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Kramer

Best known as the in-house producer and proprietor of the Shimmy Disc label, Kramer (first name Mark) also has an extensive résumé as a musician, often in bands or with collaborators, but occasionally solo as well. His music tends to be atmospheric with a touch of the abstract, often using found sounds to add texture and detail to his recordings, and his themes are often deeply personal, dealing with issues in his life and his own creative fascinations, though not without a sense of humor. 1992's The Guilt Trip was his first magnum opus, an eclectic two-hour spectacular; 2012's The Brill Building paid homage to great Jewish pop songwriters; 2021's And the Wind Blew It All Away was a meditation on love in difficult times; and 2022's Music for Films Edited by Moths was a set of atmospheric, minimalist compositions. Kramer has remained heavily collaborative, issuing the 2023 full-length Baptismal with Laraaji, and teaming up with Pan•American for 2024's Reverberations of Non-Stop Traffic on Redding Road. Born in New York City in 1958, Kramer initially chose film school as his creative path, but wound up dropping out twice. Instead, he worked as a sound engineer for several late-'70s New York groups and eventually joined the band that became Eugene Chadbourne's Shockabilly as a bass player and sometime-organist. Upon Shockabilly's mid-'80s dissolution, he served a brief stint as the Butthole Surfers' touring bassist, and in 1985 he opened a 16-track recording studio, Noise New York, which became a hub for the city's underground music community. In 1987, he founded Shimmy Disc, an independent label that was home to dozens of maverick acts, including Dogbowl, Ween, Daniel Johnston, Fred Lane, and the Boredoms. Kramer produced acts ranging from the label's own GWAR and King Missile to Galaxie 500, Urge Overkill, Half Japanese, Fred Frith, Palace Brothers, Low, and Royal Trux. From the late '80s onward, Kramer was a highly active collaborator, releasing projects with Jad Fair of Half Japanese, John S. Hall of King Missile, Ralph Carney and Daved Hild, ex-Gong frontman Daevid Allen, ex-Soft Machine bassist Hugh Hopper, and Captain Howdy, a band featuring magician Penn Jillette on vocals and cartoon voice-over master Billy West (Ren & Stimpy, Futurama, etc.) on guitar. He closed Noise New York and opened a 24-track facility across the river he called Noise New Jersey. Kramer's solo career began in 1992 with the release of The Guilt Trip, followed in 1994 with The Secret of Comedy and 1995's Japan-only Music for Crying; the albums combined Kramer's warped humor with his ample production skills and (sometimes) pop songwriting sense. In 1998, he returned to solo recording with Songs from the Pink Death on Shimmy Disc and Let Me Explain Something to You About Art on John Zorn's Tzadik record label. The Sound of Music, his second album with Jad Fair, appeared the following year. In 1999, after an unsuccessful European tour, Kramer quit the music business, but his retirement didn't last long. His second release on Tzadik, The Greenberg Variations, arrived in 2003. In 2004, he opened a mastering studio in Florida and dabbled in writing music for theater while he put his own recording career on hold. He made his comeback as a performer with 2012's The Brill Building, a collection of covers of songs written by Brill Building greats including Carole King, Burt Bacharach, and Neil Diamond, which were given Kramer's distinctive touch; Tzadik issued the LP. He continued to produce albums for artists such as Permahorn, and in 2017 launched the digital-only label Shimmy 500 with the Jad Fair collaboration The History of Crying. That same year, The Brill Building, Book Two, with guitarist Bill Frisell, arrived on Tzadik. Shimmy 500 proved to be short-lived, but Kramer gave Shimmy Disc a proper re-launch in 2020, as a partnership with Joyful Noise Recordings, who named him their Artist-in-Residence for the year. Let It Come Down, his project with British singer Xan Tyler, released their debut album, Songs We Sang in Our Dreams, that year. In 2021, he released the limited vinyl box set Make Art, Make Love, Die, which included the Let It Come Down album, two experimental LPs, and two albums which were also issued individually: Words & Music, Book One (containing musical adaptations of spoken recordings by poets like Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso), and Kramer's first solo collection of original songs since The Guilt Trip, And the Wind Blew It All Away, in 2021. Music for Films Edited by Moths, an album of ambient pieces originally included in the box set, was given a stand-alone release in 2022. Kramer released several collaborations in 2023. The vinyl box Rings of Saturn consisted of six EPs, including work with Britta Phillips, David Grubbs, Rob Crow, Eerie Wanda, and others. Kramer also reunited with longtime friend Laraaji, who had contributed a zither piece to the first Shimmy Disc release in 1987. Baptismal, described as an ambient symphony, was released in June. Kramer collaborated with Pan•American for the guitar-based, loop-heavy ambient album Reverberations of Non-Stop Traffic on Redding Road, released in 2024.
© Steve Huey /TiVo
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Discography

91 album(s) • Sorted by Bestseller

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