’s not anywhere close to being on the horizon right now.
Things have changed for sure, and I’ve been getting plenty of really exciting submissions. It’s a little different each time: sometimes I solicit projects (especially for first releases), sometimes I get demos, sometimes I record the music, sometimes a friend pitches me an idea over drinks when I’m on tour, sometimes I mix and master. It all depends on the project.
Do you accept unsolicited submissions?
Always. When I started figuring out how to do my first release, I had no idea how to go about it, and it was sometimes unclear how to go about getting a conversation going, so I wanted to make sure that was right up front. Of course, there is limited space, and I can’t accept everything, but I do listen to everything: sometimes it’s a slow process, but everything gets listened to.
I’ll be honest: sometimes I get submissions and it’s abundantly clear that folks haven’t listened to a single thing from either Sawyer imprint—those submissions take about 30 seconds to sort through, and can be annoying. But every batch since Batch #2 has had at least one release that was a submission from someone I didn’t know personally, and it is always a joy to have Sawyer considered as a potential home.
If someone is reading this and considering sending me something: make sure your work would make sense with Sawyer Editions in the first place; send me a streaming link; be patient for a slow response; be ready to be patient for a rather slow release process.
You originally produced your releases as handmade copies on CD-R, but last year you started producing CDs. Why?
In the beginning, the CD-R was mostly an economical choice: how can I get releases going without going broke if this thing didn’t work out? After spending a really long time culling the internet for materials and seeing what other labels were doing, I wanted something that looked personal, unique, artisanal, and had a nice presentation—and I really loved the CD-R sleeves with the strings. I am a fan of neutral colors anyway, but the fact that everything is black and white came in part from the fact that printing materials was cheaper in B&W than in color!
I did the first batch only making 20 copies of each album, and after that I could handle it in a “made-to-order” fashion; that way, I wouldn’t have boxes and boxes of CDs laying around my apartment if things didn’t work out. Fortunately, things did work out; unfortunately, the last batch of them – with the Royaee, Morrison, Epstein, Windsor, and Eagle – had me borrowing four other computers, and spending literal days just making CDs and packaging them in my apartment. (Shout out to Conner Simmons for posting-up with me for a few evenings and helping with this.)
As much as I love how those CD-R copies look, it just became untenable.
I really like how the new CDs look, and there are a lot of benefits to doing them with produced CDs from a plant—UPCs, for one thing, and it’s nice to be able to see/read the spine on your CD shelf. But it was always my hope that Sawyer Editions would someday grow to a point where it didn’t need to be a cottage-industry in my apartment.
In 2023 you launched a second imprint, Sawyer Spaces. Was that your plan from the start? And what's the distinction?
Starting Sawyer Spaces was not the plan from the start, but I absolutely love field recordings, acoustic ecology, and soundscape composition—all of which are part of my own practice as an artist, and a zone I really love working in. To be honest, the idea popped into my head one day – “what if I had a field recording imprint?” – and the idea stuck, so I had to see it through.
My biggest issue was what I felt would be an aesthetic confusion: is Sawyer Editions a contemporary label or a soundscape label? Is it experimental or is it contemporary? Perhaps that’s an arbitrary distinction – and I’m no authority on this – but it was enough for me to want to have a dedicated space for that work.
At the same time, Sawyer Spaces has opened opportunities to work with folks whose music I really love but I felt might not really work on Sawyer Editions itself. In some ways it’s more experimental, but it is always about place and how the spaces we live and create in are urgent and deeply connected to who we are. Every artist takes this idea in a different direction and every project can be its own interpretation of that. Sarah Ruth’s album Fellowship of the Arid Plain is a perfect example of this, it’s a stunning, beautiful album that still haunts me, but whether or not if that album is really a “field recording” album doesn’t matter to me as much as how rooted that album is in place.
Ideally, how many releases do you foresee releasing on each of your two labels annually?
At the moment, 10 releases from each imprint are enough for me. I do releases for both imprints as batches of five albums twice a year: Sawyer Editions releases five albums in January and five albums in June/July, while Sawyer Spaces releases five albums in the April and five albums in October/November. Maybe this will change in the future, but right now this is about all I can handle myself without losing my mind, and it gives me a little downtime and time to shift focus from one batch to the next.
As if running two labels of your own weren't enough, later this month you'll be posting the first batch of 10 catalog releases from Edition Wandelweiser. Why did you take on this extra workload?
Because I have an affiliation with Wandelweiser, and because Antoine [Beuger] and I are friends, I have had countless people ask me if the EWR catalog was coming to Bandcamp—so much so that it felt like there was a need to be filled. After playing at Antoine’s festival Klangraum last summer in Düsseldorf, I asked him if he had any notions of this, and the conversation got going. I already do the Bandcamp for Sawyer and my own personal Bandcamp, so I know how to do it and I would love to do it, so we agreed that I would get the project together and get it going.
I love that music, and my first release was on EWR, so it is a catalog very near to my heart. More than anything, though: I know how important the music on EWR is to me, and I know that there are so many people out there that would love to have this music on a platform they already use.
Of course, this music isn’t new, and it has been available for a long time: the first EWR release came out when I was only three or four years old. Additionally, some of it is on Spotify, some of it is on DRAM, and of course one could pick up copies from the Wandelweiser site, Boomkat, Squidco, etc. as well. But having it on Bandcamp provides a new platform for it, and I hope folks will be excited to access it there.
Can you describe the nature of your arrangement with Antoine Beuger to handle this work? And in cases where there's a physical CD available, are you handling that, too?
I don’t want to speak for Antoine, but we had several long conversations about the EWR catalog in general and this project comes down to our friendship and mutual excitement at the prospect of having this music revisited and found (again) for the first time by new listeners.
Where physical CDs are available, you will be able to order them from the Bandcamp, and Antoine will be handling those orders—make sure you check out the EWR site for his bundle deals. Still, you’ll be able to listen and download the music digitally regardless of if physical discs are still available.
You’ll be releasing 10 EWR releases per month in catalog order. The label’s last batch of titles was released in December 2023—are future releases planned?
It’s important to make this distinction: I’m not taking over anything. All I’m doing is building/maintaining a new place for the music to be found and enjoyed.
I said this on the Erstwhile Discord, but maybe it’s worth saying here as well: honestly, the idea of putting them up in this way has more to do with my time and energy than anything else. It’s not that time consuming to put an album up on Bandcamp, but 190 of anything is a lot and felt super daunting. Doing 10 a month felt more manageable, because then I can just take a day or however long it will take and put everything up for those 10, with the liner notes and stuff like that—which I wanted to have, and most of which I will have to re-type from scans because the files are gone, and I only got everything together recently, anyway.
It will take a long time at this rate to get this music up, but the music isn’t going anywhere. So I hope folks who have a hankering for the music will seek it out, and I hope that folks who follow the Bandcamp enjoy a monthly (re)visit to some great music.
Five new Sawyer Editions releases are out today; see New this week, below.
New this week.
January 10.
Derek Bailey/Paul Lovens/Jon Rose - Podewil (The Jon Rose Archive; recorded 1992)
William Basinski & Richard Chartier - Aurora Terminalis (Line)
Diaphane - München (Neither/Nor)
Jordan Dykstra - Game Transfer Phenomena (Editions Verde)
Luciana Elizondo & Guy Vandromme - Feldman and Hume: Intermissions (Sawyer Editions)
Thea Farhadian - Tattoos and Other Markings (Other Minds)
Philip Glass - Aguas da Amazonia - Constance Volk, Third Coast Percussion (Rockwell)
Insub Meta Orchestra - Exhaustion/Proliferation (Sawyer Editions)
Ashlee Mack - Green - compositions by Jeff Herriott, Ian Mikyska, Eva-Maria Houben, and Marti Epstein (Sawyer Editions)
Will Mason Quartet - Hemlocks, Peacocks (New Focus)
Ben Richter - Dissolution Seedlings - House on Fire (Sawyer Editions)
Sirius Quartet - Incantations - compositions by Gregor Huebner, Fung Chern Hwei, Sunjay Jayaram, and Jeremy Harman (Navona)
Sun & Rain (Nathaniel Morgan, Travis Laplante, Andrew Smiley, Jason Nazary) - Waterfall (Out of Your Head)
The Living Earth Show, Terry Berlier, & Sarah Hennies - A Kind of Ache (Earthy)
Kari Watson - enclosures (Sawyer Editions)
Nate Wooley - Henry House (Ideologic Organ)
Upcoming releases.
January 17.
Crux Duo (Lloyd Van’t Hoff, Lisa Moore) - My Place - compositions by Harriet Steinke, Nick Russoniello, Anne Cawrse, Erik Griswold, Elena Kats-Chernin, Martin Bresnick, and Leonard Bernstein (ABC Classics)
January 31.
jeong lim yang - Synchronicity (Sunnyside)
February 14.
Shawn E. Okpebholo - Songs in Flight - Rhiannon Giddens, Will Liverman, Reginald Mobley, Karen Slack, Paul Sánchez, Julian Velasco (Cedille)
February 21.
Christopher Cerrone - Don’t Look Down - Sandbox Percussion (Pentatone)
Oksana Linde - Travesías (Buh; recorded 1986–94)
February 28.
Daniel Carter, Ayumi Ishito - Endless Season (577 Records)
March 7.
Patrick Shiroishi & Piotr Kurek - Greyhound Days (Mondoj)
March 28.
Sasha Berliner - Fantôme (Outside In Music)
April 4.
David Longstreth - Song of the Earth - Dirty Projectors, s t a r g a z e (New Amsterdam/Nonesuch)
Find many more upcoming releases in For the Record: The Master List, here.
Photographs by Steve Smith, except where indicated.