MUSIC

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.

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.

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.

A modern funk / downbeat sanctuary recommended by fans around , , and , and also known as popular acts such as Space Ghost and Nelson Of The East , The second album "Chrysalis" of multi-instrumentalist ABUNAI based in Oakland, California appears. Slow tempo, dreamy texture, shadowy mellow vocals, and superb dream pop with rich synthesizers, it's a must-listen for fans of Tame Impala, Khruangbin, Shintaro Sakamoto, and James Blake! Limited to 500 copies.

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!

Hydroplane reinstate their formidable 1997 debut of sublime guitar atmospherics, fragile lyricism and droning incidentals with an overdue vinyl and digital reissue. An offshoot of the now-féted The Cat’s Miaow, the trio formed after their drummer decamped to London, charting new territory with tape loops, manipulated samples and a borrowed Jupiter 4 in the wake of Endtroducing. Adopting a handle that Dean Wareham once considered calling Luna, Hydroplane intended to only ever release Excerpts From Forthcoming LP, a single-sided 7” sonic collage, before imploding in mystery. Their label however insisted they deliver their taunted album. From the comfort of a Brunswick flat, they continued to record soaring melodies and restrained song structures to 4-track, sculpting dramatic Radiophonic Workshop cues weighted in reverb and near-perfect dream pop lead by Kerrie Bolton’s empyrean vocals. Bored of industry expectation and largely ignored by local audiences, the reluctant performers followed the way of The Cannanes and formed meaningful overseas alliances by mail and phone, securing releases on Michigan outpost Drive-In and Broadcast launching pad Wurlitzer Jukebox. Championed by John Peel with twenty spins on his converted Radio One slot and even polling in the Festive Fifty of 1997, the humble three-piece still walked to their neighbourhood shops undetected. Previously only available as a US-issued CD, this reminiscent late-night suite establishes Hydroplane as an everlasting ember in Australia’s beloved indie nexus.

“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.”

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.

Well it's been more than 365 days and nights since we released a record on our small and independent record label based in Vancouver, BC. For better or worse we have always operated at a pace that feels natural to us. The same could be said for Mood Hut recording artist Jack J who has not released any music in over seven years. Do you remember his last record? It was called Thirstin' and it came out in the summer of 2015, hot on the heels of Something (On My Mind) which came out the year before. So naturally after this very long silence we are proud and excited to be able to finally share Opening the Door, the first full length LP by Jack J. Self-recorded slowly but surely between 2015 and 2019 between Mood Hut and C'est Life Studios, and featuring some crucial saxophone work by Linda Fox, this LP confirms Jack J to be a masterful mood maker as well as an incisive songwriter. Over the course of the album an undeniably blue haze settles over inward-peering ambient jazz, On-U-inspired digital-dub and quiet storm soft rock leaving a distinct sense of sadness amongst all the tangerine funk. Check it out!

At Richard Swift's National Freedom studios, the live-to-tape ethos allowed the songs on Damien Jurado's 'Maraqopa' to expand and retract like a great beast's breath. Every in-the-moment bell and whistle here is hung with a natural, casual care. And from this, each song offers up its own unique gift: the enchanting children's choir that echoes each line of Jurado's lament for innocence lost on "Life Away from the Garden"; the breezy bossa nova that begins "This Time Next Year" and rises as effortless as a smoke cloud into high-noon showdown pop; "Reel to Reel"'s wobbly, Spector-symphony and its meta themes; the wonderful falsetto vocal work Jurado pulls from himself on "Museum of Flight." The Seattle Times recently called Jurado "Seattle's folk-boom godfather," a praising recognition to be sure. But also a title Jurado might not yet be ready to accept. That's a title for someone who has settled. With each visit to National Freedom, Jurado is exploring, taking risks. He's not only freeing his songs. The gate is opened wide to allow us all into his once-isolated musical universe. One gets the sense he's just now hitting his stride.

Kelz’s debut ‘5am and I Can’t Sleep’ delivers us a frothy dream-pop introduction to the mind of Vietnamese-American producer and multi-instrumentalist Kelly Truong. Written and recorded in the middle of the night in her Orange County, California home, these songs tell a nostalgic yet hopeful story following loss. For kelz, carefully looping beats, tinkering with synthetic waveforms, and interweaving guitar picking serves as a meditation--a mode of processing emotions and the inevitable passing of time. Front and center are her airy vocals, recorded in a whisper so as to not wake people in the other room. Each song folds in on itself like a wave’s undertow, reorienting infectious melodies from tracks previous. When asked about the tracks, kelz reflects on the process as “feeling like running towards something” but not knowing what it is. Escape with kelz on a long night drive with this effervescent electro-pop debut.

Salutations signals a series of meetings, greetings, group assemblies and exercises along the invisible plane created through correspondence. This is the inaugural compilation of new music from RVNG, inspired in part by a collaboration with Adult Swim. The question of how similar we are arises in the simple form of contact, and how we choose to embrace the potential of that moment and one another. Through correspondence, we connect, communicate, and form community. At first, correspondents with one another, and through the processes of collaboration and transmission, we correspond to parallel and intersecting collective cores. This eternal network, perhaps informed (consciously or subconsciously) by some celestial or spiritual force, becomes a portal to practice social responsibility and an access point to a wider, inclusive universe of information. In turn, the network becomes a human phenomenon, as well as a potent demonstration of art and collectivism. As the world heals, and evolves through future changes, having this network in place provides a vessel to and grow / glow beyond our corporeal state.

As a grade-schooler listening to the radio in his dad’s car, Stimulator Jones thought Prince was singing “round spiritual ring” on the hook of “Raspberry Beret.” The adult Stimulator Jones, aka Sam Lunsford, now knows all the lyrics to “Raspberry Beret” – and can play the song on virtually any instrument, from bass to sitar – but when the time came to title his new album, he decided to name it after that misheard lyric. Round Spiritual Ring shows a more personal and vulnerable side than Stimulator’s debut Exotic Worlds and Masterful Treasures, with lyrics that touch on his struggles with depression and chronic pain. But Sam is an optimist at heart, and his album’s overarching message is that love and connection are the forces that will ultimately save us. Round Spiritual Ring also symbolizes the connectedness of everything, what Sam calls “repetitive forces in the world” – think DNA, the planets, or vinyl records.

“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?

What Does it Mean to Be American? is the eighth solo album by Margate, UK based composer & multi-instrumentalist Robert Stillman. Performed, recorded & mixed almost entirely by Stillman, the seven tracks on What Does it Mean to Be American? are experimental in the purest sense of the word; Stillman's composition & recording techniques rely heavily on improvisation, which often sends his music in surprising directions. Elements of jazz, drone, funk, blues, psychedelia, new age & chamber music are referenced, often subconsciously, but Stillman's music ultimately defies adherence to any particular genre. Stillman explains: "The musical content of this work is varied, partly due to its having been recorded over a long period of time, and also due to the attitude I brought to curating the work, i.e. removing any sense of filter on the creative impetus. Much of this work was made very quickly and intuitively; the idea was to remove as many barriers as possible between gut-level expressions and the sound result, to essentially dream these tracks directly into existence. "This music, like much of my other recorded output, is the product of a solo studio process that involves extensive layering of multi-track recordings of me playing various instruments (tenor saxophone, clarinet, bass clarinet, piano and drums)." What Does it Mean to Be American?'s one guest performance comes from Anders Holst (Stillman's collaborator in the Bog Bodies project), who contributes acoustic guitar to the album's closing track, "No Good Old Days." While What Does it Mean to Be American? is a mostly instrumental work (only the opening track, "Cherry Ocean," features Stillman's singing voice), a strong narrative carries through the album, namely Stillman's examination of his nationality. From Stillman: "I was born and raised in America, and identify as an American. However, I have lived in the UK for over a decade, and this has given me the opportunity to consider what being 'American' means outside the day-to-day experience of being American and has created a space for me to consider the concept of American 'identity" as someone no longer living there. In the position of ex-patriot, it is tempting to claim one's favorite trappings of 'American' and disassociate from the rest, but this is unacceptable to me. "Part of growing up into an adult has meant coming to terms with the American Identity in total. In other words, recognising that to selectively claim aspects of American identity is a narcissistic game of illusion. To worship aestheticized, revisionist imaginations of Americanness (read 'Americana') plays a role in this. In this record I wish to share my insight that to 'be' American is to claim everything within that specification: historical, cultural, social, stereotypical, experiential, heroic, villainous. In this model of Americanness, there is nothing 'American' that lives outside of the 'American' identity. In the context of some of the most difficult, embarrassing, uncomfortable years of being American, I feel that doubling down on the identity in total represents a gesture of radical acceptance of reality that opens the space for positive action, be it personal or political, as a corrective to the inertia of denial and delusion. "The music on this album adopts a similar attitude of 'radical acceptance' in the sense that, to as great an extent as I could, I tried not to let 'aesthetics' get in the way of intuition. The process was geared toward letting in musical impulses before I had the chance to critically examine them. The end result is that the music is more varied and technically rough-edged than other work I've made, and the musical languages are more varied. It is a more direct expression of the thoughts, emotions, dreams, and beliefs that are the 'prime movers' of my work." WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE AMERICAN? My passport says: UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. I show it at the border, and they say, “Welcome Home”. I was born in America, and became an American Human Being as I breathed American Air. My American time touches the Deep American Time: the eternal American IS that contains all qualities/ actions/ occurrences, past-present-future. The American Ice Cream Cone reminds me, I must “Eat it All”. I am American, and I can’t buy anyone else’s American. Not with dollars; not with devotion. / / / / / / / / “America, what am I?” “Look at yourself.” “My Image?” “No.” “My question?” “Yes. That is your Birthright.”

Growing up in Brooklyn, Carlos was a reserved adolescent who loved Beethoven and Al Green. As a teenager he sang his diary into a microphone. This project grew to become a critically acclaimed, collaborative touring group, Ava Luna. His early 20s were spent entrenched at the beloved DIY sanctuary, Silent Barn in Bushwick--making a living cutting hair and recording bands in a ramshackle studio inside an unrenovated mechanic’s garage. Since that time, he has cultivated a production career that includes credits from genre-expansive artists like Princess Nokia, Frankie Cosmos, Sneaks, Gustaf, Juan Wauters, and Palehound. Having ceded creative control of his band in favor of a fully democratic process, Carlos now explores his roots in a solo outlet, Carlos Truly. Navigating a multi-cultural family history with tracks largely produced by his real-life brother Tony Seltzer, Carlos sits in a charged, intimate space. His brother’s celebrated underground hip-hop sensibilities mingle securely with Carlos’s pot-smoking nerd energy. His vocals evoke the old soul singers his radio DJ father would spin at home, the irreverence and joy of NYC's DIY scene, and the heady sonic worlds of an imagination shaped by a lifetime in NYC. Out July 1, 2022

Alison Statton of Young Marble Giants, an avant-garde / indie pioneer in Wales, has established himself as a masterpiece released from the prestigious Rough Trade in 1982, a band formed with guitarists Simon Booth and Spike. The debut album "La Varieté" has been completely remastered from And is a happy reissue! !! This work is a bold work that breaks the flow of post-punk by incorporating various elements such as bossa nova, afrobeat, and truly original contemporary exotic pop based on jazz! A masterpiece of Neo-acoustic that was highly evaluated by critics at the time of its release and had a great influence on Saint Etienne and Belle and Sebastian, who later became active in the indie world! !! Clear vinyl specifications. Limited to 500 copies.

EM Records is proud to present a new tune from Chisako and Junta. Osaka-based Chisako and Junta is a vocal unit of MTG (Chisako), a member of Casio Toruko Onsen, and BIOMAN (Junta), a musician/DJ/designer and member of Neco-nemuru. In this duo, Chisako is in charge of vocals, while Junta is in charge of song production, visuals, etc. The song 'Yume no Umi' released in 2016 received a strong response and was followed by the first album “Chisako, Junta and You”. Their tunes are highly acclaimed for its works, which have the appearance of just ‘J-Pop’ but are embedded with strange musical details, including a sense of acoustics.

Rooms With Walls and Windows is the first album by Seattle-by-way-of-Chicago-by-way-of-Buffalo singer, songwriter & guitarist Julie Byrne. Blending psychedelic & traditional folk elements, Julie Byrne creates a highly personal & quietly mystical world that echoes the early work of Leonard Cohen & Vashti Bunyan. Rooms With Walls and Windows' twelve tracks were collected from two limited edition cassette releases, recorded between 2011 & 2012 by Jake Acosta in Chicago, IL. Each song was recorded live, with Julie accompanying herself on fingerpicked acoustic guitar or keyboard. Rooms With Walls & Windows was lovingly remastered for vinyl by Owen Ashworth & Matthew Barnhart.