Susanne Lewis - self titled (signed copies) Susanne Lewis

With Monorail it sometimes feels like so much music is coming at us all at once. It can be overwhelming but most days turn up something new or new-old and often truly amazing. All of us have been pretty blown away by a forthcoming record on the excellent Concentric Circles label. First time on vinyl for this beautiful release by Susanne Lewis, a magically captivating Portland based musician.

The album is so instantly engaging and each play brings something new. It’s like looking into a slow moving stream and embracing the natural patterns and maybe even feeling inside them. Susanne Lewis’ music has an inevitability, a lightness of touch, hypnotic guitar lines gently wind on, melody focus tumbles out - ideas, builds, gentle percussion. It’s so great. Where to place it, I’m not sure, I think that’s why I like it so much. But ok I’ll give it a go - for you. These are things that have come to mind while listening in different places - Linda Smith, Sonic Youth’s Little Trouble Girl, Beat Happening when Heather sings. What else? A drawing by Victor Pasmore that stuck with me. Comber, Tara Jane O’Neil. 

Beautiful cover art makes for a fully realised edition. One of the very best archive records of 2026.

SP

“In a less ridiculous world, Susanne Lewis would need no introduction. For more than 40 years, she has been releasing brilliant, fearless, kaleidoscopic albums with various collaborators and under various names, including Corpses As Bedmates, Thinking Plague, Kissyfur and Hail. No two of them sound alike, none of them sound like anyone else, and all of them have moments that remain startling even after decades of listening.

She's an offhandedly inventive musician who makes complex, disjunctive song structures sound perfectly natural, as if they couldn’t and shouldn’t have turned out any other way. A volatile singer who can shift from serenity to delirium in the space between two heartbeats, she's capable of making the most abstruse dream-language feel immediate or, conversely, of making the most mundane experiences seem otherworldly. Her songs do not belong to a genre; they create their own genres as they go, and they typically bristle with more ideas than most of her alleged peers stumble across in an entire career.

All this being the case, the persistent neglect of her work by people who ought to know better has something pathological about it. Interesting yourself to any extent in 20th-century underground music while remaining unfamiliar with Susanne Lewis is like being a geologist who has never heard of volcanoes. Had she gotten the full attention and acclaim her accomplishments deserve, generations of lesser talents might never have managed to emerge from her shadow. If she gets it now—finally!—it will be a welcome and very timely triumph of personal vision and artistic autonomy over their increasingly ugly counterfeits.

Taken collectively, her albums constitute a parallel universe in which the early eighties post-punk avant-garde never ran out of surprises, and this reissue of her eponymous 2000 solo release—lovingly remastered from the original DAT tapes and released on LP for the first time by Concentric Circles—is as inviting a portal to that strange place as any. It’s an accessible and deceptively straightforward album with musical and emotional strata that increase in complexity and depth over repeated listenings.

- Brandan Kearney (author of “On Cinema At the Cinema Reader”)”.