MUSIC

Struck for circulation after 63 years in hock within the Lou-Mood Pictures vault, this previously unissued soundtrack traffics in the high-tone timbre and highball-sipping swoon of pop's post-war years. Muddling together sugar-lipped divas, barrel-aged big bands, and "zoo be zoo be zoo" zest, with a Latin jazz Luxardo for garnish, Call Me Old Fashioned is a 40-minute stereo-sonic adventure for the 7& 7 spy-fi fanatic.

Henry House is a recurring dream song. Combining closely tuned instruments and sinetones, tape-music editing techniques, field recordings, and voice, this eighty-minute, five-part song cycle is an evolutionary step away from the spontaneity of the free jazz/noise aesthetic usually found in the music of Nate Wooley. Henry House expands on the ecstatic, durational work found in Wooley’s Seven Storey Mountain, a six-part composition that has been premiered over the last ten years by an ensemble that now includes multiple drummers, guitarists, a twenty-one-person choir, and the composer on amplified trumpet. But its ritual is more serene, more natural, slower. Henry House is the first long-form piece that doesn’t feature Wooley’s trumpet. It is also the first to be constructed around his poetic writing. Wooley weaves a strange funeral mass for a fictional everyman from isolated phrases culled from essays, poems, and non-fiction written by Wendell Berry, John Berryman, Joseph Mitchell, and Reiner Stach. After organizing the fragments into a dream narrative, Wooley rewrote the text dozens of times, manipulating the stitched-together story until only glimpses of its sources remained. These texts become a slowly developing story of care and too much care in living. They are spoken by Mat Maneri and Megan Schubert and set amidst masses of instruments. The outer and middle movements explore the interactions between slowly shifting sine tone frequencies and massed, slightly detuned instruments—vibraphones, brass, pianos—to affect a warmly wobbling harmonic pad that undulates and revolves under Maneri’s performance of the text. The remaining movements move quickly, combining field recordings with hard cuts of Schubert’s singing voice constructed into a massive, tape-affected choir interspersed with her readings.

Few groups in recent history forged as confounding and alchemical a body of work as Coil, the partnership of Peter 'Sleazy' Christopherson and John Balance. From album to album and phase to phase their recordings spelunk perplexing depths of esoteric industrial, occult electronics, and drugged poetry, both embodying and alienating parallel currents of their peers. The late 1990's in particular were a fertile era for the duo, embracing chance, chaos, and collaboration, enhanced by recent advancements in synthesis and sampling. Fittingly, at the summit of the decade's long, intoxicated arc, their divergent strains of interstitial ritual congealed into one of Coil's most celebrated and hallucinatory creations: Musick To Play In The Dark.

Convening at Balance and Christopherson's vast Victorian house / studio in the coastal town of Weston-super-Mare, they began a series of ambitious sessions aided by inner circle associates Thighpaulsandra and Drew McDowall. Although the creative process was admittedly “iterative” and “a bit of a drug blur,” the results are astoundingly inventive and well realized, winding through shades of divination dirge, wormhole kosmische, noir lounge, ominous humor, and black mass downtempo, guided by Balance's cryptic lunar muse, which he announces on the opening track: “This is moon musick / in the light of the moon.”

What's most remarkable about the album 20 years after its release is how brazen, insular, and unpredictable it still feels. The songs follow an allusive, altered state logic all their own, warping from microscopic ripples of glitch and breath to widescreen warlock psychedelia and back again, as much hyper-sensory as inter-dimensional. Even within a catalog as eclectic as Coil's, Musick is a mystifying collection, oneiric evocations of desire, decadence, dinner jazz, and dietary advice, far beyond the pale of whatever gothic industrial ambiguity birthed such a journey.

The record closes with a slow, starlit shuffle, bathed in seething sweeps of spectral texture and high cathedral keys, like approaching the altar of some arcane temple. As the trance thickens Balance's voice rises, processed into an increasingly eerie, gaseous haze, but he resists these unseen forces, intent on delivering a final sermon: “Through hissy mists of history / the dreamer is still dreaming / the dreamer is still dreaming.”

Reissued for the first time in over 20 years, now on double vinyl LP with the complete, unedited versions of each song and an exclusive "D-side" vinyl art etching. Packaged in a sturdy matte jacket with embossed lettering and spot-gloss design elements. The compact disc version mirrors this design, and comes housed in thick tip-on "LP style" packaging. Both formats are completely remastered by engineer Josh Bonati with restored artwork and layout by Nathaniel Young - all under the project supervision of Drew McDowall and Thighpaulsandra. 
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180g vinyl, half speed mastered, heavy sleeve, obi Tracklisting LP A1. Hot House (Charlie Parker) A2. All The Things Your Are (Jerome Kern) A3. Red Carpet (Duke Ellington) A4. Bouncing With Bud (Bud Powell) B1. Embraceable You (George Gershwin) B2. Just One of Those Things (Cole Porter) B3. Mellow Dream (Ryo Fukui) Info We Release Jazz is so happy to announce the official reissue of Ryo Fukui’s New York sessions with Lisle Atkinson and Leroy Williams, the aptly titled album Ryo Fukui in New York, sourced from the original masters and available on limited edition 180 gram vinyl mastered at half speed for full audiophile sound, as well as on digipack CD. Recorded in February 1999 at Avatar Recording Studios in New York and inspired by Ryo Fukui’s idol and mentor Barry Harris, the fourth album from the famed Sapporo pianist captures memorable ses-sions with seasoned American jazz musicians (and frequent Barry Harris collaborators) Lisle Arthur Atkinson on bass and Leroy Williams on drums. Ryo Fukui in New York is pure bop heaven, glowing with poetic takes on classics by Charlie Parker, George Gershwin, Duke Ellington, Jerome Kern, Cole Porter, and Bud Powell, plus a supreme remake of Fukui’s very own “Mellow Dream". It’s expressive, soulful, and vibrating with a bouncing swing feel all the way through; every note falls exactly where it should, undeniable brilliance. Much like the other albums by the genius from Hokkaido, it’s got that “special something", hard to grasp, hard to describe, but 100% felt. Skills and heart, the Ryo Fukui way. Following his New York adventures, Ryo Fukui headed back to Sapporo, and more precisely to his jazz club Slowboat, where his newly acquired experience inspired numerous jam sessions and a full dedication to perfecting his craft. He sadly passed away in 2016, leaving behind a legacy of works that is sure to captivate jazz lovers for generations to come, and Slowboat, where the magics

After two highly acclaimed early albums, "Seanaly" and "Mellow Dream," and now known by jazz listeners around the world, "A Letter From Slowboat" is his first leader album in 2015, 16 years after his first album.

Meditations bestseller! An encounter between an illusionary ambience that lets you experience an organic space and a classical house that shines deeply. The style is different, but the content is quiet, spatial, and artistic, and it is a universal content that is similar to Larry Heard's world view. It's a deep and radical masterpiece that silently tells us that house is an art and a noble message. A folded poster is attached to the PVC sleeve.

A winsome and dizzying spin on disco pop, recorded in westernized Iran during the last moments before the 1979 revolution. All but criminalized in the wake of Ayatollah Khomeni’s theocratic repression, Hamlet Minassian’s solo masterpiece is a testament to the Middle East’s forgotten dance music culture. This six-song, 44-minute LP hybridizes Euro attitude and Armenian traditional songs to create long, hypnotic proto-house, seemingly beamed in from another dimension.

There are certain occasions when you can truly feel the stars align. One of these is when the interstellar voyager of cosmic soul Jimi Tenor finally lands his spaceship at full force on a Timmion recording. In 2023, he will be serving us two spaced out album sessions recorded together with Cold Diamond & Mink. Jimi is no stranger in these space ways as he has operated behind the Timmion scenes for years, furnishing several of the label's artists with his flute and reeds artistry. The first album out is titled "Is There Love In Outer Space?", which begs the question with the force of five extended tracks that are guaranteed to blow your mind to the stratosphere. The pieces are loaded with whooshing and glistening synth noises and span from lofi space funk to cinematic soundscapes. The sweetly floating title track is like some of those galactic ballads that rare soul collectors are spending their pensions on. At the other side of the spectrum, album closer 'What Are You Doing?' sounds like Sun Ra sat down at a JBs session, and is straight up meant to get that booty moving.Combined with the raw soul prowess of CD&M, Jimi is able to refine new shades from his already impressive repertoire of talent. Even if you are a friend of his previous work you might not have heard him get down quite like this.

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.

Ai Aso’s immaculately crafted form of minimalist pop music skirts the edges of tensity with the manner and with the skill of a tight rope walker, calmly balancing repeatedly at every step, with a combination of surety and the risk of a slip, a fall, and an unknown uncoiling of events. Aso's capacity to capture, or inspire, the tension and attention from within the listener and observer are quite pronounced. At Aso's concert the performance constantly teeters near the brink, a sharpened awareness in the hall emerges from all observing, with the will of that most delicate balance. On “The Faintest Hint” she brings a meta level to the proceedings, the dream of a singer in a bright sunlit room in the centre of the density of the society, simply and precisely searching for single ideas, single tones, a sense of sensuality and even a dream of a grandeur (rock dream) emerge. A stillness prevails, even a sharp set of instances of dreaming, melancholia, nostalgia… or even saudade. The album was recorded, mixed & mastered by Soichiro Nakamura at Peace Music between 2018-2020. Atsuo and I joined these sessions as producers, and moreso as catalysts, yet also became the skeleton of a band on the album (with the tender touch). The legendary Japanese rock band Boris accompany Aso on two pieces. A faintest hint of sharpness and la tendresse féroce quickly erodes into a fine brief cloud of the purest crystalline dust.

“I think one of the most exciting things about the reintroduction of Horizon Unlimited is the fact that young folk love our music, and are surprised at the upbeat tempo, and the lyrics, which are not only of today, but also very futuristic as well. Horizon Unlimited was our last album with Decca that came out in 1979. It’s been a long time since then and this really is part of a much longer story, but amongst one of the most significant things I remember was that we, The Lijadu Sisters, paid for all the studio and band session fees. At the time, this was unusual, and not the arrangement we had with that record label. We were originally meant to record at Decca West Africa in Lagos, but when we got to the studio, no one had told us that it was being upgraded – from eight tracks to twenty-four. So, we brought everyone to London and made the album there instead.” –Yeye Taiwo Lijadu

A companion to 2016's private country rock overview Cosmic American Music, this second volume goes way past Gram Parsons' “country-rock plastic dry-fuck” and explores the twangy falsettos and commercial curiosity that sent the Eagles soaring. Though rooted in the west coast folk rock of the late-’60s, these new kids in town rendered a safe-for-the-suburbs sound bleached of the hippie era's political strife. 20 tracks, two LPs, and gatefold tip-on sleeve for easy seed and stem separating are included.

One of the greatest, heaviest, and most sought-after guitar records from 1970s West Africa, available on vinyl for the first time in over a decade!!! Bamako, Mali, 1973: Rail Band, the official orchestra of the Malian state railway, drops their self-titled LP. It’s a relentlessly soulful and hypnotic blend of American funk, jazz horns, and Afro-Cuban music, reflected through centuries-old Mandé tradition and blasted at top volume by some of the continent’s greatest artists. Led by legendary trumpet and saxman Tidiani Koné and held aloft by the intricate web of Djelimady Tounkara’s rumbling, reverb-soaked guitar, Rail Band’s sprawling compositions embody West African storytelling traditions while exulting in the technology and modernity of a newly independent Mali. Vocalists Salif Keita and Mory Kanté, two heroes of African music who would achieve global fame as soloists, are endlessly emotive, oscillating between silky ballads and funk screams. The band’s sound is filled out by layers of percussion, rolling guitars, and melodic horns filtered through the Caribbean. Starting in 1970, Rail Band played five nights a week, from 2 pm til the early hours, at the Buffet Hotel de la Gare. Their audience was an international array of businessmen, young partiers, and people of the Bamako night. The band was incredibly versatile, switching genres, rhythms, and styles to meet their crowd. It was a volatile mix, one that would fall apart soon after these recordings were made, with Salif Keita’s departure to start the rival Les Ambassadeurs. Though Rail Band continued in many distinguished forms, the eight songs on this album reveal one of the greatest bands to ever exist, at the height of their creative powers. On “Duga,” a composition dating back to the 13th century and passed on through oral tradition by the jelis (griots), the Rail Band replaces balafon with the interplay of Cheick Tidiane’s speaker-rattling bass and Alfred Coulibaly’s tasteful organ. “Marabayasa,” with its iconic sax intro and Mory Kanté channeling James Brown, is a deep-cut favorite of DJs around the world. Part of a long and regal lineage of Malian guitar orchestras initially tasked with translating the region’s traditional music to modern instrumentation, Rail Band morphed and reenvisioned those traditions with a style and energy that has never been matched. High-quality black or translucent blue vinyl (limited to first pressing), old school jacket faithfully reproducing the iconic “mermaid” design from the 1973 release. Licensed from Syllart Records and Djelimady Tounkara.

The first vocal album by beloved Ethiopian nun, composer, and pianist Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru - profound and deeply moving home cassette recordings made amidst political upheaval and turmoil. These are songs of wisdom, loss, mourning, and exile, sung directly into a boombox and accompanied by Emahoy’s unmistakable piano. Though written and recorded while still living at her family’s home in Addis Ababa, Emahoy sings of the heartache of leaving her beloved Ethiopia, a reflection on the 1974 revolution and ensuing Red Terror in her homeland, and a presentiment of her future exile in Jerusalem. In the 21st century, Emahoy has become known worldwide for her utterly unique melodic and rhythmic style. Commonly misinterpreted as “jazzy” or “honky tonk,” Emahoy’s music actually comes from a deep engagement with the Western classical tradition, mixed with her background in Ethiopian traditional and Orthodox music. These songs, recorded between 1977-1985, are different from anything previously released by the artist. Rich with the sound of birds outside the window, the creak of the piano bench, the thump of Emahoy’s finger on the record button, they create a sense of place, of being near the artist while she records. Emahoy’s lyrics, sung in Amharic, are poetic and heavy with the weight of exile. “When I looked out / past the clouds / I couldn’t see my country’s sky / Have I really gone so far?” she asks in “Is It Sunny or Cloudy in the Land You Live?” Her vocals are delicate and heartfelt, tracing the melodic contours of her piano on songs like “Where Is the Highway of Thought?” “Tenkou! Why Feel Sorry?,” a career highlight that closes out her self-titled Mississippi album (MRP-099), is revisited here with vocals. Originally composed for her niece, Tenkou, the lyrics clarify the song title we’ve wondered about for so many years. “Don’t cry / Childhood won’t come back / Let it go with love.” Emahoy dreamt of releasing this music to a larger audience before her passing in March of 2023. We are proud to release this music, in collaboration with her family, now, in what would have been her 100th year. LP comes with a 16-page booklet full-color booklet. Gold cover first edition, pressed in both black and gold vinyl editions.

Heartache, longing and ultimate finesse...ultra pop that can not be denied. Rose Melberg, late of Tiger Trap, Gaze and Go Sailor, has teamed up with Jen Sbragia (All Girl Summer Fun Band) for this combination of two guitars and two voices and it is total, creating songs that dig deep into your heart and soul and you don't let them leave...there is a level of strength that does not recede while the songs break over you beauty after beauty. It's Love is the first of three albums by the Softies.

Thus far, Zach Saginaw's releases as Shigeto have been fragments, albeit singularly satisfying fragments--EP-length glimpses into the Brooklyn producer's creative psyche. After filling two EPs on Ghostly International, Shigeto's lush, sumptuous take on instrumental hip-hop has fully materialized. Full Circle, the artist's first full-length album, completes the journey begun with Shigeto's Semi-Circle EP, synthesizing the drummer/producer's signature themes of family, continuity, and musical boundary-pushing into a vibrant, fully unified artistic statement. The sounds on Full Circle come from four years of obsessive field recording and collaboration. Saginaw brought his Tascam mini-recorder with him everywhere, capturing the "glasses, chains, breathing, children, family meals, monks singing in cathedrals, walks in the south of France, and good friends offering their musical skill" that would all find homes in the record's compositional nooks and crannies. As a result of Saginaw's constant documentation, the songs on Full Circle play like chapters in an ongoing story--as in "Escape from the Incubator", whose initial rhythmic claustrophobia opens up into a boom-clap nocturnal chase, or "French Kiss Power Up", whose romantic digital strut gives way to discord and fragmentation as the waves of synthesizer give way to a shaky, neurotic coda. Full Circle is framed by the "Ann Arbor" diptych, a pair of beat suites named after Saginaw's hometown (one featuring a sample of Detroit MC SelfSays), all double-thick synths and triple-strength kick drums. Saginaw plays the majority of his rhythms by hand, and Full Circle's consistently deep pocket is the record's secret weapon, thumping and breathing like a living being. Having set the stage with Semi-Circle and What We Held On To EPs--twin treatises on Saginaw's Japanese grandmother's escape from a US internment camp--Shigeto is clearly ready to draw the tale to a close and take center stage. "This release represents the end of the beginning--or perhaps that there is no end and no beginning at all," says Saginaw. Regardless, Full Circle is the start of something great.

MRCY are producer Barney Lister and vocalist Kojo Degraft-Johnson. Hailing from different ends of England and disparate cultures, theirs is a space of soulful self-expression that combines the timeless musical warmth and social consciousness of Marvin Gaye with the genre-melding, modern sensibility of Anderson .Paak and SAULT. “It’s like hearing a distant memory,” Barney says. “But one that speaks to where you are now.” MRCY first connected over Instagram in the pandemic before meeting up IRL in Brixton, where they immediately found common ground in their time spent hustling behind the scenes. Hailing from Huddersfield’s thriving soundsystem culture, Barney has established himself as one of the UK’s most in-demand producers, with collaborations ranging from Ivor-Award-winning work with Obongjayar to Mercury-nominated records with Joy Crookes and Olivia Dean. South London-raised Kojo, meanwhile, earned his stripes in church as well as singing with equally-illustrious homegrown artists like Cleo Sol and Little Simz. MRCY’s music reverberates with individual perspectives, but also reminds how those common experiences of graft, grit and abandon have always been able to bring crowds - or a new band - together through tough times. Debut single ‘Lorelei’ exemplifies MRCY’s method of viewing Soul through the contemporary looking glass. Their upcoming project, VOLUME 1, artfully combines musical weight, commanding vocals and otherworldly touches to produce songs that feel as personal as they are deeply universal. For Barney and Kojo, the band is as much about putting yourself first as it is the spirit of compassion, empathy and m(e)rcy that has never felt more needed. Soul, says Barney, is “good people making music that matters.” And from the very first line of standout single ‘R.L.M.’ - “London rain on the window / I don’t care where we’re gonna go / I’m good with you” - MRCY offer a blissful respite from and an intoxicating soundtrack to the madness, the magic, of the everyday.

Sometimes, Mitski says, it feels like life would be easier without hope, or a soul, or love. But when she closes her eyes and thinks about what’s truly hers, what can’t be repossessed or demolished, she sees love. “The best thing I ever did in my life was to love people,” Mitski says. “I wish I could leave behind all the love I have, after I die, so that I can shine all this goodness, all this good love that I’ve created onto other people.” She hopes her newest album, The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We, will continue to shine that love long after she’s gone. Listening to it, that’s precisely how it feels: like a love that’s haunting the land. Love is always radical, which means that it always disrupts, which means that it always takes work to receive it. This land, which already feels inhospitable to so many of its inhabitants, is about to feel hopelessly torn and tossed again – at times, devoid of love. This album offers the anodyne. “This is my most American album,” Mitski says about her seventh record, and the music feels like a profound act of witnessing this country, in all of its private sorrows and painful contradictions. But “maybe it’s beyond witnessing,” she says. At times, it feels like the album is an exercise in negative capability – a fearless embodiment and absorption of the pain of other bodies. When I ask her what the album would look like, if it were a person, she says it would be someone middle-aged and exhausted, perhaps someone having a midlife crisis. But through the daily indignity and exhaustion, something enormous and ecstatic is calling out. In this album, which is sonically Mitski’s most expansive, epic, and wise, the songs seem to be introducing wounds and then actively healing them. Here, love is time-traveling to bless our tender days, like the light from a distant star. Mitski wrote these songs in little bursts over the past few years, and they feel informed by moments of noticing – noticing a sound that’s out of place, a building that groans in decay, an opinion that splits a room, a feeling that can’t be contained in a body. It was recorded at both the Bomb Shelter in East Nashville and the Sunset Sound Studios in Los Angeles. The album incorporates an orchestra arranged and conducted by Drew Erickson, as well as a full choir of 17 people - 12 in LA and 5 in Nashville - arranged by Mitski. And for the first time, it felt important to Mitski to have a band recording live together in the studio, to create this new sublime sound. Working with her longtime producer Patrick Hyland, the album has a wide-range of references, from Ennio Morricone’s bombastic Spaghetti Western scores to Carter Burwell’s tundra-filling Fargo soundtrack, from the breathy intimacy of Arthur Russell to the strident aliveness of Scott Walker or Igor Stravinsky, from the jubilation of Caetano Veloso to the twangy longing of Faron Young. From the first track, the album introduces and then heals a wound. “Bug Like an Angel” finds the divine in the ordinary, in the boozy drowning of sorrow. The narrator sings from the strange comfort of rock bottom: “sometimes a drink feels like family.” And suddenly, that choir of angels sings: “FAMILY!” This first track introduces a cosmic paradox: “The wrath of the devil was also given him by God.” This is an album in which dark and light exist in the same gesture, the same broken prayer. Like the Buddha inviting the demon Mara in for tea, The Land embraces brutal, daily pain — the necessary toll of transcendent love. In “Buffalo Replaced,” the wail of a freight train replaces the vibrations of the long-gone stampeding buffalo. Here, hope itself is personified, anthropomorphized into a sleeping creature, and our narrator wonders if life would be easier without her. But then, as though in response, “Heaven” offers a beautiful moment of passion, preserved like a fossil in time even though the “dark awaits us all around the corner.” This oasis is aggressively interrupted by “I Don’t Like My Mind,” a song from the perspective of someone in extraordinary pain. They are begging to keep their job, while actively keeping terrible traumatic memories at bay. Without their employment, these memories might take over, consuming them as relentlessly as the cake that they ate one “inconvenient Christmas.” The toggling between hope and despair in these four songs is masterful — the good, the bad, and the ugly in America’s backyard. This mythology continues to deepen with the stunning “The Deal,” in which someone is so burdened by their soul that they beg for it to be taken from them. Soon, the singer’s soul is revealed to be a bird perched on a streetlight. In a coup of songwriting, the narration does not switch into the newly-souled bird’s voice. No, we stay with the soulless “I.” The bird calls down: “You’re a cage without me. / Your pain is eased but you’ll never be free.” This song reinforces the album’s tug-of-war between the intoxication of love and the pain of isolation. Close on its heels is “My Love Mine All Mine,” an instant classic and the beating heart of the album, wherein the singer imagines their love shining down on the earth from the moon, long after the speaker is gone. “It’s just witness-less me,” she sings on “The Frost,” which suddenly takes us from the anticipation of loss right into the aching loneliness of it. On the subject of witnessing, Mitski says: “I’ve always been the person on the outside watching. And I’ve also done that with myself... outside of myself, witnessing myself, watching myself.” She thinks that she might have adopted this habit as a condition of being a woman of color, and that it’s led to the occasional post-apocalyptic fantasy of being the only person left in the world. We talked about Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, in which a man is profoundly alone, with only an archive of old tapes to keep him company. He remembers the seismic event of an old sexual encounter, but now it’s: “Past midnight. Never knew such silence. The earth might be uninhabited.” The Land repeatedly offers that same hypothesis. Without love, is there anyone here? After the alien lift of “Star” comes the album’s showdown. “I’m Your Man” feels as inevitable, bloody, and haunting as a Sergio Leone duel scene. The “Man” in the title isn’t some fella proclaiming devotion, Mitski says, but rather the man inside her head, the haunting patriarch who treats her like a dog and can destroy her at whim. Despite his confidence and swagger, he is tracked down by a pack of hounds — who have unionized in the name of catharsis. After this violent reckoning, a Fowler’s Toad calls out in what sounds like a human scream. The night settles into silence. The earth might be uninhabited. We glide into the liberating closer, “I Love Me After You,” in which someone is truly alone but truly free. King of all the land. “I don’t have a self,” Mitski observes. “I have a million selves, and they’re all me, and I inhabit them, and they all live inside me.” Loving all of these selves does not yield the easy burst of a pop song. It’s the “long, complex, deep love, that you can never get to the end of, that’s always evolving, like a person. And there’s just no end to it. It feels like space travel.” The album is full of the ache of the grown- up, seemingly mundane heartbreaks and joys that are often unsung but feel enormous. It’s a tiny epic. From the bottom of a glass, to a driveway slushy with memory and snow, to a freight train barreling through the Midwest, and all the way to the moon, it feels like everything, and everyone, is crying out, screaming in pain, arching towards love. Maybe this is what our best artists do: take a spaceship into the furthest reaches of pain, in order to bring back the elixir that we already had inside us. The unknowable known of love. “You have to go to both worlds all the time,” Mitski says, by which she means the mysterious world of making and the brutal world of living. This album is an act of hyperlocal space travel. Love is that inhospitable land, beckoning us and then rejecting us. To love this place — this earth, this America, this body — takes active work. It might be impossible. The best things are.

Limited Blue Seaglass Wave Translucent Vinyl edition. singer-songwriter Devendra Banhart, who is known for his work at Meditations best-selling compilation 'Fragments du Monde Flottant', and who is a great admirer of esoteric studies, oriental music and Haruomi Hosono. Devendra Banhart, a singer-songwriter, and Noah Georgeson, a producer and friend who has produced many great works together, recorded and completed their ambient albums separately during the pandemic. The work began while recording Devendra Banhart's album "Ma" in 2019, and was put together with friends in 2020. An idea that had been brewing since they first met, and now, after over 20 years, has finally taken shape and been released as a necessary part of the current era. It's quintessential that they express their own sensibilities to the fullest while showing strong influences from their predecessors in new age music such as Henry Cowell, Lou Hudson, and Pauline Oliveros! This compassionate, meditative piece of work, with its like Zen quality, will be a beautiful "refuge" as the title suggests.

The first-ever official vinyl edition, completely remastered by Josh Bonati. The turn of the millennium ushered in an apex visionary phase for English esoteric duo Coil. Relocating from the city to the coastal quiet of Weston-super-Mare freed them to follow even more fringe obsessions, fully untethered from peer influence. During a single six-month stretch in 2000 they released the devious underworld sequel to Music To Play In The Dark, arcane drone summit Queens Of The Circulating Library, and a malevolent hour-long synthesizer exorcism prophetically titled Constant Shallowness Leads To Evil. This latter work remains one of the group’s most miasmic and mind-expanding creations, on par with Time Machines – a sustained divination of shuddering, psychoactive noise, rippling with the motion sickness of an all-seeing eye. Thighpaulsandra characterizes the album as “an exercise in brutality,” born from a thorny patch of his Serge modular unit that Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson found entrancing. Processing this sliver of electronics into a ravaged labyrinth was a trial and error process, aided by Christopherson’s visual sense of sound, stretching and manipulating it for maximum spatial disorientating. Frequencies nauseously crawl across the stereo field, burrowing into the ear like a sinister brainwashing experiment. An outlier / centerpiece is the 13-minute alien tribalist sea shanty, “I Am The Green Child,” guided by John Balance’s sung-spoken free verse concerning vengeance, oblivion, and insanity, culminating in the memorable refrain, “We're swimming in a sea of occidental vomit.” But the rest of the record seethes in unhinged instrumental chaos, divided into 18 micro-movements of a composition called “Tunnel Of Goats.” Intended to scramble the functionality of a CD player’s shuffle mode, the piece throbs, thrashes, and flatlines in compressed frenzies of twisted synthesis, at the threshold of some bottomless purgatory, forbidding and unknown.

During the transitional period in which Coil’s primary leadership (Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson and John Balance) reorganized their creative direction by taking on new membership in the group through their inclusion of Drew McDowall, Coil took a drastic turn towards the metaphysical unknown. Employing the subtle handiwork of Coil’s “real life” members, as well as cleverly guised aliases and spiritual collaborators, the band chose to filter their identity through a the nome de guerre, 'Black Light District', setting the precedent of Coil’s future exploration of otherworldly influence. Recorded during the Winter of 1995/96, 'Black Light District' leans more on their formal avant-garde pursuits and academic interests rather than their industrial pedigree resume. Starting off with an obvious nod to John Cage with their introductory “Unprepared Piano”, the tone is prepared in exactly the same way… unpredictable. Conceptually abstract, Black Light District shows Coil’s old guard disregarding the pop rhythms found on previous albums, such as Love's Secret Domain, and fully embracing their experimental electronic trajectory. Subtle patterns of looping melancholy and malaise are placed delicately underneath ghostly electronic timbre. Approaching their creative method as something from the beyond, another realm in which sounds blur and performers seemingly appear from the ether.

Like the days of Steely Dan or Harry Nilsson releasing a classic album every year (or less) comes Mac DeMarco's Another One, a Mini-LP announced one year after the release of the meteorically successful Salad Days. Written and recorded during the downtime between a relentless touring schedule, Another One is an eight-track release that expands the arsenal of Mac's already impressive catalog, showing the maturity of Mac's progression as songwriter: it's a bit more refined, a bit more sophisticated, but nonetheless retains the guts and soul of classic Mac. Despite working at the same pace as artists like Creedence and The Rolling Stones, coupled with an equally unending schedule of touring and press, it's odd that Mac is labeled as a slacker. With two full-lengths and two EPs released and hundreds of sold out shows performed in the last several years, a recent late night television debut on Conan following a special performance on The Eric Andre Show, it seems, as Mac nears his 25th birthday, there's not a slack bone in the man's body. Great songwriters don't need to reinvent themselves; they just need to keep going and let the songs out in the world. Thus, here's Another One.

This long-playing record, a thing we made in the midst of communal mess, raising dogs and children. Eyes up and filled with dreadful joy - we aimed for wrong notes that explode, a quiet muttering amplified heavenward. We recorded it all in a burning motorboat. 1. UNDOING A LUCIFERIAN TOWERS - Look at that fucking skyline! Big lazy money writ in dull marble obelisks! Imagine all those buildings much later on, hollowed out and stripped bare of wires and glass, listen - the wind is whistling through all 3,000 of it's burning window-holes! 2. BOSSES HANG - Labor, alienated from the wealth it creates, so that holy cow, most of us live precariously! Kicking at it, but barely hanging on! Also - the proud illuminations of our shortened lives! Also - more of us than them! Also - what we need now is shovels, wells, and barricades! 3. FAM / FAMINE - How they kill us = absentee landlord, burning high-rise. The loud panics of child-policemen and their exploding trigger-hands. With the dull edge of an arbitrary meritocracy. Neglect, cancer maps, drone strike, famine. The forest is burning and soon they'll hunt us like wolves. 4. ANTHEM FOR NO STATE - Canada, emptied of it's minerals and dirty oil. Emptied of it's trees and water. A crippled thing, drowning in a puddle, covered in ants. The ocean doesn't give a shit because it knows it's dying too.

Karate Boogaloo are proud to present Hold Your Horses, a mesmerizing new long-playing disc of original instrumental tunes from Melbourne, Australia’s most dedicated. Sitting at the core of Melbourne’s burgeoning movement of cinematic instrumental soul, Karate Boogaloo’s roots go deep into the fabric of the DIY soul idiom. A mainstay of the Melbourne underground over the last decade, their now sought-after series of LPs delving into hip-hop sample culture and its relationship to funk music, The ‘KB’s Mixtapes’, are evidence of their long-standing contribution to the development of the Melbourne cinematic soul sound. Henry Jenkins, Hudson Whitlock, Callum Riley, and Darvid Thor have been playing music together since their playground days. Meeting as high school preteens, these four friends explored the teachings of the great small combo instrumental bands à la Booker T & The MG’s and The Meters. With these lessons in one hand and their characteristic sense of goofy humor in the other, the ensuing 15+ years saw Karate Boogaloo develop the kind of shared musical language that can only be built through countless hours spent together existing as friends and musical allies. Karate Boogaloo’s singular bond shines brightly on Hold Your Horses, the second album of original Karate Boogaloo compositions. Following on from the cult classic Carn The Boogers (College Of Knowledge Records, 2020), Hold Your Horses is a document of KB’s distinct interpretation of instrumental funk. A bona-fide journey from start to finish, each tune melds seamlessly into the next, deftly creating a world built on moments of cinematic tension, whimsical melodies and eerie discordance and underpinned by undeniable super heavy funk. Hold Your Horses respectfully builds on a legacy of soul music whilst remaining unimpeachably unique and authentic. Recorded and mixed by bassist Henry Jenkins, the mind responsible for the sound of the entire College Of Knowledge catalogue (Surprise Chef, The Pro-Teens, Let Your Hair Down, Karate Boogaloo), Hold Your Horses employs a methodology for writing and recording music that mirrors KB’s long relationship together. “It’s always instrumental, and it’s always recorded live. We have a strict no overdubs policy,” Jenkins explains. All of the songs were written collaboratively in the studio, with no pre-prepared material being brought in by any member. It's a process specifically designed to maximize the strengths of the band and their relationship to one another; KB’s MO is enabled by their innate understanding of one another as people and musicians. Stylistically, links can be drawn to the deep funk of the late 60s and early 70s, certain examples of European film music and new wave of instrumental soul. The restrained instrumental palette is limited to drums, guitar, bass and organ, establishing a distinct and consistent tone throughout, yet the use of dynamics, space and finite execution in the playing carves the experience, keeping the listener glued to their headphones from start to finish. The artwork, created by Melbourne-based visual artist Drez, is a stunning visual representation of the 12-track medley. To add to the experience, the LP cover creates an interactive optical art experience as the inner sleeve is removed from the jacket.