MUSIC

We’re all on our own unique emotional road trips. Infinite Avenue happens to be Carmen’s. Here she is, holed up in the Motel Nowheresville, unpacking a suitcase full of stories of guilt, desire, rage, apathy, love and friendship, loneliness, nature, inner demons and other tales of twenty-first century womanhood. Carmen Villain is half-Norwegian and half-Mexican, born in the USA and now living in Oslo, Norway, having moved back after living in London for a few years. She has a lot of stories to tell. Writing, recording and producing alone, Carmen’s intensely personal songs are entirely self-created in her makeshift studio, made up of tapestries of guitar, piano, programmed drums and synths, making the most she could out of her limited gear. Once she had arrived at more than enough tracks for a follow-up album to 2013’s 'Sleeper,' some of them were mixed with experimental house producer Matt Karmil and ‘Quietly’ was treated by noise improviser Helge Sten (aka Deathprod). Taboo-busting Norwegian artist Jenny Hval contributes lyrics and vocals on ‘Borders’, a song especially relevant among today’s tightening frontiers in America and elsewhere. ‘Red Desert’ is titled after the legendary Antonioni movie about a woman’s survival tactics in a surreal industrial landscape full of existential crisis. ‘To me the movie feels like a perfect visual representation of what it can be like to be anxious and uncomfortable in your head sometimes,’ says Carmen. Musically, 'Infinite Avenue' has a similar effect. With 'Infinite Avenue,' Carmen Villain’s songwriting and production skills have taken a major leap forward, and on the final, ethereal ‘Planetarium’ her voice shoots into the stratosphere, riding the comet tail of a Korg bass drone. It’s about acknowledging the immensity of the universe, while remembering that we’ve each got our own private constellation of issues to deal with down here. It’s a typically Villainous contrast of rapture and irony, with a murmured coda recorded as she was falling asleep one night. ‘Everything I write has to be true,’ she says, ‘even if I sometimes find it’s too confessional. Whatever was my truth at that moment.’ The hollow-eyed woman on the cover, that’s Hollywood actress Gena Rowlands, partner of the late director John Cassavetes – a heroine of Carmen’s because of the way her face and body can so brilliantly express psychological states, nervousness, being stressed out, desperation, anxiety, joy without necessarily using words. A freakish dream sequence in 'Love Streams,' where she gambles with the love of her estranged husband and child and desperately tries to make them laugh with a bunch of practical-joke toys, is manic genius – and one of Carmen’s favourite film scenes. Ms Rowlands, by the way, personally approved the use of her image for this project. A famous movie maker once called film ‘truth at 24 frames per second’. With 'Infinite Avenue,' you get an earful of truth at 33 1/3 revs per minute.

Nocturne, the sophomore album by Wild Nothing, is a window into singer/songwriter Jack Tatum's "ideal world" of pop music. Written largely while living in Savannah, GA during 2011, the songs that became Nocturne speak to a new Wild Nothing where the lines between Jack's influences and personality have been further blurred. The album features some open references to past music just as his critically acclaimed debut Gemini did, but it's also an album that feels much less rooted in anything in particular and, well, more adult. Gemini was written before there were Wild Nothing fans or even a live band; Nocturne is different. With an unexpected fan base to turn to, Jack spent more time perfecting his craft. The obsessiveness of Nocturne is inherent in it's gentle harmonies, orchestrated synths, wandering voice, and songs that speak of his post-Gemini experiences as he explores new paradoxes of pop. And yet, Nocturne isn't obvious, it is a strange and distinctive musical beast, the product of an obsessive pop vision that creates its own reality.

From the academy of deep soul and no ego, Reverend Baron delivers visions of liquor store East LA, the off-the-freeway dry mirage of slow motion graffiti and lonely seagulls. A nylon stringed zen fog with themes of woozy love, layered dimensions of nostalgia and glazed neighborhood tales that roll in with a natural ease. After notching a permanent status in the skateboarding orbit as Danny Garcia, he transferred his effortless style, dedication and authenticity into music. Practicing a philosophy of demystifying the process and doing it yourself, he has become a proficient multi-instrumentalist, engineer, and producer of his own and other artist's music. All streams of curiosity converge into the river. An enigma, Reverend Baron emerges from the proverbial gray overpass with no sense of urgency. He takes a sharp gaze at his surroundings and processes them through a factory of depth and gentle swag to yield a sound that sits as easy as fallen molasses on the bodega shelf. The songs are an unassuming invitation to either walk through the doorway or lean on the wall outside, either way something beautiful and rare.

Amid massive global paradigm shifts Dave Hartley (aka Nightlands) became a father twice over and left his native Philadelphia for Asheville, where the pace of daily life is slower and it's easier to maintain a zoomed-out perspective on modern life. From the newfound refuge of a studio he built using the bones of a barn attached to his hundred-something-year-old house in the mountains, Hartley has tailored a collection of well-crafted pop rock, pointedly titled Moonshine. Guided by some of the harmonic sensibilities that have helped make The War on Drugs a force in modern music, Moonshine combines immaculate-yet-dense vocal stacks and billowy clouds of effected keyboards with classic songcraft, revealing previously unseen acreage in the unfurling dreamscape that is Nightlands. The surrealistic album art by Austin-based illustrator Jaime Zuverza depicts an archway opening to the stars over the surface of an idyllic sea flanked by both moon and sun. Similarly, Moonshine reveals portals within portals leading to ever deeper places in Hartley's vocal-centered labyrinth. Hartley lays out the narrative of Moonshine on its masterfully sparse opener, "Looking Up." "Take your family to the mountains," he sings, "Hide them safely; pray for mercy, and easy fictions..." Throughout the album, there are plenty of buoyant high moods where the pitter-patter of drum machine and humming digital organ hints at Hartley's low-key tropicalia streak, but lyrics such as these anchor the dreaminess in real-world sorrow and resignation. Nowhere are these sentiments more apparent than on the title track, a nearly acapella recitation of "America the Beautiful" that poignantly hovers over a mirage of soft keyboards before dovetailing into Hartley's own words about the hypocrisy of the American dream. "This was never intended to be an overtly political record" he admits. "I have so many friends who are able to process the frustration of current events gracefully or with wisdom or in a nuanced way, but I often find myself just consumed with anger about it all. I decided to just let that come out, and it manifested itself lyrically." Moonshine's wide-eyed, utopian instrumental backdrops provide sharp contrast to Hartley's lyrics, which sting even harder within the sweetness. "With You" follows with full-on pop romanticism, as a rolling synth bass line and a decelerated drum machine ground the breezy arrangement. The track departs after an accumulation of warbling keyboard textures give way to "Blue Wave," an angelic instrumental vignette that deepens the mood while allowing the listener to reflect on Moonshine's earlier chapters. The slowly anthemic "No Kiss for the Lonely" takes poetic aim at xenophobia beneath a canopy of chiming bells, kalimba-like textures, glassy vocoded passages, and a massive chorus derived almost entirely from Hartley's own voice, exemplifying the nucleus of his creative process. "I spend ninety percent of my studio time building these vocal stacks with sort of endless vocal layering and lots of speeding up and slowing down of the track, overdubbing at different speeds and with different microphones," Hartley details, "and I really perfected that, I think, on this record." In terms of instrumentation, Hartley pared things down as much as possible, choosing to allocate all of Moonshine's density to his vocal harmonies, the layers of which number in the hundreds on some songs. "People sometimes ask me what's in my vocal effects chain, gear wise" he muses, "but honestly it's just a matter of having put in thousands of hours obsessing over the blend of these stacks, honing the craft." Even in light of the album's vocal emphasis, Hartley's history as a bassist brilliantly beams through Moonshine, giving effortless and sprightly movement to songs like "Down Here," which also features an extended section of saxophone lent by his Western Vinyl labelmate, Joseph Shabason. In addition to Shabason, the album hosts a short list of remote collaborators including four of Hartley's bandmates from The War on Drugs, Robbie Bennet, Anthony Lamarca, Eliza Hardy Jones, and Charlie Hall, as well as exotica virtuoso Frank Locrasto (Cass McCombs, Fruit Bats), and producer Adam McDaniel (Avey Tare, Angel Olsen). Hartley was forced to keep the guest list small out of the necessity of pandemic isolation, coupled with his move to a smaller city, all of which challenged him to do most of the album's heavy lifting right down to the mixing duties, resulting in the most independent effort of his career. By that measure, Moonshine is also the clearest image yet of Dave Hartley as a person and creator.

An exceptional masterpiece that must be heard by all shoegazing enthusiasts. The 2023 cassette reissue version of the 2021 digital work "_____" by the one-man post-black metal act "Sadness", which is one of the most popular blackgaze acts, will be released from in Italy. Stocked! Sweet and gloomy, aetherial and nocturnal, anthemic and prayerful, a solitary masterpiece in the 2020s! Limited 97 copies.

The earth rotates, seasons change…there is but one long day… Time is a beguiling, indistinct entity…sometimes standing still, sometimes bending back upon itself in premonitory memories of the future. Growing out of a musical pen-pal style correspondence that took place over the course of a year, separated by the Atlantic Ocean, Gloria de Oliveira and Dean Hurley passed thoughts and music back and forth that would eventually form their collaborative album Oceans of Time…all without ever meeting or speaking. The result is a sonic tapestry of that exchange: woven from conceptual threads of the celestial within, mortality and the realm beyond the stars. The duo’s partnership is an effortless merge, with the steady presence of de Oliveira’s vocals endowing the record with its sense of potency. Throughout the album, there is an innate understanding of how a lyric across a chordal color can sharpen an emotional truth. Much like a sunbeam that pierces a spiderweb to reveal its intricacy, her lyric and melody are purposely aimed in order to illuminate the truths deep within one’s self…a process that ties us all to the universal. The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, a professed influence, wrote about concepts of truth and faith in a way that illuminate the hidden depths of the soul amidst an individual’s earthly trials of experience. Much of this feeds into the album and threads its quilt of themes. With its impressionistic synths, shimmering guitars, and ethereal sonics, Oceans of Time at moments recalls the foundational dreampop of 4AD acts and early 90’s New Age pop. Frequent David Lynch collaborator Dean Hurley sets the tonal and sonic backdrop of each track on the album, lending a layered ether that envelops, frames and spotlights de Oliveira’s vocals. The album feels especially attuned to the connections between the physical and transcendental realms, and like the best dreampop, has a way of making the veil between two worlds feel just a little bit thinner. Oceans of Time is a key that has the power to release its listener from the handcuffs of reality, however briefly… The duo’s first single from the album is sourced from a unique place: an unfinished Jeff Buckley & Elizabeth Fraser demo entitled ’All Flowers in Time Bend Toward the Sun.’ The legacy and lore of the song is in itself a poetic cascade of time, cosmic links, loneliness, and the optimism of a love never realized… In 1983, Elizabeth Fraser would record a cover version of folk singer Tim Buckley’s 1967 “Song to the Siren.” Released under the 4AD collective ’This Mortal Coil,’ the Fraser/Guthrie performance would launch the duo’s first charting success. A little more than a decade later, Fraser would find herself amidst a romantic relationship with Tim Buckley’s son Jeff shortly after her relationship with Cocteau Twins’ guitarist Robin Guthrie had come to an end. During the brief affair, the two would record the only demo for ‘All Flowers in Time Bend Towards the Sun.’ Although the demo recording was never officially released, the song exists as a unique and profound musical artefact birthed from the lives of 3 cosmically entangled beings…a testament to the eternal nature of music that flows and connects across seas of time.

From the academy of deep soul and no ego, Reverend Baron delivers visions of liquor store East LA, the off-the-freeway dry mirage of slow motion graffiti and lonely seagulls. A nylon stringed zen fog with themes of woozy love, layered dimensions of nostalgia and glazed neighborhood tales that roll in with a natural ease. After notching a permanent status in the skateboarding orbit as Danny Garcia, he transferred his effortless style, dedication and authenticity into music. Practicing a philosophy of demystifying the process and doing it yourself, he has become a proficient multi-instrumentalist, engineer, and producer of his own and other artist's music. All streams of curiosity converge into the river. An enigma, Reverend Baron emerges from the proverbial gray overpass with no sense of urgency. He takes a sharp gaze at his surroundings and processes them through a factory of depth and gentle swag to yield a sound that sits as easy as fallen molasses on the bodega shelf. The songs are an unassuming invitation to either walk through the doorway or lean on the wall outside, either way something beautiful and rare.

"This album was made in the span of 1 year, through much struggle and pain I was able to synthesize the best in me into this album and game. A cold but gentle embrace, a deep look into one's self." - Astrophysics

"This album was made in the span of 1 year, through much struggle and pain I was able to synthesize the best in me into this album and game. A cold but gentle embrace, a deep look into one's self." - Astrophysics

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.

Recordings of The pale faced family on the hill took place over a week in January 2020 in a small church hall on the outskirts of London. A small number of electronic music producers decided to form a collective and make heavy ambient music for raw pleasure in the agreement that their identity be withheld. They invited Oliver Coates as a live musician to contribute cello drone which they would then add to, process, subtract from and mix with weather recordings and esoteric ways of generating sounds, including old sample packs and whatever else they had to hand. The results were mixed down to tape live without further editing or arrangement. Wishing to work under a cloak of anonymity, the process freed the producers from their other lives and released output, allowing them to enter a new group alias, to induce heady states of sound and to become a group without hierarchies.

For the past 10 years, it has been a sacred place that has expanded the horizon of the underground scene in Copenhagen, Denmark, to the world, and defines one of the current experimental lifelines represented by and . A new catalog of Posh Isolation, a sacred place where you can feel the shoegaze sound of a new era, which is a prestigious and unprecedented beauty, is in stock at once! !! The latest 2022 "The Last Picture Show" by Christian Stadsgaard's famous project Vanity Productions, which is known for his activities in the noise duo with Loke Rahbek sponsored by Posh, Damien Dubrovnik and The Empire Line, has been released on CD. A masterpiece that created an exceptional drone gaze sound full of melancholy and introspection as a desolate by repeating loop operations! You can enjoy the fantastic and majestic sound that is typical of Posh, which makes you feel the gaze of "somewhere other than here" far from this world such as the equinoctial week and the heavens. Limited to 300 copies.

Named for a familial forested retreat on Wisconsin’s Shell Lake, Scout Island is the vessel for Jungle Gym audio boss Jared Carrigan’s compact and compelling instrumental guitar vignettes. His latest, Laurentian Voyage, charts a rich trip down river through the North Woods of Minnesota and beyond, a formative landscape of his youth (recently revisited during Covidian isolation). The collection’s 19 tracks flow through twilight psych, sunset jangle, dockside devotionals, and whispering pines soft rock, a gallery of glimpses into scenes and seasons come and gone. Lean guitar figures ripple, riff, refract, and reverberate, framed by filtered drum loops, organ, synth, or bass. The mood softly sways between reverie and reflection but skews more autumnal as it unfolds, a sense of waning warmer days, a paler shade of light, campfires long since lit. Even so, the embers of memory cast their own warmth: faces, cabins, summers, music drifting out across the water. The clarity of fleeting moments, captured in snippets of strings and melody, slicing through choppy waves like the nose of a boat towards distant lightning.

Light touches of curved liquid sable highlight clouds above a mermaid’s island on a page of white. The swim-bubbled treasure gleams the blissful pleasure of Summer leisure, where at any time of day you’ll find an iridescent glow. As incredible as a dream.