Michael Yonkers - Grimwood LP
Currently out of print on CD, Michael Yonkers's Grimwoodfinally receives its long-overdue vinyl re-release (with download code included). Yonkers's first four LPs were released simultaneously in 1973, but it is Grimwood, his first, that regular commands the biggest bucks on the collector-scum market. Recorded in 1969, less than a couple years after the material eventually released as Microminiature Love, Grimwood sounds like it emanates from another universe entirely. Straightforward on the one hand, yet fascinatingly and psychedelically abstruse on the other, Grimwood remains an essential "outsider" document that sits comfortably (and irreplaceably) alongside Spence, Grudzien, Tweddle, and a few select others. "It would seem that Yonkers followed a trail that psychologically parallels the sun life highway, and his private flight took place in a presumably small hut, nestled on a lemonade lake, and from his chimney wafted rainbow smoke, in the fantastical haven of the mystical, mythical grimwood town for which the rec is named, as he attempted to allow light / space into areas of his psyche that hadn't seen enough of either in some time." --Karl Ikola, liner notes to 2007 CD reissue