MUSIC

Temporary Requiem is a mass for dance - the music score to “Known Mass. No. 3: St. Maurice.” A collaboration with Ann Glaviano, a dance maker and choreographer (and friend since our time together at a girl's Catholic school in New Orleans), it utilizes heavily dissected and altered passages of the traditional Latin requiem mass as the accompanying text across 6 movements. As the mission of “St. Maurice” is to build and break down a lost church over the span of the performance, the music serves to help transport "the congregation" to this dreamworld. Initially written and recorded over two weeks in 2018, Temporary Requiem is a proto-Sour Cherry Bell (kranky 2020), serving as an experimental space and springboard for ideas for that LP. Temporary Requiem completes a trinity with SCB and equally-of-the-era Matanzas.

YOUTH are back in town on a 3rd Sports volume packed with exclusive chops from Michael J. Blood, Rat Heart, Sockethead, pigbaby, FUMU, and Iueke, plus new cats Craig Birrel and Zesknel among many others. Programmed by footie-mad graphic designer/DJ, Andrew Lyster, ’Sports 3’ casts a wide net over work by Youth label friends and extended family with results limning a dead cranky conception of club music and blooz/beatdown pressure. All sharing a taste for texture that sounds like the masters were left to decompose for winter, the 16 cuts map odd gooches and ginnels of the contemporary soundsphere from the washed-out jazz reminiscence of Zesknel next to harder-to-place works such as the metallic cyborgian slug of ‘Driesh’ by Craig Birrel, or the groggy breaks of ‘Cocaine’ from HR For Drug Dealers. Pigbaby plays the game with a highlight of midnight keys on ‘Far From Home’, and we spy a zinger from Sockethead on the feral yowl of ‘Coarse Ground’, while Dave Saved keeps it slanted on ‘Abisso 66’ and into a super glum one by the still enigmatic Yugen Disciple. That sense of entropy also infects the set’s more energetic bits, as with the PointilisticT arp flight of ’T’ by S, and the drowning struggle of ‘When It Rains (It Pours)’ from Significant Other complementing the worn out acid trample of Iueke’s ‘Videoslash’ and Jessic*nt’s murky stealth bomb ‘Manic/Panic’. Rat Heart, Michael J. Blood x Sockethead unsurprisingly steal the show on the slow cymbal-crash blooz of ‘True’, and the album ends with Lyster’s own VIP of NW / HR tripped & screwed hardcore submersion.

‘Cupo’ is the debut album of gothic folkways and dark jazz rituals enacted by prolific percussionist Valentina Magaletti and enigmatic spirit Laila Sakini, deploying an orchestra-sized ensemble of instruments into a 10-part movement spread over two seamless sides. Ghostly and completely transfixing material, it sounds like a pitch-black reduction of Talk Talk's ‘Spirit of Eden’ crumbling into Julee Cruise's ‘Floating into the Night’. An ode to DIY culture and improvisation, Cupo marks a turning point and coming together of two of London’s most imaginative figures. The project sprung to life after Magaletti, versatile drummer-composer for a myriad projects including Moin, Tomaga, Holy Tongue and CZN, asked singular singer-songwriter/art explorer Sakini to contribute to an album that quickly developed into a separate project in its own right. Initiated under a title meaning ‘dark’ in Italian, Sakini plays trumpet, flute, harmonica, recorder, vocals, bass, strings and piano, while Magaletti adds acoustic guitar, spoken word, bass, and drums, pitched down to match the sunken swag of Sakini’s voice. ‘Cupo’ oozes a sense of theatrical dramaturgy that feels like two players in a staged psychodrama. The pair’s exquisite twists of light and space enhance the sensation of peering in from the dark of the stalls, scenes mysteriously changing on stage. The opening hums with nervous energy, the vast sweep of possibility - things could go in so many different directions - concrète, free jazz, doom noise, forest folk, trip hop - who fucking knows. Magaletti's drums gain momentum, cutting into the void like a snare roll in the middle of a trapeze act, or the din from the orchestral pit in an old cinema. Staggered bass and pitched trumpet are thrown into the mix, the deep thrum of subs, a heartbeat, shapeless words, flute, lost fragments of chamber music, piano keys wafting in from outside. Just as things feel irrevocably shapeless, all the elements coalesce, Sakini’s voice and a recorder flip the mood. We’re in smokey, weird pop mode - just the thing we were hoping for. The spirit of post-prog/proto-shoegaze hangs in the air, but the music isn't quite so specific. Pop dissolves into jazz, ambient passages cut into rickety blues, then scuffed into DIY art noise. The linking thread is always the duo's creative energy, providing a space for each to explore, without overwhelming the other. Gentle, fierce music from two of the very best in the game right now.

Duval Timothy’s piano music grows in stature and sprawling ideas with this mix of odes to Mahler and electro-acoustic/concrète evocations of the landscapes to England, Italy, and West Africa, featuring guest input by Fauzia, Yu Su, Vegyn and Lamin Fofana ‘Meeting With a Judas Tree’ is Timothy’s first solo album since 2020 and a significant way marker on his path thus far, which has snaked from Freeport, Sierra Leone, to London, UK. Recorded 2019-22, it expands on ideas from his early pursuit of brooding avant-jazz on 2016’s introductory ‘Brown Loop’ LP, and the more angular experiments of his first sides on personal imprint Carrying Colour, to a vivid blend of inspirations and a broader emotive palette put to canvas with raw finesse. Capturing his feelings in his South London home studio, plus the Carrying Colour studio in Freetown, the Old Police Statin in Rotherhithe, and Casa Mahler in Spolete, Umbria, the recordings share a immediate vivacity and emphasis on texture that serve to heighten the emotive grip of his work. ‘Plunge’ is a case in point, makign use of an auld upright in Freetown whose palettes had lost their felt due to humidity, and lending the piece a quality of Lonnie Holley’s blues, while the smeared electronics and electric guitar licks amplify the aching cadence, and also in ‘Mutate’ whose cascading discord recalls the uneasy dreampop of A.R. Kane. But a big attraction in the record lies with Timothy’s feel for balancing raw and lofty ideas, as with the mix of warbling effects applied to stately Mahler-esque figures and field recording made with his mum in the hills outside Bath on ‘Up’, and his ability to to seamlessly bring others not the vibe, as on the utopian promise of ‘Wood’ featuring piano and synth by Yu Su, and Vegyn co-production, or the subtle disturbances of Fauzia in ‘Thunder’ that edge the piece close to Klein’s most enigmatic. The final sequence ‘Drift’ with Lamin Fofana is an ideal curtain closer, brimming with an brooding but unresolved quality that recalls his Mahler inspiration via The Caretaker and a sea of natural world inspiration that gives it a beautifully in-between worlds headiness.

A Colourful Storm presents Enteha, the latest piece by Elodie, the longstanding duo of Andrew Chalk and Timo van Luijk. Chalk and van Luijk embody a bold, free-spirited approach to music making whose improvisational processes can be traced to a distinct period of Europe's post-industrial landscape: the former’s Ferial Confine project finding a home on Broken Flag (Ramleh, Kleistwahr) while the latter co-founded Noise-Maker’s Fifes, a Belgian audiovisual project employing unusual homemade instruments. More than two decades of ambitious solo and collaborative work would solidify both Chalk and van Luijk as masterful craftsmen exploring (and exposing) the tension between composition and free play. Their individual lists of collaborators boasts a certain fin-de-siècle faction of the avant-garde: Christoph Heemann, Giancarlo Toniutti, David Jackman and Colin Potter, to name but a few, have recorded with Chalk while van Luijk has also welcomed Heemann as well as a guard of other artists including Raymond Dijkstra, Kris Vanderstraeten and Frederik Croene. Elodie’s first documented recording, 2011’s Echos Pastoraux, betrayed a musical interplay of extremely accomplished standards, Chalk and van Luijk’s pastoral mise-en-scène daubed with Daisuke Suzuki’s Asiatic elements creating a sound world at once mystical and eerie. A figment of two imaginations, Elodie materialised almost fully formed with each subsequent recording patiently revealing glimpses into a world concerned with time dilation, the phantasmagoric and spirits of the everyday. Enteha is one of the duo’s more subdued and melancholic pieces and can be seen as a human response to seasonal transition, foretold by the concluding passages of 2020’s Le Nid d'Ivoire. It’s one of their uniquely longform explorations of mood and atmosphere as an air of romance drifts deftly into mystery and despair. The delicate hues of autumnal haze. The deceptive optimism of morning light. A work of supremely understated beauty, Enteha develops at an hypnagogic, if not unconscious, level and will appeal to anyone who finds solace in Harmonia, Gas, Joanna Brouk, Roberto Musci, Zoviet France and other investigators of pastoral arcana.

We've been very lucky to release the debut releases of the fantastic duo Mundos Sutis. They became an instant favourite of many people with their unique music style, that immersive deep techno etiquette that they craft really well. "Quintessence" is the album that gathers our favourite works released on the label in the past months. The journey is about to start, just press play and fly away.

Limited, fully licensed 180g vinyl-only reissue of ultra rare South African disco-jazz classic. Featuring tracks: Side A: Kabuzela; Bayabaleka; Side B: Disco Freaks; Disco Baby Available for the first time since its original South African release in 1979, Outernational Sounds presents tenor giant Mike Makhamalele’s monster excursion into funktified disco jazz, Kabuzela. Despite a peerless run of groundbreaking fusion and funk albums through the 1970s, the great South African tenorist Mike Makhamalele has remained somewhat unsung. It’s hard to know why – the music he made at the end of the 1970s is some of the finest jazz fusion made anywhere on the planet. This new edition of Kabuzela is the first time that any of his work has been issued outside of South Africa. Respect is long overdue. Born in Alexandra Township, Johannesburg, Makhalemele learned his craft at the knee of the great Zakes Nkosi, one of the originators of the township jazz sound. By the early 1970s he had joined South Africa’s most successful jazz funk outfit, Henry Sithole’s famous group The Drive, in which he played alongside the great Bheki Mseleku, and storied altoist Kaya Mahlangu. As jazz in South Africa turned toward dancefloor funk and fusion, Makhalemele become a fixture at Soweto’s most happening jazz and dance club, The Pelican – the owner, Lucky Michaels, remembered him as ‘one of the guys who’d walk around to every other musician he knows and say, “Listen, guys, why don’t we meet at the Pelican, let’s go and jam there...”’ From 1975, he began to record under his own name, developing a sophisticated fusion sound in a musical lane where few of his contemporaries were travelling. His stature at this time can be judged by the fact that he went head to head with the legendary Winston Mankunku on 1976’s The Bull And The Lion, an album that marked a symbolic passing of South Africa’s tenor torch. No other player was keeping such close tabs on the changes occurring in the US, and as slick fusion and advanced smooth became the leading sound for contemporary jazz, Makhalemele was in the vanguard, translating the new styles into South African idioms on LPs like Peaceful Eyes and Walking Spirit. The tenorist also carefully watched other global fashions in Black dance and pop music – working under numerous studio aliases, he cut 45rpm covers of big hits including Fela’s ‘Shakara’ and even the Sugar Hill Gang’s ‘Rapper’s Delight’. And in 1979, he entered the Gallo studios with producer Peter Ceronio to respond to the ascendant sound of disco. Kabuzela, named after a contemporary township dance craze, was the result: four extended tracks of bouncing, upful disco jazz. Perfectly calibrated for dancing, heavy on the bass and drums, the album is set off by a gleaming centre piece, ‘Disco Freaks’ – a joyous paean to the weekend and true lost gem of global disco, perfect for the most discerning dancefloors. Transferred from the master tapes by Gallo in South Africa, and mastered for release by D&M. Fully licensed from Gallo South Africa. Distributed by Honest Jons.

A miraculous union of techno and dub reggae. The outstanding universal masterpiece of acoustic dub / techno released only on CD in 1995 by the Basic Channel of German Mark Ernestus & Moritz von Oswald is vinylized with a full-length version longer than the original cut.

Download card includes bonus track "Revelation."

Cindy Lee is the brainchild of singer / guitarist Patrick Flegel. While some may know Flegel from their time spent in Canadian experimental indie band Women, Cindy Lee has spent the past four years crafting songs that push and pull in opposing directions – from tales of tragedy laced with haywire distortion to moments of breathtaking beauty.

On Malenkost, Flegel combines everything that makes Cindy Lee so essential: heart-wrenching romantic pleas, rough shards of noise and twilit ballads. Featuring the lo-fi pop single "A Message From The Aching Sky," Malenkost sounds like Deerhunter playing The Supremes or vice versa.

Superior Viaduct's imprint W.25TH presents the first of many Cindy Lee releases. Spectral and timeless, the music of Cindy Lee is hauntingly familiar yet of another plane, a magical collision of Brill Building hooks and uncompromising No Wave.

"Over the years, they would come to say that the Africans just appeared one day in Jamaica. That two Congo men somehow materialized on the streets of Kingston sometime in 1977, almost as if by magic, speaking not a word of English or patwa. The duo, they say, were musicians brought in by a Jamaican promoter – a woman who ditched them, leaving them to fend for themselves, stranded in a strange land.

"What really happened is harder to fully divine. The two young Africans – Molenga Mosukola (aka Seke) and Kawongolo Kimwanga (aka Kalo) – were musicians from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, then known as the Republic of Zaire, and had indeed been brought to Jamaica by a woman. But she was not a Jamaican promoter; she was a Frenchwoman named Nadette Duget, an executive at CBS France.

"Seke and Kalo were both vocalists and guitarists who also played percussion; one of them also handled the saxophone. Initially, Duget had intended for the recording to take place at Byron Lee's Dynamic Sounds studio. Somehow, though, the project instead ended up at Lee 'Scratch' Perry's Black Ark.

"When Seke Molenga and Kalo Kawongolo arrived at the Black Ark, Perry was wrapping up the sessions for the Heart of the Congos. He was immediately enamored with the two Congolese visitors and did regard their presence as a fortuitous sign. As he later said in 1992, 'I know they were sent from Africa, because Africa wanted to make that heart connection in the Ark Studio. So African have to appear in the Ark Of The Covenant to manifest the African drum.'

"Perry eventually completed the work with Seke and Kalo: a deeply rootsy and rugged album under the working title Monama (which in Lingala means 'Rainbo'). He submitted it to Island, but as they had done with Heart of the Congos, they passed on releasing it.

"While it has remained relatively obscure, even as Perry's Black Ark oeuvre has been rehabilitated and lionized over the past two decades, the album has nevertheless been quietly influential. Its groundbreaking amalgamation of African music and dub anticipated similar experiments by producers like Adrian Sherwood, Bill Laswell and Jah Wobble who would ride to critical acclaim in the '80s and '90s."

– Uchenna Ikonne (excerpt from the liner notes)

Singer-songwriter Bob Lind will forever be remembered for the 1965 hit "Elusive Butterfly," but his career is so much more interesting than the fading wonder of that one song. Once a hard-partying buddy of Charles Bukowski, Lind was the inspiration for the character "Dinky Summers," a down-on-his-luck folk singer in Bukowski's 1978 novel Women. Lind also doubled as a writer, penning a number of novels and plays as well as serving as a longtime staff writer at the lowbrow tabloid Weekly World News. If that wasn't enough, Lind is also responsible for one of the greatest major-label "loner" albums of all time, 1971's Since There Were Circles. After several years languishing without a second hit for the World Pacific label, Lind signed to Capitol and went into the studio with some of the biggest names in the LA country-rock scene including Doug Dillard, Gene Clark, Bernie Leadon and legendary session bassist Carol Kaye. While the record was well-received critically, it sold poorly and marked Lind's bitter departure from the music business for several decades. The intervening half-century has been incredibly kind to Since There Were Circles, and it is now regarded as a cult masterpiece that pairs perfectly with Gene Clark's No Other, Bobby Charles' self-titled Bearsville album and Lee Hazlewood's Cowboy In Sweden. Lind's songwriting here is vastly darker and more self-reflective than anything from his folk-pop period, and the production is simultaneously loose and rootsy, yet lushly orchestrated and occasionally bombastic. Lind somehow manages to bring it all together with wry delivery and literate detail. Comes with lyric booklet.

It's by some strange inversion that since his untimely death in 1999 Bryn Jones' Muslimgauze project has become evermore enigmatic as his publicly available recordings have become evermore vast. The Mancunian artist's sudden passing at the age of 37 prematurely resolved a body of work that remains as experimental as it is diffuse, with an informal archive that was left spread between favoured labels and confidantes. And though this monadic project never abided by genre specifications, it all feels as if it is taking the critical pulses of its time and rendering them into something other than the sum of its obscure compulsions. Jones' double album 'Veiled Sisters' from 1993 is no exception, and it persists as a magnificent outlier in his singular and bewildering discography. Originally released by the label Soleilmoon, an early and lifelong supporter of Jones' work along with Staalplaat, the album is a notable example of the uniquely recombinant fragility and fervour of Jones' work. This 3LP edition marks the album's first appearance on vinyl. Like much of the Muslimgauze catalogue, 'Veiled Sisters' is dedicated to the Palestine Liberation Organization, with its two halves—Sister One and Sister Two—calling on the history and conflicts of the modern Islamic world through opaque titles and snatches of musical oration. Forgoing the raucous timbre and abrasion that Jones could occasionally employ, this album balances a medley of shrill instrumental bursts with a complex patterning of ambient atmospheres. 'Veiled Sisters' moves with a hypnotic gait across its extended runtime with a dynamic ensemble of electronics grounded in a pulsing yet evasive combination of low-slung kicks and dub-soaked bass. The hissy wash of drums, both played and machined, decorate a restless patina all over, and the cacophony of samples send impressions scattershot into Jones' idiosyncratic yet readymade psychedelia. With a quiet intensity that is not often captured this succinctly in the Muslimgauze catalogue, this new edition of 'Veiled Sisters' is a reminder of the haunting wonder that Jones was capable of manifesting.

It's by some strange inversion that since his untimely death in 1999 Bryn Jones' Muslimgauze project has become evermore enigmatic as his publicly available recordings have become evermore vast. The Mancunian artist's sudden passing at the age of 37 prematurely resolved a body of work that remains as experimental as it is diffuse, with an informal archive that was left spread between favoured labels and confidantes. And though this monadic project never abided by genre specifications, it all feels as if it is taking the critical pulses of its time and rendering them into something other than the sum of its obscure compulsions. Jones' double album 'Veiled Sisters' from 1993 is no exception, and it persists as a magnificent outlier in his singular and bewildering discography. Originally released by the label Soleilmoon, an early and lifelong supporter of Jones' work along with Staalplaat, the album is a notable example of the uniquely recombinant fragility and fervour of Jones' work. This 3LP edition marks the album's first appearance on vinyl. Like much of the Muslimgauze catalogue, 'Veiled Sisters' is dedicated to the Palestine Liberation Organization, with its two halves—Sister One and Sister Two—calling on the history and conflicts of the modern Islamic world through opaque titles and snatches of musical oration. Forgoing the raucous timbre and abrasion that Jones could occasionally employ, this album balances a medley of shrill instrumental bursts with a complex patterning of ambient atmospheres. 'Veiled Sisters' moves with a hypnotic gait across its extended runtime with a dynamic ensemble of electronics grounded in a pulsing yet evasive combination of low-slung kicks and dub-soaked bass. The hissy wash of drums, both played and machined, decorate a restless patina all over, and the cacophony of samples send impressions scattershot into Jones' idiosyncratic yet readymade psychedelia. With a quiet intensity that is not often captured this succinctly in the Muslimgauze catalogue, this new edition of 'Veiled Sisters' is a reminder of the haunting wonder that Jones was capable of manifesting.

NTS DJ, label boss and fabled collector Howard Williams lands on DDS with an etheric communique under his Japan Blues moniker, inspired by early C.20th Min'yō folk and avant-dub, richly spirited with field recordings and ghostly ephemera. Six years since his debut Japan Blues album ‘Sells His Record Collection’, Williams is back - and it’s been worth the wait. Based around enka and minyo recordings made with London based singer Akari Mochizuki and Tsugaru shamisen master Hibiki Ichikawa at London’s Earthworks studio back in 2018, Williams adds field recordings made while traveling through Japan, inviting The Dengie Hundred to co-produce, bringing his own sound worlds into the mix. The two spent several months shuttling ideas back and forth, processing mixes and adding environmental recordings, like snatched penny whistle melodies or the familiar whirr of an extractor fan. Singer Tamami Pearl is the final piece of the puzzle, providing an almost imperceptibly breathy aura to proceedings. The obsessively researched archivist’s resolve is still very much present, but the processing style and overall sound here is more faded than the Japan Blues of yore, transmuting discernible sounds into magickal textures that boil and bubble until all that’s left is vapour. On 'Sazanka, Hokkai Bon Uta', Japanese vocals are dubbed into bare syllables, juxtaposed with flute improvisations and muddy whirrs. Eventually, the instrumental elements turn to noise, like some shortwave radio transmission slowly falling out of range. Environmental sounds become uneven, clunking percussive currents offer a sort of dream logic, morphing into faint choirs. In the final third, Williams pulls away the veil almost entirely. The album's most compelling section is the side-long 'Soran, AIzu Bandai-San, Shimabara Lullaby'. If you've heard Robert Turman's 1981 album "Flux" - a reel-to-reel recorded slo-mo kalimba and piano masterpiece - you'll have an idea of how this one rolls. Williams and The Dengie Hundred work into the source material like modelling clay, dubbing and distorting shamisen twangs and echoing vocals into half-speed, dissociated dream visions. It's not Ambient by any means, but there are undoubtedly traces of Brian Eno's earliest, most crucial experiments. It's not Folk music either, but Williams' deep obsession with Japanese traditions allows him to integrate sounds holistically, provoking a conversation rather than simply cherry picking aesthetic decorations. He works like a dedicated DJ, giving The Dengie Hundred room to tweak the spaces in-between. Together, they create an atmosphere that's fiendishly hard to put into words, and even harder to forget. If you're into tape-damaged industrial experiments (think Skaters, Spencer Clark, Aaron Dilloway et al), the surrealist global exploration of labels like Stroom, or simply after a new perspective on Japanese folkways, "Japan Blues Meets The Dengie Hundred" is unmissable.

Special Guest DJ & Pontiac Streator are crimeboys, here delivering a debut album volley of ambient jungle and trip hop dub paying homage to influences including Vangelis, Burial, Silent Hill and the putative effects of N ₂O. ‘Very Dark Past’ is the pair’s immersive debut, with eight cuts that firm up a flux of etheric inspirations into a translucent body of aerosolised ambient and writhing rhythms primed for the back rooms. Working within etheric parameters established over recent years by their respective solo efforts and a plethora of collaborative projects by peers such as Huerco S., Perila, Exael, and Ulla,‘Very Dark Past’ digs into a now familiar vein of lathered cultural ephemera and rave nostalgia full of gauzy signposts and warm sentimentality that works a treat on stressed minds and bodies. Titled tongue-in-cheek in key with their mode of prophylactic rave safety, the crimeboys step off from the gentlest ends of LTJ Bukem or PS1-style jungle into pulpiest/soft focus ambient dance. Bladerunner vibes prompt the opening lushness of ‘holodeck blue’, and ‘trippin’’ trades in filigree ambient jungle delicacy, beside the caress of ‘deja entendu (dub)’ and frayed echoes of Timeblind in ‘red shift’, while a sublime highlight of spongiform subbass and fractalised breaks in ‘sex and drugs’ gives way to Burial-esque 2-step of ‘haunted tattoo’ and a weightless lushness approximating DJ Crystal or Photek underwater in ‘days go by’. Some hidden cuts on the vinyl edition too.

Dominique Lawalrée (b. 1954) is a composer born and based in Brussels. First Meeting is Lawalrée's first archival release to date. Culled from four different albums originally self-published on his private label Editions Walrus, circa 1978-1982, this compilation highlights the composer's unique sense of ambient and minimal composition. Originally considered for release on Brian Eno's Obscure Records, Lawalrée's music is now no longer hidden. 

In this collection the listener finds the sounds of piano, synthesizers, percussion, wurlitzer, organ, and voice, all performed by Lawalrée. Using these tools Dominique creates miniature themes that gallop across the speakers in slow motion, stretching our normal sense of dynamics and color, effortlessly widening the stereo plane. On “Musique Satieerique,” Dominique pays homage to the influence of Satie with simple repeated piano figures and a lush field of organs and flutes. And on other selections, like “Le Maison Des 5 Elements,” he takes a more wistful, ambient approach, layering keyboard lines, and invoking found/tape sounds to create a hypnogogic world of his own. Childlike in its playfulness and surreal to the bone, the music spins like a carrousel placed inside the Rothko Chapel. Lawalrée’s sense of timbre, tone, and overarching composition is like an impression of a home movie whose charm lies in its knowledge of intimacy, shared by few. An incantation of innocence. 

"a quiet, understated music that is both touching and elegant" - Gavin Bryars 

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

A masterpiece of the schooner rock variety, Black and White Raven is an album that emerged from Archie James Cavanaugh’s youthful dream of recording his own music while stuck in the Alaskan wilderness. “This dream was always elusive,” Cavanaugh said, “believing either that it was only meant for those famous artists who got picked up by major record labels, or that it was just too impossible to achieve because of cost and lack of know-how.” With a freewheeling cast culled from Archie’s travels around the Pacific Northwest, Black and White Raven was set down as the ’70s crested and self-released in the spring of 1980. Traces of disco, AM gold, gospel, and yacht mixed freely with his Tlingit heritage, creating a breezy and optimistic portrait of life in the 49th state.

2022年度リプレス。アメリカのインディ・ロック・バンド、Bedheadが1998年2月10日に〈Trance Syndicate Records〉に残した3枚目のスタジオ・アルバムが〈Numero〉からアナログ・リイシュー。Steve Albiniがエンジニアを務めた本バンド唯一のレコードであり、前作よりもアップテンポで激しく歪んだサウンドを披露したスロウコア/オルタナティヴ・ロックの傑作！

Jim Kirchstein founded Cuca Records in 1959 to capture the undocumented musical talent of rural Wisconsin. Originally a tiny recording studio in the corner of a record store, the independent label quickly expanded in response to the success of its early releases. Despite its remote location in the hills of Wisconsin’s Driftless Area, the label’s growing popularity attracted a diverse group of artists and performers from Wisconsin, Michigan, and the Chicago area. The combination of the label’s remote location and the area’s cultural diversity created a unique catalogue that was often divergent from the current music trends. The country music that Kirchstein recorded is best described as “outsider country”—lo-fi, dreamy, and just a little too weird to make the charts. Driftless Dreamers tells the story of these artists and their takes on the term “country.” Driftless Dreamers takes its name after the Driftless Area, a geological region of the American Midwest untouched by the last continental glacial movement. The majority of the Driftless Area lies in southwest Wisconsin, but extends into the corners of Minnesota, Iowa, and Illinois. The area’s lack of glacial drift is what preserved the land’s rugged terrain of forested ridges, inhabited caves, carved river valleys, and some of North America’s last true prairies. As a preserved area, the Driftless is home to many species of rare wildlife species, unknown to the rest of the country. The area’s black, fertile earth is also very suitable for farming. In the 19th century European immigrants poured into Wisconsin and began to farm. Small agrarian communities dotted the hills of the Wisconsin Driftless. Agriculture was, and still is, the lifeblood of these communities, as is music. The mainly German and Irish immigrants established community bands to carry on the musical traditions that they carried with them from their homelands. The domination of farming as the main industry in the Driftless area encouraged these musical styles to develop into the country music that Jim Kirchstein would record in the 1960s. After a stint in the Navy, Jim Kirchstein returned home to the Driftless Area to pursue an electrical engineering degree at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Kirchstein lived on the eastern boundary of the Driftless in the sleepy town of Sauk City, close to his school in Madison. To support his new family, Kirchstein started selling records out of the basement of his brother’s hobby shop, located next to their family’s grocery store. Through his work at the record store Kirchstein soon recognized a need for a recording studio for the area’s local musicians. In 1959 Kirchstein founded the original Cuca recording studio in his basement record shop. Despite its remote location, the studio drew in a variety of artists from across the Midwest. The studio was also popular with local communities, whose mixed heritages produced a variety of folk and country genres. Jim Kirchstein intended for his recording studio to serve the local population’s need for both a creative outlet and historical documentation of their music traditions. As the label grew, Kirchstein created genre-specific sublabels, including Top Gun Country. The Driftless Dreamers series is a glimpse into this trove of recordings, focusing on the isolated interpretations of popular country music and the lonesome twang of outsiders. Driftless Dreamers in Cuca Country Volume 1 is a survey of the range of Wisconsin’s country music. This volume starts with a regional hit and ends with an echoing ballad from an untrained voice. Along the way we visit some family band bluegrass, teenage Nashville sound, rockabilly, and improvised bar tunes.

Who do we become when we live our dreams? It's all here - the high hairdos, the dreams and schemes, the tender camp, the wedding bell fantasias and chaste tragedies. Sister acts, studio receptionists, classmates, angelic voices of the 1960s; some legendary, many hidden in the basement of expired rainbows.

The third installment of Numero’s ode to lowrider souldies, Rust Side Story compiles highly sought after sweet soul singles from the Buck Eye State. Prepare for a low and slow ride from Youngstown to Dayton, Cleveland to Columbus, Toledo to Cincinnati, all soundtracked with silky falsettos and dreamy harmonies.

The Manchester based artist Craig Tattersall returns to the label with 2 longform compositions centered around piano. The compositions were generated by birds which were captured by a contact mic attached to his garden bird feeder. These initial recordings were partly included in the final recordings adding an organic and intimate touch to the music. Hence, the album presents itself as a more outside experience and complements the Autumn season quite well.

The Humble Bee is the pseudonym of Craig Tattersall, one of Britain's leading ambient writers, who has left outstanding works for famous groups such as The Boats, The Remote Viewer, and The Sea. The 2019 masterpiece cassette album "things are sweeter when they're lost" from Belgian prestigious has been repressed as the 2nd edition after a long absence. A gem of an ambient work released in 2019 as a limited numbered edition of 75 handmade artwork specifications, reissued in a limited edition of 150 copies.