KATH BLOOM & LOREN CONNORS - RESTLESS FAITHFUL DESPERATE (BLUE COLOURED) VINYL

The extraordinary creative partnership of New Haven, CT duo Kath Bloom and Loren Connors has haunted psych-folk fans since the early 80s.

Kath taught herself guitar during shifts as a janitor at a New Haven cemetery, while Loren’s free-form idiosyncratic style had been developing since the late 60s. Between 1981 and 1984, the duo recorded two live and four studio albums, mostly self-released in tiny quantities.
Early on, their music mixed folk and blues traditionals with a handful of Kath’s vulnerable, moving originals. By the later albums the songs were all Kath’s - her fragile voice and subdued finger-picking set against Loren’s abstract but always supportive playing. Together the duo created a sound almost impossibly emotional and haunting.

Restless Faithful Desperate emerged in 1984, in an edition of 200-300 copies. As her creativity accelerated, Kath’s songs became looser and more intuitive, but Restless contains one of her most gorgeously realised compositions, Look at Me. Loren’s long-term collaborator Robert Crotty contributed electric guitar on a couple of tracks.

By 1984, however, Kath was married with a young son, and Connors was entering a new relationship, so after 1984 the duo found themselves drifting apart. Kath did not release anything again until a 1993 solo cassette Love Explosion, but then developed a devoted cult following through the pivotal use of her song Come Here in Richard Linklater’s 1995 film Before Sunrise.