Indie / Alternative

This one’s been teased for awhile, decades even. The Hated box set was an idea before Numero was an idea. Today we’re pleased to announce the first of five planned Hated collections that we’ll be rolling out over the next several years. Up first is Best Piece Of Shit Vol. 4, which compiles the Annapolis quartet’s earliest explorations into revolution summer emo. Spread across two LPs is the band’s 1985 debut cassette, the No More We Cry EP, and 14 period bonus tracks from these hardcore hooligans. We’ve also made a limited 7”+CD+tape edition with an additional five bonus tracks. Andrew Gephardt and Ken Shipley provide lengthy essays on the band and scene, illustrated by dozens of photographs from the band’s archive. We’ve got 500 copies broken bone white wax on both, but not for long. The Hated on Numero… Never said it’d be like this, right?

Music From Memory quietly released the stunning debut album from the mysterious duo The Zenmenn (who turned out to be musicians Magnus Bang Olsen and Ben Anderson) in 2021. ‘Hidden Gem’, recorded with singer and songwriter John Moods, serves as a kind of companion piece to ‘Meet The Zenmenn’ (its title the same as a song that didn’t make that debut’s final cut). Another set of extended jams encompassing country, AM rock and folk. Music From Memory are delighted to present a new chapter in their ongoing collaboration with Berlin based band The Zenmenn. 'Hidden Gem' is the band’s first full album produced together with songwriter and vocalist John Moods and follows their much-loved debut record, 'Enter The Zenmenn'. Named after a country song that didn't quite make it to the final selection, 'Hidden Gem' is the result of an extended jam session at a friend’s studio, in a field of mystical meadows somewhere south of Hamburg, in which the band would experience a series of inexplicable phenomena. It was their earlier collaboration on the future classic, 'Homage To A Friend' that kickstarted their idea to team up with John Moods again, and in the late summer of 2021 the band set to work on a full album of material together. Using The Zenmenn's trusted drum kit, good old DX7, an unusual Ukrainian bass and an almost discarded pedal steel guitar, combined with Moods’ uniquely fragile voice, the outcome resulted in six timeless songs. The resulting harmonic sound is, as the band put it, “something like Adult Oriented Rock with a teaspoon of Celtic sentimentalism, a pinch of big city Country wrapped in a late night '70s style jam”. 'Hidden Gem’, much like their debut 'Enter The Zenmenn’, was recorded without pre-arranged songs or any fixed musical concept. Instead, it captures fleeting moments of creativity and reflects the joint musical sentiments of the band members at the time. “Some artists are amazing at vision and curating, our work-flow is opposite to that. We are pretty messy and all over the place in our creation, as in life. It has its advantages and disadvantages, but hopefully it comes out all right in the end.” MFM060 will be released in LP and digital format, and comes with artwork by Bráulio Amado. The album is expected to release on October 17th 2022.

Swell Maps / Television Personalities affiliated C86-era indie pop rescued from sheer obscurity and thrust into semi-obscurity by FELT. The Catburgers were a short-lived Scottish group, this recording initially primed for release on Dan Treacy’s Dreamworld imprint yet placed on the perennial backburner as so many creative projects inevitably are.

Soundcloud uploads dating back over a decade ago and the odd blog/twitter post aside, the group lived on only in the memories of those who happened to catch them on the Edinburgh scene back in the day. Until now! With the help of the National Sound Archives, the original master tape containing these three tracks has been rebaked, cut and mastered for seven-inch.

‘Holiday House’ sounds immediately at home in the Postcard Records nexus, the influence of 1980 particularly tangible. Slower paced and with a touch more melancholy than its companions, the song sounds both in and out of time, as if some young teens raised on a hand-me-down diet of Pastels CDs might have laid it down yesterday.

Jowe Head of Swell Maps joins the group for ‘The Acid Tree’, whilst EP closer ‘Diving For The Brick’ sees the band ruminating on weak knees, sore lungs and stinging eyes down at the local swimming pool.

Recorded at Electro Rhythm Studio, London on 28th February 1987

Guitar & Vox: Robert Jones
Bass: Stuart Macgregor
Drums: Jeff Duffy
Producer: Jowe Head
Engineer: Wilson Sharp
Mastering: Mark Klon
Audio Restoration: Conor Walker
Cover Photo: Gerard Livett
Sleeve Design: Andrew Beltran

Japanese Breakfast's 'Soft Sounds From Another Planet' is less of a concept album about space exploration so much as it is a mood board come to life. Over the course of 12 tracks, Michelle Zauner explores a sonic landscape of her own design, one that's big enough to contain her influences. There are songs on this album that recall the pathos of Roy Orbison’s ballads, while others could soundtrack a cinematic drive down one of Blade Runner's endless skyways. Zauner's voice is capacious; one moment she's serenading the past, the next she's robotically narrating a love story over sleek monochrome, her lyrics more pointed and personal than ever before. While 'Psychopomp' was a genre-spanning introduction to Japanese Breakfast, this visionary sophomore album launches the project to new heights.

To celebrate Arbutus' 100th release we have created a compilation of our artists covering each other's songs. Available on cassette and digital download, all proceeds from the cassette will be donated to Suicide Action Montreal.

Léonore Boulanger studied drama, experimental jazz improvisation and Persian music in Paris. Her music reflects her wide interest in African folk and in composers such as George Crumb, Teiji Ito, Harry Partch and singer Meredith Monk. For their fifth album, Un Lièvre Etait un Très Cher Baiser Léonore Boulanger and Jean-Daniel Botta with percussionist Laurent Sériès compose and decompose a set of fragments of the outsider art poetry of Ernst Herbeck from Gugging center in Austria. Small formats for the movement, singed in German as in a Kindergarten Krautrock: imaginary folk, music boxes, r'n'b medievalism, motets and futuristic madrigals set up like hopscotches, Byzantine mathematics.

After a 19-year hiatus, Duster came back with their S/T chef-d'oeuvre in 2019. Recorded in band member Clay Parton’s garage (aka Low Earth Orbit), the record bears all the hallmarks of the band’s early work: gaunt basslines, spindly guitars, and melancholy lyrics that lurk in the background.

On-U Sound are proud to present a new album from longtime friend and associate of the label, Jeb Loy Nichols. Produced by Adrian Sherwood, with careful arrangements framing twelve beautiful, acoustic-based songs. The album features contributions from the likes of Martin Duffy (Primal Scream/Felt) and Ivan “Celloman” Hussey, fresh from his work on the massively acclaimed duo of Horace Andy albums, Midnight Rocker and Midnight Scorchers, both of which featured songwriting contributions from Jeb Loy.

Jeb Loy comments: "The United States Of The Broken Hearted has been forty years in the making. I’ve known Adrian, and considered him one of my closest friends, for that long. During that time we’ve spent more hours listening, and talking about, music than anything else. Reggae, Country, Folk, Jazz, Soul; it’s been the backdrop to our friendship. Adrian introduced me to some of my favourite music; Count Ossie, Culture, Harry Beckett, Mulatu Astatke. Through the years we’ve listened to Sun Ra, Lee Perry, Ornette Coleman, Johnny Cash, Woody Guthrie. A couple years ago, on a visit to Adrian, I mentioned Gram Parsons’s concept of ‘American Cosmic Music’, the melting mix of musical genres that constitutes a uniquely American sound. We talked about recording a record that incorporated all the influences I’d gathered, from Bluegrass to Jazz to Reggae to Soul. The United States Of The Broken Hearted is that record. We wanted to include Folk (Deportees), Country (Satisfied Mind), protest songs (I Hate The Capitalist System), and songs of my own that bore the marks of those that had gone before. I sang the songs and played guitar; Adrian brought in friends and fellow travellers to finish them. It’s all there, Soul, Jazz, Country, Folk; and underlying everything, Adrian’s Reggae infused production.”

Adrian Sherwood adds: “This is Jeb’s ‘Great American Songbook’, he’s become such a great singer and songwriter over the years. This is a beautiful piece of work reminiscent of our mutual love for the Miracle album I made with Bim Sherman. I’m really proud of this record and it’s a fitting follow-up to Long Time Traveller.” 

Mansoor Brown is an artist, producer and multi-instrumentalist from Brixton, London. The debut work from , led by Henry Wu, who is the typhoon of the new generation of UK jazz, has attracted attention to the extent that Robert Glasper and Thundercat have been cited, and he has released the latest mixtape. !

It has a cinematic style throughout, and it can be said that the expressive power of the internal guitar that can be felt everywhere is a sound unique to Mansoor Brown. The B-side contains 4 songs developed without beats, and you can fully enjoy his guitar sound. "Meikai", which decorates the last track, is the closest to ambient music in the work, and it is a must-listen song that invites you to another world with modulated vocals, sparkling guitar sounds, and the electronic sound that appears at the end!

New Zealand’s Marlon Williams has quite simply got one of the most extraordinary, effortlessly distinctive voices of his generation—a fact well known to fans of his first, self-titled solo album, and his captivating live shows. An otherworldly instrument with an affecting vibrato, it’s a voice that’s earned repeated comparisons to the great Roy Orbison, and even briefly had Williams, in his youth, consider a career in classical singing, before realizing his temperament was more Stratocaster than Stradivarius.

But it’s the art of songwriting that has bedeviled the artist, and into which he has grown exponentially on his second album, Make Way For Love, out in February of 2018. It’s Marlon Williams like you’ve never heard him before—exploring new musical terrain and revealing himself in an unprecedented way, in the wake of a fractured relationship.

Like any good New Zealander, Williams doesn’t boast or sugarcoat: songwriting is still not his favorite endeavor. “I mean, I find it ecstatic to finish a song,” he explains. “To have done one doesn’t feel like an accomplishment as much as a relief and maybe a curiosity, you know? To have come through to the other side and have something. But it certainly always feels messy.” In the past, his default approach to was storytelling. On 2015’s Marlon Williams, the musician took a cue from traditional folk and bluegrass, and wove dark, character-driven tales: “Hello Miss Lonesome”, “Strange Things” and “Dark Child”. But when it came to sharing his own life in song, he was more reticent. “I’ve always had this sort of hang up about putting too much of myself into my music,” he admits. “All of the projects I’ve ever been in, there was a conscientious effort to try and have this barrier between myself and the emotional crux of the music. I’ve loved writing characters into my songs, or at least pretending that it wasn’t me that it was about.”

Sensing that people wanted more Marlon from Marlon, on album number two he was determined to deliver. And while he’s still a firm believer in the art of cover songs—his live shows regularly feature covers of songs by artists ranging from Townes Van Zandt to Yoko Ono—Williams wanted the new record to be all original material. By the autumn of last year, with a recording deadline looming the following February, it was crunch time for the musician, a reflexive procrastinator. “I hadn’t written for two years!” he recalls. What was needed was a lyrical spark. A triggering event, perhaps. As it turns out, life delivered just that.

In early December, Williams and his longtime girlfriend, musician Aldous (Hannah) Harding, broke up—the end of a relationship that brought together two of Down Under’s most acclaimed talents of recent years, who’d managed to navigate the challenges of having equally ascendant—though separate—careers, until they couldn’t. While personally wrenching, the split seemed to open the floodgates for Williams as a writer. “Then I wrote about fifteen songs in a month,” he recalls. The biggest challenge? Condensing often complex, conflicted emotions and doing them justice. “Just narrowing the possibilities into a three-minute song makes me feel dirty”, he explains. Also, not making a breakup record that was too much of a downer. “I had a lot of good friends saying, ‘Don’t worry about sounding too sad,’” he says. “They were saying, ‘Just go with it.’”

Sure enough, while Make Way For Love draws on Williams’ own story, in remarkably universal terms it captures the vagaries of relationships that we’ve all been through: the bliss (opener “Come To Me”); ache (“Love Is a Terrible Thing”, a ballad that likens post-breakup emptiness to “a snowman melting in the spring”); nagging questions (“Can I Call You”, which wonders aloud what his ex is drinking, who she’s with, and if she’s happy); and bitterness (“The Fire Of Love”, whose lyrics Williams says he “agonized over” more than any).

On “Party Boy”, over an urgent, moody gallop that recalls his last album’s “Hello Miss Lonesome”, Williams conjures the image (a composite of people he knows, he says) of that guy who has just the stuff to keep the party going ‘til dawn, and who you might catch “sniffin’ around” your “pride and joy.” There’s “Beautiful Dress”, on which Williams seems to channel balladeer Elvis on the verse and the Future Feminist herself, Ahnoni, on a lilting, tremulous hook; in contrast, the brooding “I Didn’t Make A Plan”, casts Williams as the cad. In a deep-voiced delivery akin to Leonard Cohen—unusual for the singer—he callously, matter-of-factly tosses a lover aside, just cuz. It’s brutal, but so, sometimes, is life. And there’s “Nobody Gets What They Want Anymore”, a duet with Harding, recorded after the two broke up, with Williams directing Harding’s recording via a late-night long distance phone call. “It made the most sense to have her singing on it,” he says. “But it wasn’t that easy to make that happen.”

Williams flipped the script recording-wise as well. After three weeks of pre-production five doors from his mother’s house in his native Lyttelton, New Zealand (for several years, Williams has made his home in Melbourne) with regular collaborator Ben Edwards—“really the only person I’d ever worked with before”—Williams and his backing band, The Yarra Benders, then decamped 7000 miles away, to Northern California’s Panoramic Studios, to record with producer Noah Georgeson, who’s helmed baroque pop and alt-folk gems by Joanna Newsom, Adam Green, Little Joy and Devendra Banhart. “I was a really big fan of those Cate Le Bon records he did [Mug Museum, Crab Day],” Williams says. “I was obsessed with those albums.”

If the idea in going so far from home to make the new record was to shake things up and get out of his Kiwi comfort zone, Williams succeeded—to the point where at first he wondered if he’d gone too far. “The first couple of days I nearly had a breakdown,” he recalls. “Just cause I got there and I’m working with Noah on this really personal record having only met twice before over a coffee. I was like, ‘I wish we’d talked about it a little bit more’ and figured out exactly how the dynamic was going to work.” Williams is a worrier. But he needn’t worry. He and Georgeson settled into a zone over twelve days of recording, helped by the bonding experience of what Williams describes as the “greatest prank of all time”, with Georgeson convincing both Williams and multi-instrumentalist Dave Khan that there was a ghost in the studio, using an effect on his keyboard. Georgeson made his mark on the record as well, adding a fresh perspective on songs that had been well developed in pre-production, and alongside the incredible performances by The Yarra Benders, they have, in Make Way For Love, a triumph on their hands.

The record also moves Williams several paces away from “country”—the genre that’s been affixed to him more than any in recent years, but one that’s always been a bit too reductive to be wholly accurate. Going back to his high school years band The Unfaithful Ways and his subsequent Sad But True series of collaborations with fellow New Zealander Delaney Davidson, and on through his first solo LP, Williams has proven himself plenty adept with country sounds, but also bluegrass, folk, blues and even retro pop. “I think I’ve always been sort of mischievously passive when people use that term [“country”] to describe me,” he says. “I like letting labels be and sort of just play that out.” Make Way For Love, with forays into cinematic strings, reverb, rollicking guitar and at least one quiet piano ballad, is more expansive—while still retaining, on “Party Boy” and “I Know A Jeweller”, some cowboy vibes, the record will likely invoke as many Scott Walker and Ennio Morricone mentions as it does country ones. “I think just having the time,” he explains, “and having just finished a cycle of playing these quite heavily country-leaning songs for the last three or four years, and playing them a lot, has definitely pushed me into exploring other things.

As ever, you can expect some memorable videos with the new album. As reluctant as he’s been to put his lyrical heart on his sleeve in the past, Williams has never been shy about visuals and the more performative aspects of his art. Unlike many of his folk and alt-country brethren, Williams embraces the chameleonic possibilities offered by music videos. Since The Unfaithful Ways, he’s appeared in nearly all of his videos, assuming a variety of characters—multiple ones, in the Roshomon-like “Dark Child.” He’s gotten naked and visceral, in “Hello Miss Lonesome” and loose and playful in this past summer’s one-off, “Vampire Again”, which saw Williams as a goofy Nosferatu—his most lighthearted persona to date. “For me, I think that ambiguity is such an important part of my process and my art,” he explains, “that [videos are] just another way to further muddy the waters, you know? And I look for that, I think.” He’ll further muddy the waters with a new video for opening single “Nobody Gets What They Want Anymore”, directed by Ben Kitnick, in which Williams plays an overwhelmed waiter at a restaurant full of demanding hipsters.

On the live front, Williams—who’s been a road dog in recent years, touring with Justin Townes Earle, Band Of Horses, City & Colour and Iron & Wine’s Sam Beam —had a comparatively low-key 2017, though appearances at Newport Folk Festival, Pickathon and Into The Great Wide Open kept him in game shape, not to mention February support dates in New Zealand for none other than Bruce Springsteen. In 2018, Williams will head out on a 50 plus date world tour, taking the music of Make Way For Love far and wide. They’re songs that need to be heard by anyone who’s ever loved, and lost, and loved again.

If “breakup record” is a trope—and certainly it is—then Marlon Williams has done it proud. Like the best of the lot—Beck’s Sea Change, Bon Iver’s For Emma, Forever Ago, Phosphorescent’s harrowing “Song For Zula” and Joni Mitchell’s masterpiece Blue (written perhaps not coincidentally, following her own breakup with another gifted musician) Make Way For Love doesn’t shy away from heartbreak, but rather stares it in the face, and mines beauty from it. Delicate and bold, tender and searing, it’s a mightily personal new step for the Kiwi, and ultimately, on the record’s final, title track, Williams dusts himself off and is ready to move forward. Set to a doo-wop backdrop and in language he calls “deliberately archaic”, that superb voice sings: “Here is the will/ Here is the way/ The way into love/ Oh, let the wonder of the ages/ Be revealed as love.”


John Norris
October 2017 

Both versions were recorded around 2014: “Fourth of July (April Base Version)” was recorded in Eau Claire, WI at Justin Vernon’s April Base studio, and “Fourth of July (DUMBO Version)” was recorded in Sufjan’s old studio in Brooklyn, NY. The original version of “Fourth of July” appeared on Sufjan’s 2015 album, Carrie & Lowell. As is (and was) his custom, Sufjan would often rework different versions of his songs while recording an album, and “Fourth of July” was no exception. (Other versions & remixes of the song were released on “The Greatest Gift” mixtape and on the “Exploding Whale” 7” single.) These two latest versions were recently found on old harddrives. The refrain of the song, “We’re all gonna die,” invokes a meditation on human mortality and fragility, even as it acts as an anchor of stoic hope. Its solemnity invites listeners to feel comfort, connection — even joy — wrought from great pain and loss. The song has recently had a resurgence with listeners — which may speak to a deep national grief and sense of loss. A limited run physical 7" in red will be released in December 2022, which marks the 10-year anniversary of Carrie’s death.

The latest act to emerge from MFM's new album series is another super-powerful one. Heisei No Oto" is a masterpiece that presents even Japan's unique book-off style digs to the world, and "Virtual Dreams" is a must-have 90's techno and house compilation that looks through the prism of the new age revival. The Zenmenn, a mysterious new band from the newly established Music From Memory label, has released their debut album. Their fresh and organic indie music is a combination of oriental lefty pop, new age/ambient, Sufjan Stevens, and even Shintaro Sakamoto. The band's name may also come from the word "Zen"? Their timeless sound and vibes make for a great listening experience no matter where you are!

A lingering guitar note. A cushion of a bassline nudging along a hushed cadence unspooling impressionistic poeticism one halting line at a time; the sparse snap of a snare providing punctuation. This is how Boston’s Karate opened their third full-length, 1998’s The Bed Is In The Ocean. Perhaps this was a reaction to the aggressive punk tones that marked their previous album, or maybe they hoped to capture the somnambulant dusk on one of those pristine fall days that make living in a town whose population swells when colleges welcome back students all worthwhile. Then again, Karate never made a point of chasing the same idea twice, and “There Are Ghosts” remains in line with the band’s stylistic intrepidness and unpredictability. Even the group’s lineup appeared constantly in flux. After expanding from a trio to a quartet and employing a dual-guitar attack with 1997’s In Place of Real Insight, founding member Eamonn Vitt hung up his axe to attend medical school. Karate soldiered on as a trio, with mid-stream addition Jeff Goddard’s bass work helping establish a sidewinding path forward through the smoky jazz melodicism and sun-beaten blues brushstrokes that hung in the background of the band’s catalog. In their short time together, Karate helped bolster the national punk ecosystem, a scene in which individual artistic vision was prized but rarely achieved. Their exacting precision and emotive interplay helped recombine the DNA of the dignified grace of slowcore, the hot-and-sweaty atmospherics of the blues, and the high-wire tension of post-hardcore to deliver drawling instrumental curveballs and a furtive riptide climax with a controlled grace on “Outside Is The Drama.” Singer-guitarist Geoff Farina frequently teased out the emotional nuances of each song, his worn-in voice shading in the complexities of his enigmatic lyrics; no matter how difficult it may be to parse his snatched-from-daily-life wisdoms, on The Bed Is In The Ocean Farina sounded like a guy who knew exactly the right thing to tell whoever may be listening. And with Karate’s snaking turns through quasi-punk reveries no one else appeared capable of mustering, it’s comforting to hear it accomplished by a band that knew exactly what they were doing.

“Even my subconscious is self-conscious,” Okay Kaya sings on “Inside Of A Plum”, giving us a sense of the mental state she entered while making SAP, an album she wrote, performed, engineered, and produced alone, sometimes spending weeks at a time without social interaction. This is a concept album about consciousness in which Okay Kaya focuses her trademark combination of abstraction and wit on what happens to her mind unaccompanied, on her tendency to feel less like a human and more like the sticky secretion of a tree. After releasing her Spellemann Award winning album Watch This Liquid Pour Itself in January of 2020, Kaya left her home in New York and moved to Europe to create and show her various interdisciplinary exhibitions. Among others, she made an installation that amplified music made underwater and an interactive sculpture based on Jungian sandplay therapy for children. Between her exhibits, Kaya recorded through lockdowns by herself in the loaned studios of generous friends. SAP first grew from the first single “Spinal Tap” about Kaya wandering in Berlin, tree-touching. “Sap reminds me of the bodily functions I need to remember to do, like sleep. One might say it ‘resinates.’” The album was further inspired by Ketamine Therapy which is discussed in “The Inside Of A Plum.” Kaya explains, “The doctor said this treatment grows literal physical branches in your brain.” As she experimented with ego death, the subject of her song “Jazzercise”, Kaya found herself writing in the voices of fictional characters she’d encountered in other people’s stories. In ‘Jolene From Her Own Perspective,’ she imagines Dolly Parton’s nemesis responding to her song. In ‘Origin Story,’ Kaya writes as a mythical goddess frustrated with her creation myth. In ‘I’ve Spent Forever Planning A Crisis,’ Kaya responds to Cassavetes’ film A Woman Under The Influence writing from the perspective of the story’s children. Okay Kaya’s investigations of mind-body come along with sexy dance beats, unpredictable interlocking synths, delicate soft guitars, and close-to-the-mike R&B whispering. But Kaya likes her falsettos cracking and her soul-inspired hooks careening wildly, a beautiful chaos that somehow fits together. When she returned to New York, Kaya was excited to collaborate again, to get friends to “bless the record.” She invited friends to Gaia Studios in Greenpoint, Brooklyn to sing or play an instrument. Most songs on the album unfold with guest performances from artists as varied as deem spencer, Taja Cheek of L’Rain and Adam Green of The Moldy Peaches. Just as the recording process began with isolation and ended with friends, SAP starts with the internal and leads outside to romance, to lovers who serve as funhouse mirrors, reflecting Kaya back to herself from different angles. In “Pearl Gurl” Kaya harmonizes with her multi-tracked second self and sings her uncertain conclusion: “If love is not the answer, it’s one hell of a question.”

Epic Garden Music is the debut studio album by English post-punk band Sad Lovers & Giants. It was released in 1982 on the band's own record label, Midnight Music.

Limited edition of 500.

Their shambolic 1994 debut, remastered from the original tapes and presented in lavish, gatefold form. A mix of restrained loud and purposeful quiet, WhatFunLifeWas’s eleven tracks unfold at a marathon runner’s pace, picking up speed when necessary, but its eye on completing a personal race. Singer Matt Kadane’s soft, semi-drawl is buried in the mix, letting brother Bubba and Tench Coxe’s guitars weave cleanly around drummer Trini Martinez’s all-ride-all-the-time timekeeping.

The long-awaited album from Twain released via Keeled Scales is his first-ever double LP titled Noon. Twain’s first album in three years, Noon looks to explore the balancing exercise between soul-fantasy and self- scrutiny. The songs on Noon try to sit in the liminal state between the spirit’s ambition for itself and the often harsh truth of the present. The hope is to erode the barrier between those two states. ‘Twain’ is Mat Davidson’s approach to reconcile those two states, and to forget that they could ever exist in opposition.

“Yīn Yīn hop and bound along, being whisked up by the pure joy of their experimentation, unafraid to see how far from home it takes them...eccentric, boundary-bashing, genre-melding groove.” – The Line of Best Fit YĪN YĪN’s dazzling second album dives even deeper into dancefloor propulsion and space travel atmospherics than their lauded debut The Rabbit that Hunts Tigers (2019). While there is an expanded sonic richness on the new album as samples, drum computers and otherworldly synthesizers intertwine with the band’s taut playing, more than anything The Age of Aquarius is a simple, direct appeal to dance. The record’s groove manifesto can be put down to YĪN YĪN’s experiences on the road, where the positive energies picked up from their audiences fed back into a sound that increasingly “kept people moving.” Funk and disco beats. Electro experimentation. Global retro vibes. A shimmering, cinematic sweep. --------------------------------------------- YĪN YĪN’s new long player, The Age of Aquarius, is a simple, direct appeal to dance. It is also a record blessed with a considerable hinterland; with cosmic time, long studio hours and a determination to transcend the daily ennui of living in the Dutch city of Maastricht all playing their part. YĪN YĪN see themselves as a bunch of musical dreamers. The track ‘Declined by Universe’ references the fact that “we’re all kinds of drop outs.” The beautiful, old and somewhat staid city of Maastricht, where the band is based, isn’t really conducive to setting up a bustling music scene: and it’s a place where the outsiders quickly recognize each other. YĪN YĪN are all “nightlife people”, which meant their friendship initially came about through co-organizing and deejaying DIY parties. Before the band formed, none had carved out a conventional career, or done the “very Dutch thing” of completing their studies. Things started to move for real when Yves Lennertz and Kees Berkers decided to make a cassette tape that drew on references to Southern and South East Asian music. Once the idea was formed, Lennertz and Berkers wasted no time in taking “a lot” of instruments to a rented rehearsal room in a small village near Maastricht. There the pair set up a couple of mics and recorded a number of songs in three days flat. Yves: “When we put it [the recorded session] out on tape, the reactions were very positive. So we decided to do a live show in Maastricht. We asked our musical friends to help us out, and from that night on we became a full band: with Remy Scheren on bass, Robbert Verwijlen on keys and Jerome Cardynaals and Gino Bombrini on percussion.” This “united against the world” stance is also heard at the end of ‘Declined by Universe’, where the band claps their own music, making the track initially sound like a live track. It’s a funny, maybe surreptitious statement of belief in what they do. YĪN YĪN also wanted to create an illusion of strength in other ways: ‘Declined by Universe’ sounds as if there is a large group of people playing, not just the core band. This was done by passing over sampling in favour of live recording multiple layers of percussion. Yves: “In the end we were getting kind of silly and started applauding every take. We decided to keep that reaction in. I still visualize a sort of school building in Thailand where people are playing this when I hear the recording.” Maybe YĪN YĪN also see their position of a band hiding in plain sight in their own land reflected in the legend of Chong Wang. Kees: “Chong Wang is a historical mystical figure. Very little is known about him and some people even deny his existence. But we wrote a ballad for him on the first album and now dedicated another track for him.” Regardless of attitude, the new record is bags of fun. Mainly because YĪN YĪN make dreamers music, in the sense that everything can happen, sometimes all at once. The working title was YĪN YĪN In Space, one that referenced the band’s inner vision of an entity that travels through space, encountering different planets, aliens, parties and galaxies along the way. Despite the name change, the music is still the soundtrack for that vision. And the intergalactic party vibes are strong. Nods to brilliant, invigorating dance music abound, some of the thumping beats in numbers like ‘Chong Wang’ the title track and ‘Nautilus’ drop some thumping 1990s-style electric boogie and italo disco chops along the way. Then there is ‘Shēnzhou V.’, which plots a stately course between eastern-inflected pop music, Italo and Harmonia-style electronic meditations. The record’s party vibe can also be put down to YĪN YĪN’s experiences on the road, where the positive energies picked up from their audiences fed back into a sound that increasingly “kept people moving”. The expansive richness in sound and feel may also be down to the fact that more samples, drum computers and synthesizers are used on The Age of Aquarius than in their previous records, a process that intertwines with real-time playing in the studio. ‘Faiyadansu’, for example, started with a sample found on an old traditional Japanese koto record. Kees: “I first programmed a beat with 808 drums. Yves recorded guitars over that. Then we found some great vocal samples from a lady on YouTube who teaches the Thai language. These phrases and words all have something to do with enjoying food. The last step was to record some extra percussion on top.” Cosmic appropriations of time also crop up in the titles, which may give the lie to some of the band members’ preoccupations with the state of the world. The Age of Aquarius is seen as a time when humanity takes control of the Earth and its own destiny as its rightful heritage, with the destiny of humanity being the revelation of truth and the expansion of consciousness. An old trope musically the Age is most famously referenced in the hippie musical, Hair. For YĪN YĪN it seems to denote the time when this record first took shape during the previous January, when the Age was meant to finally dawn. Other direct references to cosmic times are in the track names ‘Kali Yuga’ and ‘Satya Yuga’: the Kali Yuga, in Hinduism, is the fourth and worst of the four yugas (world ages) in a Yuga Cycle, preceded by Dvapara Yuga and followed by the next cycle's Krita (Satya) Yuga. It is believed to be the present age, which is full of conflict and sin. Who said this was just a party record?

After 20 years of incubation, My Bloody Valentine's third album, m b v, was suddenly released in 2013, and was at once their most experimental and most melodic and immediate work, proving their insatiable appetite for reform. Highly acclaimed as an astounding work that pushed the boundaries of musical and genre concepts even further, it also featured a type of music that had never been heard before. At once otherworldly, familiar, and intuitive, this album is a masterpiece for a new era, a stunningly beautiful transformation of the sound synonymous with MBV as it had been known up to that point. The album's final track, "Wonder 2," is a testament to this, with Shields' hypnotic guitar sound mixed with drum'n'bass that has left many awestruck.

Mastered from original 1/2" analog tape using Studer A80 VU-PRE and Neumann VMS 80.
Mastered from original 1/2" analog tape using Studer A80 VU-PRE and Neumann VMS 80
180g weight vinyl
Standard gatefold outer sleeve
Produced and mixed by Kevin Shields
Includes five 300 x 300 mm art prints
Includes DL code (24-bit | 16-bit | mp3)

Eye Escapes is a collection of recordings from 2016 - 2021 primarily from a lost album between Path and View No Country. Brought to you by Mutual Skies.

In mulling over their career, it’s staggering to realize that Sonic Youth not only delivered a healthy slab of releases as a unit but also have a myriad of shelved material still waiting for broader ears. While the group’s current Bandcamp abode lays out a generous amount of it, a bunch more has yet to surface. And it’s a massive mountain to chip away at in the sense of the group output alone; individual members’ projects are a whole other game, needless to say. "In/Out/In" ably delivers a new slab of mostly-unheard Sonic righteousness, with a scope on the post 2000-era band in especially zoned/exploratory regions. The 80’s and 90’s continually saw Sonic Youth reminding everyone that their jams ran free alongside song craft and visible development album to album; there were Peel excursions, dipping toes into soundtrack work starting with 1986’s "Made In USA", and of course great impromptu expansive takes of tried and true previous material onstage. The millennial establishment of home turf studio spaces in NYC then NJ greatly egged on forays into improvisation and composition on their own clock as evidenced in "Goodbye 20th Century" and the plethora of SYR releases that trickled out side by side between major release albums. At this juncture they had already created a cultural template for a whole new breed of rock heads who, in turn, entered a feedback loop to SY itself, which cultivated more of its own new moves informed by the very fandom they had for their acolytes all the while pushing the band outward to uncharted fields. Jim O’Rourke’s residency had already influenced the band’s material in part into denser, longer, meditative paths. Mark Ibold’s entry for their swan song "The Eternal" also allowed for more of this exploration with Kim Gordon having more room to commit to third guitar. However "The Eternal" also took more cues from Ibold’s bottom-end swing and perhaps dialed back the expansiveness of the "NYC Ghosts and Flowers" and "Sonic Nurse" era a notch in a cool way, making it one of the best group efforts for me, anyway. Perhaps this fueled some of these tracks here, in an already comfortable zone with a new lineup and new drive to take sideroads to even more outer realms. "In/Out/In" reveals their last decade to be still heavy on the roll-tape and bug-out Sonic Youth. Not all recorded in one session but rather spread out over 2000-2010, the sequencing here is especially well thought out. Opening with the 2008 “Basement Contender” we get a super-unfiltered glimpse of the band at Kim and Thurston’s Northampton house creating a gentle springboard of Venusian choogle, with phased Lee lappings at cascading Thurston figures forming a simmering soundtrack. “Machine” offers another instrumental track from "The Eternal" sessions and is a steamy exercise in stop-start rhythmic grunt amidst a jungle of chiming and upward spiraling chord progressions. We’ve also got the extended score offering “Social Static” from the Chris Habib/Spencer Tunick film of the same name, draping white sheets of noise over your head then descending into a gauzy maw of car-alarm guitars and ambient-yet-disruptive turbulence that eventually subsides into a smoky coda. Two more tracks round out the set both culled from a Three Lobed box set of various artists from 2011 called "Not the Spaces You Know, But Between Them": “In & Out” quietly resembles Can in a cave with dripping stalactites of Kim’s wordless tone rumble and was recorded at a soundcheck in Pomona California and their home Hoboken turf in 2010. “Out & In” from 2000 was done in their late downtown NYC studio and serves to close out this LP’s last 12 minutes as a reminder of what they got up to with O’Rourke there. More gentle time shift chord framework erupts into molten fury three minutes in, before mutating into the sonic equivalent of a slowly collapsing star. Casting an audio net over the entire instrumental/outtake oeuvre of Sonic Youth’s long history isn’t something easily committed to a single release without a doubt. Hearing these tracks in comparison to, say, 1986’s "Made In USA" material shows the massive leaps they took over the years. Whereas ’86 showed them freshly discovering their go-with-the-flow instrumental abilities for a soundtrack, their last decade showed them complementing the ambience with assured twists and turns that only came to be through their inimitable and rooted telepathy. That, plus the freedom to compose in more comfortable environs other than dank Ludlow Street rental spaces (hard to believe "Daydream Nation" was created in a claustrophobic practice basement) most assuredly was a component in their continued paths of discovery. Shifting on the drop of a dime from quiet/deep forays into full on noised-out Autobahn stomps with Steve Shelley at the wheel, they painted detailed and varied brush strokes and continually created organic sounds that undoubtedly carried the signature sound of the band, while ringing loud with their continual drive to free themselves from just that. Enjoy this capsule. -Brian Turner, 2021-

A year before the groundbreaking debut album "Stratosphere" by Duster, one of the most famous US slowcore bands of the 90's, the members of Duster formed a little-known band called "Valium Aggelein". Valium Aggelein" is a band that is even less known than Duster, with only two albums left. The album includes 16 tracks from the original cassettes and LPs, which are now very hard to find, remixed and remastered from the analog tapes, as well as unreleased tracks & outtakes and other gorgeous bonus tracks. This is a golden collection of work from the forerunner of the most important slowcore band of all time, hidden in a surprisingly obvious place.