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Tidiane Thiam - Africa Yontii (LP)Tidiane Thiam - Africa Yontii (LP)
Tidiane Thiam - Africa Yontii (LP)Sahel Sounds
¥3,597
“It’s time. Africa, it’s time. It’s time that Africa changes. It’s time our leaders change. Everything that happens in Africa is extraordinary. We have everything: water, earth, sun, fields of oil, gas. We have all this in Africa, but Africa is still poor. It’s time we change our way of thinking. It’s time for Africans to take their destiny into their own hands. If not, others will take it.” This is the message instrumental guitarist Tidiane Thiam hopes to convey with his new solo album, Africa Yontii, a Pulaar title that translates to “Africa, It's Time.” To a casual listener, Thiam’s bold statement starkly contrasts with his melodic playing. But a closer listen to Thiam’s expressive playing reveals a thoughtful voice that stands out from the crop of contemporary guitarists. “What I should be singing (with words) I’m instead saying with my guitar,” he says. Hailing from the sleepy fishing Senegalese fishing town of Podor, home of the great Baaba Maal, Thiam taught himself guitar by playing along to late-night radio broadcasts of Manding music. He soon developed his style, often reworking Pulaar folk themes into his compositions. On Africa Yontii, Thiam’s third album for Sahel Sounds, he teamed up with hip-hop beat maker Ndiaye Moctar from studio M.N. Records to provide accompaniment, integrating unexpected elements such as field recordings and electronic sounds. In the liner notes for Africa Yontii, Thiam voices his concerns about the lack of opportunities for Africa’s youth and the lonely road that can come with leaving behind loved ones in the hope of a better life. He also sprinkles in a philosophical query about the eroding state of the world alongside two more hopeful, traditional offerings in the form of wedding and river songs. Despite the sometimes heavy subject matter, Thiam’s love for his homeland and heritage shines through. Tidiane Thiam's Africa Yontii reclaims the maligned “world music” genre within a sonic space that has long been dominated by others telling the story. As the title suggests - It’s time!
Anastasia Coope - Darning Woman (White Vinyl LP)Anastasia Coope - Darning Woman (White Vinyl LP)
Anastasia Coope - Darning Woman (White Vinyl LP)Jagjaguwar
¥3,484
The feeling that Anastasia Coope's music transmits seems to emanate from a precipice beyond the material world, like a void or memory pressing up against the veil. It’s exacting and enveloping, but unmoored in space and time: ghostly, spectral, far-out folk. Darning Woman, her debut album, feels like a dispatch from another past. Akin to lullabies or nursery rhymes, its minimal folk instrumentation contorts into something staccato and strange led by Coope's expressive, stratified vocals. In spite of the suggestion of antiquity that runs through Darning Woman, 21-year-old, Brooklyn-based Coope is very much a contemporary artist. Born to an English father and American mother (whose original Martin acoustic she uses to compose), she was raised in the New York village of Cold Spring. The lonely landscapes and small towns of the Hudson Valley populate her songwriting, setting wintry backdrops against the acrobatics of her voice. Her experience making this record was a largely insular one, too; she began recording music while staying at a relative’s empty home in Beacon, NY, experimenting with recording software in an empty living room, singing directly into the open space. Until that point, Coope had only thought of herself as a visual artist, not a musician– but it felt right immediately. Throughout the next year, she worked to invent the lush, sweeping universe conveyed here. Her voice is the core of this work - emotive, oscillating between shadowy effervescence and something more guttural, building atop itself. Coope spent months teaching herself to sing in a new way, through hocketing and layering her voice, constructing choirs of herself. These songs often start from a chorus or phrase that gets stuck in Coope’s head and bloom into chaotic, fractured earworms. There’s a slew of past cultural touchstones that inform her approach to music making – the avant-garde art rock of the ‘80s; Trish Keenan or Su Tissue or Brigitte Fontaine; medieval choruses; church choirs; contemporary folk; romantic close harmonies groups of the ‘50s; Meara O'Reilly’s Hockets for Two Voices. But rather than the sonics of those works, Coope was instead moved by the ephemera surrounding them, their songs’ abilities to conjure whole worlds. Here, the lush, romantic opener “He Is On His Way Home, We Don’t Live Together” is the portal into Coope’s universe. It teeters in, disquieted, a choral slowburn building into something between hysteria and euphoria, with a slinking piano and a jarring electric guitar line closing out the din. On later songs, like “Sounds of a Giddy Woman,” the auditory illusions became tactile as she composed: “I was able to envision a room of things happening, rather than me just building something,” Coope says. “The record was me starting to think spatially about music.” Coope’s songwriting revolves around intuition and aesthetics, rather than precise lyrical storytelling; she has a striking ability to invoke a sense of movement with her makeshift mantras. The word “woman” appears repeatedly throughout the album’s song titles, but for Coope, that was an unconscious motif. “The word ‘woman’ was having a physical idea of what my songs were trying to represent through this idea of a muse or an idol or an icon,” she says. “It was a mix of the idea of being maternal, of housekeeping, and then also the idea of a character, a star.” The title track serves as a skeleton key for the entire record; “Darning Woman” is a hyperphysical sing-song, a literal instruction to darn and repair, the wane and waxing repetitions that make up a life. It’s the umbrella under which the rest of the songs live. Decisive in its fervor, it loops around nesting: mending, cleaning, housework – collecting, building, and decorating – the hands-on, tangible aspects of at-home life. These songs are built from that, and mantras plucked from the ether or poems and fragments of overheard conversations jotted down, transformed into an entity unknown. Like Coope’s paintings, drawings, and mixed media artworks, which occasionally feature among the imagery in her album and single materials, her songwriting yields an esoteric distance. It’s the feeling of the work pushing back on you, holding you at arms’ length. It invites you to see, to feel, rather than know – but for all that’s arcane here, Darning Woman is rooted deeply in the things we can touch. --Libby Webster
Cukor Bila Smert’ - Recordings 1990—1993 (2LP)Cukor Bila Smert’ - Recordings 1990—1993 (2LP)
Cukor Bila Smert’ - Recordings 1990—1993 (2LP)Shukai
¥7,287
The founders of Cukor Bila Smert’ (Ukrainian: Цукор – Біла Смерть, English: Sugar – White Death) band were Svitlana Okhrimenko (a.k.a. Svitlana Nianio), Oleksandr Kohanovs’kyi, and Tamila Mazur, who studied at the Reinhold Glier Kyiv Academy of Music in 1984-1988. In the summer of 1988, they got acquainted with Eugene Taran, a young guitarist and artist. He joined the band and also became the ideologist of Sugar – White Death. Moreover, Eugene coined the name for the band: the irony towards the Yellow Press. The musicians gathered at Kohanovs’kyi’s house, where they spent their free time not only playing music but also listening to and discussing new records and thinking about the conception of their new project. For two years, the band recorded a few home-made albums, such as “Rhododendrons Coral Aspides” in 1988 (which is considered lost), where Kostyantyn Dovzhenko took part as a guitarist and sound engineer. He also replaced Taran during the recording session because Eugene was passing an exam at that time. The band also recorded another album – “Lilies and Amaralises,” in 1989, which is also considered lost. Eugene remembers that the band made a lot of recordings but did not pay so much attention to them. Sugar – White Death played live occasionally but spent more time creating their own sound, which was named by Oleksii Dekhtyar (a founder of “Ivanov Down”) as a “sugar calypso sound.” At that time, the music was mostly created by Oleksandr Kohanovs’kyi, and the lyrics were written by Svitlana Okhrimenko and Eugene Taran. In February 1990, a quartet came to the Scientists House Studio in Kyiv, where they had one studio session only, recorded by Valerii Papchenko. Musicians played live for about one take. This session was represented on the “Mannered Music” compilation by several blocks – “Venus with Long Neck,” “The New Sissies,” and “Rhododendrons Coral Aspides,” which was shortened to “Rhododendrons” on the cassette (two songs from which – “Summer Will Not Come” and “The Great Hen-Yuan’ River,” dedicated to Grigorii Khoroshylov, the sinologist from Kyiv). The compilation cover design was created by Eugene Taran. Later, this tape got to Vlodek Nakonechnyj, the founder of Koka Records, a young Polish label, who released “Mannered Music” on cassettes and made efforts to invite Sugar – White Death to play several gigs in Poland. In November 1990, Sugar – White Death played their last gig as a quartet in Kharkiv. They were invited by Sergii Myasoyedov, who curated the art association “Nova Scena” (The New Scene). The band played selected tracks from the albums “The New Sissies” and “The Shellfishes in Gold Wrappers” (the last one is also considered lost). Due to Sergii Myasoyedov's efforts, the performance was documented: he saved a lot of photos and fragments of soundboard recordings on reel-to-reel tape. Later, Oleksandr Kohanovs’kyi and Tamila Mazur left Sugar – White Death: Oleksandr founded his own project Pan Kifared, and Tamila became a bass player of Shake Hi-Fi (whose co-founder was Eugene Taran). Sugar became a duo of Svitlana and Eugene. They started to focus on their next work: “Antinoy Is Leaving” in late 1990. In 1992, they were also invited by Sergii Myasoyedov for a studio session in Kharkiv, where due to the efforts of Oleksandr Vakulenko, Sugar recorded the new album called “All Secrets Of A Poem”. Some tracks from the work (“Dead Ceremony,” “Vienna Is Sleeping,” and “Untitled”) were released on their next and last album, “Selo” (“The Village”). The rest compositions were published as a part of the compilation for the first time. In the autumn of 1992, the musicians went to Poland, where Vlodek Nakonech- nyj, who wanted Sugar to come to a “real” studio, organized their last recording session. Although the journey’s beginning was unsuccessful (Eugene’s guitar was taken away by a customs officer when crossing the border), the musicians worked fast during the session at the Arek Waś studio at Marki on an 8-track reel-to-reel machine. Boleslav Blazhchyk took part as a cellist, playing the parts created by Svitlana. The album was completed in three days – the musicians spent two days recording and one-day mixing, mostly done by Eugene Taran. In 1993, this work was released as “Selo” (“The Village”) album on cassette tapes by Koka Records (remastered by Tadeusz Sudnik). Later, Sugar – White Death was disbanded.
Cat Power - Cat Power Sings Dylan: The 1966 (2LP+Japanese Obi)Cat Power - Cat Power Sings Dylan: The 1966 (2LP+Japanese Obi)
Cat Power - Cat Power Sings Dylan: The 1966 (2LP+Japanese Obi)Domino
¥5,343
In November 2022, Cat Power took the stage at London’s Royal Albert Hall and delivered a song-for-song recreation of one of the most fabled and transformative live sets of all time. Held at the Manchester Free Trade Hall in May 1966—but long known as the “Royal Albert Hall Concert” due to a mislabeled bootleg—the original performance saw Bob Dylan switching from acoustic to electric midway through the show, drawing ire from an audience of folk purists and forever altering the course of rock-and-roll. In her own rendition of that historic night, the artist otherwise known as Chan Marshall inhabited each song with equal parts conviction and grace and a palpable sense of protectiveness, ultimately transposing the anarchic tension of Dylan’s set with a warm and luminous joy. Now captured on the live album Cat Power Sings Dylan: The 1966 Royal Albert Hall Concert, Marshall’s spellbinding performance both lovingly honors her hero’s imprint on history and brings a stunning new vitality to many of his most revered songs.
Ronnie Lion - Spanish Town (LP)Ronnie Lion - Spanish Town (LP)
Ronnie Lion - Spanish Town (LP)Isle Of Jura
¥3,998
The debut solo album from Ronnie Lion, one half of Ambient Warrior, is a homage to Spanish Town the capital of St Catherine in Jamaica. As the title suggests the Spanish guitar features heavily from both Ronnie and lead guitarist Sean Wilkinson. The album has a reggae palette at its core with the rhythm section of Ronnie on Bass and Horseman on drums providing a rock solid foundation for the intricate and memorable hooks provided by Sean’s Spanish Guitar. The album’s fusion of Reggae with Bossa Nova & Flamenco Guitar creates another special album that will appeal to fans of Ambient Warrior and beyond. The LP is pressed on heavyweight 180 Gram Vinyl with full sleeve artwork from Bradley Pinkerton.
Nino Gvilia - Nicole / Overwhelmed by the Unexplained (LP)Nino Gvilia - Nicole / Overwhelmed by the Unexplained (LP)
Nino Gvilia - Nicole / Overwhelmed by the Unexplained (LP)Hive Mind Records
¥3,989
We invite you to enter the strange and enchanting world of Nino Gvilia, where nothing is quite what it seems. These two ep's (presented on one disc in March 2024) draw you deep into her dreamlike sound-world of hushed late night atmospherics and surreal songwriting. Born in Poti, near Lake Paliastomi in Georgia, Nino Gvilia is a singer-songwriter whose lyrics offer up meditations on what it is to be human in the 21st Century, and aim to carry us beyond into ecology and the politics of the non-human world. Her songs are influenced by folk and minimalism and make use of magnetic tapes, field recordings, vocal samples of contemporary thinkers and philosophers, and an array of strange instruments and vintage textures, drawing for us an intense dreamlike atmosphere. On these two EPs, Nino Gvilia collaborates with Zevi Bordovach (synth / keyboards) and Pietro Caramelli (electric guitar / vocals), with Giulia Pecora and Clarissa Marino adding violin and cello. Now I should tell you that Nino Gvilia does not exist. She is a purely fictional character invented in order to help us reflect on the place of the songwriter in times of global crisis.
Meril Wubslin - Faire ça (LP)
Meril Wubslin - Faire ça (LP)Les Disques Bongo Joe
¥3,989
Embarking on an unprecedented musical odyssey, Meril Wubslin unveils their highly anticipated fourth album, "Faire Ça," a sonic journey recorded in Kwake Bass' South London studio. This nine-track masterpiece defies genre boundaries, seamlessly merging blues, folk, post-rock, and dub, resulting in a distinctive and unparalleled palette born from all-night sessions and a shared love for avant-garde composers. Collaborating with Kwake Bass, celebrated for groundbreaking work with Sampha and Kae Tempest, the trio fearlessly navigates unfamiliar soundscapes. From the intimate blues and folk-inspired "Grands Espaces" to the experimental fusion of "La Main," and the electro-blues percussion of "Famille Phare," "Faire Ça" showcases the band's ability to craft a bold new shade that transcends its musical ingredients. Breaking free from norms, "Faire Ça" promises enduring musical rewards and solidifies the band's dedication to continuous evolution and exploration beyond the confines of conventional expectations.
Clarissa Connelly - World of Work (LP)Clarissa Connelly - World of Work (LP)
Clarissa Connelly - World of Work (LP)WARP
¥4,008
Clarissa Connelly is a Scottish-born, Copenhagen-based producer, composer, vocalist, and multi-instrumentalist who has been remarkably active in the last year, performing in the UK and EU as a front for Jenny Hval and joining Laurie Anderson's choir. She has also been performing with Laurie Anderson's choir. Her debut album "World of Work" will be released on April 12! Taking its title from French philosopher Georges Bataille's "Eroticism," "World of Work" explores the sacred and the profane, weaving together a dreamlike blend of Norse folk songs, Celtic mythology, black magic, and pop music on a total of nine tracks. The preceding single, "An Embroidery," describes the way sound grows, building up one sonic element at a time until it reaches a great cacophony. In this cacophony, Connelly brings together elements such as the sound of church bells and distorted bass guitar in a patchwork fashion. This is Connelly's gift for linking the ancient and the modern.
Joanne Robertson - Blue Car (LP)Joanne Robertson - Blue Car (LP)
Joanne Robertson - Blue Car (LP)AD 93
¥3,768
‘Blue Car’ is a collection of songs from Joanne's archive of unreleased solo recordings, similar to ‘Painting Stupid Girls’, these tracks attempt to record the moment, and where she was at emotionally that day, similar to diary entries. The dates she wrote these songs is unknown, they span roughly a ten year period.
Karen Dalton - 1966 (Green Vinyl LP+DL)
Karen Dalton - 1966 (Green Vinyl LP+DL)Delmore Recording Society
¥4,876
Karen Dalton was a remote, elusive creature. A hybrid of tough and tender with an unearthly voice that seemed to embody a time long past. As is often the case with such fragile beings, she instinctively understood that the only way to survive the harshness of the world around her, was to keep herself hidden. So it comes as no great surprise that she rarely sang in public or ventured into the unnatural setting of a recording studio. Only twice, for 1969’s It’s So Hard To Tell Who’s Going To Love You The Best and then again for 1971’s In My Own Time, was she coaxed from her habitat into the studio. Other times she made music in casual settings, sitting around a kitchen table or wood burning stove with her friends, singing and playing until daybreak. In 1966, Carl Baron brought his reel to reel over to her remote cabin in Summerville, Colorado and recorded one of those exquisite musical evenings. Karen and Richard Tucker were rehearsing for a gig when Carl hit the “Record” button. The result is a 45-year-old tape, carefully exhumed, documenting Karen at her most raw and unfiltered. On it are Fred Neil and Tim Hardin songs we’ve never heard Karen give voice to before, as well as traditional songs she uncannily makes her own, including a devastating version of ‘Katie Cruel’, that is so powerful, it is as if the ghost of Katie Cruel seeped into her blood. This recording is a window to her Summerville cabin opened, allowing us to eavesdrop on Karen Dalton at her most pure and unaffected.
Marissa Nadler & Happy Rhodes - Where Do I Go (Clear Color Vinyl 7")
Marissa Nadler & Happy Rhodes - Where Do I Go (Clear Color Vinyl 7")Numero Group
¥1,681
Ethereal dream gloom from a voice so unique they had to create an entirely new genre to contain all four octaves. Mixing classical music with synthesizer and acoustic guitar, Happy Rhodes' "ecto pop" never quite broke outside upstate New York, but that didn't stop gothic-americana queen Marissa Nadler from reinterpreting "Where Do I Go" in 2018. Both the original and cover have been paired here, housed in an elegant black and silver sleeve, with embossed braille lettering for the visually impaired.
Catherine Howe  - What a Beautiful Place (Yellow Color Vinyl)
Catherine Howe - What a Beautiful Place (Yellow Color Vinyl)Numero Group
¥3,697
This recorded autobiography of Catherine Howe, age 20, briefly appeared in 1971. Too young for memoirs, most artists have barely established any sort of musical competence by the age of legal adulthood, let alone compositions matching the maturity and complexity of Howe’s. What A Beautiful Place, however, is a prodigious effort wrought from the melancholy ruminations of post-adolescence. The album’s twelve songs unfold like a classic bildungsroman, beginning in the smoke-stained industrial county of Yorkshire, transformed by the electrified creative landscape of mid-century London, and retiring to the warm pastoral bliss of the county of Dorset on England’s southern coast. Produced by noted jazz pianist Bobby Scott, the LP—oft-mistaken for a concept album—was available for only a month in the summer of 1971, disappearing after Reflection Records’ shuttering in 1971.
Jimmy Carter & The Dallas County Green - Summer Brings the Sunshine (Opaque Green Vinyl LP)
Jimmy Carter & The Dallas County Green - Summer Brings the Sunshine (Opaque Green Vinyl LP)Numero Group
¥3,568
絵葉書のようなジャケット・アートに惑わされてはいけません!70年代半ばのレコード売り場に並んでいたメジャー・レーベルのカントリー・ロック・アルバムの中でも、頭ひとつ抜けた知られざる名作であるJimmy Carterの77年のアルバム『Summer Brings The Sunshine』が〈Numero Group〉からアナログ再発。ナッシュビルやロサンゼルスから送り出される何百、何千もの洗練されたプロダクションを横目にミズーリ州の田舎で農夫やセミプロたちと共に77年に録音した作品。味わい深い女性のバッキング・ヴォーカル、物憂げなペダル・スティール、気迫のこもったギター・リックなど、コズミック・アメリカン・ミュージックの高貴でピークに近いスライスに溢れています。
Andwella - To Dream (Grey Butterfly Effect Color Vinyl 3LP)Andwella - To Dream (Grey Butterfly Effect Color Vinyl 3LP)
Andwella - To Dream (Grey Butterfly Effect Color Vinyl 3LP)Numero Group
¥7,689
Hold on to your mind! Led by Belfast-born phenom David Lewis, Andwella made three LPs circa 1970 for London's Reflection label, redolent with Cream-y rock workouts, soaring post-Sgt. Pepper psych experimentation, and earthbound laments The Band might've dreamt up at Big Pink. Barely heard back then, they now conjure a popular rock fantasia to challenge the most expertly composed and orchestrated songs of the era. This deluxe set includes meticulous reproductions of the band’s 3-LP discography, plus an ephemera-packed booklet detailing Lewis's brief moment as a downbeat songwriting visionary at the height of his powers.
Gia Margaret - Romantic Piano (Hinoki Cypress Color Vinyl LP)Gia Margaret - Romantic Piano (Hinoki Cypress Color Vinyl LP)
Gia Margaret - Romantic Piano (Hinoki Cypress Color Vinyl LP)Jagjaguwar
¥3,859
At first, Gia Margaret called her new album ‘Romantic Piano’ to be a bit cheeky. Its spare, gentle piano works share more spirit with Erik Satie, Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guébrou and the ‘Marginalia’ releases of Masakatsu Takagi than they do with, say, a cozy and candlelit date night. But in that cheekiness lies hidden intention: across the gorgeous set, “Romantic” is suggested in a more classic sense, what the Germans call waldeinsamkeit. Its compositions conjure the sublime themes of the Romantic poets: solitude in nature; nature’s ability to heal and to teach; a sense of contented melancholy. "I wanted to make music that was useful,” says Margaret, vastly understating the power of the record. ‘Romantic Piano’ is curious, calming, patient and incredibly moving — but it doesn’t overstay its welcome for more than a second. Margaret’s debut, ‘There’s Always Glimmer,’ was a lyrical wonder, but when an illness on tour left her unable to sing, she made her ambient album ‘Mia Gargaret’ (another cheeky title!) which revealed a keen intuition for arrangement and composition not fully shown on ‘There’s Always Glimmer’s lyrical songs. ‘Romantic Piano’, too, is almost totally without words. “Writing instrumental music, in general, is a much more joyful process than I find in lyrical songwriting,” she says. “The process ultimately effects my songwriting.” And while Margaret has more songwriterly material on the way, ‘Romantic Piano’ solidifies her as a compositional force. Originally pursuing a degree in composition, Margaret dropped out of music school halfway through. “I really didn’t want to play in an orchestra,” she said of her decision, “I really just wanted to write movie scores. Then, I started to focus more and more on being a songwriter. ‘Romantic Piano’ scratched an old itch.” ‘Romantic Piano’ does indeed touch on a rare feeling in art often only reserved for the cinema — a simultaneous wide-lens awe of existence and the post-language intimate inner monologue of being marooned in these skulls of ours. How very Romantic!
Carmen Villain - Only Love From Now On (LP)Carmen Villain - Only Love From Now On (LP)
Carmen Villain - Only Love From Now On (LP)Smalltown Supersound
¥3,012
US-born, Norwegian-Mexican artist and producer Carmen Villain's fourth album Only Love From Now On is out February 25th, 2022 on Smalltown Supersound. The culmination of a build-up that began with a turn in sound evident on 2019's Both Lines Will Be Blue, Only Love From Now On presents Villain’s aesthetic blossoming into something unexpected, benevolent in its composure and altogether luxuriant in its sensuality. If her themes are wide, philosophical, and occasionally abstract, the emotional tenor of Hillestad's music is clear and purposeful. Makes sense that her key musical touchstones are dub, ambient, and cosmic jazz – flexible vehicles for tranquil wonder. Listening to Only Love From Now On is simultaneously comforting and alluringly strange. Partly it’s the contributions of guests Arve Henriksen (trumpet, electronics) and Johanna Scheie Orellana (flutes). Partly it’s the fluidity between instruments – such as clarinets – field recordings, the studio, jam, and careful composition. She calls the process a conversation with sound that occurs in her deliberate attempts to experiment with new methods, like granular synthesis, for her music-making. Only Love From Now On is fueled by the sense of scale in feeling small in the face of things so large, the contemplation of how the biggest impact we can have is in the people close to us, the attempt to make sure that impact is a positive one, and the choice to try to focus on love instead of fear. Hillestad describes it as "wishing to maintain a sense of careful optimism for the future, while on the cusp of something unknown."
Steve Gunn & David Moore - Reflections Vol. 1: Let the Moon Be a Planet (LP+DL)
Steve Gunn & David Moore - Reflections Vol. 1: Let the Moon Be a Planet (LP+DL)Rvng Intl.
¥3,254
Let the Moon Be a Planet marks the first volume of Reflections, a new series of contemporary collaborations orchestrated by RVNG Intl., and documents an inspired exchange between guitarist and songwriter Steve Gunn and pianist and composer David Moore of Bing & Ruth. Conjured by a mutual curiosity, and appreciation, for the respective musician’s work, Let the Moon Be a Planet initially took form over a progression of remote sessions and ultimately harmonized when Gunn and Moore completed the album together in the bucolic surroundings of Hudson, New York. Let the Moon Be a Planet is an invitation to relive the intimate moments shared between two artists finding their way along a single path, and into a world where the most subtle of gestures can ripple for an eternity.
Itasca - Spring (LP)
Itasca - Spring (LP)Paradise Of Bachelors
¥3,496
Itasca’s Kayla Cohen wrote the anticipated follow-up to her acclaimed 2016 album Open to Chance in a century-old adobe house in rural New Mexico. Inspired by the landscape and history of the Four Corners region, the sublime Spring—its title summoning both season and scarce local water sources—dowses a devotional path to high desert headwaters. Featuring contributions from Chris Cohen, Cooper Crain (Bitchin’ Bajas), James Elkington, and members of Gun Outfit and Sun Araw, Spring contains Cohen’s most quietly dazzling and self-assured set of songs to date. With color inner sleeve, lyrics, and high-res DL code. * In the fall of 2017, a year after the release of her acclaimed 2016 album Open to Chance, Kayla Cohen, the songwriter and guitarist who records and performs as Itasca, left her home in Los Angeles to live and write for two seasons in a century-old adobe house in rural New Mexico (pictured on the album cover). More urgent escape than fanciful escapade, the move from one Southwestern desert to another resulted from a set of dire circumstances, both personal and societal, not least of which was the sense, shared by many, that a sinister cabal of impaired lunatics had irredeemably poisoned the already sour well of our American discourse. She decided to drop out and dive deeper—hiking into the mountains, through fragrant juniper and piñon forests, past groves of golden cottonwoods, to the source of what she calls in the song “Cornsilk”—with a nod to poet Clayton Eshleman—“the canyoned river.” Inspired by the landscape and history of the Four Corners region, the resulting album, the sublime Spring—its title summoning both season and scarce local water sources—dowses a devotional path to high desert headwaters. Cohen followed some heavy footprints across the Sandia and Sangre de Cristo ranges. In the long American tradition of lighting out for the territories, many artists, particularly visual artists—including Terry Allen, Georgia O’Keefe, Agnes Martin, Walter de Maria, Bruce Nauman, and Susan Rothenberg—have famously sought refuge and inspiration in the Land of Enchantment. Captivating landscapes and the astonishing biodiversity aside (outside), foot-thick adobe walls provide a security and shelter—insulation and isolation—that can be hard to find in LA. With her studies of New Mexico’s long history and seismic geological and cultural changes, Cohen sought something different, more ancient—a hearth, a retreat from the noisy and noisome city, yes, but also a deeper historical understanding of urbanity and community, landscape and loss. (Chaco Canyon’s massive architectural complexes ranked as the largest buildings in North America until the late 19th century.) Her investigations bore bright fruit in the form of an interpretive travelogue: Spring, suffused with mystery and a keenly evoked sense of place, contains Cohen’s most quietly dazzling, coherent, and self-assured set of songs to date. Having withdrawn from and returned to the city, she sounds more like herself than ever before. In the context of the album’s bolder arrangements, her gorgeous, lambent voice and helical fingerstyle guitar plumb new depths of expressivity, confidence, and wonder. Inflected with flourishes recalling the ’70s orchestrated concept albums from which it draws influence, Spring resembles an archeological excavation of Cohen’s own encanyoned style. She recorded unhurriedly, in piecemeal fashion, with various collaborators: first to two-inch tape at Minbal studio in Chicago, with Cooper Crain (Bitchin’ Bajas) engineering; then to quarter-inch tape at home, with a Tascam 388; and finally overdubbing at Tropico in Los Angeles, with Greg Hartunian. Daniel Swire (drums), Kayla’s bandmate in Gun Outfit, and Marc Riordan (piano) of Sun Araw provided the exquisitely delicate rhythm section; Dave McPeters once again contributed lightning-field flashes of pedal steel; and James Elkington arranged the subtly cinematic strings (played by Jean Cook.) Chris Cohen mixed, imparting some of his signature classic pop dynamics, which press beyond the sonic realm of the solitary singer-songwriter. If Open to Chance felt moonlit, spectral and spooky, Spring sounds positively auroral, luminous, a brisk early morning walk through lucid daylit dreams, a series of vivid visions in thrall to the dusty New Mexican terrain. By opening themselves to multivalent interpretations, these generous, sun-dappled songs hide nothing. An intentional narrative of discovery connects the sequence, from the beckoning highway apparition in “Lily,” through the immersion in the “Blue Spring” dug deep into the recesses of a cliffside cave, to the resigned farewell of “A’s Lament” (which ends, poignantly, with a blessing to a departed friend: “I just want you to be free”). Elsewhere the links to Cohen’s research are oblique, more atmospheric and impressionistic than explicit. She carefully claims no authority or answers, but instead offers a traveler’s tranquil observation and wide-eyed reflection, weaving together her questions about the relationships between the land and the Ancestral Puebloan culture that shaped it with her questions about her own cultural and ecological bearings. Lead single “Bess’s Dance” provides a metaphorical key to the record’s concept, with a glimpse of the Basketmaker culture’s woven artifacts, functional art objects that so fascinated Cohen that she found herself dreaming their patterns: Change was rushed by the refrain Kept on dreaming of a basket, overflowing with grain A worn red cloth woven over the cobs single figure of the wild plain The song ends with a tidy summation of the project, a suggestion of how, through the lens of history and nature, Spring collapses ancient and contemporary contexts to push, languorously and gently, against the constraints of time: We create great stages where we act out the borders of desire
Sanford Clark - They Call Me Country (Opaque Blue Vinyl LP)Sanford Clark - They Call Me Country (Opaque Blue Vinyl LP)
Sanford Clark - They Call Me Country (Opaque Blue Vinyl LP)Numero Group
¥3,859
Propelled by his 1956 Lee Hazlewood-produced hit “The Fool,” Sanford Clark was already a rockabilly legend in his own right by the time he swapped his hair gel and switchblade for a pair of cowboy boots on They Call Me Country. Recorded between 1965-67 and originally released as a series of singles for Phoenix’s Ramco label, the 12 tracks on this LP borrow Bakersfield’s outlaw sound and ignore Nashville’s countrypolitan flair, standing as a true lost masterpiece of country music’s third generation. Clark’s booming baritone tells tales of bar fights, heartaches, and drinking til you can’t stand, while Waylon Jennings provides a backdrop of fuzzed out guitar twang. Mastered from the original session tapes and back on vinyl for the first time since the Nixon administration.
Branko Mataja - Over Fields And Mountains (White Blossom Vinyl LP)
Branko Mataja - Over Fields And Mountains (White Blossom Vinyl LP)Numero Group
¥3,859
Recalling Ennio Morricone spaghetti westerns, the electrified belly dance music of Omar Khorshid, and ’90s bedroom psychedelia at once, the music of Branko Mataja is from its own epoch. Snatched from the streets of Belgrade as a teenager, Mataja spent World War 2 in a German work camp, escaping the insanity of post-war Europe to settle in North Hollywood to live out the American Dream to its fullest. Crafting handmade music on homemade guitars throughout the 1970s, Mataja taught himself to play in order to pay homage to his ancestral home of Yugoslavia, a place he would never return to except through these guitar meditations.
Bon Iver - Bon Iver, Bon Iver (LP)
Bon Iver - Bon Iver, Bon Iver (LP)Jagjaguwar
¥3,496
Bon Iver, Bon Iver is Justin Vernon returning to former haunts with a new spirit. The reprises are there – solitude, quietude, hope and desperation compressed – but always a rhythm arises, a pulse vivified by gratitude and grace notes. The winter, the legend, has faded to just that, and this is the new momentary present. The icicles have dropped, rising up again as grass.
Mitski - The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We (LP)
Mitski - The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We (LP)Dead Oceans
¥3,597
Sometimes, Mitski says, it feels like life would be easier without hope, or a soul, or love. But when she closes her eyes and thinks about what’s truly hers, what can’t be repossessed or demolished, she sees love. “The best thing I ever did in my life was to love people,” Mitski says. “I wish I could leave behind all the love I have, after I die, so that I can shine all this goodness, all this good love that I’ve created onto other people.” She hopes her newest album, The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We, will continue to shine that love long after she’s gone. Listening to it, that’s precisely how it feels: like a love that’s haunting the land. Love is always radical, which means that it always disrupts, which means that it always takes work to receive it. This land, which already feels inhospitable to so many of its inhabitants, is about to feel hopelessly torn and tossed again – at times, devoid of love. This album offers the anodyne. “This is my most American album,” Mitski says about her seventh record, and the music feels like a profound act of witnessing this country, in all of its private sorrows and painful contradictions. But “maybe it’s beyond witnessing,” she says. At times, it feels like the album is an exercise in negative capability – a fearless embodiment and absorption of the pain of other bodies. When I ask her what the album would look like, if it were a person, she says it would be someone middle-aged and exhausted, perhaps someone having a midlife crisis. But through the daily indignity and exhaustion, something enormous and ecstatic is calling out. In this album, which is sonically Mitski’s most expansive, epic, and wise, the songs seem to be introducing wounds and then actively healing them. Here, love is time-traveling to bless our tender days, like the light from a distant star. Mitski wrote these songs in little bursts over the past few years, and they feel informed by moments of noticing – noticing a sound that’s out of place, a building that groans in decay, an opinion that splits a room, a feeling that can’t be contained in a body. It was recorded at both the Bomb Shelter in East Nashville and the Sunset Sound Studios in Los Angeles. The album incorporates an orchestra arranged and conducted by Drew Erickson, as well as a full choir of 17 people - 12 in LA and 5 in Nashville - arranged by Mitski. And for the first time, it felt important to Mitski to have a band recording live together in the studio, to create this new sublime sound. Working with her longtime producer Patrick Hyland, the album has a wide-range of references, from Ennio Morricone’s bombastic Spaghetti Western scores to Carter Burwell’s tundra-filling Fargo soundtrack, from the breathy intimacy of Arthur Russell to the strident aliveness of Scott Walker or Igor Stravinsky, from the jubilation of Caetano Veloso to the twangy longing of Faron Young. From the first track, the album introduces and then heals a wound. “Bug Like an Angel” finds the divine in the ordinary, in the boozy drowning of sorrow. The narrator sings from the strange comfort of rock bottom: “sometimes a drink feels like family.” And suddenly, that choir of angels sings: “FAMILY!” This first track introduces a cosmic paradox: “The wrath of the devil was also given him by God.” This is an album in which dark and light exist in the same gesture, the same broken prayer. Like the Buddha inviting the demon Mara in for tea, The Land embraces brutal, daily pain — the necessary toll of transcendent love. In “Buffalo Replaced,” the wail of a freight train replaces the vibrations of the long-gone stampeding buffalo. Here, hope itself is personified, anthropomorphized into a sleeping creature, and our narrator wonders if life would be easier without her. But then, as though in response, “Heaven” offers a beautiful moment of passion, preserved like a fossil in time even though the “dark awaits us all around the corner.” This oasis is aggressively interrupted by “I Don’t Like My Mind,” a song from the perspective of someone in extraordinary pain. They are begging to keep their job, while actively keeping terrible traumatic memories at bay. Without their employment, these memories might take over, consuming them as relentlessly as the cake that they ate one “inconvenient Christmas.” The toggling between hope and despair in these four songs is masterful — the good, the bad, and the ugly in America’s backyard. This mythology continues to deepen with the stunning “The Deal,” in which someone is so burdened by their soul that they beg for it to be taken from them. Soon, the singer’s soul is revealed to be a bird perched on a streetlight. In a coup of songwriting, the narration does not switch into the newly-souled bird’s voice. No, we stay with the soulless “I.” The bird calls down: “You’re a cage without me. / Your pain is eased but you’ll never be free.” This song reinforces the album’s tug-of-war between the intoxication of love and the pain of isolation. Close on its heels is “My Love Mine All Mine,” an instant classic and the beating heart of the album, wherein the singer imagines their love shining down on the earth from the moon, long after the speaker is gone. “It’s just witness-less me,” she sings on “The Frost,” which suddenly takes us from the anticipation of loss right into the aching loneliness of it. On the subject of witnessing, Mitski says: “I’ve always been the person on the outside watching. And I’ve also done that with myself... outside of myself, witnessing myself, watching myself.” She thinks that she might have adopted this habit as a condition of being a woman of color, and that it’s led to the occasional post-apocalyptic fantasy of being the only person left in the world. We talked about Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, in which a man is profoundly alone, with only an archive of old tapes to keep him company. He remembers the seismic event of an old sexual encounter, but now it’s: “Past midnight. Never knew such silence. The earth might be uninhabited.” The Land repeatedly offers that same hypothesis. Without love, is there anyone here? After the alien lift of “Star” comes the album’s showdown. “I’m Your Man” feels as inevitable, bloody, and haunting as a Sergio Leone duel scene. The “Man” in the title isn’t some fella proclaiming devotion, Mitski says, but rather the man inside her head, the haunting patriarch who treats her like a dog and can destroy her at whim. Despite his confidence and swagger, he is tracked down by a pack of hounds — who have unionized in the name of catharsis. After this violent reckoning, a Fowler’s Toad calls out in what sounds like a human scream. The night settles into silence. The earth might be uninhabited. We glide into the liberating closer, “I Love Me After You,” in which someone is truly alone but truly free. King of all the land. “I don’t have a self,” Mitski observes. “I have a million selves, and they’re all me, and I inhabit them, and they all live inside me.” Loving all of these selves does not yield the easy burst of a pop song. It’s the “long, complex, deep love, that you can never get to the end of, that’s always evolving, like a person. And there’s just no end to it. It feels like space travel.” The album is full of the ache of the grown- up, seemingly mundane heartbreaks and joys that are often unsung but feel enormous. It’s a tiny epic. From the bottom of a glass, to a driveway slushy with memory and snow, to a freight train barreling through the Midwest, and all the way to the moon, it feels like everything, and everyone, is crying out, screaming in pain, arching towards love. Maybe this is what our best artists do: take a spaceship into the furthest reaches of pain, in order to bring back the elixir that we already had inside us. The unknowable known of love. “You have to go to both worlds all the time,” Mitski says, by which she means the mysterious world of making and the brutal world of living. This album is an act of hyperlocal space travel. Love is that inhospitable land, beckoning us and then rejecting us. To love this place — this earth, this America, this body — takes active work. It might be impossible. The best things are.
Bill Fay - Still Some Light: Part 1 (2LP)
Bill Fay - Still Some Light: Part 1 (2LP)Dead Oceans
¥4,654
Scheduled to arrive in late February, reservations are being accepted. The editorial board released on CD from in 2010 by British singer-songwriter Bill Fay has been re-released in analog form from . He left two great works on Deram, 1970's Bill Fay and 1971's Time Of The Last Persecution, but little was known at the time. In the 1990s, his work gained cult popularity, and when it was reissued in 2005, his secular folk and pop hymns gained new fans and his career began. Re-evaluated. This work is a collection of 1970s demos and home recordings released in 2010. In addition to these songs, this reissue includes rework by contemporary artists who were heavily influenced by Bill Fay's music such as Kevin Morby, Mary Lattimore, Julia Jacklin, and Steve Gunn.
Phoebe Bridgers - Punisher (LP)Phoebe Bridgers - Punisher (LP)
Phoebe Bridgers - Punisher (LP)Dead Oceans
¥3,496
Punisher is the second studio album by American singer-songwriter Phoebe Bridgers, released on June 18, 2020 by Dead Oceans. Bridgers first established herself with her 2017 debut, Stranger in the Alps, a widely acclaimed indie rock effort. In the years preceding her second album, the California native formed the bands boygenius and Better Oblivion Community Center. On Punisher, Bridgers' songwriting is somber and sardonic; deeply personal in nature, it explores topics like dissociation and fragmenting relationships.

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