Carol Kelly is an amazing poet from Portstewart, Ireland. Jason and I were deeply moved by her performance early one morning at Never Records Derry.

Phil handed this track to me in London and it took three months and a trip to Bangladesh for me to respond. I’ll cut it this week to warm the machine up for S.J. Downe’s records and send to Phil for the new year.
-Ted, December 27, 2011.

Press Play and read……

It is with great pride that S.J. Downes and I announce the release of S.J. Downes-II.II.II.

Since we first met one rainy September night at midnight and I convinced him to come record music in the rubble of an abandoned disco in Liverpool, S.J. Downes has recorded at all three Never Records installations in Liverpool, Derry, and London.

Our friendship and his songs have become an integral part of Never Records, anthems for my mission to affect change through music and art.

We are now taking orders for this limited release with records being shipped in January 2012.

This release will contain seven songs recorded by S.J. Downes at all of the Never Records that took place in 2011. This will be a limited edition of ten hand cut and hand printed 12″ records with two artist proofs, with artwork by S.J. himself and me. Each record will cost $50, and proceeds will go to ordering blanks and silkscreens.

This is the first of what I hope is a long series of limited releases of special Never Records projects. For those of you without record players, S.J. plans a digital release as well.

For orders and more information please contact neverrecordsnewyork@gmail.com.

-Ted Riederer, New York, November 11, 2011

For more….

Photo by Tommo http://www.tommophoto.com

October 10th, 2011

“Of what use are words? The future was so splendid and so sure! When he was counting the days, at those weary moments when everything seems precarious and threatening, or when one is really forced to be anxious, the sweetness of his dream removed his fears.”
We Others: Stories of Fate, Love, and Pity. Henri Barbusse

The act of crossing the street in London into inverted traffic caused a persistent disassociation that enhanced the hypnagogia of Never Records. Add to that the hypnosis of recording music until late into the night and cutting clear records with spiraling, nautilus grooves of concentric circles, the strobe of red dots on the turntable platter, and the euphoria of being permitted to enact again a project that has brought so much joy and so much more, to so many.

During the past year I have recorded and cut four-hundred records of over one-hundred-and-fifty different performances. I can sing, speak, or drum along with all of them. They are the soundtrack of a dream.

The Never Records shop, with the giant record above the door, at 11 Southwark St., across from Borough Market and around the bend from London Bridge, closed two days ago. As I struggle to resume my work-life in New York City and once again experience the futility of paying rent for a studio I’m often too exhausted to use, I fantasize that moments of fellowship spent capturing art in London produce a much purer, crystalline reality than the murk of trying to sell my artwork, of trying to sell myself.

In London, I was humbled by the convergence of loved ones from across the Irish Sea, and the Atlantic Ocean. All of us, family, friends, and new acquaintances alike, drew close together under the label Never Records to open ourselves to each other’s words and songs, and, by some process none of us fully understood, touch the inner spirit of each one of us, a place where perhaps only communal music, given freely, can go. We will never again be quite as we were.

Never Records, you are not listening.

Photo by Jason Wyche