Black vinyl with colour printed labels with risograph-printed pasted-on cover and craft paper spine wraparound with handwritten titles on white or craft brown sleeves.
"Starkly original acoustic guitar renderings, occasionally hinting at Fahey or Derek Bailey, but those are only hints. The feeling Jon is getting at is more Shadow Ring/Graham Lambkin, baiting you into facing up to the nature of reality, right here and now. Early Music is abstract in the extreme, but also very personal, almost uncomfortably so." (Scott McDowell, WFMU)
Coming a couple of years after High Peak Selections, Early Music was the second 'studio' full-length album by Jon Collin. More spare and sparse than its predecessor, both in atmosphere and presentation (the track names are simply numbers), it's also perhaps more focused and consistent in terms of sound and mood (as well as instrumental set-up and recording locale). While High Peak Selections and later recordings feature environmental and external sounds bleeding in and out of recordings, the only sound other than an amplified acoustic guitar heard on Early Music is the whirr and squeak of the reel-to-reel tape machine that it was recorded on, the recording device becoming an additional instrumental presence.
The importance of the release in the wider context of Jon Collin's back catalogue is shown by the fact that the record's title would become the name of the record label that he would start not long after its release, and indeed that that this reissue is presented by.
