Sean Smith is an excellent guitarist and a visionary composer, in the field of steel-string guitar music.
He proved it over the years with several releases, though his talent was exposed to the world much thanks to the fantastic Tompkins Square compilation Berkley Guitar (this year they released the sequel – Beyond The Berkly Guitar).
In both compilations, Tompkins took the stars of the west coast acoustic guitar scene, and along Smith they included tracks by Matt Baldwin, Adam Snider and others, and the album documents in real time that west coast bubbling scene.

Smith is one of those guitarists I love so much. The kind that can mix their influences (Takoma school of music) and pour their inside world without risking themselves of being tagged as imitators. The last C Joynes album is just that (not an imitator! An innovator!)
In 2007, Smith had released Eternal on vinyl, 300 copies made and the record was gone. Lucky for all of us, the good guys at Strange Attractors Audio House, reissued it on CD, as a part of their Resurrection Series, so now it’s available again for everyone.
Disclosure for those who don’t read this blog often – I will have my album released by the label in this series, next month.

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1. Elephant Stone – Strangers
2. Aloha – Moonless March (03:18)
3. Ted Leo and the pharmacists – Ativan Eyes (07:46)
4. Annuals – Loxtep (12:00)
5. Nada Surf – Elecrocution (15:52)
6. Burnt Ones – Gonna Listen To T.Rex (All Night Long) (18:57)
7. Pylon – Stop It (22:12)
8. Super Wild Horses – Golden Town (25:00)
9. Dark Meat – When The Shelter Came (27:32)
10. Double U – Breathing In The Wind (31:42)
11. Bill Wells – Perfect Window (34:30)
12. Mourning Phase – Putrescence (36:44)
13. C Joynes – Happy & Delightful (42:00)
14. Underwater Fireman – Perfect Haze (45:26)
15. Elmar Gantry’s Velvet Opera – Dream Starts (48:42)
16. XTC – War Dance (51:40)
17. Itamar Zieger – I Blu (54:47)
18. Booker Ervin – True Blue (59:22)

Couple of days ago I wrote couple of words about the brilliant new record by C. Joynes. I hope you had the time to go and listen to it.

I sent Joynes couple of questions as a short interview, and while he’s on the road, he was kind enough to find the time and answer.
My questions were :
1. Tell us a bit about your influences
2. How much time it took to record the new album?
3. Many guitarists these days fall to the ‘Fahey trap’ of doing nothing new, but recycling the past.
How do you manage to keep Fahey as an influence and not a main motive in your music? where’s
your originality coming from?
4. Who are the interesting guitarists in the ‘American Primitive’ genre (if I may generalize it) and what
are the most outstanding albums for you, in recent years?
5. What are the plans for 2011?
6. Ask yourself a question and answer it

And here’s Joynes answers, it’s long but worth reading all the way!
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Yea baby, it’s time for a new mixtape. And this time, how surprising, a good one.
As usual, you can stream it or just right-click-download it.

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1. Blind Roosevelt Graves And Brother – I’ll Be Rested
2. Jefferson Airplane – Good Shepperd (2:28)
3. Sleep Whale – Cotton Curls (6:49)
4. Colin Blunstone – Smokey Day (10:06)
5. Theme – Point Of Everything (13:16)
6. Mogwai – Honey (18:34)
7. Ben Reynolds – England (22:21)
8. C Joynes – Bones For Dogsi (25:18)
9. Unknown Instructors – Sunny Afternoon Spent At The Bar (30:14)
10. Akron Family – The Will Appear (33:00)
11. Ed Askew – Songs For Pilots (39:17)
12. Micah Blue Smaldone – Bastard Of Times (45:20)
13. Clair and the Reasons – Mellifera (50:57)
14. Built To Spill – Hindsight (54:57)
15. Nels Cline – Yokada Yokada/The Rumproller (58:29)
16. Can – Half Past One (63;03)
17. Frank Palmes – Troubles ‘Bout My Soul (67:30)

In our world, the life of the artist is very easy on one hand, due to his ability to record in his bedroom and spread his music all around the world easily. Genres that used to be specific and geographically related, expands and become available to the masses and if in the past you had to be Thai to love Thai psychedelia, or at least a big collector of the genre – today you can just go to the internet and learn everything you need to know about the genre. What used to belong to the elite, is now a common knowledge.

The Frankfurt School who challenged the control of the bourgeois, elite status on the communication methods and asked to reserve the high, elitist culture, to itself – totally collapsed and today, though the trash pop music controls the medias everywhere and talks face to face to the lowest common denominator, everyone has the ability to discover the high culture, consume it and maybe even create in its field. On one hand, it can develop the culture, but it can also demolish it when undeveloped people (in the high culture field, that is) are messing around with it, and every 13 year old guitarist with a delay effect is doing ‘post rock’. But in the end of the day, if you’re an artist in the modern age, you can have access to every house in the western world that has a computer. You just need to be clever to enter through the port.

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