Indie / Alternative

An eclectic compilation album celebrating twenty ‘tips of the tongue’ from David Keenan, released to coincide with a book of his collected music writing.

As well as being the title of a book. Volcanic Tongue was a record shop that existed in Glasgow from 2005 to 2015, run by David Keenan and Heather Leigh, it championed contemporary DIY music from around the world, often released in tiny runs on homemade CD-Rs, and also sought to shine a light on forgotten artists from the past, who had often released their music as a ‘private press’ LP. The shop was also known for it’s weekly mailing list, with Keenan enthusiastically rapping about new arrivals, especially the record of the week, given the sobriquet ‘tip of the tongue’. This collection has been put together from releases that were a ‘tip of the tongue’, containing music that runs the gamut from outsider synth to psych-folk to damaged rock’n’roll, with tracks recorded between 1968 and 2013, a celebration of a vibrant and eclectic underground avant-garde.

Printed inner sleeves with original notes on each artist by David Keenan, housed in a sleeve designed by Julian House.

The Smile have today announced two new remixes of tracks from their critically acclaimed third album CUTOUTS, from James Holden and Robert Stillman.

The remixes will also be released as a limited edition AA side 12-inch on 28th March. Stanley Donwood’s sleeve design pays tribute to XL Recordings’ signature housebag series

Alabaster DePlume often asks a simple question: what do people need? In his work, at his shows, in his collaborations, the Mancunian singer-saxophonist and poet-philosopher poses this to the people around him. What are people looking for? In recent years, the same reply kept coming up: healing, healing, people need healing. But why, and what does it mean to heal, especially in a world where the very idea is often commodified and sold as a luxury? If people were coming to his music for something so mysterious, he ought to figure it out. Maybe he ought to try some healing himself.

“For a long time, I've always tried to give responsibility for my value to someone else,” DePlume told me on a recent phone call. It seemed he’d become so caught up in the work of forging connections, and thinking about the effects of his work on others, that he’d lost a sense of himself. “I was working on that,” he explained.

This experiment in healing included slowing down, reading, reflecting, and even taking up the practice of jiu-jitsu. DePlume wrote poetry, too, including the book 'Looking for my value: prologue to a blade', seventy pages of verse rooted in its title’s great search, in finding strength of self within a community, alongside meditations on the paradox of the blade. “The blade, that divides, is whole,” he writes in the introduction. “Healing is the forming of a whole, and a whole is singular, more itself, as in more one, as in more alone.” A blade could be used to attack, to shave, to sever, but it could also be used to cut oneself loose—in the process of getting free.

“What's the opposite of sleep? It’s trying to sleep,” he told me. “And so what's the opposite of looking for my value? It is knowing my value. It simply is there. My dignity is there. I don't need anyone else to know my dignity, or me, to know it. I know it first. I can't seek it from another. I stand for it.”

Selections from the poetry book ultimately became the lyrics across half of the tracks on 'A Blade Because A Blade Is Whole', DePlume’s latest full-length work for the reliably great International Anthem label: eleven songs of agency and survival and presence; of confronting life’s pains rather than trying to avoid them; of banishing escapism. In sum, it documents his learning of the fact that dignity and self-determination are prerequisites for becoming whole, which is to say, for healing. If a blade were broken it would not serve its purpose; it must be unbroken, it must be whole, to be of use.

In the Alabaster DePlume songbook, the celestial ease of his instrumental tracks can sometimes feel like a trojan horse for a voice that is disarmingly honest about the heaviness of existence. Opener “Oh My Actual Days” is true to form in that sense, with DePlume’s tenor sax and Macie Stewart’s ghostly strings playing together like a slow march towards an inner reckoning, one that’s beautiful because it is true. The punchy and contemplative “Thank You My Pain” makes a rhythmic refrain from his titular lyric, inspired by the Vietnamese monk and peace activist Thích Nhất Hạnh, who urged the importance of listening to one’s own pain. “Hello my little pain, I know you are here,” Nhất Hạnh would say. “I am home to take care of you. I do not want to cover you up with consumption anymore.” While writing A Blade, DePlume “watched loads of him on YouTube.”

Then there’s the gorgeous swell of “Invincibility,” an ode to self-respect that feels a bit like a choir of angels led by a trickster, a group contemplating: how do we live with the forces that seek to destroy us? The whole song feels like a heavy exhale, or like the feeling of reaching the surface after a long while underwater. “If I meet with my feelings, they cannot destroy me,” he told me. “When I allow myself to embody them, physically, then I live through that feeling and I meet with it and I make peace with it and I find that my feeling is me, and I welcome it. It is a sense that I cannot be destroyed by my feeling. I am invincible.”

“Form a V” is the closest DePlume comes to a monologue, and also his song most indebted to his jiu-jitsu practice. “I’ve only been doing it for the past two or three years,” he told me. “But now I don’t know how you get by without it.” The song takes inspiration from a tradition where a whole dojo will stand in the shape of a V, facing just one lone individual, who is then attacked quickly and repeatedly by each of the others. “The title is a challenge to the world,” DePlume explained. “Go on, form a v—I am ready.”

Across the first half of the record, when the sax comes in short phrases, it feels like a highlighter over lines in DePlume’s poetry book. Other times, it plays out like an extension of his voice. “Playing the saxophone feels like singing,” he said. A transfixing run of instrumentals on the second half of the record includes “Prayer for My Sovereign Dignity,” an anthem for self-possession. “Believing in yourself feels ridiculous,” he says. “It's ridiculous, but that's what it takes. That's what's required. To stand for yourself is absurd. Let us do the absurd that is standing for ourselves. There is this prayer going on in the background—you can't quite tell what the words are, but it's basically, I'm praying for my sovereign dignity but I don't need to pray for it. It's not going to be given to me. I already have it.”

Where DePlume’s previous material was drawn from collective sessions, improvisation, and editing, A Blade was tightly composed, arranged and produced by DePlume himself. From there, he brought his compositions to a cast of players and co-arrangers, including Macie Stewart (strings), Donna Thompson (backing vocals), and Momoko Gill (strings and backing vocals), for sessions at the collective arts space Total Refreshment Centre, where he has long been involved.

Born Gus Fairbairn, DePlume is a man of many past lives. He played “rock band type music” as a teenager, and started playing improvised music around 2008. He is compelled by how improvising allows him to “put faith in others.” He taught himself the saxophone around the time that he became employed as a support worker assisting men with mental disabilities; he once called playing music with them “one of the best breakthroughs for me as an artist.” His debut as Alabaster DePlume came in May 2012, while he was still living in Manchester. He moved to London in 2015 and took up residency at Total Refreshment Centre, where he was encouraged to put on a monthly concert, leading to the series Peach, releasing a namesake album that year, too. His music, from the start, has been imbued with his politics and values; he was maybe arrested once during a protest with the environmental group Extinction Rebellion. His proper international breakthrough came in 2020 with 'To Cy & Lee: Instrumentals Vol. 1', after nearly a decade of steadily releasing records.

On a phone call in the fall of 2024, we barely speak about any of this though. For at least an hour, we mostly just speak about his recent trip to Palestine, and how could we not? DePlume had traveled to Bethlehem in the spring for a conference hosted by a local Lutheran pastor, before meeting up with musicians from a community arts space, the Wonder Cabinet, and the independent radio station, Radio Alhara. “Palestine is a place where people make records,” he says. “I want to normalize the dignity of that. It's not like, oh, I'm going to make a thing about Palestine. I am just there, and I'm making a thing.”

At the end of 2024, DePlume prefaced A Blade with a collection of recent works: the poetry book and a three-track EP partially recorded in Bethlehem, and in collaboration with Palestinian musicians. There’s “Honeycomb” and “Cremisan,” both recorded during his “Sounds of Places” residency at Wonder Cabinet; “Cremisan” documents the conclusion of a daylong performance presented by Wonder Cabinet and Radio alHara, June 1, 2024, described as “a cry from the Cremisan Valley (Bethlehem, Palestine) to Rafah (Gaza).” The EP’s final recording, “Gifts of Olive,” references the soul-wrenching poem “If I Must Die” by Refaat Alareer, professor of English literature at the Islamic University in Gaza, who was killed by an Israeli airstrike in 2023.

To suggest that dignity is a human right we are all entitled to is to say: by nature of being alive, every human life has worth. Contemplating the very concept of human dignity also raises the daily indignities that are so normalized in a world of suffering. The lack of access to clean water, air, housing, healthcare. Without the basic necessities of life, we cannot know dignity. And how can people know dignity if they are living under a constant state of military attack, if they are living as the target of a genocide?

“The album was written before the genocide started, but I had Palestine on my mind all the time,” DePlume explains. “This question of dignity, sovereignty, and the work of healing. It has a relevance in what's being perpetrated there by the Israeli state, and taking responsibility for my place in that. I pay my taxes here in the United Kingdom—I am contributing to, as a white Englishman, the country that brought the Balfour Declaration, that brought the Sykes-Picot Agreement, that supports and enables the colonization and the settler-colonial project in Palestine. It is my issue, and I have a position where I can speak about it.”

“Dignity” has roots in the Latin dignitatem: worthiness. And instilling the plain truth of every human life’s worth has been a recurring commitment in DePlume’s work. “They can’t use us on one another if we don’t forget we’re precious,” he sang in 2022, summing the emotional core of his 2022 album 'GOLD', concerns of shared humanity that play out into the new works as well.

“We make stories in our lives,” DePlume says. “Oh, I need my story. Oh, something bad happened, and I need to heal upon that. Then I will be healed and all will be good, happily ever after. But no, it is work that needs doing all the time. We all are wounded in our many different ways. And there are degrees of healed, or wounded. Basically, we are either doing one thing or we're doing the other. How do I know I am not destroying myself? I only know that when I am working on healing.” 

Driving is Sam Wilkes’ Indie Rock record. Out October 6th, 2023, it is the first release on Wilkes Records, an imprint borne of the artist’s emergent need to self-release. The songs presented here exist comfortably within the ever-expanding Wilkesian cosmos, characterized as they are by virtuosity, torqued experimentalism, and collaboration with a range of talented musicians. But Driving’s influences, its sincerity, and its allegiance to a certain pop sensibility reflects a departure for an artist who has primarily staked his claim within the experimental jazz idiom. Take the first track, “Folk Home,” which inaugurates the album’s fecundity—a bright, green, humid, summer feel. A swirling, freakout coda of reversed vocals gives way, in no short order, to a caterwaul of flute work that conjures Van Morrison’s (in)famous Astral Weeks sessions. Standing beside Morrison, the usual suspects are all present, if somewhat abstractedly. Dylan, The Dead, Joni, the Fab Four. Wilkes has developed a reputation as an experimental jazz luminary, but his deep affinity for the pop/rock/folk idiom of the latter twentieth century rings clear throughout Driving. More so than any Wilkes release to date, Driving is a collection guided by and dedicated to the man’s attention to songcraft. Written and recorded during a period of rain-damage induced renter’s itinerance (and the attendant desire to produce a kind of therapeutic, self-soothing, home-feeling music), Driving loosely charts the trajectory/experience of “a protagonist,” both Wilkes and not, “who has figured out how to live an enlightened and fulfilled life, but is unable to do so because he thinks about it too much.” This friction is surely relatable — a symptom of our compulsively self-aware present. But Wilkes avoids the obvious pitfalls of public hand-wringing. Rather, Driving’s nine tracks evince a genuine, and mature searching-ness, both sonically and lyrically. The ending refrain of “Own” serves like something close to a thesis— “Letting go // isn’t a concept // it’s an action.” In an attempt to beat back ego, hyper-cogitation, language itself, Wilkes arrives at an axiom that feels so true and familiar, you’d swear you’d heard it one hundred times before. Driving’s final third is, fittingly, its most emotive and cathartic. Tracks seven and eight, “Again, Again” and “And Again,” form a diptych, joined most obviously by the jangling, recursive grooves of guitarist Daryl Johns. Wilkes is said to have encouraged Johns to go “full Lindsey [Buckingham]” (clearly a welcome and resonant prompt), but one also catches stray Knopfler vibes, some intermittent Fripp, and (perhaps more-so in tone than technique) the spirit of DIY prophet and jangling man himself, Martin Newell (the Cleaners from Venus). Wilkes has stated that he finds joy in creating musical environments suitable to the contribution and flourishing of his favorite musicians. Throughout Driving, and in these two tracks especially, he has more than succeeded. The record closes with the titular track: a story-song that, according to Wilkes, poured out of him (melody, composition, and lyrics) in a single sitting. The tale is told plainly, bravely, starkly; a mistake was made, regrets have been had, and all is wrapped up in the recollection of a deeply felt adolescent heartsickness—a time when the narrator was first afire with music and automotive freedom. The song captures the moment when meaning inexplicably falls into place, when a long-nagging memory suddenly assumes narrative form, and the subsequent sense of lightness and unburdening. It is fitting that Driving, a record conceived as a form of self-therapy, should culminate with a sense of humble revelation. That Wilkes is plainly eager to share the vulnerable fruits of this labor constitutes Driving’s joyful offering.

Released in 2000 by the UK rock band, Radiohead, Radiohead's 4th album has been described as "the last masterpiece of the 20th century in music history."
A controversial work, an innovative work that shifted to electronica sound rather than approaching Aphex Twin and Autechre. Includes "Everything in its Right Place", "Idiotech" and others.

Japanese Edition with Obi. Repetition and motorik beats borrowed from Krautrock. A unique work with a noisy and experimental soundscape.

Japanese Edition with Obi. A beloved masterpiece of its time. Produced by John McEntire (Tortoise) and Andy Toma (Mouse on Mars), this is a must-hear album with a diversity unrivaled in its time.

Japanese Edition with Obi. Re-mastered from the original 1/2" tapes by Bo Kondren at Calyx Mastering and overseen by Tim Gane. Includes bonus tracks originally included on Instant 0 In The Universe and a tour single. Including the bonus material this reissue contains everything Stereolab recorded during the sessions for Margerine Eclipse.

Spell Blanket comprises songs and sketches drawn from Trish's extensive archive of 4-track tapes and MiniDiscs. The recordings lay the groundwork for what would have been Broadcast’s fifth album, offering a window into Trish and James’ creative process during the post-Tender Buttons period from 2006-2009.

Half asleep you hear a guitar echo through the early morning haze, you're so zonked you cant tell if its a dream or if the droney reverb is coming from real life, you sit up, now starting to understand what is afoot. Thats right, its the errant kings of slowcore Duster returning with yet another surprise release - In Dreams. Disintegrated, half remembered melodies permeate this record like a slow tide of static soaking into a discarded slice of sponge cake, proving somehow inventive and nostalgic at the same time, in other words Duster on top form.

Listening to The Softies feels like peeking into a diary, with no personal detail spared. Holiday in Rhode Island, their third album, presents the most accessible means inside the humble honesty of the emotive universe of Rose Melberg (Tiger Trap, Gaze, Go Sailor) and Jen Sbragia (All Girl Summer Fun Band). The band lyrically documents a lovelorn heart in every manifestation, here hope is a bright silver lining adorning each of these new songs. The harmonies between Rose And Jen shimmer, brighter than ever before, benefiting from strong arrangements and production. Their two delicately jangling guitars and crystalline voices never needed anything else, their minimalist blueprint succeeds in filling every single space, but with maturity comes the security and confidence to explore, and that's just what The Softies do with these tunes.

At once a hazy relic and a digital snapshot of the human experience, Your Day Will Come is the debut album from Chanel Beads, arriving April 19 via Jagjaguwar. The remarkable project announces the arrival of New York-based musician Shane Lavers as a new force in experimental music. After his 2022 singles “Ef” and “True Altruism” marked his breakout on corners of the internet, Your Day Will Come sees Lavers evolving his uncanny and dreamlike sound which he achieves through layering synthetic and real instruments. His songs feel like a memory in which you can’t distinguish between what actually happened or what was a false reproduction in your mind—although the burning emotion remains intact. Your Day Will Come sees Lavers capturing the many contradictions of modern existence and the strange infiniteness of the digital world, as he searches for truth and faith amid competing realities. Though he incorporates the scrappy sonics of post-punk, the gripping sentimentality of pop tunes, and the spectral artifice of electronic music, he blurs lines through unconventional song structures that build into transcendental climaxes. As he intentionally prints his songs down to embed fried artifacts and ghostly remains, the resulting songs have a time-collapsing quality, both transitory and timeless. Lavers first started writing Your Day Will Come during a period of reflection in November 2022. Stuck quarantining in his Brooklyn apartment, he found himself wanting to dig down into the core of who he truly was, apart from fleeting trends or rebounding cultural moments. So during that strange time between winter holidays, he started to write songs that wrestled with an early loss that had rippled throughout his life, foundational to the way he sees himself and the way he relates to others. Many of the lyrics that remained were in response to both internal and external conflicts. They were words that he had to speak aloud to uncover the reality of the situation. Throughout, Lavers weaves in contributions from his live bandmates, singer-songwriter Maya McGrory (Colle) and experimental instrumentalist Zachary Paul, who offer their own layers of feeling that add to the huge emotionality of the album. Accustomed to performing in various bands when he lived in Seattle, Shane began to strip everything back when he started playing shows around NYC, working to locate what felt worthy for him to perform. That mindset informed the writing of the record, in which Lavers forced himself to only keep what felt the most necessary to say. “There was a filter to this record,” Lavers says. “If it didn’t move me while performing, then I couldn’t make it into a song. As much as I wanted to make something that was cool to the touch, I had to make something that made me feel something.” Now, his live shows see all three performers weaving together in absolute cathar

The Softies, comprised of Rose Melberg and Jen Sbragia, embody timeless themes of friendship and self-discovery through their minimalist pop soundworld. Since their formation in 1994, they've created uncluttered and fearlessly vulnerable music, contrasting with prevailing trends. The Bed I Made, The Softies’ first new studio album in 24 years, showcases growth while reflecting on life's complexities with lyrics drawn from real experiences. Despite individual pursuits and personal losses, Melberg and Sbragia reunite, channeling grief and rejuvenation into an album that captures the essence of their enduring friendship and offers hope and renewal amid life's challenges. Through their perfectly-paired harmonies and telepathic playing, they navigate the present, past, and future, offering a poignant continuation of their musical legacy, resonating like time spent with an old friend who knows you best.

Japanese Edition with Obi. More pop, softer...
The sound design is made with a warm sound image in the background.
This is a turning point work that shows a new frontier.

Japanese Edition with Obi. A gem of a record with mature songwriting talent and production work by John McEntire and Jim O'Rourke!

The final recordings by Annapolis early emo pioneers the Hated, Flux compiles their 1989 acoustic and electric sessions, home demos, and live shards from their extensive archive. The accompanying 24-page book outlines the last year of the band with essays from founders Dan Littleton and Erik Fisher, a track-by-track oral history, photos, flyers, and lyrics from this vital post-hardcore unit."Hostile and magnetic—like perfume wafting through a barbed wire fence."— Washington Post

Like all three HTRK albums, 2009's Marry Me Tonight is singular in sound and circumstance. It's the only album the outfit recorded from start to finish as a trio, and it's the only HTRK record that bears the co-production stamp of Rowland S. Howard. Breathy, caustic and rife with contradiction, _Marry Me Tonight _took the raw material recorded on 2005's Nostalgia and transformed it into a pop record—pop that buckled and warped beneath the glare of Howard, fellow producer Lindsay Gravina and the HTRK trio: Jonnine Standish, Nigel Yang and Sean Stewart. Howard died at the end of 2009; Stewart died the year after. Things would never be the same.</p><iframe style="border: 0; width: 100%; height: 439px;" src="https://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/album=1991166217/size=large/bgcol=ffffff/linkcol=333333/artwork=none/transparent=true/" seamless><a href="https://htrk.bandcamp.com/album/marry-me-tonight">Marry Me Tonight by HTRK</a></iframe>

HAPPY's "Ancient Moods Mahollova Mind" is their third full-length album in five years, and most of the songs were recorded in the members' home studio, which was built up during the pandemic disaster. As the album title suggests, the theme of the album is an ancient fascination and an exploration of the mind, and it has a new sound with an exotic atmosphere, as is typical of HAPPY's exploration of music that has never been heard before. In addition to their usual instruments, the members themselves play a variety of instruments such as the Taishogoto, lyre harp, bansuri, conga, and djembe, expanding their range of expression while maintaining the catchy approach of their previous works. Mastering was done by Timothy Stollenwerk, who has worked with Wooden Shjips and Drugdealer, and the depth and dimension of the sound has been increase.

Rainy Day was an album released in 1984 on the now-defunct indie label Enigma. It consisted of cover songs performed by various musicians from California's so-called "Paisley Underground" scene. This loose collective was assembled by David Roback, who was then a member of Rain Parade and later of Opal and Mazzy Star. Other participants included Roback's Rain Parade mates (brother Stephen Roback, Matthew Piucci, Will Glenn) and members of the then-little-known Bangles (Susanna Hoffs and Vicki Peterson), the Dream Syndicate (Kendra Smith, Dennis Duck, Karl Precoda), and the Three O'Clock (Michael Quercio).

The songs that were chosen indicated the influences that were generally shared by bands from that scene; not only is a Velvet Underground song covered, but also one by Big Star, and two by the Buffalo Springfield which both happen to be Neil Young compositions. Some other selections are old folk songs which are best remembered as Byrds and Beach Boys recordings. Hendrix and the Who also made the list.

Everything Is Simple arrives four years after its predecessor, Hold You Up, which in turn came five years after Show Us The Fire. Zelienople does not do things in a hurry. Why should it? Operationally and musically, haste has nothing to offer the Chicago-identified trio. They do not rush their time signatures, and they do not rush their albums, because however long it takes is the amount of time necessary. So, what’s necessary? Singer-guitarist Matt Christensen, multi-instrumentalist Brian Harding, and drummer Mike Weis had all been in other bands before they united to become Zelienople in 1998 (the band’s name references a town in Pennsylvania where Harding and Christensen were once stranded while waiting for parts necessary to fix a broken-down car). All of them have all played other music since then. Harding records long-form instrumental music under the guise Ill Professor. Weis has explored ambient sound, studied Korean rhythmic practices, and improvised with Kwaidan and Slow Bell Trio. Christensen is torrentially productive on his own; at the end of April 2024 he had 212 digital releases on Bandcamp, and by the time you read this, there’ll be more. If Christensen is driven by compulsive necessity, Zelienople’s rate of production must be a spoiler, not an enhancer. But the three musicians need each other to make the convergence of ceremonial cadences, echo-laden instrumentation, and mournfully resigned singing that constitutes Zelienople’s music. Still, the making of Everything Is Simple took Zelienople out of its comfort zone. In 2020, Weis left Chicago for Kalamazoo, Michigan, which meant that the band no longer had access to its usual recording refuge in his basement. They turned loss into an opportunity to change their approach. Instead of layering tracks incrementally, they recorded mostly live with two extra musicians, Eric Eleazer (synthesizer, Fender Rhodes piano) and PM Tummala (synthesizer, Fender Rhodes piano, vibraphones). Keyboards and metallophones broaden the sound field around Weis’ patiently perambulating percussion. And instead of clinging, Harding’s basses and clarinets swirl and wreath around Christensen’s apprehensive articulations of the experience of being a quiet person in a menacingly loud cultural moment. Tummala also contributed his engineering skills, which enabled Christensen to step back from recording duties to concentrate on singing and playing, and his studio, which is much more spacious than Weis’ old basement. While the basic tracks went down quickly, a lengthy period of mixing and fixing ensued, followed by the spatially conscious mastering of Slowdive’s Simon Scott, all of which further magnified the effect of being a bigger band in a bigger space. Still, Zelienople wears its expansiveness lightly; Everything Is Simple may loom sonically, but it doesn’t overwhelm the listener so much as give them the space to inhabit a singular realm.

Following his post-hardcore heroics with Indian Summer and Calm, Marc Bianchi unplugged his distortion pedal and switched on the four-track. From his boyhood San Mateo, California bedroom, Her Space Holiday explores the bewilderment of young adulthood through a dreamy prozac lens. This expanded 25th anniversary edition of Home Is Where You Hang Yourself includes an extra LP of remixed songs from Duster, Bright Eyes, Micromars, and Mahogany, an elegant tip-on jacket, lyrics, and 20 milligrams of millennial malaise. Ask your doctor if Her Space Holiday is right for you. </p><iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/t10kLmzhlwY?si=xj1ZO5Tfox-u_gtL" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Queer tweemo from the pop fringe of Little Rock, Arkansas’s thriving ’90s DIY scene. Paper Airplanes, Paper Hearts gathers Everyone Asked About You’s complete recorded works, including the Let's Be Enemies LP and their two and a half 7"s released between 1997-2000. Remastered from the original DATs for maximum nostalgic crunch, this deluxe 2xLP is housed in a gatefold tip on sleeve and includes a 20-page book crammed with flyers, photos, lyrics, and an extensive essay on this crucial missing link between midwest emo and the Moog synthesizer.

Winter Pageant is the drama of utter melancholia documenting the broken promises, missed phone calls, conversations stalled, love lost. Colossal tasks recorded two guitars deep, forming a new Iliad, chapters on brave deeds and the power of love on the move. You can live for love, or you could live for the splendid cascade of guitar on guitar, voice over voice. It is the Softies combination of Jen Sbragia (All Girl Summer Fun Band) and Rose Melberg (Tiger Trap, Gaze, Go Sailor); feathers and thorns, fawn and fearless, fable and friction.

The mid-2000s underground stir surrounding Studio, the project of Swedish musicians Dan Lissvik and Rasmus Hägg, feels nearly lost to time. West Coast, their seminal 2006 debut, captured a faraway romanticism of Balearic brushed up against Krautrock, disco, dub, and afro-beat, with pop lyricism lifted from new wave, all made modern by two art school grads in Gothenburg. First pressed in a small vinyl-only run via their own Information label, the album has been notably absent from most streaming services, and the internet’s record of its initial impact is all but fossilized from a bygone blog era, while its sound is simply untraceable to any one moment in music. Presented with a minimalist black circle LP design, the set possessed an uncanny escapist sensibility, underscored by track titles like “Life’s A Beach!” but otherwise entirely on the suggestion of that sound, imagined, displaced, and subconsciously amalgamated. Some called it “the missing link between The Cure and Lindstrøm,” Pitchfork heard Durutti Column and Can, as the duo’s story became swept up in a loosely developing scene — adjacent first to the label Service (Jens Lekman, The Whitest Boy Alive) and later Sincerely Yours (The Tough Alliance, jj) — and a precursor to the 2010s boom at the axis of electronic and psychedelic music guided by indie greats like Caribou, Four Tet, and Darkside. Featuring six free-flowed tracks that glide between hypnotic instrumental terrain and anthemic pop architecture, West Coast succeeded in its premise, a trance-inducing, deja vu-like destination instantly identifiable and endlessly replayable. By late 2007, following its expanded CD repackaging as Yearbook 1, the songs were staples of year-end lists, including best album write-ups by Pitchfork, FACT Magazine, and Rough Trade. While Lissvik and Hägg kept busy, Studio’s proper follow-up never came, thus adding to West Coast’s strange allure and legacy. In 2025, the record sees renewed appreciation, remastered and reissued by Ghostly International. West Coast took shape throughout much of Studio's existence. The earliest recordings trace back to sessions held at Lissvik’s art school and Hägg’s rehearsal space between 2001 and 2004. During this period, Lissvik co-founded the Service label, creating a platform to release music, produce T-shirts, and host events. Service organized large parties, and the art school served as both a club venue and office, in a style reminiscent of Factory Records and Haçienda. Aside from their three initial 7-inch releases on Service, they kept most of their music to themselves for several years. Hägg remembers, "All these recordings were just piled up and we dusted them off and started to deconstruct and assemble them in a more drawn-out fashion." In 2005, they left Service, flirted with breaking up, and then revisited material and wrote two new songs at Hägg's Ferry Terminal Studio and Lissvik's N.47 studio, which he jokingly dubbed the "Beach Ball of Death sessions" due to the slow processing strain put on his Power Mac G4. Hägg continues, "I had started a disco club night with a friend and we went deep down the rabbit holes of Balearics, space rock, and strange leftfield dancefloor stuff. This probably seeped into Studio's output. Around the same time, with Dan slowing drums down to half tempo, finishing ‘No Comply’ and creating ‘Radio Edit’, the B-side of Studio's first 12", a West Coast blueprint was born.” Soon songs were finalized and sequenced from countless sketches and layers, and the titles clicked into place after being kicked around for a while. The title for the pulsing, guitar-driven “Self Service” was inspired by Lissvik’s visit to the office of the Paris fashion magazine and chosen to mark their newfound independence. Thematically, a larger vision emerged. “Somehow, I knew I wanted to make a conceptual record that, although only imaginary at that point, could represent or define how our city sounded,” says Lissvik. “I was totally immersed in a word bubble and was really struggling with lyrics for one of our potential instrumentals. While walking back to the studio one day after a lunch break, ‘West Coast’ appeared in my mind. I ran back to the studio, wrote down the lyrics for ‘West Side,’ and suddenly ‘Life’s A Beach!,’ ‘Indo’ and the rest of the potential instrumentals all made sense.” Sonically, the set represented years of developing taste as well. In the same breadth, they cite DJ Screw, J Dilla, and Joy Division, along with early ‘80s European live DJ sets from the likes of Beppe Loda, DJ Mozart, and Baldelli as reference points. “The anything-goes mentality was very encouraging and was a big cornerstone to the Studio sound,” says Hägg. “But there’s so much more to the picture, we were not that young then and had lots of musical baggage in our suitcases, the new thing was that we finally let it all come through, not bound by any borders that was often the case with music identity in Sweden during the ‘90s.” West Coast is defined by its swing, an ability to lock into loops and beat-grids while still prioritizing looseness and genuine surprises across long passages with layers constantly appearing and fading from the mix. Songs can momentarily fall out of step or change course, like 10 minutes into the hazy opener “Out There” when the bass line suddenly dips back beat for 4 bars and then returns on the beat, giving way for a dubbed-out breakdown and ascendent finish. Or take the 13-minute “Life’s A Beach!” which eases into a soft, tide-changing crescendo just before the 9-minute mark, returning anew on an optimistic bass line as the guitar gets moody above the shimmering wash. Hägg says, “It always transcended very well live, like an implosion. It’s a very tricky song to play, due to strange rounds so it’s such a relief when one gets there, probably what you hear is a big sigh.” In the afterglow of the record’s 2007 reception, as their oft-mentioned un-Google-able name and Myspace page made rounds and West Coast was cemented as “one of the finest pieces of electronic music you ́ll hear this year,” per The Guardian, Studio receded from view, clouded behind a mountain of remix requests (including belter for Kylie Minogue and Stockholm’s Shout Out Louds) and label bureaucracy. But both artists, now well into respective careers beyond Studio, have come to peace with West Coast as their most enduring effort together. Lissvik adds, “It serves as a good reminder for me to keep to that decision and promise and to continue exploring and growing.”