MUSIC

Kate NV’s WOW offers listeners a prismatic shift in perspective and scale, a parallel dimension in which the mundane becomes funny, unfamiliar, and altogether sensational. Turning the contents of her 2020 album Room for the Moon upside down and spilling it across a floor checkered with intrigue and surprise, Kate places sound, object, and ritual under the microscope to magnify the delight hidden in plain sight of everyday life.

“Blue” Gene Tyranny’s debut album Out of the Blue — newly remastered with original cover art — which was among the first to releases on Lovely Music in 1978 alongside Robert Ashley Private Parts, David Behrman On the Other Ocean, Jon Hassell Vernal Equinox, Meredith Monk Key, and Peter Gordon Star Jaws. Disarmingly direct, funky, and profound, Out of the Blue is an equanimous, wide-open exploration of Tyranny’s musical world: equal parts song cycle, tone poem, keyboard fantasia, and avant-garde pop record. Recorded and mixed by Tyranny at Mills College, this album emerged following the legendary 1976 Trust in Rock concerts, where Tyranny and collaborator Peter Gordon presented New Music for rock band. “Next Time Might Be Your Time” and “For David K.” were co-produced by Gordon, and also feature Mills’s Maggi Payne on flute as well as Oingo Boingo’s Steve Bartek on guitar; “Leading a Double Life” is sung by Lynne Morrow and Jane Sharp, accompanied by Tyranny on piano and polyMoog synthesizer; “A Letter from Home” is a half-hour electro-acoustic narrative meditation on “the Doppler effect as a metaphor for the development of consciousness.” Out of the Blue lives up to its name: it is both surprising and familiar, revealing for the first time something that was always already there.

Lucrecia Dalt channels sensory echoes of growing up in Colombia on her new album ¡Ay!, where the sound and syncopation of tropical music encounter adventurous impulse, lush instrumentation, and metaphysical sci-fi meditations in an exclamation of liminal delight. In sound and spirit, ¡Ay! is a heliacal exploration of native place and environmental tuning, where Dalt reverses the spell of temporal containment. Through the spiraling tendencies of time and topography, Lucrecia has arrived where she began. CD edition includes lyrics and an essay by Miguel Prado in Spanish and English.

Mount Wittenberg Orca is named so because it is about whales, it was inspired by events on Mt. Wittenberg in California, and because it elaborates on David Longstreth's obsession with vocal harmony introduced on Dirty Projectors' 2009 album Bitte Orca. This seven-song, twenty-one minute collection is the first original music the band has recorded since Bitte Orca, and it feels more like a small album than an EP. It is also their most staggering collaboration yet — with the Icelandic artist Björk.

The music — originally written to be performed unamplified in a small Manhattan bookstore — was guided by a conversation between Longstreth and Björk about the small theaters in Italy where opera was born in the 1500s. The recording was informed by the simple, direct feel of early rock & roll recordings from the '50s. The band and Björk rehearsed for three days at the Rare Book Room in Brooklyn, and then recorded the songs as quickly and as live as possible, overdubbing only lead vocals and solos. The result feels like part children's story, part choral music from some strange future.

It's unlike anything else in the Projectors' body of work: Nat Baldwin's bass is massive and lumbering, like the silhouette of some undersea creature. Drums and guitars, so crucial to the songs on Bitte Orca, are all but absent. Instead, it's all about voices — and the voices are astonishing. Longstreth, sharing lead vocal duties with Björk, exudes a limber confidence. The Projectors women Amber Coffman, Angel Deradoorian and Haley Dekle sound beautiful and virtuosic. And Björk, seismic and elemental as always, sounds fresh in this new context, singing lead on half the songs.

This record is a triumph for Björk and for Dirty Projectors. It merges the energy and rawness of the band's live shows with the intricate arrangement and delicate beauty of Bitte Orca, and seems to do it effortlessly. Björk abides as a kind of artistic patron saint, sharing the spotlight rather than dominating it. Her mix of sophistication and emotion, of composition and instantaneity, has become the blueprint for a generation of creative musicians — and with Mount Wittenberg Orca, Dirty Projectors prove themselves at the forefront of that generation. 

40th Anniversary Edition - newly remastered from the master tapes, with an additional bonus LP of instrumentals and the previously unreleased “Narration Theme.” 

Daytime Viewing (1979-80) is an extended narrative song, based on a casual analysis of daytime television drama and the audience phenomena such programming addresses. The piece explores the use of fantasy as a survival mechanism against loneliness, illustrating the human compulsion to inflate the mundane to mythological proportions. A central female character weaves tales, using threads of personal experience and the idea of TV as friend, as mantra, and as transformational window between imagined spectacle and the pedestrian plane. 

Originally released as a private cassette edition [recorded, 1982; Chez Hum-Boom release, 1983] documenting the collaborative performance piece of the same name by Jacqueline Humbert & David Rosenboom. This heady, thoroughly enjoyable work was first made available on CD and LP in 2013 by Unseen Worlds. Jacqueline Humbert (aka J. Jasmine) is a songwriter of brains and wit on par with Robert Ashley, with whom she's worked extensively. David Rosenboom's complex, harmonic electronic arrangements are accentuated brilliantly by percussion from William Winant. Daytime Viewing can happily be added to a small but significant group of work that, through lesser-known paths, engaged in an equally revelatory reexamination of the Great American Songbook as Minimalism did with 20th Century composition. 

If you can’t trust yourself, who can you trust? This is the crucial question at the core of Julia, Julia, the moniker for Julia Kugel, founding member of garage punk icons The Coathangers and the dream pop duo Soft Palms. On her first solo full-length album Derealization, Kugel shifts her focus from collaboration and band dynamics towards a singular artistic vision and private self-discovery. Steeped in the beguiling pop elements of her past work, Derealization is a meditative deep dive into the mind of a person struggling to understand a crumbling internal and external world. The album traverses a landscape of ethereal folk, atmospheric deconstructed pop, and dubbed-out country ballads, all centered around straight forward and direct lyrics. This juxtaposition of nebulousness and lucidity gives the album a sense of clarity emerging from the haze, an apt reflection of Kugel's personal growth and journey toward self-acceptance. Derealization is based on weaving the unreal, unsaid, and unknown into an undulating sonic fabric. Vocal layering and abstract instrumentation convey a blurred desperation to connect to an emotional and psychological focal point. Moody, dark, and sumptuous, the record is a flow chart of Julia Kugel coming into herself as an artist and songwriter. The album finds Julia playing almost all the instruments and taking her first stab at engineering at COMA, her and her husband's home recording studio in Long Beach, CA. “You know how touring musicians often speak of whether home is real or tour is real? Well, it can lead you to lose grasp on ‘reality,’ especially when touring is taken away and you are left to wonder if anything was ever real, including yourself. Like you we're just playing a character,” Kugel says of her headspace leading up to the creation of Derealization. “Honestly, I kinda lost it, and through making this record I made peace with it and reconciled myself as a real person. I forgave myself and in turn forgave those around me. The song ‘Forgive Me’ is the apology I wanted to say and to hear. I wrote every song from that place and gained the confidence I was pretending to possess.” This raw and personal approach to the lyrics is present throughout Derealization. On the opening track "I Want You," Kugel creates a woozy sense of space with reverb-soaked drums and spaghetti western guitars while she lists off her desires for a mysterious “you.” Is she actually listing off her desires for herself? For the people around her? As she repeats "do you feel it?" in the song’s chorus, it feels as if she’s conjuring a magical thread by which we are all connected, showing us how our desires are all the same. On "Fever In My Heart" the listener is treated to a lush, acoustic techno track detailing the exhilarating madness of an emotional breakdown. Simple truths percolate to the surface on "Words Don't Mean Much,” as if clearing away the murk of platitudes and empty gestures. The journey continues on the detached and conflicted "Do It Or Don't,” an alluring walk through the winding road of lonely choices. The name for the project—Julia, Julia—is a look in the mirror, a reflection of what is hidden and unanswered, of what is real and what is transient. The experience of living life not as you planned it but as it unfolded, and the mysterious, magical pain that creates meaning. Suicide Squeeze Record is proud to offer up Julia, Julia’s Derealization to the world on September 30, 2022.

In the wake of their acclaimed comeback album 'Figures' (2020), Aksak Maboul took a playful sideways step to create this total work, a 63-minute, continuous suite of fifteen pieces, which could be described as an experimental audio play.

The thread running through 'Une aventure de VV (Songspiel)' is Véronique Vincent’s text, an enigmatic philosophical-poetical tale unfolding through monologues and dialogues, spoken and sung by a series of characters, played by Alig Fodder, Laetitia Sadier, Audrey & Benjamin from Aquaserge, Don The Tiger, Blaine L. Reininger, and the members of Aksak Maboul’s current live band: Faustine Hollander, Lucien Fraipont & Erik Heestermans.

The music was written & arranged by Marc Hollander and features his characteristic genre-hopping tendencies: strands of electronica, pop, jazz, collage, techno, ambient, improv, krautrock, contemporary classical & systems music are merrily woven together, in the inimitable Aksak Maboul style.

The album’s subtitle, 'Songspiel', highlights its theatrical/musical aspect: the work pays oblique homage to the those experimental radio plays that once emerged from the creative workshops of the BBC, the RTF and the RAI, and especially to those German Hörspiels which, at their best, might combine spoken word, instrumental or electronic music, songs and sonic research.

Une aventure de VV also modestly alludes to certain stage works written by adventurous composers during the first half of the 20th century, which embraced singing, spoken dialogues and elements inspired by popular music. Those composers sometimes invented genre names to describe their pieces: fantaisie lyrique, mimodrama, or... songspiel). 

koleżanka is Kristina Moore: vocals, guitars, bass, drum machine, synths, glass clanks, piano Ark Calkins: bass, drums, vibraphone, hand claps and aux percussion clarinet written and performed by Elana Riordan, additional vocals on “Saddle Up, Cowboy” performed by Ark Calkins, Danny Clifton, Abigail Clark, and Steven Head tour guide, spiritual advisement, Sherman Filterbank operator on “Goliath”, ebow guitar on “River Rushing”, and unfailing kindness and attentiveness to The Process by Steven Head all songs written by Kristina Moore/koleżanka music (ASCAP)

koleżanka is Kristina Moore: vocals, guitars, bass, drum machine, synths, glass clanks, piano Ark Calkins: bass, drums, vibraphone, hand claps and aux percussion clarinet written and performed by Elana Riordan, additional vocals on “Saddle Up, Cowboy” performed by Ark Calkins, Danny Clifton, Abigail Clark, and Steven Head tour guide, spiritual advisement, Sherman Filterbank operator on “Goliath”, ebow guitar on “River Rushing”, and unfailing kindness and attentiveness to The Process by Steven Head all songs written by Kristina Moore/koleżanka music (ASCAP)

Debut album by Ani Zinc, member of the Spanish experimental duo Diseño Corbusier and co-founder of the iconic record label Auxilio de Cientos. Originally released in 1986, this record is a showcase of her radical blueprint, comprising sound collages and voice experiments, and also welcomes the use of conventional instruments such as drum machines and keyboards, resulting a richer and more diverse outcome. First time reissue of this much sought-after record on the highly collectable Spanish experimental label Auxilio de Cientos.

Laila Sakini fleshes out her Princess Diana of Wales avatar on a quietly stunning album of slowburn, coygaze dream-pop for the ever-wonderful A Colourful Storm. Following a trio of wonders released last year - her AOTY contending ‘Vivienne’ and it’s endlessly layered 'Into the Traffic, Under the Moonlight’ companion piece, as well as a brilliantly distinctive submission for our Documenting Sound series, on Princess Diana Of Wales Sakini finds a contemplative and opaque downstroke, her forlorn vocals convected via radiant webs of reverb in an ephemeral style of songcraft that drifts effortlessly, like the sound of someone coming to terms with themselves. Making use of negative space as an evocative ingredient, she keeps everything in a sublime tension between reserved emotion and the lingering decay of FX, effectively allowing us into her space but at arms reach, obfuscated by pink hued smoke and down lit in a manner that keeps her features oblique but tangible. And like everything we’ve heard from Sakini before - her work here is multi-dimensional, its emotional complexity taking a while to resolve, its impact multiplied in waiting. Lulled into existence with the snoring bass and sleepy cicadas of ’Sleet’, Laila's voice comes to occupy a dreamily illusive mid-ground, smudged into whispers and drizzly atmospheres on the breathy country nocturne of ’Still Beach’ and plumbing rich depths of her echo chamber in the all too fleeting ‘Closer’. Flip it over and the kneaded bass presence of ‘Exhaust’ guides us into a sort of flinty 2-step dream-sequence, before that dream logic steers a lonesome post punk bass and dubbed snare rolls of ‘Fragments of Blue’. On the closing ‘Choir Chant’, harpy squeals ride against a low slung bassline, one part Coil, one part Joy Division, notched with a longing detachment. Difficult to absorb and benefiting from attentive, repeat listens, Princess Diana of Wales resonates with these strange twilight times above perhaps anything else we’ve listened to this year. "What is real and how does it feel?" the cryptic press release asks. We're gonna be unravelling that for months.

Kinzua debut a ritualistic, zonked outernational ambience, downbeat and cyberpunk bliss on Vladimir Ivkovic’s Offen Music - RIYL Morphosis, To Rococo Rot, CS + Kreme, Black Zone Myth Chant. Formed by Lucas Brell in Berlin and Leipzig’s Marvin Unde (Qnete), Kinzua emerge from the German club undergrowth with hypnotic slants of brownfield-pastoral electronica and meter-messing motorik pulses on their first release ‘None of the Above’. Smeared over a double LP, the hour-long album pitchbends with a properly lysergic quality as it executes its functions between the folksy crackle of ‘First Chapter’ and the grungy, viscous, post-D&B rolige of ‘Breath’. Rhythmic prompts ranging from klassic kosmiche to ‘90s UK armchair music and contemporary dembow dancehall underline Kinzua’s lines of melodic thought and dream-textured electronics in swirling permutations that feel in-the-moment but ever rolling towards an uncertain horizon. Kinzua act as spirit guides for the mind expanding new generation of trippers, with effortlessly oily grooves and keen attention to detail that suspend a sense of disbelief and mesmerise to their method. Seductive oddities such as ‘Domestic Affair’ follow to Detlef Weinrich-esque electro on ‘Elevator Moving Flor’ and ‘Heidi Peter’ echoes original Harmonia from a bleaker perspective, while supremely groggy drone in ‘Surface’ gives way to arid dancehall abstraction on ‘Sahara’, and ‘Gobi’ slopes off on a crooked outernational tip to a highlight of Laila Sakini-like scenes in ‘The Dancing Smoke’ starring vox by GiGi FM reciting from Baudelaire’s ‘Les Fleurs de Mal’.

Forever an associate of the American avant-garde, Taralie Peterson has been baring her soul on outward-leaning recordings as a solo artist (as Louise Bock and Tar Pet) and with a dazzling array of collaborators (most notably and fruitfully with Ka Baird as Spires That in The Sunset Rise). The Madison, WI based musician now steps out as Tekla Peterson with Heart Press, a garishly gripping set of songs that simmer in a stew of heartbreak and survival. Put simply in Peterson’s own words: “This music came from the fiery flames of pain from the ending of my 20 year relationship.” Matching these previously uncharted emotional areas are Peterson’s experiments with pop structures paired with fruitfully barren arrangements and vivid, pseudo-string textures. No polished ennui or overly gory details, just transcendent beauty and universal emotion. The set opens with “Soda Pop Jam,” an eerily enchanted earworm that writhes in a sultry bed of melody and melancholy. “Swarm of Gnats” heightens the morbid musicality that drips onto a desolate dance floor littered with emotional detritus. “Cancel Out Effect” offers a scruffy, operatic opus that traipses through a litany of confessions and castigations. Casting things in an entirely different light, “Between a Rock” and closer “Count Out Shadows” bring a neon-lit, neo noir of nonchalance that pair perfectly in a downstream drift of sullen musings. “WWIB” is a cacophony of catharsis, a fever dream fugue that cycles into an infinite blur. Heart Press presents the ultimate breakup album that devastates everything in its wake, but Peterson finds true beauty in the emotional valleys and eventual peaks with poise and prowess. credits released April 8, 2022

Bruno De Angelis and Giovanna Gulinello unwittingly met in London in the late 70’s, after being introduced by a mutual friend. Both Bruno and Giovanna arrived with varying ambitions. Giovanna wanted to learn English or be a painter, while Bruno found work at the Royal Post Office, which he found testing. It wasn’t until Bruno rescued Giovanna from an awkward date that the pair became a couple. At the time, music was just something they did for fun. Bruno already had an acoustic guitar and G bought a bass. Those were the days when you could start a new band, whether you could play or not, and new independent labels were springing up. Rough Trade Records was literally around the corner. In 1981 the pair moved back to Italy and found an apartment in Rome. It’s here that they began to focus on their music and where they started ‘recording’ their tracks. First, they would record the rhythm, maybe add the Gigster (the name of their “cheap drum machine”), the bass, and then, as they made a copy of the first cassette onto a second cassette they would add guitar, more synth, or both at the same time. After that, it was not unusual to copy from the second cassette back into the first cassette adding even more “stuff”. As with many artists during the early 80’s, the Influenza Prods’ sound was the direct result of the accessibility of emerging electronic instruments and the recording equipment available to them. The duo was resourceful and inventive, acquiring new equipment as resources allowed. They recorded dialogue from British Soap Operas on their TV set, which were later added to their tracks, while further making use of their family’s cutlery sets, which were used to fill in certain percussion sections The duo’s homespun recordings found a web of admirers in the unofficial distribution of tape trading and mail-art scenes. Despite the DIY ethos and the fact that most tapes were handmade, the Influenza Prods managed to ‘release’ three tapes which comprised of the Greatest Tits (1983), Cheek-A-Bomba (1984) and Quasi Solo (1985). Bruno and Giovanna were sadly subjected to serious family problems, including the loss of loved ones in their lives and eventually parted ways, concluding the Influenza Prods. However, to this day they remain close friends who keep in touch regularly.

"The Japanese avant-garde pop band strove to create a “sacred ambiance” on their second album, fusing unconventional arrangements with bouncing volleyballs and an eyes-wide air of wonder." “It’s rare that art-pop matches its extravagance with such alluring modesty. In doing so, Paradise of Replica feels like encountering cinematic spectacles in miniature.” —Joshua Minsoo Kim (Pitchfork, September 30, 2022)

Once again Studio Mule dives deep into the music history of Japan, unearthing the multi-colored album “A-Key” by Eiki Nonaka, released as CD only on the short living japanese label Sun & Moon Records in 1995. An album, that uniquely unifies global ethnic music styles, the playfulness of Jazz, innovative electronic soundscapes, and the winding per-sonality of spiritual music. It’s the only solo album of a musician, that is triggering the advanced electrified japanese music culture since the early 1980ees. Eiki Nonaka was part of electronic New Age quartet interiors, releasing the two minimalistic, synth-pop leaning albums “Interior” and “design” in 1982 and 1987. likewise, he was a member of Haruomi Hosono’s band friends of earth, playing, voicing, and tuning the drum machine, guitar, synthesizers, and mi-crophone on their second landmark experimental Pop Electronic album “Sex, Energy and Star”, released Hosono’s outstanding non-standard label in 1986. His one and only solo album “A-Key” features the essence of all his musical journeys until 1995, bringing, as he puts it on his blog http://www.viewz.jp, “all my musical career up to that point designed in sounds that were ringing in my head at that time. It's extremely introspective, but the various mental landscapes of that time are still vibrating fresh and acoustically new.”

Austudy Records is proud to present it’s debut release Burning It Up: Australian Reggae (1979-1986). A compilation surveying the influence of Reggae on Australia’s preoccupation with Rock, Pop and New Wave between the years of 1979-1986. This selection of 8 obscure tracks originally issued on 7” records represent some of the earliest examples of Reggae sounds in Australian recorded music. Across 8 tracks Burning It Up encounters a psychedelic Dub-Soul stepper in Janie Conway’s Temptation, similarly The Lifesavers provide the compilation’s name-sake in their own spaced-out, improv-riddim. In Sydney Delaney/Venn join forces with Marcia Hines to deliver a glammed-out anthem while down the road a few ex-pats known as The Nights In Shining dance to an anthem of their own at a disco on the beach. The mysterious Wide Boy Youth preaches over Roots-Rock from some plastic-tropics whilst up north the irrepressible Time Lords Inc. fight the good fight in a loose funk-rock protest. Faded, late-night echoes of Ska wane with the The Agents and one of, if not the earliest examples of an Australian dub reverberates gloriously in Jo Jo Zep's hands-on approach to his Oz-Rock-classic.

Another Interplanetary Star Creature team up for a Chicago <-> Tokyo expedition across a fusional soundscape ranging from bossa nova lounge to pre-vaporwave exotica; new age city pop to minimal library boogie. June Chikuma is best known now for her ground breaking Video Game soundtrack throughout the late 1980s and early 90s, most notably the now cult-classic status Bomberman Hero OST for Nintendo. During this same period of the late , she produced many recordings for a wide variety of clients including Japanese Public Transit Commercials, Video Game Arcades and VHS Nature Documentaries. We reached out to June in 2019 with the hopes of combing her archives to present the modern listener base here on Earth. We selected a nice mix of tracks as entry point in June's work. These tracks have been rescued from obscurity, remastered and waxed up for contemporary universal enjoyment. Hear Chikuma & Co. interpret influence's from Kraftwerk to Steely Dan, Herbie Hancock to Eric Dolphy, and Composers Ali Sriti to Paul Hindemith across a legendary line up of hardware synths ranging from Yamaha DX7, Korg Polysix, Roland D-550, and Oberheim Matrix-1000.

In 2004 Jan St.Werner and Andi Toma, aka Mouse On Mars, celebrate their 10th anniversary. Many will claim their music already was so revolutionary and pioneering back in 1994, that it could well have been written today without sounding the slightest bit dated whatsoever. Starting as an avant-garde experiment in electronic music and philosophy, Mouse On Mars has evolved into one of the biggest music exports from Germany. After a decade of producing music, the duo have released eight full length records including their newest: Radical Connector. In true Mouse On Mars style, Jan St.Werner and Andi Toma came up with a perfect way to celebrate their anniversary. In conjunction with the prestigious Kunsthalle Düsseldorf they worked on an art exhibition called "doku / fiction: Mouse On Mars reviewed and remixed" in which artists delivered their visions of Mouse On Mars, but and here's the special twist (or should we say 'twift') without being able to use Mouse On Mars' music or to generate any sound. The exhibition opened on April 3rd to huge acclaim in both the art and music worlds alike and, as such, constitutes the perfect start for the launch of Mouse On Mars' new album Radical Connector. Due for release in the second half of 2004, it is the follow up to 2001's Idiology. Critical acclaim has been heaped on Mouse On Mars for their significant contribution to the development of electronic music, their importance for the German music scene as a whole, and for their innovations using live instrumentation in performance and recording long before it became common place in the power book scene. Mouse On Mars are true innovators. Jan St.Werner and Andi Toma provide positive proof that despite it being an incredibly difficult undertaking, it is nevertheless possible to write and perform sophisticated music as part of a theoretical framework and still rock like hell. Anyone who has ever been to a Mouse On Mars show will testify to the latter; anyone who has ever talked to Jan St.Werner or Andi Toma will confirm the former. Mouse On Mars' unique way of creating music demonstrates that intelligence and playfulness are not mutually exclusive terms. Their music is both challenging and funny - complexly layered yet with a simple driving beat. Mouse On Mars has a unique vision and a unique way of expressing this vision, resulting in an unmistakeable sound which functions on a universal level and makes people move their minds and their bodies. In a musical genre not noted for longevity, Mouse On Mars has not only found their own distinctive voice, but have remained a force of imaginative innovations for a decade. The new album Radical Connector includes nine new tracks which took Jan and Andi three years to write and produce in their famous St. Martin studio in Düsseldorf. Long-time musical collaborator Dodo Nkishi was part of the recording team once again, and the album fe atures both his drumming and his strangely recorded vocals most prominently in the aptly named "Wipe This Sound". Never has Mouse On Mars written a more danceable track with such irresistible drive. Expect to see dance floors from Tokyo to Santiago de Chile full to overflowing. Sonig recording artist Niobe also participated in the recording her wonderfully aloof vocals ("the end is near...") adorn two tracks. With Radical Connector Mouse On Mars is taking an important step forward both in terms of musical vision and international standing. Their Touring will focus for the first time on North America. Making appearances not only with Drummer Dodo, but as both a duo and as DJ's. When you show up remember to bring your dance shoes and your thinking cap! If in 1994 Mouse On Mars sounded like 2004, then Radical Connector is a portent of what the year 2014 will bring. Enjoy!