MUSIC

Sam Gendel is known for his work with saxophones and wind controllers. Benny Bock is a keyboardist, composer, producer and sound designer from Oakland, California. Hans Kjorstad is a musician and composer in the field of contemporary microtonal music, informed by Norwegian traditional music and experimental improvised music.

Fresh transmissions from the sacred Temple of 5 Gate... This time it's 8 new tracks from London producer Xterea. TIP! Limited run of CDs…complete with download code.

Across eight tracks that mesh jazz-laced, emotive, and spacious composition with fourth-world and adult-contemporary tonality, Toronto saxophonist Joseph Shabason sketches an auditory map of the transcendence, unity, conditioning, and eventual renunciation of his upbringing in an Islamic and Jewish dual-faith household. The resulting album The Fellowship bears the name of the insular Islamic community Shabason’s traditionally Jewish parents belonged to from a time before he was even born; a mental and spiritual push-pull which continued shaping, even controlling, his outlook well into his adulthood. As a listening experience The Fellowship follows a chronological arc that spans three generations covering his parents’ early lives, his own spiritual and physical adolescence, and his subsequent struggle to eschew the problematic habituations of such a conflicted past.

“Life With My Grandparents” commences The Fellowship in overcast hues. A cassette recording of a child’s voice pops in and out of a murmuring brass tone as both elements drift like memories receding forever into the past. “My parents grew up in really difficult households. Both of my father’s parents had just survived the Holocaust only six years before he was born.” Shabason explains, cutting right to the root of what might have led his parents to diverge from their inherited spiritual conventions. "My grandparents were deeply traumatized from having lost so many friends and family members, and even if the war hadn’t happened I don’t think they would have been particularly emotionally available.” Exchanging the gloom for tension, the anxiously experimental “Escape From North York” jolts the cadence forwards and backwards by way of skittering jazz percussion as a nauseated synth melody balloons into full-on terror, all while the melodic elements are ambushed from below by a flash flood of air-rending texture. The title (a play on John Carpenter’s Escape From New York) refers to the area of Toronto where Shabason’s parents were raised, and rebelliously fled in their twenties against their own parents’ wishes. The title track of The Fellowship swings toward relief and reflection, and buoys the mood up to something childlike. It is suffused with saxophone, upright bass, chorus-drenched guitar, and digitized pan flute; the kinds of 90’s jazz timbres that mark a time in Shabason’s adolescence when the dilemmas of his family’s faith were still obscured by comfort, community, and a dash of the forgivable naivete of early youth. At the same time, the piece shows Shabason at his most melodically athletic, darting around chord changes with fervor for the subject at hand.

From here the perspective moves from third to first person as Shabason unpacks his teenage years across a three song suite, the titles of which mark the exact years they are meant to sonically illustrate. Where the previous track floated ever upward on innocence and clarity, “0-13” dispenses with both by its final third at which point things have unraveled into aleatoric unease representing “the first chink in the armour,” as Joseph admits, “and the first time I really started to question everything I’d been taught.” By “13-15” the pendulum is fully back on the side of apprehension as galloping percussion, an unrelenting synthetic marimba, an off-key wood flute, and jittering electric guitar tell a story of doubt and anger, dressed in fourth-world atonality. “By that time,” says Shabason, referring to the age denoted in the track name, “I was smoking weed and really getting into my head. According to my religion, smoking weed was gonna land me in hell, and all my friends who drank were also on the path to hell. The whole thing seemed totally absurd. The idea of a God that was that petty and vengeful made no sense. Those thoughts just swirled and created this background dissonance that existed all throughout my early teens. Middle school was fucked.”

“15-19” is the sadness that follows outrage, when the dust settles and the pieces need putting back together, yet they simply won’t fit in light of a new found perspective. As such, this final movement is bathed in tragic, futile optimism. Under a bed of half-tempo RnB, muted trumpets glow like dying embers catching the wind. Shabason elucidates, “at that point, I’d discovered punk and hardcore and decided to be straight edge. It provided me with a community and a great cover for why I didn’t drink or do drugs. It felt like this really cool disguise. It kept me from questioning why I was doing it in the first place, but underlying it all was sadness. Why were my gay friends going to hell? Why did women have to be modest and not men? Why did God want to punish me for so many things? Was I going to hell because I had sex with my girlfriend? None of it made sense, but I was so completely brainwashed that I never thought to seriously question it. Instead, I just slipped up more and more, did drugs, fooled around, and tried to put the divine ramifications of my actions out of my head.”

“Comparative World Religions” is a caffeinated gamelan named for the college course that caused Joseph-- and so many other young people engrossed in inherited repressive ideologies-- to see the irreconcilable nature of his beliefs from the outside in. Like the class itself, it stands apart from the backdrop of The Fellowship by replacing the seesaw of religious ecstasy and uncertainty with the type of transcendence that can only be arrived at through factual illumination. Using mournful brass and glassy keys, the aptly titled “So Long” represents the slow walking away that Shabason had to do mentally and emotionally, even long after the illusion had been cracked open. “It took me at least another twelve to fifteen years to fully deprogram myself from all the guilt and shame that was bred into me by religion, but I think that I’m finally free from it,” says Shabason of his present-day outlook. “This song is a final goodbye to that life… an exhale and deep inhale before I start a new chapter.” On The Fellowship, as on prior albums that bear his name, Joseph Shabason does what only the best instrumental music makers can: tell a story with emotional clarity that conveys even the subtlest of feelings, all without singing a single word. As wordless as ever-- with as complex a theme as ever-- this album may be his most emotionally articulate yet. Most importantly, those lost in the woods of repression and self-doubt that organized religion can be at its worst now have The Fellowship to help guide them into a softer light.

Slavic Folk Songs is a collection of songs and sacred chants from diverse Slavic regions, based on oral traditions and melodies often without authors or composers, with a special emphasis on Ukrainian songs. The songs have been arranged by the duo for two voices and are performed a cappella by Latvian singers Ansis Bētiņš and Artūrs Čukurs, in various techniques, characteristic to the specific Slavic singing traditions. The songs are performed in a traditional style of singing called "white voice" which requires no significant amplification or accompaniment. The record outlines a path of perils, struggles and the misfortunes of the world, yet is full of longing, respites, fleeting moments of joy and relentless hope and love throughout. This release is the duo’s first on XKatedral and consists of a double album containing a studio recording and a live performance at Fylkingen in Stockholm on March 3rd 2023. “In Latvia we are surrounded by melodies of folk songs – they have been sung to us by our mothers before we were even born, long before we started to speak and sing ourselves. These melodies are passed from generation to generation and they continue to be an essential part of our culture today. Throughout centuries they have been influenced by other cultures of the region interacting with each other – they have been shaped and reshaped together, traveling from mouth to mouth without borders. And you can find themes, characters, even melodies and attitudes towards life in the folks songs near and far – akin to the ones that were sung to us when we were kids. So, in this way our process of researching and collecting Slavic folk songs has been a process of understanding more about ourselves – through others, through our neighbors. We haven't aimed to achieve historically informed performance and authenticity with these recordings. But we believe we have made them with utmost respect and honesty. These songs have brought a huge amount of joy and ensnared us in their beauty. And we are excited and beyond grateful to share them with others through our voices.” Ansis and Arturs met when singing in a youth choir and singing together has been an integral part of their friendship. When they first came across music sung in the Slavic male tradition they were primarily struck by its power and beauty. ”It touched us directly, beyond words, and made us dig for more, to dive into it and – naturally for our friendship – to experience it with our own voices.” As they started researching this vocal tradition they were taken by the incredible richness and variation found in the material – the magnificent strength, humor, wit and wisdom, hope and defiance contained within. When Russia launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, a number of digital archives sprung up made by dedicated people increasingly digitizing sound recordings of folk songs and early chants from the regions affected by war in order to save their rich immaterial culture from destruction. Ansis and Arturs started collecting and transcribing the melodies and texts, eventually arranging them for two voices. Ansis Bētiņš studied academic singing and early music at the Jāzeps Vītols Latvian Academy of Music and the Luigi Cherubini Conservatory in Florence, Italy. Artūrs Čukurs has studied at the Jāzeps Vītols Latvian Academy of Music, the Royal Conservatory of The Hague, and the Theatre Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague. In their newly formed vocal duo Ansis and Arturs are driven by their organic interest in different singing traditions of various periods, regions, and styles.

Masma Dream World, a self-described multi-ethnic, non-binary, multi-disciplinary artist named Devi Mambouka who has roots in Gabon and Singapore, with her second album. Please Come To Me is an intense, beautiful, and haunting album that finds the technical developing with the spiritual, and the electronic with the natural. Masma Dream World reaches deep down to the interior of herself as its most vulnerable, proving that sorrow can be transformative, and music can be transformative.

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<iframe style="border: 0; width: 350px; height: 472px;" src="https://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/album=1345221564/size=large/bgcol=ffffff/linkcol=333333/artwork=none/transparent=true/" seamless><a href="https://masmadreamworld.bandcamp.com/album/please-come-to-me">PLEASE COME TO ME by Masma Dream World</a></iframe>

A quarter century since their 1998 debut, No Fear of Time finally reunites one of the greatest hip-hop duos of all-time, Black Star. Group members yasiin bey and Talib Kweli first joined forces to deliver their iconic breakout, Mos Def and Talib Kweli are Black Star, which quickly became one of hip-hop's most revered works and launched both already-rising stars into the stratosphere. Although each has since enjoyed success and acclaim in their individual careers, they've never realigned for a sophomore follow-up to that release until now. Produced entirely by renowned beatsmith Madlib, No Fear of Time has a future vibe with vintage soul. The 9-track album was recorded guerrilla-style in hotels and dressing rooms around the globe, and initially saw a non-traditional release, being made available exclusively on a subscription-based podcast platform. Now, the album is officially available on physical formats for fans worldwide to own and appreciate the triumphant return of Black Star.

Actress marks an auspicious 20th year releasing music with a vinyl edition of his RA mix; a near hour-long collage or braque of some 100 unreleased cuts trawling his HD and traversing its depths of brisk 313 techno, silver haze synth noise and flashes of neo-classical beauty. Trailing ’Statik’ back in spring ’24, 'Дарен Дж. Каннінгем' is practically on par with the album for levels of engrossing and gritty noirish atmospheres, scattering a breadcrumb trail of puckered keys and teasing rave signals that go deep into the forest of his mind/sound at a strident pace that buckles into offbeats and practically stumbles, groggy and spangled to the close. As with all his work, an underlying, artful narrative thread ties it all together in an abstract storytelling style that has served him incredibly well thus far and continues to pique the imagination of listeners across the fields of hazed electronics and dance music who may not necessarily listen to one or the other style, yet can’t help but be snagged by his restless equilibrium of those vibes.

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.

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.

Let the Moon Be a Planet marks the first volume of Reflections, a new series of contemporary collaborations orchestrated by RVNG Intl., and documents an inspired exchange between guitarist and songwriter Steve Gunn and pianist and composer David Moore of Bing & Ruth. Conjured by a mutual curiosity, and appreciation, for the respective musician’s work, Let the Moon Be a Planet initially took form over a progression of remote sessions and ultimately harmonized when Gunn and Moore completed the album together in the bucolic surroundings of Hudson, New York. Let the Moon Be a Planet is an invitation to relive the intimate moments shared between two artists finding their way along a single path, and into a world where the most subtle of gestures can ripple for an eternity.

On Hardcore, James Mapley-Brittle (GRRL) and Nick Sanborn (Made of Oak), meld their love of late-night club music to make mind-bending high-energy dance music. GRRL is one of the brightest emerging stars in the underground arts space and a regular collaborator with PC Music, NTS, and more; Sanborn is better known as one half of the Grammy-nominated electronic pop duo Sylvan Esso. First sparked during DJ sets in North Carolina basements, the duo’s unique creative chemistry has grown exponentially since the 2022 release of their debut EP, Inertia. GRRL x Made of Oak’s glitched-out sounds have been featured on Adult Swim, Fortnite, and with their own sample pack on Splice. Finding new fans in the likes of Björk, Arca, AG Cook, Porter Robinson, Barker and DJs across the world, GRRL x Made of Oak is an exhilarating experience that will shake the speakers and get any after-hours dance floor moving.

Sam Gendel and Antonia Cytrynowicz didn’t set out to make a record – it just happened. LIVE A LITTLE, a collection of songs resulting from one late summer afternoon in Gendel’s Los Angeles home, is less an album and more a moment. The ten tracks here were recorded mostly in one sitting, fully improvised, in the order in which they appear. It was the first and last time the songs have been played – a snapshot of an idea, an artifact of inspiration, at once both a beginning and an end. At the time of recording, Cytrynowicz was only eleven years old. The younger sister of Gendel’s significant other and creative partner Marcella, Cytrynowicz is an artist in her own way. She has no formal musical training, but is the product of a creative family and is someone who makes art the way many kids do – in the purest way, simply because they are moved to. On LIVE A LITTLE, she spontaneously crafted all the melodies and lyrics on the spot as Gendel played alongside her. Cytrynowicz’s musicality is sophisticated, strange, and other-worldly, and the resulting record is experimental jazz colliding with some sort of fantasy universe. Because of that, LIVE A LITTLE is a stand-out amidst Gendel’s extensive and varied catalog. Over the years, the multi-instrumentalist has been known for his prolific musical output as both a sought-after collaborator and as a solo artist. During 2021 alone he collaborated with Vampire Weekend, Maggie Rogers, Moses Sumney, Laurie Anderson, and Mach Hommy, as well as released Notes With Attachments with Blake Mills & legendary bassist Pino Palladino. In the same year he also released the 52-track Fresh Bread, as well as the follow-up to the acclaimed Music for Saxophone & Bass Guitar with Sam Wilkes. Then Mouthfeel / Serene, AE-30, Valley Fever Original Score, and singles “Isfahan” and “Neon Blue.” LIVE A LITTLE, though, exists on its own island. For one, the majority of Gendel’s work under his own name skews instrumental, but here the playfulness of his saxophone and nylon-string guitar work alongside the twinkle of Cytrynowicz’s voice. It’s the sound of unapologetic imagination running amok – and really, more than anything, the sound of having fun. Cytrynowicz is the ideal collaborator for Gendel, who throughout his career has remained largely unconcerned with the pageantry and presentation of the music business, instead focused solely on the music-making itself. Here, he found the purest sort of writing partner – he admires Cytrynowicz’ “supreme openness,” explaining: “Whatever is happening, she’s there with you. We really meet right where we are. She’s all ears, I’m all ears. I don’t even know how to explain what it is. It just works out somehow.” Gendel remembers first being impressed by her musicality one day while they were gathered in the backyard at her family’s home; she improvised a strange and fully-formed little composition. The melody struck Gendel - he pulled out his iPhone and had her sing into it, then later orchestrated an ornate, fully fleshed out world around the voice memo. It came easily and simply. The subsequent LIVE A LITTLE session unfolded naturally, too – no discussion, no plan, no ambition – just “let it rip.” They started when it felt right and ended when it felt finished, once the flow of ideas dissipated. Then they put it away without discussion and moved on to the next activity. For a week afterward, Gendel tinkered with the live recording, adding a part or three on top of the initial session, sculpting it into its final product; a moment of raw creativity condensed into a polished little stone. Then he brought it back to Cytrynowicz, who hadn’t heard it since that summer afternoon, and was floored by hearing what they had created. LIVE A LITTLE is a series of “what ifs” cascading into one another, off-kilter and experimental, a kaleidoscope of spontaneity and imagination. It’s a sweet distillation of the musical present, of daring to follow through on an impulse – what happens when a project is helmed by someone who doesn’t have time for second thoughts or self-doubt. “That’s why she and I can make music I think, because I don’t think I ever deviated from that approach - or at least, I hope I didn’t,” Gendel says. “I really think that’s the best way that works for me musically – that ‘no mind’ sort of thing.” And here they both decisively follow that intuition, chronicling the way an idea blossoms and moves through you. The moment is the thing, and LIVE A LITTLE just happens to capture it.

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.

インディ・ロック・シーンに多大なる影響を及ぼしてきたカリフォルニア・ベイエリア・サンノゼ出身のスロウコア・バンド、Duster。1999年に自宅で録音されたEP作品『1975』がアナログ・リイシュー。『Stratosphere』でのスラッカー・ポジティブなドリーム・スケープを発展させたもので、クリーンなギターとファジーなギターが幾重にも重なり、鼻歌のようなオルガン、そしてあっと驚くドラムマシンが満載されたグレートな内容の一枚となっています。

A ’70s homemaker stuck between the studio and a getting dinner on the table, Joyce Street eked out an arresting countrypolitan discography in the margins of an otherwise traditional American life. With lyrics drawn from the pages of her diary, Street’s stirring Mississippi warble led her into the fly-by-night world of custom studios, cutting tracks for upstart country concerns like Reena, Sonobeat, Revelation, and Arc. Channeling the honky tonk angel energy of Bobbie Gentry, Lorretta Lynn, and Jeannie C. Riley, Tied Down compiles a decade’s worth of melodies disguised as lottery tickets.

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.”

Through evocative, emotionally resonant music, Goodbye, Hotel Arkada, the new LP from American harpist and composer Mary Lattimore, speaks not just for its beloved namesake — a hotel in Croatia facing renovation — but for a universal loss that is shared. Six sprawling pieces shaped by change; nothing will ever be the same, and here, the artist, evolving in synthesis, celebrates and mourns the tragedy and beauty of the ephemeral, all that is lived and lost to time. Documented and edited in uncharacteristically measured sessions over the course of two years, the material remains rooted in improvisation while glistening as the most refined and robust in Lattimore’s decade-long catalog. It finds her communing with friends, contemporaries, and longtime influences, in full stride yet slowing down to nurture songs in new ways. The cast includes Lol Tolhurst (The Cure), Meg Baird, Rachel Goswell (Slowdive), Roy Montgomery, Samara Lubelski, and Walt McClements. “When I think of these songs, I think about fading flowers in vases, melted candles, getting older, being on tour and having things change while you're away, not realizing how ephemeral experiences are until they don't happen anymore, fear for a planet we're losing because of greed, an ode to art and music that's really shaped your life that can transport you back in time, longing to maintain sensitivity and to not sink into hollow despondency.” Memories, scenes, and split-second impressions have long filled Lattimore’s musical universe. As one of today’s preeminent instrumental storytellers, she has “the uncanny ability to pluck a string in a way that will instantly make someone remember the taste of their fifth birthday cake," writes Pitchfork's Jemima Skala. Lattimore's impulse to record life as it happens matches her drive to travel and perform, as profiled by Grayson Haver Currin for The New York Times: "Lattimore recognized that being in motion shook loose strands of inspiration, moods she wanted to express with melody. She needed, then, to remain on the go." That sense of fluidity has also made her a prolific collaborator outside of solo work. 2020's Silver Ladders, recorded with Slowdive's Neil Halstead, opened the door for Lattimore to widen the vision of her primary project as well, and its proper follow-up is the natural next scale. “All of these people I asked to contribute have deeply affected and inspired my life.” For the title and inspiration, Lattimore’s mind returns to the island of Hvar in Croatia, where she first saw those silver ladders at the water’s edge. “There's a big old hotel there called the Hotel Arkada, and you could tell it had been hosting holiday-goers for decades in a great way. I walked around the lobby and the empty ballrooms and it looked like a well-worn, well-loved place. My friend Stacey who lives there told me to ‘say goodbye to Hotel Arkada, it might not be here when you get back’ and I heard soon after that it was actually going to be renovated in a very crisp, modern way.” Lattimore became fixated on the ingredients that make a place special — for Hotel Arkada, the patinaed chandeliers, the patterned bedspreads, the echoes of its intangible charm — and how when those leave this world, as they inevitably always will, it feels important to memorialize them, “to bottle it for a brief second.” For the opening track, “And Then He Wrapped His Wings Around Me,” Lattimore looks to two of her closest friends — songwriter Meg Baird, her collaborator on 2018’s Ghost Forests, and accordionist composer Walt McClements, who she’s toured and performed alongside — to surface a core memory. As a kid, Lattimore won a drawing contest through a country radio station and got to see Sesame Street Live! in Asheville. She and her mom were invited backstage, and there the benevolent icon Big Bird “gave me an incredible hug with his scratchy yellow wings.” The trio channel the enveloping warmth of that portrait, the feeling of innocent escape, flying away towards a childhood dream that is just out of reach, surreal, and tinged with sadness. In a rare vocal passage in Lattimore’s library, Baird softly hums with the rolling washes of harp above McClements’ tranquil drone; just for a moment, we are held in a sublime canary yellow embrace. “Arrivederci” features the synth work of Lol Tolhurst, an original member of The Cure and one of her musical heroes. Lattimore started the song after getting fired from a project because she hadn’t played the harp parts well enough. “So I came home and cried my eyes out and then wrote this song to try to recapture my love of playing the harp with nothing to mess up. I received Lol’s parts on New Year's Eve when I was hosting a party. I secretly went into my room and listened to the song and it felt just so magical to have such an influential musician connecting with a song that I made, especially a song I made when I was feeling like a total failure.” On “Blender In A Blender,” Lattimore connects with guitarist Roy Montgomery, a pioneer of New Zealand’s underground. First drafted by Lattimore during an artist residency program in UCross Wyoming, the track later evolved over the duo’s pen pal correspondence. Montgomery adds chords that first feel distant, hazed behind a high-drama harp pattern, before thundering into the foreground in a thrilling outro. The title refers to the trend of teenagers blending their cell phones; Lattimore and a friend were joking about all stuff that could be blended, including another blender. Humor is an unsung key to Lattimore’s craft; titles and anecdotes provide unexpected, counterbalancing levity. The subdued and striking “Music For Applying Shimmering Eye Shadow” is a tribute to the earthly rituals of preparation. “I wanted to make a song for the green rooms,” she says, recalling a moment in the mirror when a tourmate readied herself to go out into the unknown of performance. “It originally was made after googling ‘what does space smell like’ and getting an answer of ‘walnuts and brake pads’ and thinking about the wooziness of space, somehow smelling familiar earth smells in unfamiliar territory. Once I started adding more layers, I started thinking about what I hoped the song would soundtrack and what I wished a song would do.” In the case of “Horses, Glossy on the Hill,” the narrative is nearly inextricable from the sonics. The percussive clacking resembles hooves in an anxious gate. There’s a storm cloud in the sky; from a car window, Lattimore captures the silvery sheen coming off the horses’ striated shapes as if photographing the scene through sound. Her shimmering strings accelerate and distort under twisting effects as the herd becomes one with the horizon. There’s a crumbling elegance to the closing track, “Yesterday's Parties,” indebted to the reveries of Julee Cruise and the droning down-tuned strings of The Velvet Underground. We join Lattimore on a midnight stroll through the streets of Brussels; she looks through stained glass windows into quiet apartments and thinks of late nights with her friends who were out of town. Slowdive’s Rachel Goswell sings a wordless hymn as the harp, a special one Lattimore keeps in Brussels, glides with violin from Samara Lubelski. Leaving Lattimore in this place, itself a memory of yearning for connection, is an appropriate end to an album devoted to remembering and manifesting through shared expression.

The first ever vinyl LP compilation of songs by the great Eddie and Ernie! The duo produced tons of great singles throughout the 60¡Çs and early 70¡Çs. This LP features a couple dance numbers, but mostly slow dramatic soul ballads reminiscent of the best moments of more well known acts like Sam and Dave and Otis Redding. Some pretty eerie soaring vocals and existential lyrics of the highest order. Under appreciated in their time, Eddie and Ernie are two of soul musics greatest talents! Old school ¡Ètip on¡É record cover and classy black inner sleeve. One time limited pressing.

The fifth album from shoegaze giants Slowdive contains the duality of a familiar internal language mixed with the exaltation of new beginnings. everything is alive is transportive, searching and aglow, the work of a classic band continuing to pitch its unmistakable voice to the future. Six years after the group’s monumental self-titled album, everything is alive finds Slowdive—vocalists and guitarists Rachel Goswell and Neil Halstead, guitarist Christian Savill, bassist Nick Chaplin, and drummer Simon Scott—locating evermore contours of its immersive, elemental sound. The new record began with Halstead in the role of writer and producer, working on demos at home. Experimenting with modular synths, Halstead originally conceived of everything is alive as a “more minimal electronic record.” Slowdive’s collective decision-making ultimately drew the group back towards their signature reverb-drenched guitars, but that first concept seeped into the compositions. “As a band, when we’re all happy with it, that tends to be the stronger material,” Halstead says. “We’ve always come from slightly different directions, and the best bits are where we all meet in the middle.” The convergence of five unique characters has made the sound. “Slowdive is very much the sum of its parts,” Goswell adds. “Something unquantifiable happens when the five of us come together in a room.” The group’s projected studio sessions for everything is alive, in April 2020, were naturally scrapped, and when the group finally did meet up, six months later, at Courtyard Studio, where they’ve historically recorded, the mood was jubilant. (Finally, they had a proper reason to leave the house.) That was the beginning of a multi-year recording process, which moved from Oxfordshire and into the Wolds of Lincolnshire and back to Neil’s own Cornish studio before extending into February 2022, when the band brought in mixer Shawn Everett (The War On Drugs, SZA, Alvvays) to mix six of the record’s eight tracks. Owing to their deep history, there’s a palpable familial energy to Slowdive in 2023. everything is alive is dedicated to Goswell’s mother and Scott’s father, who both died in 2020. “There were some profound shifts for some of us personally,” Goswell says. Those crossroads are reflected in the many-layered emotional tenor of Slowdive’s music; everything is alive is heavy with experience, but each note is poised, wise, and necessarily pitched to hope. Its unique alchemy subtly embodies both sadness and gratitude, groundedness and uplift. Reflecting on “kisses,” which may be Slowdive’s surest pop moment yet, Halstead said, “It wouldn’t feel right to make a really dark record right now. The album is quite eclectic emotionally, but it does feel hopeful.” everything is alive, is exactly what the title suggests: an exploration into the shimmering nature of life and the universal touch points within it. Spanning psychedelic soundscapes, pulsating 80’s electronic elements and John Cale inspired journeys, the album lands immediately as something made for the future; which figures, as their fanbase has grown younger and younger as time has gone on, and their influence on forward thinking musical artists continues to prevail. For a genre that is often thought of as divisive, and often warrants introspection, here Slowdive show their craft as the masters of it by pushing it outwards, beyond the singular; the end result being a record which feels as emotional and cathartic as it is optimistic.

Mac DeMarco’s debut full length, 2, released in 2012, cleaned up the songwriter’s warped take on soft rock and brought it to a broader audience. Given DeMarco’s affinity for keeping things lo-fi — 2 was the first time he’d bothered to record demos — it’s revealing to hear these songs in their most embryonic form. The performances here are a little looser and the sound a little hazier than on the actual LP, lending an atmosphere of dreamy vulnerability, especially to ballads like “Annie” and the Lennon-esque “Sherrill.”

After being long out of press (with the exception of a small, instantly sold- out pressing in 2018 to celebrate Captured Tracks’ 10-year anniversary), Golden Haze is finally back on limited edition Gold vinyl!The charming and gorgeous Golden Haze EP is the culmination of Wild Nothing’s (Jack Tatum) sound in 2010. Fresh off the heels of breakout debut album Gemini, Golden Haze has become a true fan-favorite of Tatum’s cata- log, and an enduring fixture of Wild Nothing’s live shows across the world. The tracklist features the previously unavailable Evertide EP, a Gemini B- Side, and now, for the first time on vinyl, includes bonus tracks “Asleep” and “Vultures Like Lovers.”When Golden Haze was released in 2010, the EP filled with melancholy vocals over addictive guitar riffs offered a perfect continuation to Gemini. It also re-revealed that Tatum has a knack for creating unique, modern ar- rangements based on decades-old influence. On Golden Haze’s single of the same name, tweaked drums and a “textural mesh of severely-gated snare and sleigh bells” evoke 80s bands like The Cure. “Vultures Like Lovers,” a newly available track on vinyl, presents delayed guitars with tremolo’d vocals. The most different to Gemini, it revealed that Tatum could make more “electronically pulsed” songs with echoey, hollow vocals. Over 10 years later, Golden Haze continues to prove Tatum’s ability to create new songs while evoking a musical nostalgia for the past.

With their new album 'Rhapsody', the extraordinary vocalists Ifedayo Gatling, Dennis Bailey, and George Marage are able to fully explore the entire range of music that influenced them. The follow-up to their acclaimed 2022 release 'Look Up!', the record is a dive into a lesser-known but hugely important era in the evolution of gospel music. Starting in the mid-1960s, local gospel groups and singers began incorporating elements of popular soul and funk styles and in 2006, Chicago-based reissue label Numero Group released Good God! A Gospel Funk Hymnal. HGT’s longtime friend and mentor Eli "Paperboy Reed" approached the group with the idea of digging through the Numero catalog and recording some of the gospel funk material, reinterpreted in their own way—from the high-energy, old-school soul of “God’s Been Good to Me” to the hip-hop-inflected “Get Involved.” The Harlem Gospel Travelers story began when Gatling and Marage met while studying under Reed's tutelage. The group put out their debut LP, 'He’s On Time', to rave reviews in 2019, earning them high profile fans like Elton John and landing them festival slots everywhere from Pilgrimage to Telluride Jazz. Originally a quartet, they brought in Bailey and reconfigured as a trio prior to recording Look Up!, their first album of all original material. At a moment when the world is reconsidering the concepts of genre and category and who’s allowed to participate in which traditions, HGT are squarely on the cultural pulse. “We always found it difficult to stay in this one lane of what people think gospel is supposed to be,” says Gatling. “This record allowed us to hear people that were innovators in their own time, pushing how gospel music sounded, and now we've created this project that is message-wise gospel, but the feeling and the sound can be whatever you want it to be.”