After nearly two decades of recording Arkansas musicians, East Hall Recording’s Chris Moore has released a five-volume compilation and retrospective, which he calls “some of the cream of a very large crop.” The seeds for the cozy Fayetteville studio began “with a 4-track cassette player in a dorm room over 20 years ago,” as Moore says on the studio’s website. “Since then, it has grown through a series of dorm rooms, bedrooms, and garages, and has been in the current custom built building for the last 10 years.”
East Hall’s compilation is completely free and available for download at the studio’s Bandcamp page. Cue the volumes up in your desired medium (each of them fits onto a single CD, if the automobile is your version of a headset) and enjoy over a decade of Northwest Arkansas’s finest, including tracks from Ten High, May the Peace of the Sea Be With You, The Inner Party, 1 oz. Jig, Pagiins, and Shawn James and the Shapeshifters.
Though the recordings date back to 2004, a great number of the bands featured are still playing live shows. Find them. See them. Hear them.