Various Artists: Parallelogram

Three Lobed Recordings operates from the brightly lit basement of a one-floor midcentury home in a quiet subdivision of modest ranches outside of Greensboro, the third largest city in North Carolina. When the label issued its first vinyl box set in conjunction with its 10th anniversary in 2011, Cory Rayborn—Three Lobed’s owner, a lawyer by day—joked of the operation’s at-home modesty by way of a sales pitch. “In this case,” he wrote of his staff, “‘we’ means one human and three feline assistants.”

Since the release of that collection, the excellent Not the Spaces You Know, but Between Them, Three Lobed has continued unabated with its curatorial quest through the weird annals of experimental American folk, drone, and rock. The pace has been methodical, with four or so albums a year, but the execution masterful. In that span, Three Lobed has served as a syndicate for some of the world’s best, relatively young solo guitarists—Chuck Johnson, William Tyler, Sir Richard Bishop, and Tom Carter. There’s been shambling, snarling folk-rock from Wooden Wand, impish permutations of folk and metal from Horseback. Three Lobed issued one of the decade’s most transfixing drone records—On Jones Beach, a bagpipe-anchored collaboration between members of the Necks and Sonic Youth—in 2012, followed by two essential collections from Bardo Pond, the free Philadelphia spirits that prompted Rayborn to launch Three Lobed in the first place. For an imprint so smitten with noisy records, Three Lobed’s actual signal-to-noise ratio remains nearly perfect.

Still, four years and all those accomplishments later, Three Lobed’s operations remain minimal, with Rayborn and his cats working away in the basement after-hours. The small scale seems by now a point of pride, a way to show that the persistent dedication of one person can help shape an entire scene. Indeed, such modesty and minimalism offer significant returns for the roster of Parallelogram, Three Lobed’s second vinyl set and a collection of 10 acts so strong it would feel like a fever dream for most any avant imprint. Bardo Pond splits a full-length with Yo La Tengo, Six Organs of Admittance one with William Tyler. Transatlantic and trans-generational kindred spirits Michael Chapman and Hiss Golden Messenger face off, while Kurt Vile and Steve Gunn back one another up on sides of their own. And for the five-record set’s white-hot point of dissonance and bedlam, Thurston Moore and John Moloney duel as the duo Caught on Tape while Chris Corsano, Alan Bishop and Bill Orcutt crash, clatter and grind as a trio. Parallelogram presents a constellation of explorers, separately ferrying the same enthusiasm and openness that have animated Three Lobed’s very catalog.   

Almost every act here has experience with a much larger label. In Sonic Youth, of course, Thurston Moore made major waves by moving to a major label a quarter-century ago, while Michael Chapman issued Rainmaker on Harvest Records during the company’s first year, the same year they issued Pink Floyd’s Ummagumma. Four have deals on Matador, two on Merge, one on Drag City and so on. Some of these bands may sell more records in a week of touring than Rayborn sells of all his releases combined in a year.

But these five splits are available only in an edition of about 950 LPs. Through the label, they’re offered only as a buy-them-all bundle, though stores and the bands themselves will be able to sell individual titles. Coupled with those low numbers and a relatively high barrier to entry, Three Lobed’s low-key status and individual-driven aesthetic seem to have made each act comfortable, or free and clear to try something different out of their typical spotlight. As William Tyler, who continues his recent streak of austere wonder with his two contributions here, put it in an early interview about Parallelogram, “I pretty much say yes to anything Cory suggests. He is a number one ace dude, like a Yogi Berra-type figure in the subterranean rock scene.” Everyone on Parallelogram seems to respond to that same why-not directive.

Yo La Tengo, for instance, shows a piece of their collectively complex musical mind rarely seen in a recording studio; their “Electric Eye” is a fierce 20-minute improvisation, with stalled signals, scraping guitars, and muffled, murmured vocals fighting against a militantly loping rhythm. Its counterpart is Bardo Pond’s “Screen for a Catch (Fur Bearing Eyes)”, a sidelong beauty that seems to funnel almost every strength of their catalogue into one arcing collage. They move from bleary-eyed stoner drift to howling-guitar psychedelia, from seraphic harmonies to acoustic-slide tangents, closing with a high-and-mighty jam that fades into the middle distance. It’s like a patchwork homage to a label that exists only because they do.

And just two months after releasing the biggest album of his career, Kurt Vile pounds the piano keys through Randy Newman’s “Pretty Boy”, a song that’s a bar fight waiting to happen. You can almost picture Vile, a tumbler of brown liquor in his hand, singing it this way at a bar after a show, offering it as send-up to casual new fans who might have quaked his perpetual mellow. And when he digs into heartland country for a cover of John Prine’s gleefully apologetic “Way Back Then”, he sounds carefree, temporarily leaving behind his cool for a moment as an earnest balladeer.

Steve Gunn adds guitar to that cover, and Vile returns the favor for Gunn’s faithful and steely-eyed cover of Nico’s “60/40.” More intriguing, though, is “Spring Garden”, a 10-minute fantasy featuring Gunn, Vile and harpist Mary Lattimore on piano. In the last few years, Gunn has morphed from a guitarist issuing long-form, dexterous instrumentals through Three Lobed to a proper singer-songwriter and bandleader. But just a few months ahead of his own big Matador debut, Gunn attempts to reconcile both past and present with this extended beauty. The trio delights in seemingly infinite refractions of a riff without distracting from Gunn’s soft-focus hook.

As the title suggests, Rayborn intended these pairings to highlight interesting, perhaps overlooked similarities between sets of artists he treasures. And that approach works. Hearing Six Organs of Admittance and William Tyler on the same LP, for example, you notice how well both manage density, or the lack thereof, as a discrete aspect of dynamics. Tyler’s stunning “Southern Living” begins as a bucolic duet for acoustic guitar and sighing slide. But he slowly lets the notes hang until the space can handle no more sound, until it all blurs into a messy web he then must pull apart. Likewise, in the gorgeously distorted “Lsha”, Chasny piles layers into the mix—his ghostly vocals and rapid fretwork, broken keyboards and whirring synthesizers—until it merges into one signal. He then drifts from the din, arriving at chords so soft and pretty they sound like bedside whispers.

But the ultimate takeaway of Parallelogram might be the tension among all these acts, not their similarities. Compare the guitar elegance of Tyler or Chapman, especially on the latter’s stunning “Stockport Monday (Homage Tom Rush)”, to the six-string aggression of Moore. Here, he takes a familiar riff—in this case, the pinging theme of his “Ono Soul”—and twists, turns and tackles it in every way he can. Feedback and static, squeals and divebombs: Moore searches for new ways to destroy his own melody. Usually so solemn, Hiss Golden Messenger seems to bask in the springtime sun during a delicate, groove-heavy take on J.J. Cale’s blushing “Wish I Had Not Said That”. He adds a lightness of soul at which the original only hinted. Corsano, Bishop, and Orcutt, on the other hand, torture Jack Bruce’s soft-rock flop “Politician”, turning its creepy come-on into an off-putting, oft-hilarious fuck-you. The cumulative effect of all these lines—parallel, perpendicular, divergent—is one of sheer wonder. 

There was a time not to long ago—when it became clear that most every act, no matter how large or small, could release their own records online—that people questioned what role, if any, labels might play in music’s future. Why would someone need an imprint if they could simply convince friends and fans to share a file or link? In many cases, that has come to fruition, allowing for the emergence of trends that might have been bypassed by the old, slow system. But labels aren’t just big businesses. They are, as in the case of Three Lobed, people with a long-standing dedication to a sound they want to push into the world. And their involvement in those scenes can help connect dots or create ideas, turning strange potential scenarios into five-record box sets that create new contexts for familiar acts. More than curation or tastemaking or filtering, the usual quasi-canards invoked for label survival, their real source of staying power might be their ability to invest in, understand, and help evolve a niche. For the last 15 years, that’s what Three Lobed has done. Parallelogram is a trove of evidence, fit for a label too big for a suburban basement.