Protection 
 Each record is protected within its record sleeve by a white vellum anti-dust sleeve.
 

 
Packaging 
 All items are shipped brand-new and unopened in original packaging. Every record is shipped in original factory-applied shrink wrap and has never been touched by human hands.

SUMAC MAY YOU BE HELD Vinyl Record

MAY YOU BE HELD Vinyl Record

This is a new, unopened CD in its original packaging.

SUMAC MAY YOU BE HELD CD

MAY YOU BE HELD CD

Band Merch - Invented and perfected by the gods of rock. 

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Rock

Vinyl Records & LPs

SUMAC

<ul>
<li>140-gram double black vinyl </li>
<li>Includes download code </li>
</ul>
Track Listing: 
A1. A Prayer for Your Path  A2. May You Be Held  B1. May You Be Held (cont.)  B2. The Iron Chair  C1. Consumed  D1. Laughter and Silence 
<hr/>
“As an artist in this time of significant upheaval, society seemingly having reached the end of its current iteration, it’s of critical importance to absorb and interpret this process of dissolution - and of the transformation that hopefully follows it” says Aaron Turner, guitarist and vocalist for the expressionistic metal ensemble SUMAC. “While I don’t believe we’re on the brink of collective destruction precisely now, this is clearly a pivotal stage in the story of humankind - and there is something that feels right about this music at this exact and very uncertain moment.” In this case, the music in discussion is May You Be Held, the latest album for the American-Canadian trio. Picking up where the band left off with 2018’s Love in Shadow, SUMAC push further into the extreme polarity of their sound with their latest collection of long-form composition and free-form exploration. Meticulously detailed and complex one moment, rudimentary and repetitive the next, and completely untethered and unscripted at seemingly random intervals—it’s an album that fluctuates between extreme discipline and control on one end and an almost feral energy on the other.
SUMAC’s work has always been about transition between different states of being. Our sense of normal, and indeed our sense of life, is now being shaken. We don’t know what is coming next. We are looking for pointers towards the future, as well as things to hold onto in the moment. This is a fundamental aspect of May You Be Held’s larger theme. Musically, it’s about continual unification and divergence—and is imbued with the uncertainty inherent in that cycle. In that uncertainty there is also hope, frustration, madness, and a desire for connection. All this too is part of this moment in our history—everything happening at once, the simultaneous emergence of humanity's best and worst characteristics. Lyrically, May You Be Held follows the humanistic themes explored on Love in Shadow, partially informed by Turner’s navigation of fatherhood and family life. “It’s clear humans have figured out many ways over the centuries to acclimate to adverse circumstances, and even to thrive in them,” Turner says. “My hope for our family, humanity and future generations, is that we find our way by doing what we have always done—invent, adapt, band together, and ideally, hold each other up through love and kindness.” 
This compassionate tone stands in stark contrast to the misanthropic and death-obsessed nature of most heavy metal music, and perhaps even seems diametric to the caustic and aggravated tone of May You Be Held. It may make more sense to approach the album as if it were a free jazz record or an abstract noise piece, where the emotional resonance isn’t bound up in melody as much as it is in performance. Here, Turner’s bellows and howls seem less threatening than wounded, primal, and mammalian. On guitar, his subversion of melody and penchant for noise seems less like aural punishment and more like an open horizon for frequencies and timbre. In a traditional metal context, drummer Nick Yacyshyn’s dexterous beats, exhilarating fills, and creative flourishes might seem like the pinnacle of rhythmic ferocity, but on May You Be Held there’s a kind of ecstasy in his performance, a fluidity and ability that conveys both urgency in purpose and joy in execution. Bassist Brian Cook glues it together with a heavy handedness that could be seen as hostile or malicious if it didn’t also provide the clearest path to navigating the band’s thorny arrangements. 
May You Be Held opens with “A Prayer for Your Path,” a composition culled from improvisational exercises centered on the interplay between Turner’s guitar drones and Yacyshyn’s bowing of a vibraphone. Threaded together with warming bass swells, it serves as the entry point for the album’s increasingly tumultuous and unpredictable strategies. The album’s title track is more in line with SUMAC’s established tactics: fusing heavy riffage, knotty structures, and expressionistic forays into an epic narrative arc that winds and weaves through so many peaks and valleys that it spills across two sides of an LP. The band’s free moments hit their apex with “The Iron Chair,” a fully unscripted spontaneous moment in the studio that sounds both completely uninhibited while also locking into some kind of alien logic. From there SUMAC launches into their second long-form orchestrated composition—the imposing “Consumed.” The track is perhaps their most ambitious work yet, morphing and evolving across multiple recording sessions at different locations over the course of several years until reaching its final form where SUMAC’s troglodyte force slowly ramps it up over its twenty-minute run time to a near panic-inducing frenzy. The album is bookended with a final improvisation exercise, the somber and subdued “Laughter and Silence.” 
While past SUMAC records have been concentrated efforts churned out in short flurries of activity, May You Be Held is a record that came from seemingly out of nowhere. Pieced together from vestiges of the Love in Shadow session with Kurt Ballou at Robert Lang Studio in Shoreline WA, a session at The Unknown recording studio in Anacortes with Matt Bayles at the engineering helm (where the band’s sophomore album What One Becomes was tracked), and supplementary work at House of Low Culture out on Vashon Island in the Puget Sound, May You Be Held reflects the temporal shifts and protracted scope of its genesis. It’s a record that feels more human than anything else—at times flawed and wounded, at others, triumphant, purposeful, and pensive. The music is by no means a salve or anodyne, but neither is it nihilistic. Rather, its forceful approach and challenging timbres are like a confrontation, a baptism by fire, a therapeutic razing. Ultimately, May You Be Held is a reminder of the life force that binds us together and a clarion call to be an active participant in an evolving world.

SUMAC / May You Be Held - 2LP Vinyl

May You Be Held - 2LP Vinyl

<ul>
<li>CD Cardboard Sleeve </li>
</ul>
Track Listing: 
1. A Prayer for Your Path  2. May You Be Held  3. The Iron Chair  4. Consumed  5. Laughter and Silence 
<hr/>
“As an artist in this time of significant upheaval, society seemingly having reached the end of its current iteration, it’s of critical importance to absorb and interpret this process of dissolution - and of the transformation that hopefully follows it” says Aaron Turner, guitarist and vocalist for the expressionistic metal ensemble SUMAC. “While I don’t believe we’re on the brink of collective destruction precisely now, this is clearly a pivotal stage in the story of humankind - and there is something that feels right about this music at this exact and very uncertain moment.” In this case, the music in discussion is May You Be Held, the latest album for the American-Canadian trio. Picking up where the band left off with 2018’s Love in Shadow, SUMAC push further into the extreme polarity of their sound with their latest collection of long-form composition and free-form exploration. Meticulously detailed and complex one moment, rudimentary and repetitive the next, and completely untethered and unscripted at seemingly random intervals—it’s an album that fluctuates between extreme discipline and control on one end and an almost feral energy on the other.
SUMAC’s work has always been about transition between different states of being. Our sense of normal, and indeed our sense of life, is now being shaken. We don’t know what is coming next. We are looking for pointers towards the future, as well as things to hold onto in the moment. This is a fundamental aspect of May You Be Held’s larger theme. Musically, it’s about continual unification and divergence—and is imbued with the uncertainty inherent in that cycle. In that uncertainty there is also hope, frustration, madness, and a desire for connection. All this too is part of this moment in our history—everything happening at once, the simultaneous emergence of humanity's best and worst characteristics. Lyrically, May You Be Held follows the humanistic themes explored on Love in Shadow, partially informed by Turner’s navigation of fatherhood and family life. “It’s clear humans have figured out many ways over the centuries to acclimate to adverse circumstances, and even to thrive in them,” Turner says. “My hope for our family, humanity and future generations, is that we find our way by doing what we have always done—invent, adapt, band together, and ideally, hold each other up through love and kindness.” 
This compassionate tone stands in stark contrast to the misanthropic and death-obsessed nature of most heavy metal music, and perhaps even seems diametric to the caustic and aggravated tone of May You Be Held. It may make more sense to approach the album as if it were a free jazz record or an abstract noise piece, where the emotional resonance isn’t bound up in melody as much as it is in performance. Here, Turner’s bellows and howls seem less threatening than wounded, primal, and mammalian. On guitar, his subversion of melody and penchant for noise seems less like aural punishment and more like an open horizon for frequencies and timbre. In a traditional metal context, drummer Nick Yacyshyn’s dexterous beats, exhilarating fills, and creative flourishes might seem like the pinnacle of rhythmic ferocity, but on May You Be Held there’s a kind of ecstasy in his performance, a fluidity and ability that conveys both urgency in purpose and joy in execution. Bassist Brian Cook glues it together with a heavy handedness that could be seen as hostile or malicious if it didn’t also provide the clearest path to navigating the band’s thorny arrangements. 
May You Be Held opens with “A Prayer for Your Path,” a composition culled from improvisational exercises centered on the interplay between Turner’s guitar drones and Yacyshyn’s bowing of a vibraphone. Threaded together with warming bass swells, it serves as the entry point for the album’s increasingly tumultuous and unpredictable strategies. The album’s title track is more in line with SUMAC’s established tactics: fusing heavy riffage, knotty structures, and expressionistic forays into an epic narrative arc that winds and weaves through so many peaks and valleys that it spills across two sides of an LP. The band’s free moments hit their apex with “The Iron Chair,” a fully unscripted spontaneous moment in the studio that sounds both completely uninhibited while also locking into some kind of alien logic. From there SUMAC launches into their second long-form orchestrated composition—the imposing “Consumed.” The track is perhaps their most ambitious work yet, morphing and evolving across multiple recording sessions at different locations over the course of several years until reaching its final form where SUMAC’s troglodyte force slowly ramps it up over its twenty-minute run time to a near panic-inducing frenzy. The album is bookended with a final improvisation exercise, the somber and subdued “Laughter and Silence.” 
While past SUMAC records have been concentrated efforts churned out in short flurries of activity, May You Be Held is a record that came from seemingly out of nowhere. Pieced together from vestiges of the Love in Shadow session with Kurt Ballou at Robert Lang Studio in Shoreline WA, a session at The Unknown recording studio in Anacortes with Matt Bayles at the engineering helm (where the band’s sophomore album What One Becomes was tracked), and supplementary work at House of Low Culture out on Vashon Island in the Puget Sound, May You Be Held reflects the temporal shifts and protracted scope of its genesis. It’s a record that feels more human than anything else—at times flawed and wounded, at others, triumphant, purposeful, and pensive. The music is by no means a salve or anodyne, but neither is it nihilistic. Rather, its forceful approach and challenging timbres are like a confrontation, a baptism by fire, a therapeutic razing. Ultimately, May You Be Held is a reminder of the life force that binds us together and a clarion call to be an active participant in an evolving world.

SUMAC / May You Be Held - CD

May You Be Held - CD

<ul>
<li>CD Cardboard Sleeve </li>
</ul>
Track Listing: 
1. Image Of Control  2. Rigid Man  3. Clutch Of Oblivion  4. Blackout  5. Will To Reach 
<hr/>
SUMAC (Aaron Turner on guitar and vocals, Nick Yacyshyn on drums, and Brian Cook on bass) invests in the recursive exercises of chaos and control, which manifest on the band’s second album What One Becomes. The trio’s debut The Deal (2015) revealed a new side of Turner’s combustible songwriting and guitar work, further expanding on his efforts in Isis and Old Man Gloom. On the new album (recorded by the prolific engineer Kurt Ballou of Converge, who has also recorded High on Fire and Torche), the trio has elevated the songs’ complexities with a greater entanglement of velocity, density, form, and function. The results are a testament to the tour-honed collective intuition and technical skills of drummer Yacyshyn (Baptists), bassist Cook (Russian Circles, These Arms Are Snakes, Botch) and Turner. The music of What One Becomes requires that each player be attuned to the dynamics and the tension within the multilateral structures. 
On “Clutch Of Oblivion” the riff develops from a languid desert-rock melody and blossoms into a dense aggregate of rhythm, force, and vigor. A muscular hypno-rock aspiration burns out before reaching escape orbit, and the ensuing plummet of solitary guitar notes lead the band into the realm of introspection before another volley of motorik pummel. “Rigid Man” begins as a lurching epithet that finds the trio in a shadow boxing lockstep for the song’s first half of pugilistic rhythm and noise, only to smash itself on the ground amidst a diabolical feedback whorl from Turner’s guitar and to tear free from the rhythmic underbelly, tapping into the vein of unhinged expressionism howled by Les Rallizes Denudes and Caspar Brotzmann Massaker. 
There is a profound anxiety that leaches through What One Becomes. SUMAC's choreographed structures parallel the internal and personal struggles with anxiety. They seek to identify the source, devise a course of action, and confront that condition at hand. Turner explains, “Much of it has to do with questioning fabricated structures of identity and what it means when those structures are destabilized by contact with the outside. That has been a unnerving process to undergo, but also fruitful in terms of discovering the path to individuation and realized connection with the self. Another facet of experience I’m working to convey is about living with the sustained presence of anxiety, and avoiding reliance on musical devices of cathartic release to provide escape from this condition.” Sumac channels psychic distress into their rigorously algebraic maneuvers and syllable-crack dissonance. These are an acts of honesty in the face of a particular conduction as well as acutely prescient designs of musical intensity that commands attention to all of this detail.

SUMAC / What One Becomes - CD

What One Becomes - CD

SUMAC LOVE IN SHADOW Vinyl Record

LOVE IN SHADOW Vinyl Record

SUMAC WHAT ONE BECOMES Vinyl Record

WHAT ONE BECOMES Vinyl Record

SUMAC LOVE IN SHADOW CD

LOVE IN SHADOW CD

SUMAC LOVE IN SHADOW - Limited Edition Colored Vinyl Record

SUMAC DEAL Vinyl Record

Track List 
<ol class="track-list">
<li class="track">Spectral Gold (03:26)</li>
<li class="track">Thorn in the Lion's Paw (09:04)</li>
<li class="track">Hollow King (12:26)</li>
<li class="track">Blight's End Angel (10:19)</li>
<li class="track">The Deal (13:34)</li>
<li class="track">Radiance of Being (05:25)</li>
</ol>
 This is a new, unopened CD in its original packaging.

SUMAC DEAL CD

SUMAC WHAT ONE BECOMES CD

SUMAC BEFORE YOU I APPEAR Vinyl Record

Track List 
<ol class="track-list">
<li class="track">Image of Control</li>
<li class="track">Rigid Man</li>
<li class="track">Clutch of Oblivion</li>
<li class="track">Blackout</li>
<li class="track">Will to Reach</li>
</ol>
 
Protection 
 Each record is protected within its record sleeve by a white vellum anti-dust sleeve.
 

 
Packaging 
 All items are shipped brand-new and unopened in original packaging. Every record is shipped in original factory-applied shrink wrap and has never been touched by human hands.

Sumac is a new band consisting of core members Aaron Turner (Mamiffer, Old Man Gloom) on guitar and vocals, and Nick Yacyshyn (Baptists, Erosion, A Textbook Tragedy) on drums. Brian Cook (Botch, Russian Circles, These Arms Are Snakes) performed bass. Their debut album The Deal will be co-released by Profound Lore and SIGE in Feb. 2015. It was recorded by Mell Dettmer at Litho and Aleph in Seattle. Mixed by Kurt Ballou at God City. Artwork will be a joint effort from Aaron Turner and Faith Coloccia.
 
Track List 
 [Disc 1]
<ol class="track-list">
<li class="track">Spectral Gold 3:18</li>
<li class="track">Thorn in the Lion's Paw 8:54</li>
</ol>
[Disc 2]
<ol class="track-list">
<li class="track">Hollow King 12:21</li>
</ol>
[Disc 3]
<ol class="track-list">
<li class="track">Blight's End Angel 10:16</li>
</ol>
[Disc 4]
<ol class="track-list">
<li class="track">The Deal 13:41</li>
<li class="track">Radiance of Being 5:15</li>
</ol>
 
Protection 
 Each record is protected within its record sleeve by a white vellum anti-dust sleeve.
 

 
Packaging 
 All items are shipped brand-new and unopened in original packaging. Every record is shipped in original factory-applied shrink wrap and has never been touched by human hands.

SUMAC

Official SUMAC Merchandise & Vinyl

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