The second of Chapter Music’s double disc reissues by extraordinary early 80s folk duo Kath Bloom and Loren Connors. Meeting in 1976 in their hometown New Haven, CT, Kath Bloom and Loren Connors formed a creative partnership that has haunted psych-folk fans ever since, releasing six albums of fragile avant-garde folk-blues in miniscule quantities, all of which now change hands for huge sums.

After self-releasing two limited edition live albums, the duo recorded Sing The Children Over for tiny Boston label Ambiguous Records in 1982, and then in 1983 self-released fourth album Sand In My Shoe. Early on, their albums mixed traditional folk and blues songs with a handful of Kath’s vulnerable, moving originals, but by the later albums, the songs were all Kath’s – her fragile voice and subdued finger-picked guitar set against Loren’s abstract playing, sometimes atonal but always intuitively supportive.

Their last two albums Restless Faithful Desperate and Moonlight both emerged in 1984, in editions of 200-300 copies on Loren’s St. Joan label. As her creativity accelerated, so Kath’s songs became looser, more intuitive, with a darkening of tone and an eventual abandonment of intent to shape the music. The songs were still there, however – Restless contains one of her most gorgeous compositions Look at Me, while Moonlight includes an early version of Kath’s signature tune Come Here.

By 1984, however, Kath was married with a young son, and Connors himself was entering a new relationship, so the duo found themselves drifting apart. Kath did not release anything again until a 1993 solo cassette Love Explosion, but then developed a devoted cult following through the pivotal use of Come Here in Richard Linklater’s 1995 film Before Sunrise. She has since released two solo albums on Chapter Music, as well as the recent Bloom tribute album Loving Takes This Course, featuring covers by the likes of Devendra Banhart, Bill Callahan, Mark Kozelek, Josephine Foster and many more.

Loren also retreated from music for a period until re-emerging in the late 1980s. He is now recognised as a pioneering guitar explorer, and has worked with the likes of Thurston Moore, Keiji Haino, Jim O’Rourke and many more. After a quarter of a century, Kath Bloom and Loren Connors’ incredible recordings are finally available again. The reissue includes extensive liner notes, original photos and artwork, and six bonus tracks taken from a rare 1982 compilation and an unreleased 1984 live session!

“Devastating songwriting…the cult singer-songwriter’s weary voice gnaws into the listener’s hide.” – NPR

“Unlike anything else of its time in its mix of the conventional and avant-garde” – Allmusic

“(Kath Bloom) is teetering on a Vashti Bunyan level of rebirth” – Pitchfork

At first, their performances were based on drama and improvisation, with Kath acting out monologues while Loren played his attenuated free-form guitar, extrapolated from Mississippi Delta and Chicago blues. But while Loren worked on his now legendary nine volume series Unaccompanied Acoustic Guitar Improvisations, released between 1979 and 1982, he and Kath’s performances gradually became more song-based, taking the spirituals, blues and work songs of the American South as their foundation. Kath began practicing guitar among the headstones of New Haven’s Grove Street cemetery, entertaining herself there so often that she was given a job by the groundskeeper, while Loren began developing his idiosyncratic guitar style in the 1960s.

By the early 80s, the duo were playing occasionally outside of New Haven, and in 1982, Boston independent label Ambiguous Records approached them to record their first studio album. Sing The Children Over was recorded in Watertown, Massachusetts with Ambiguous label boss Andy Breslau in the producer’s chair. Acclaimed jazz critic and music historian Nat Hentoff, already a fan of Kath and Loren’s music from two earlier live LPs, wrote sensitive, insightful liner notes and the album emerged in 1982.

Sing The Children Over mixed traditional folk and blues songs with Kath’s originals, but tracks such as It’s So Hard To Come Home and The Breeze/My Baby Cries revealed Kath to be an increasingly accomplished and moving songwriter. It also set up the dynamic template that she and Loren would follow over their remaining recordings – Kath’s keening, fragile voice, her subdued finger-picked guitar, and Loren’s own guitar playing: abstract, skittering, sometimes atonal but always intuitively supportive. Together the duo created a sound almost impossibly emotional and haunting, one that despite its ties to the past is unlike anything created before or since.

Having been bitten by the songwriting bug, Kath’s output became prodigious. She and Loren released three more albums, Sand In My Shoe, Restless Faithful Desperate and Moonlight, in 1983 and ‘84, all on Loren’s new Saint Joan label in editions of 200-300 copies, and all featuring nothing but Kath’s original compositions. The last two albums will also be released by Chapter Music as a 2CD set in August.

By 1984, however, Kath was married with a young son, and Connors himself was entering a new relationship. Although the two struggled to maintain their joint creativity, they found themselves drifting apart. After she and Loren’s final album Moonlight in 1984, Kath did not release anything again until a 1993 solo cassette Love Explosion. She then developed a devoted cult following through the pivotal use of her song Come Here in Richard Linklater’s 1995 film Before Sunrise, and has released two solo albums on Chapter Music, including the brand new Terror.

Loren also retreated from music for a period, focusing on other forms of writing until re-emerging in the late 1980s. He is now recognised as a pioneering guitar explorer, and has worked with the likes of Thurston Moore, Keiji Haino, Jim O’Rourke and many more.

The daughter of world-renowned oboist Robert Bloom, Kath was born and raised in New Haven, Connecticut, where she trained as a cellist. However, she soon gave away formal musical education for the acoustic guitar, which she taught herself over long afternoons spent among the tombstones of her local cemetery.

Kath met avant-garde guitarist Loren Mazzacane Connors in 1976, teaming up with him for a series of now highly sought-after recordings of traditional blues and folk songs and Bloom’s originals. Some records were released in editions of as few as fifty, most no more than 200 copies, until the duo released their swansong Moonlight in 1984.

After a period of child-rearing, family life and daily financial struggle, Kath began to return to songwriting and recording in the early 90s, revealing a mother-of-three songwriter as accomplished and affecting as any of her more acclaimed colleagues such as Lucinda Williams, Gillian Welch or Hazel Dickens.

“One of the most heartbreaking singers ever. Beautiful” – Devendra Banhart
“I consider myself her biggest fan.” – Josephine Foster
“I’ve never enjoyed sharing a bill with anyone as much as I have with Kath. She’s wonderful and lights up the room wherever she goes.” – Mark Kozelek

OUT NOW!