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The saga of composer Tim Story's 1982 debut is a case study in the shifting sands of the early progressive music industry. Recorded on a Tascam 4-track reel-to-reel in his basement bedroom in Whitehouse, Ohio using a ragtag array of equipment - salvaged vibraphone, pawn shop Les Paul, his mother's spinet piano, a PAiA synth kit assembled by his girlfriend's father, and a Yamaha CS-30 - Story optimistically dubbed six cassettes and sent them around the world. Following a polite rejection from Klaus Schulze, the French avant-garde tag Atem (This Heat, Univers Zero, Art Zoyd) reached out with an offer to Threads via their new instrumental electronic subdivision, Labyrinthes. After several letters confirming terms of the arrangement as well as multiple rounds of test pressings, correspondence suddenly ceased. Some months later the tag folded, never having begun.Synchronistically, however, Schulze's copy ended up in the glovebox of an engineer associate, who happened to play it for a couple visiting journalists with contacts at a newish Norwegian imprint, Uniton Records (Popul Vuh, Harold Budd). Impressed, they connected Story to the tag head, but by then he'd already recorded a follow-up, the more neoclassical-leaning In Another Country, which became his inaugural . Finally, 40 years later, Dais Records is rectifying history's error by properly issuing Threads on vinyl for the first time. It's a beautiful, beguiling work, exploratory but emotive, documenting, as Story puts it, Inchthe path not taken... like the first chapter of a book that was set aside to begin another.InchDespite only being in his early twenties at the time of it's creation, Threads feels finessed and considered, weaving through a diverse spectrum of moods and minimalist melodies. From sunburst synthesizer devotionals (InchTethered By A ThreadInch) to shadowy cosmic drift (InchWithout Waves,Inch Inch
