The December selection for our Record of the Month Club has landed in the shop. We’re packing them up now and shipping them out as we go!
The December pick is “To Cy & Lee: Instrumentals Vol. 1” by Alabaster DePlume from our pals at International Anthem–one of the best record labels on the planet, based in Chicago. ROTM Club members will be getting a copy of the recent deluxe repress of the album, a copy of the latest zine from International Anthem, and our newest bumper sticker.
Winter is settling in around the country, and it’s crisp and cold in Mississippi. We’ve selected holiday music in the past for our ROTM Club, but this time we went with something very mellow and meditative. This is music for reflecting as 2025 comes to an end, and the promise of a new year brings some hope. This album by Mancunian poet, singer, saxophonist and composer Alabaster DePlume was released a few years ago. We fell in love with the record instantly, constantly playing it in the shop and at home. It’s beautiful. We think it’s the perfect soundtrack for the holiday season and all the emotions this time of year can bring. This record can live on your turntable and reveal itself over time.
International Anthem is celebrating it’s 11th anniversary by rereleasing some of their bestsellers. “To Cy & Lee: Instrumentals Vol. 1” is part of this series. The record contains beautifully illustrated liner notes, an obi strip, a pristine slab of wax, great cover art… it’s got it all!
We’re also sending out the autumn issue of International Anthem’s magazine, Tracing the Lines. It’s full of music writing and coverage of the avant-garde world surrounding the groundbreaking record label.
Lastly, Club Members are getting our latest bumper sticker. It has an alien and UFOs on it.
Happy Holidaze from The End of All Music
More about Alabaster DePlume and the record from the label’s website:
To Cy and Lee: Instrumentals Vol. 1 is a collection of Mancunian poet, singer, saxophonist and composer Alabaster DePlume’s simple and serenely intimate wordless adventures in melodic ennui. The collection properly introduced the world to a previously under-exposed, undeniably deep dimension of DePlume who, at the time of the its release, was most known to his followers for his music with words, his poetry, and his prowess as an impassioned orator. His performances (especially those that were part of his monthly Peach residency at Total Refreshment Centre in London) were becoming legendary for blurring the boundaries between secular sermon, theatrical monologue and song, as he turned audiences into experimental large ensembles and lead full-throated shout-a-longs to tunes like “Is It Enough” and “Be Nice To People” (both from his 2019 Lost Map album The Corner of a Sphere). The instrumental pieces that quietly buffered the big vocal moments of his recorded catalog, to that point, had mostly lived, quietly, in those buffers.
We’re not really sure what inspired DePlume to gather all of his recorded instrumentals, add a couple new ones, and invite International Anthem to collaborate on the campaign (we had only recently been getting to know him a little deeper, after our second trip to Total Refreshment Centre in the fall of 2018 when we recorded jaimie branch’s FLY or DIE II: bird dogs of paradise). But what we do know is, not long after To Cy & Lee’s February 2020 release and the subsequent arrival of a global pandemic, those recordings went very far, very fast, taking on a new life as stay-at-home hits — the quiet catharsis we didn’t know we needed in the face of rapidly unfolding confusion, fear, and isolation. As the people of the world found themselves inside their small rooms, they began to search for smaller, more intentional sounds to fill them. These instrumentals carried the healing qualities we were after then, and still seek now. As we cite on the obi strip, the music is an antidote with seemingly ancient sonic characteristics, and a unique ability to embrace the core of our very being.
To Cy & Lee was also the first document of an ongoing collaboration between DePlume and International Anthem, which has already yielded the albums GOLD (2022), Come With Fierce Grace (2023), and A Blade Because a Blade Is Whole (2025), in addition to sundry singles and EPs. The depth of partnership between DePlume and our crew that has developed since To Cy & Lee, coupled with the endlessly quenching spiritual comforts the album continues to provide, makes it an absolute essential of the International Anthem catalog and a proud choice for the final three of the IA11 series.
The IA11 Edition of To Cy and Lee: Instrumentals Vol. 1 comes on classic black 140-gram vinyl LP inside a heavyweight reverse-board jacket, with a 12-page 11×11″ insert booklet (including previously-unpublished photos and new liner notes by DePlume himself), IARC 2025 obi strip and printed poly-lined printed inner-sleeve. Pressed at Pallas in Germany, with new lacquers cut by Daniel K at SST.
