'Interzone' is the third full-length album by New York’s electro post-punk duo The Vacant Lots, to be released via Fuzz Club. A genre-blending synthesis of dance and psych, 'Interzone' is made for secluded listeners and all-night partygoers, meant for headphones and the club. Uninhibited by the limitations of two people and continuing their mission of “minimal means maximum effect,” The Vacant Lots’ Jared Artaud and Brian MacFadyen create an industrial amalgam of icy electronics and cold beats with detached vocals and hard hitting guitars.

'Interzone's trance-like opener ‘Endless Rain’ and the kinetic Krautrock stomper ‘Into The Depths’ are followed by scintillating dark disco anthems 'Rescue' and 'Exit’. Side 2 kicks off with 80’s synth-pop track ‘Fracture’ and haunting after-hours minimal wave ‘Payoff,’ while ‘Station’ and album closer 'Party's Over' deal with disillusionment and conquering one’s indifference to make real change. The album creates order from chaos and delves into escapism, isolation, relationship conflicts, and decay. With nods to William S. Burroughs and Joy Division’s song of the same name, “Interzone is like existing between two zones,” Jared says. “Interzone doesn't mean one thing. It can mean different things to different people depending on their interpretation. Working on this album was a constant struggle reconciling internal conflicts with all that’s going on externally in the world. Interzone, in one word, is duality."

On Interzone, the band produced the 8 songs, 30 minutes record and teamed up with long term collaborators Ivan Liechti who designed the album artwork, and Ted Young who engineered the record. Maurizio Baggio mixed the record and contributed additional production and it was mastered by Gianni Peri. The Vacant Lots have released singles with Mexican Summer and Reverberation Appreciation Society, collaborated on their debut album 'Departure' with Spacemen 3’s Sonic Boom, their second album 'Endless Night' with Alan Vega, and most recently on their two EPs, 'Berlin' and 'Exit', with Brian Jonestown Massacre’s Anton Newcombe at his studio in Berlin. The group has toured with Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, Suicide, Brian Jonestown Massacre, The Growlers, Dean Wareham, The Dandy Warhols, and Spectrum. 

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Sounding like an amped-up Dandy Warhols, the Vacant Lots have always perfectly toed the line between distorted, power-chord rock and hypnotic psychedelic electronica, and 'Interzone' is the indication that they've hit their creative zenith. Rich, deep and hypnotic without ever being self-indulgent.

TRACK LISTING

1. Endless Rain
2. Into The Depths
3. Rescue
4. Exit
5. Fracture
6. Playoff
7. Station
8. Party's Over 

THIS IS A RECORD STORE DAY EXCLUSIVE, LIMITED TO ONE PER PERSON.

"Live From London" official bootleg.

Back In Love City, is the new album produced by Daniel Ledinsky (Rihanna, Carly Rae Jepson), Andrew Maury (Lizzo, PostMalone) and Fryars (Pharrell Williams, Mark Ronson).

It sees The Vaccines both perfecting their winning formula, and pushing their sound forward, evolving from their previous foundations with an album that reflects on escapism as a necessary part of modern living.

TRACK LISTING

1. Back In Love City
2. Alone Star
3. Headphones Baby
4. Wanderlust
5. Paranormal Romance
6. El Paso
7. Jump Off The Top
8. XCT
9. Bandit
10. Peoples' Republic Of Desire
11. Savage
12. Heart Land
13. Pink Water Pistols

Torchbearers for British guitar music, The Vaccines - Justin Young (lead vocals, guitars), Árni Árnason (bass, vocals), Timothy Lanham (guitars, keys, vocals) and Yoann Intonti (drums) - are back with their sixth studio album Pick-Up Full of Pink Carnations. The title comes from a misheard lyric from Don McClean's "American Pie," a song that for Young fittingly evokes the death of innocence and the American Dream. After he moved to Los Angeles - a city the band has grown up being captivated by - he was forced to wrestle with the disillusionment that comes when expectations, dreams, and reality don't quite meet. Yet, though Pick-Up Full of Pink Carnations is an album about reconciling with loss, it's also filled with gratitude for the people and places we once loved. "Pink carnations symbolise gratitude and tell a person they’ll never be forgotten," says Young. "So whether it's the loss of a lover, or a friend, or even just a dream, the record is a reminder that they’ll live on in whatever capacity the mind allows them to. And it's a reminder to keep on dreaming.” Produced by Andrew Wells (Halsey, Phoebe Bridgers) with Mixing from Dave Fridmann (Tame Impala, The Flaming Lips), Pick-Up Full of Pink Carnations is an immediately anthemic addition to the band's discography. With a mammoth five UK Top 5 albums – including a Number 1 with 2012’s Come of Age – and a fierce live reputation forged through arena-filling headline shows and unforgettable slots at Glastonbury and Reading/Leeds, The Vaccines continue to be a vital band in the British rock canon.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: A brilliantly produced ode to the follies of human existence and joys of persistence from London indie-rockers, The Vaccines. Bright guitars and snappy synths punctate the wry delivery of vocalist, Justin Hayward-Young. It's a brilliantly nuanced and uplifting return for the band.

TRACK LISTING

1. Sometimes, I Swear
2. Heartbreak Kid
3. Lunar Eclipse
4. Discount De Kooning (Last One Standing)
5. Primitive Man
6. Primitive Man
7. Another Nightmare
8. Love To Walk Away
9. The Dreamer
10. Anonymous In Los Feliz 

D album ‘Taiyō’ by Vādin, a new collaborative project from Lucie Štěpánková (Avsluta) and Christian Duka.

They describe the record:
“Vādin is a shapeshifter formed through sound, a seismic energy. ‘Taiyō’ is Vādin’s first word. It was improvised and recorded in the Welsh wilderness over three days within a makeshift yurt studio using analogue and digital synthesizers, voice, location field recordings and amplified objects. ‘Taiyō’ is an entity emerging from the process of opening up, inviting, curiously exploring and being vulnerable; it is inspired by the flow of life in all its finite magic, intangibility and imperfection.

The album opens with the drizzling drone scenery interweaved with shivering whispers of ‘The Seven Laws’ followed by the disintegrated rhythms and warm ripples of ‘First Contact’. ‘Merging’ is a multi-layered organism of spiralling undulations, astral droplets and hypnotic pulsations while ‘The Forest’ narrates a sensuous connection with the world where the suggestive monologue and extra-terrestrial pearls float atop galloping liquid rhythms. ‘Sufi Trance’ is a slow-burning cyclone, an ecstatic rite, a hypnotic pilgrimage into the centre of the Sun - ‘Taiyō’ - which brings the journey to a stirring climax with its morphing drops and electrifying trills.”

Mixed at SAE Institute by Christian Duka and mastered by Rashad Becker at Clunk.
Transferred and cut by Helmut Erler at D&M.

Artwork designed by Marco Maldarella.

STAFF COMMENTS

Matt says: RIYL: Demdike Stare, the XPQ? Label and synthesized hauntology in general; this scarily good, witching-hour release is full of late nite, nocturnal voodoo; and should be the go-to play for your next black magik mushroom ritual. Recommended!

TRACK LISTING

A1. The Seven Laws
A2. First Contact
B1. Merging
B2. The Forest
C. Sufi Trance
D. Taiyō

Infi nite Worlds via House Anxiety Records is the reissue of Vagabon’s criti cally acclaimed debut album.

The renowned label that launched everyone from King Krule to Courtney Barnett, amongst many others, has announced itself as the European home for the heralded record, which garnered numerous accolades including Pitchfork’s Best New Music tag earlier in 2017.

TRACK LISTING

The Embers
Fear & Force
Minneapolis
Mal L’aise
100 Years 
Cleaning House
Cold Apartment
Alive And A Well

Infi nite Worlds via House Anxiety Records is the reissue of Vagabon’s criti cally acclaimed debut album.

The renowned label that launched everyone from King Krule to Courtney Barnett, amongst many others, has announced itself as the European home for the heralded record, which garnered numerous accolades including Pitchfork’s Best New Music tag earlier in 2017.

TRACK LISTING

The Embers
Fear & Force
Minneapolis
Mal L’aise
100 Years 
Cleaning House
Cold Apartment
Alive And A Well

It can be argued that Serge Gainsbourg was a typically French artist, although his music was so personal that it would be difficult to find another similar artist in France at the time. The same could be said about Vainica Doble. They were a duo with a distinctly Spanish edge, although it is almost impossible to establish parallels between them and any other Spanish music released during the years they were active. Gloria van Aerssen and Carmen Santonja were truly unique and their mix of folk, traditional genres and psych rock is a landmark in Spanish pop.

This self-titled LP is their impossible-to-find first album, which despite extremely low sales (it is said that the majority of the copies were destroyed by one of the investors in the Ópalo label after shipping them to Argentina) has been highly influential for generations of pop musicians in Spain and a holy grail item for many music fans. There are plenty of reasons for this.

The opening track, ‘Caramelo de limón’, already shows how effective their personal musical recipe can be. Fantastic vocal harmonies, unexpected arrangements, original elements brought into the song and even fierce guitars where needed (their backing band, Los Tickets, would later become Asfalto, one of the biggest hard rock bands in Spain). As the album progresses, every track is a wonderfully idiosyncratic marvel: ‘Dime, Félix’, ‘Roberto Querido’, ‘Fulgencio Pimentel’... You will even find drum breaks on ‘Quién le pone el cascabel al gato’!

The package is completed with the amazing psychedelic artwork designed by Ivan Zulueta, a cult Spanish artist whose work spanned different fields and some will remember for his film posters for Pedro Almodóvar.

Moog Recordings Library is the record arm of Moog Sound Lab which was created and loaned by Moog Music Inc as a celebration of the life and work of Dr Robert Moog. Across 2015 and 2016 the project invited a who's who of contempory electronic artists for a 'conference' around the celebrated synthesizer. This week we see the fruits of these sessions via releases by Mika Vainio, Hieroglyphic Being and The Grid.

Mika visited the Moog Sound-Lab in April 2015. He made one his last known solo studio recordings in the form of two vinyl sized side long pieces. Entitled "Lydspor" - Danish for ‘Soundtrack’. Mika worked almost exclusively with the lab’s Moog Modular System 55. This UK sound-lab instrument is the sole protoype model (containing several golden filters) of Moog’s recent sold out reverse-engineered edition (55 units only) recreating the 1970’s classic. On completion of his sessions Mika announced ‘I could work with this machine for the rest of my life….I would need nothing else”. A second Moog session was planned but tragically Mika died in an accident in April 2017, shortly after he had approved the vinyl mastering. 

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: The late, great electronic genius Mika Vainio brings his imitable ambient electronics to Moog Recordings Library for his superb suite of simmering industrial electronics and crushing, static drone.

TRACK LISTING

Lydspor (Part 1) 20:00 
Lydspor (Part2) 19:37

A collaboration between Massive Attack’s Robert ‘3D’ Del Naja and Ukrainian artist Slava Vakarchuk, the frontman of Ukraine’s most popular rock band Okean Elzy. Vakarchuck has performed 179 impromptu shows for civilians and soldiers across Ukraine since the invasion began 12 months ago. The track, “Obiymy (Legacy of War Mix)”, was re-worked by Del Naja and Euan Dickinson in March last year and is now released through his Battle Box label. In April we’ll see a vinyl release featuring a B-side “Field Recordings / 2022” in a gatefold sleeve press by Deepgrooves, the world’s most eco-friendly vinyl plant. 

All profits go to the Legacy of War Foundation; an international charity providing support to civilians affected by conflict, founded by Giles Duley - a photographer, writer, campaigner and UN Global Advocate. Duley shot all photography for the digital and vinyl release, which was then designed by Robert Del Naja. Legacy of War Foundation will be partnering with UNITED24, a global fundraising platform, (launched by president Volodymyr Zelenskyy in May 2022) to help restore destroyed homes in Kyiv Oblast, under the Rebuild Ukraine program.

About Legacy of War Foundation:
Legacy of War Foundation was set up to do things differently: operating localised, beneficiary-led projects to support civilians affected by conflict and raising awareness of the lasting impact of war without big offices, international teams or unnecessary overheads. Founded in 2017, the Foundation now runs projects around the world including its innovative land transfer and sustainable agriculture program Land for Women in Rwanda, refugee support in Lebanon, and an extensive Ukraine crisis response supporting marginalised groups with specialist evacuation support, shelters and humanitarian aid.

www.legacyofwarfoundation.com / @legacyofwarfoundation

A note about proceeds:

Legacy of War Foundation will use the proceeds from the single to partner with UNITED24’s Rebuild Ukraine program, which aims to restore residential buildings in the Kyiv Oblast damaged during the Russian invasion. This program will enable 4237 Ukrainians to return to their homes in Irpin, Borodyanka, Hostomel, Buzove and Mila.

UNITED24 was launched by the President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy as the main venue for collecting charitable donations in support of Ukraine.

TRACK LISTING

A. Obiymy (Legacy Of War Mix)
B. Field Recordings : 2022 

Wolfgang Valbrun carries the torch for all great soul musicians with an incredible debut album, which looks at human frailty that's shaped by his lived experiences and perception of current affairs. Straddling the lines between soul, rock and blues, Wolfgang provides introspective insights through raw unapologetic lyrics, married with the incredible musicianship of his band. Nothing is off the table as 'Flawed By Design' examines relationships, money, religion, greed, growing civil unrest and the antagonism by authorities towards the marginalised. Institutional and social matters are addressed with this refreshing body of work, which calls for humanity to reflect on who we are, and where our actions will lead us. This LP/CD comes with two extra tracks not found on the digital version of the album.

TRACK LISTING

1. Sun Don't Shine
2. Cyclone
3. Love Yourself
4. Keep Your Head Up
5. Some Day
6. Where Is The Peace
7. I'll Be Your Prey
8. Almighty $$
9. Paris
10. Shadows
11. Baptist
12. Flawed By Design

Acid Jazz presents a very special collaboration with Flying Dutchman – the first new music from the iconic US label since the ’70s. Billy Valentine is one of the great soul voices working in America (‘the secret weapon of almost every songwriter in L.A.’) – with a history as deep and varied as the Young-Hold Trio, the original touring company of ‘The Wiz’, in collaboration with his brother as ‘The Valentine Brothers’, right up to credits that include Swedish House Mafia.

Collaborator Bob Thiele Jr. is the son of legendary producer and Flying Dutchman founder Bob Thiele (John Coltrane, Gil Scott-Heron and many others), and an acclaimed producer and songwriter in his own right. Having worked together for over three decades, his vision was to produce a Billy Valentine record to reflect our times.

Conceived in the summer of 2020, it is a response to the throes of a global pandemic and the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd. More than a covers album, this record uncovers the works of the likes of Curtis Mayfield, Gil Scott-Heron, and Pharaoh Sanders in a new setting. Recorded at EastWest Studios (formally the historic United Western Recorders), produced and mixed by Dave Way, and featuring a stella cast of session musicians, the album is as sonically stunning as it is moving.

TRACK LISTING

1. We The People Who Are Darker Than Blue
2. Home Is Where The Hatred Is
3. My People… Hold On
4. You Haven’t Done Nothin’
5. The Creator Has A Master Plan
6. Sign Of The Times
7. Wade In The Water
8. The World Is A Ghetto 

Pablo Valentino steps up on Handy with Kai Alcé on the remix!

The A1 fuses funk, guitars & piano to great effect, creating a slice of classic contemporary house. Kai Alcés remix adds extra percussion and drums to take it down dancier route.

Low-slung beats, warm synths and lush pads play in harmony on the B1 to great affect, 'Not Yet' rounds off the record with an eerie vocal seriously trippy percussions whilst still keeping it danceable!

TRACK LISTING

A1. Rua De Cima Do Muro
A2. Rua De Cima Do Muro (Kai Alcé NDATL Smooth Interpretation)
B1. My F*cked Up Left Ear
B2. Not Yet

"We can already see that this band has a lot to offer the world and we haven’t seen the half of yet” MTV.

"Watch this lot because they're going all the way" Spindle Magazine.

This new material marks an expansion of the duo’s dynamics, which represents another musical leap forward for the band, adding new textures and further honing a sound that has been theirs since their inception. In the process of embracing this evolution, the band enlisted the help of award-winning songwriter and producer, Tarek Musa (of Spring King / Dead Nature) as well as bringing in Claudius Mittendorf (Weezer, Parquet Courts, LIFE) for mixing duties. From the hook-heavy lead single “Rita”, a song about “a hard-working woman who defies the negative surroundings that try to stop her from doing what she is truly passionate about.” Through to alt-pop anthem “Let Me Go”, and darker, psych-inflected “Change Your Mind”, the band’s new material is simultaneously more cutting, energetic and melodically encapsulating than anything else they have released to-date.

Tracks from ‘Tell Me Now’ have been heavily supported by BBC Introducing and have received plays on Radio 1 and BBC 6 Music including support from Steve Lamacq and Tom Robinson. About their EP, VALERAS say: ‘This EP is the proudest VALERAS moment for the both of us. It’s made up of the first songs we wrote together as a duo in which we explored a dynamic we hadn’t before due to having a different line-up of members of the band in the past. This body of work marks a moment of growth for us as a musicians and individuals, and represents our ability to be able to co-write music that came so naturally that means so much to us. The songs were also co-written and produced by Tarek Musa, a musical hero of ours and great friend who we are so proud to say we worked beside.’

TRACK LISTING

Side A

1. Rita
2. The Other Side

Side B

3. Let Me Go
4. Change Your Mind 

Kranky's run of superlative albums continues (3 albums in The Wire's Top 50 Records Of The Year 2007) with the second solo release from Portland artist Valet, aka Honey Owens, following up her widely lauded "Blood Is Clean" album from early 2007, another trip through the fertile garden of her imagination. From the gentle narcotic haze of the album opener "We Went There", which is dissected by Honey's trademark incendiary guitar work, to the lazy alien country blues of "Fuck It", and through the hyperventilating rhythmic distortion of the closer "Streets", "Naked Acid" is a fever dream of ghostly incantation and smudged psychedelia. Honey Owens has collaborated with a number of well-known and obscure artists including Jackie-O Motherfucker and Nudge and has been an important figure in the Portland, Oregan experimental music scene for more than 10 years. 'A beguiling, meandering combination of trance-like chants, pulsating drones and frazzled guitar doodles'. - The Wire.

Recorded at home over the course of a year, Nature evolved as a collaboration between Honey Owens, Fauria, and drummer/bassist/keyboardist Mark Burden. The album ?nds the trio crafting enveloping layers of guitars, synthesizers, and reverb to create a shimmering, wide open sound.

It's a restrained, direct style, but tying it all together is a lulling, dreamy melodic sense that is distinctively Valet. At the center stands Owens' ethereal voice, which has transitioned from evoking trippy fantasies to creating space for honest contemplation. 

Informed by Honey Owens early musical life in the 90s Bay Area underground music scene, Nature slyly synthesizes the DIY spirit of punk, the expansive guitar whirl of shoegaze, and the propulsive rhythmic drive of dub.

For Valet, Nature's sound is a change in style, but not substance. From the haunted blues of 2006's Blood is Clean to the Fourth World free fusion of 2008's Naked Acid, Owens and company have always demonstrated a mastery of bringing together disparate musical genres into a uni?ed musical whole.

Epic organ led prog, strong vocals and more riffs and time changes then you can shake a stick at.

Marcos and the other Brazilian luminaries Adrian and Ali hosted for Jazz Is Dead, are able to create an entirely different sound and feel using the exact same palette. Throughout the album Marcos sings in his trademark percussive and melodic style (“wa-di-do-bem, ba di da we da bem”), a distinctly Brazilian take on vocalese. Like the sweet and foreign sounds coming out of his mouth, Marcos and the other Brazilian luminaries Adrian and Ali hosted for Jazz Is Dead, are able to create an entirely different sound and feel using the exact same palette. “It was really interesting how we can play the same instruments, listen to the same music and they can still have their distinctly Brazilian flavor that we admire so, so, so much,” Adrian effuses. “And to just hear our influences mix with theirs and to make something brand new is a dream come true.”

TRACK LISTING

1. Queira Bem
2. Isso É Que Eu Sei
3. Oi
4. Viajando Por Aí
5. Gotta Love Again
6. Não Saia Da Praça
7. Our Train
8. A Gente Volta Amanhã

It comes as no surprise to discover we are massive fans of Marcos Valle here at Piccadilly Records but this forgotten and obscure gem from the Brazilian maestro has proven to remain elusive to us until very recently

'Girassol' is a lost Brazilian-boogie stunner from 1983. It was originally released as an ultra-rare promo only 7". Composed by Marcos Valle, Paulo Sergio Valle and Ribeiro José Francisco, this all-too-short nugget (under 2 minutes) was recorded and pressed on the Valle, Ribeiro & Associados Ltda. imprint for Rede CB De Supermercados. It was a promotional item to be distributed to customers of a supermarket chain as a gift. Due to not having any conventional distribution channels this resulted in the 7" becoming a slippery customer to find.

It's a smooth AOR / Brazilian boogie joint with an uplifting chorus. The vibe is reminiscent of the much loved 'Estrelar' era of Marcos Valle's glorious recording career, and certainly one for fans of the Lincoln Olivetti, Robson Jorge production sound.

Ultra-rare Brazilian boogie from Marcos Valle.

Reminiscent of 'Estrelar' era Valle.

For fans of Lincoln Olivetti productions.

STAFF COMMENTS

Matt says: Thought you had dug all the Marcos Valle from the seams? Mr. Bongo have unearthed a supremely rare offering from a free supermarket promo! The stuff of Balearic legend until now and thankfully matching its unquestionable rarity with high musicality.

TRACK LISTING

Girassol
Girassol (playback)

A pure vintage that features the ultimate Brazilian-boogie cult-classic ‘Estrelar’ and iconic 80s cover art that sees a gloriously sun-drenched Marcos dressed in a pink v-neck t-shirt surrounded by a generous selection of deadly-looking neon cocktails.

The album was produced by the legendary Lincoln Olivetti and Marcos’ brother Paulo S rgio Valle. It showcases a real who’s who of Brazilian music at the time, with stellar performances from vocalists and musicians such as Rosana, Serginho Do Trombone, Robson Jorge and Oberdan Magalh es to name but a few.

This was Marcos’ second album, after having moved back to Brazil from his time living in Los Angeles, and that US influence is evident through its prominent boogie, soul and funk sounds. It also features collaborations with the US singer-songwriter, composer, pianist, keyboardist, and record producer, Leon Ware, who co-penned three tracks including ‘Estrelar’.

To complete the album there are tracks such as ‘Fogo Do Sol’, which is pure AOR / Balearic vibes, and tracks that are more MPB and pop-inspired, making a well-balanced track list for both home-listening pleasure and dancefloor business.

To celebrate the release we have pressed up several vinyl versions; both standard master, and half-speed mastering editions on Black vinyl, alongside special limited edition Rose and Mint-Green coloured vinyl variants that were inspired by the audacious-looking cocktails on the cover - sheer 80s excess! 

TRACK LISTING

1. Estrelar
2. Fogo Do Sol
3. Samba De Verao
4. Para Os Filhos Abraao
5. Naturalmente
6. Tapa No Real
7. Tapetes, Guardanapos, Cetins
8. Dia D
9. Mais
10. Que Amor
11. Viola Enluarada

Matteo Vallicelli is an Italian drummer and composer, best known as the live drummer of The Soft Moon and Death Index and as a founding member of many renowned Italian punk bands. This winter he debuts his first solo project, ‘Primo’, on Captured Tracks.

In 2013, Vallicelli relocated from the ancient neighbourhood of Trastevere in Rome to the ever-changing Kreuzberg district in Berlin. This dramatic uprooting acted as a catalyst, inspiring him to try and make music on his own. Heavily inspired by the pulsating techno scene of the German capital, Vallicelli began experimenting with synthesizers and drum machines. Recording sounds onto his computer and cassette tapes led him to create a massive collection of loops and samples, sometimes in protracted home sessions where he wouldn’t leave his apartment for days.

For Vallicelli, the transition from playing drums in punk bands to sitting alone in his home studio, working on minimalistic electronic compositions, has dramatically shifted his music career. “Being in charge of everything can be disorienting. Having no other band members to work or fight with… I would end up with hours of music that I would endlessly edit on my computer. It took me years to learn how to limit myself, to finish up a project and move on to something else. But, as soon as I mastered that, I was able to assemble my first album quickly.”

Songs like ‘Michelangelo’ and ‘Frammenti’ were born as techno tracks but, through subtraction, became something different and more representative of the introspective state in which they were created. These two tracks opened up a path for the rest of the music on the Primo, in which most of the songs have no traces of drums or percussive elements, marking a new, liberating way for Vallicelli to make music. The result of three years of experimentation, Primo is ultimately an exercise in self-limitation and discovery.

TRACK LISTING

Frammenti
Nuova Notte
Il Balletto Delle Stelle
Lacrime In Estate
Giungla Elettrica
Lausitzer Platz
Michelangelo
Arpeggio Due
Come Un Gatto
Futuro
Ore Di Tempesta

After a hard spell, heartbroken and drifting, Suzanne Vallie aimed to make a driving record rich with sympathy, high romance, and dedicated to the magic of good-timing. Other themes on the album include dogs, surfers, and the supernatural.

Vallie, a sorta-recluse living in rural Big Sur, California, is known for her improvisational performances where she freestyles lyrics and tells stories, both mythical and rowdy. She wrote the bulk of Love Lives Where Rules Die during the bummer summer after a breakup. It was a time when she drove up and down Highway 1 trying to blow out the speakers of her 94’ Honda. (bummer summer playlist).

The 11 songs of Love Lives Where Rules Die were largely live-tracked over five days. Suzanne Vallie and a core band of California col-laborators flew out to upstate New York during the last warm days of September 2019. Vallie and her producer, Rob Shelton, chose Dream-land Recording in Hurley, New York, for many reasons. The analog signal flow sounded embracing. The studio, a hundred-some-year-old church, had room for the whole crew to live-track. Some said a ghost might come around. What’s more, much of the band was already on tour out East, playing a run of shows with both Luke Temple and Meerna, double duty every night. They were plenty warmed-up.
Opening with “Ocean Cliff Drive”, Vallie sings of driving on the winding cliff side of Highway 1, blinded by fog and rain, all the same singing, “I can't see the road ahead of me, but I’m coming.”

The title track, "Love Lives Where Rules Die", begins with baritone guitar calling in a story of a broken heart among good company. With no way out in a three-day storm, Vallie asks friends to sing her love songs, and flies "on a wild light" with a “heart on borrowed wings.”

The party anthems, “Morro Bay” and “High With You”, celebrate friendship and the delicious urge for fun with Springsteen length lyric sheets. For Vallie, recording the sing-along "High With You" was also a “high” point in the making of Love Lives Where Rules Die. “It was midnight. We were real loose. Everybody got a tambourine!”

The album features production and keys by Rob Shelton (Meernaa, Sis, Luke Temple, Kacey Johansing), guitar by Blake Kennedy (The Range of Light Wilderness), guitar and vocals by Carly Bond (Meerna, Sis), guitar and bass by Doug Stuart (Meerna, Brijean), percussion and drums by Andrew Maguire (Mirah, Vetiver, Meerna) with contributions from violin virtuoso, Edwin Huizinga (Acronym, Dark Watchers), percussion by Mark Clifford and Bob Ladue, and backing vocals by Paul Spring, Emily Ritz (Yesway, Honeycomb), and Molly Sarle´ (Moun-tain Man).

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Shimmering folky ballads, rich with glowing strings and slide guitar, all topped with Vallie's softly enunciated vocals. A perfect mix of haze and melody.

TRACK LISTING

Ocean Cliff Drive (3:44)
Love Letter (4:16)
Beauty From The Blue Country (4:45)
Where Are You (2:47)
Love Lives Where Rules Die (6:38):
Sundowner (7:27)
Morro Bay (4:09)
Love Me Too (4:17)
High With You (5:03)

Composer Valtteri Laurell Pöyhönen presents his Nonet formation on We Jazz Records. Their debut album Tigers Are Better Looking is released 3 Feb and the ensemble features internationally renowned Finnish clarinetist Antti Sarpila, plus a strong cast of Helsinki-based musicians from several of the top Finnish groups.

Based on the writings of British-Caribbean author Jean Rhys (1890–1979), the 6-track album is a melancholy, intimate chamber jazz creation. Laurell's music swings, yet he doesn't stop there, but moves further to paint an original, richly-toned sonic image with the highly potent Nonet.

Laurell states Gerry Mulligan, Miles Davis's "Water Babies" and Charles Mingus among the key musical influences of his compositions on this album. Through Rhys's text, Laurell finds a special sense of detachment and melancholy evident in his new material. Antti Sarpila's masterful clarinet provides the icing on the cake, floating high above the clouds of sound.

TRACK LISTING

1. Tigers Are Better Looking
2. At The Villa D'Or
3. Wide Sargasso Sea
4. Let Them Call It Jazz
5. Till September Petronella
6. Temps Perdi

Occasionally, you find music outside the commercial mainstream, outside of everything – the music of visionaries, eccentrics, inventors, loners, the keepers of secrets, the path-finders. Moondog, Daphne Oram, Harry Partchare from this mould. And so too is Lori Vambe.

New on Strut, the first ever reissue of Vambe’s privately pressed original albums from 1982, Drumland Dreamland and Drumgita Solo. A self-taught drummer, inventor, and sonic experimentalist, Lori Vambe is a unique figure in British music. Creator of his own instrument, the drumgita (pronounced ‘drum-guitar’) or string-drum, Vambe intended to create a kind of music that had never been made in order to pursue access to the fourth dimension.

Vambe was born in Harare, Zimbabwe and his father, Lawrence Vambe, was a noted Zimbabwean journalist and author. Moving to London in 1959, Vambe immersed himself in the Brixton squat movement of the early 1970s, teaching himself to drum and creating a short-lived performance group, The Healing Drums of Brixton (Vambe, the sculptor Alexander Sokolov and outsider musician Michael O’Shea). Vambe later had a dream-vision involving a feeling of ecstasy while playing an unknown instrument that extended from his own umbilical cord; the instrument would manifest itself as the drumgita. In 1982, he privately produced a pair of home recordings, the diptych set Drumgita Solo and Drumland Dreamland, releasing them on his own label Drumony. On these records, he rejected any commercial aesthetic and employed tape effects, temporal shifts, reversed sound and overdubbing to investigate space-time and access the fourth dimension. Combining layered drums with the rhythmic throb of the drumgita and, on Drumland Dreamland, an improvised piano performance by Brazilian concert pianist Rafael Dos Santos, the albums are both hypnotic and perturbing.

Both albums were cut at Portland Studios by Chas Chandler and stand as a concealed monument of Black British experimental music. 500 copies of each record were originally pressed, and both were released together. The albums were never performed live.

For this first ever reissue of DrumlandDrumland and Drumgita Solo, Strut presents the two albums in their original artwork, housed in a deluxe slipcase including an additional 8-page 12”-sized booklet featuring unseen photos, liner notes and an interview with Lori Vambe by The Wire magazine writer Francis Gooding. Both albums are fully remastered by The Carvery.

TRACK LISTING

Drumgita Solo
1. Intro
2. Drumgita
3. Ancient Boogie (Mantra)
4. Artnam
5. Mantra
6. (One) Boogie Home Going
7. Going Home Boogie (One)
8. Un Minuto (One)
9. Un Minuto (Two)
10. Going Home Boogie (Two)
11. Going Home Boogie (Three)

Drumland Dreamland (Part One)
1. Drumsong (One)
2. Drumsong (Two)
3. Drumsong (Three)
4. Strumelody
5. Drumelody (One)
6. Drumelody (Two)
7. Ydolemurd
8. Hum Drum Dring (One)
9. Hum Drum Dring (Two) (The Freedrum Song)

Vampire weekend return for their newest full-length since 2013's 'Modern Vampires Of The City', this time choosing to go further down the Americana route hinted at on their first LP. We kick things off with the acoustic-heavy duo of 'Hold You Now' and 'Harmony Hall', the former stripping back everything to vox and guitar, accentuated with airy vocal samples and lo-fi hissing only to bring in a choral accompaniment, knocking things into grand orchestral territory. The latter of the two flits between melodic piano and insistent percussion, all accentuated with perfectly phased vocals and flickering acoustic guitar. The technique of stripping things back only to bring it all back in is not a new idea, but the way it's handled here is beautifully done, with filter fades and instrumental shifts clearly highlighting the differing sections without resorting to the usual verse-chorus tropes. 

Move things along a little and we get a bit of synthpop atmospherics ('Unbelievably White'), plaintive jazzy progressions ('My Mistake') and funky angular soul ('Sunflower'), whilst still retaining the underlying sound that makes Vampire Weekend unique. At the heart of things, we still have the same playful progressions and flickering momentum of their earlier work (along with that unmistakeable vocal style and harmonic accompaniment), but brought up to date with a more mature outlook and delicate balance between beautiful harmony and patchwork construction of sound. Brilliantly inventive and warmingly original, this is Vampire Weekend but brought into the present. 

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Vampire Weekend have always stood out from the crowd with their own particular brand of dreamy melodic indie, characterised by rapid changes in direction and richly textured instrumental passages. What we have here is a classic distillation of their sound, spread across a hefty 18 tracks. It was well worth the wait.

TRACK LISTING

1. "Hold You Now"
2. "Harmony Hall"
3. "Bambina" 
4. "This Life" 
5. "Big Blue" 1:48
6. "How Long?" 3:32
7. "Unbearably White" 4:40
8. "Rich Man" 2:29
9. "Married In A Gold Rush" (featuring Danielle Haim) 3:42
10. "My Mistake" 3:18
11. "Sympathy" 3:46
12. "Sunflower" (featuring Steve Lacy)  2:17
13. "Flower Moon" (featuring Steve Lacy) 3:57
14. "2021"  1:38
15. "We Belong Together" (featuring Danielle Haim) 3:10
16. "Stranger" 4:08
17. "Spring Snow" 2:41
18. "Jerusalem, New York, Berlin"

Only God Was Above Us is the fifth studio album from Vampire Weekend. The album is inspired by and infused with the essence of the band’s birthplace of New York City, though recorded all over the world, from New York to Los Angeles to London and Tokyo. The album was produced by Ezra Koenig, and longtime collaborator Ariel Rechtshaid. The album title is lifted directly from the album artwork, which is a photo taken from a Subway graveyard in New Jersey in 1988 by photographer Steven Siegel.

Only God Was Above Us includes universal themes ranging from the urge to question the world in which we live, and the quest for peace that can only be found through acceptance. The album is equal parts as direct yet complex as anything the band has ever released, as beautiful and melodic as they’ve ever sounded but also at their grittiest.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: There's something unmistakeable about the way Vampire Weekend form their songs, and it's been the case since they first burst onto the scene with their debut LP in 2008. 'Only God...' has all of the pitch-shifted guitar lines and rolling basslines of their early work with Koenig's vocals working away beautifully over the top, but there's a sense of a more mature songwriting drive, and results in possibly their greatest work yet.

TRACK LISTING

1. Ice Cream Piano
2. Classical
3. Capricorn
4. Connect
5. Prep-School Gangsters
6. The Surfer
7. Gen-X Cops
8. Mary Boone
9. Pravda
10. Hope

Dealing in genres the band have dubbed 'Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa' and 'Upper West Side Soweto', Vampire Weekend is a breath of fresh air, both musically and lyrically, with this New York band endeavouring to make music that is anything but straight ahead rock. This is indie-rock that isn't indie-rock, a joyously exuberant carnival of melody and rhythm. Strings. Organs. Afro-funk guitars. Courtly 18th century harpsichord. A bit of post-punk (maybe Franz Ferdinand crossed with the Bhundu Boys?). Lyrics about grammar and architecture and preferred bus routes and the British Imperial origins of American preppie fashion. With fleet-footed pizzazz Vampire Weekend deploy all these to craft a tinglingly refreshing sound. Anyone for brainy party music?

TRACK LISTING

1 Mansard Roof
2 Oxford Comma [Explicit]
3 A-Punk
4 Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa [Explicit]
5 M79
6 Campus
7 Bryn
8 One (Blake's Got A New Face)
9 I Stand Corrected
10 Walcott [Explicit]
11 The Kids Don't Stand A Chance

Some bands stay in a holding pattern their whole careers. Others jerk the steering wheel hard and fly off the road. On their second album, Vampire Weekend do neither. Or maybe they do both. “I think we sound more like Vampire Weekend than we did on the first record,” says drummer Christopher Tomson.

"Contra" pulls off a series of impressive feats: It’s bustling with fresh ideas and yet it sounds immediately familiar; it’s heavily layered but taut and kinetic; it chews ravenously through sound palettes and rhythms, and yet it’s nimble and assured; it’s still breezy, and yet it smolders with a newfound emotional heft. “It’s sadder than the first one, a bit more sentimental,” says singer Ezra Koenig. The songs are catchy, fast, twinkling, clattering – the darker themes of loss, doubt and regret accumulate almost imperceptibly, but they land a powerful blow.

TRACK LISTING

1 Horchata
2 White Sky
3 Holiday
4 California English
5 Taxi Cab
6 Run
7 Cousins
8 Giving Up The Gun
9 Diplomat’s Son
10 I Think Ur A Contra

Vampire Weekend’s third album is ‘Modern Vampires Of The City’, released on XL Recordings.

When asked in interviews about the new record, the band have been guarded in describing it, but have stated the album is darker and warmer, saying in Triple J Magazine that “this is our most American album” and citing New York City at night as inspiration for the new sound. The band told interviewer Zan Roew that they focused on “good songwriting”, saying “we wanted the songs to just be amazing”, working towards a sound in which “something that sounds traditional and maybe something that seems modern come together and it feels natural.”

The cover art is a 1966 photograph by Neal Boenzi of the smoggiest day in New York City history, on which the air pollution killed at least 169 people.

TRACK LISTING

1. Obvious Bicycle
2. Unbelievers
3. Step
4. Diane Young
5. Don't Lie
6. Hannah Hunt
7. Everlasting Arms
8. Finger Back
9. Worship You
10. Ya Hey
11. Hudson
12. Young Lion

A Belfast escapee finds himself in France at the start of the 21st century. Recruiting three French musicians with the same idea, nothing else for it than to depart on quest to find something real. The Vampyrs play up-tempo rock'n'roll with a penchant for 60's psych and freakbeat. Already an LP under their belts, they're celebrating the release of their first 7" on the Cougouyou Music label.
Linked to the record store of the same name in Perpignan in the deep South of France, Cougouyou Music has a focus on the local scene in Northern and Southern Catalonia.

Esoteric Antenna are delighted to announce the release of the excellent new album by the legendary Van Der Graaf Generator.

“Do Not Disturb” is the band’s 13th studio album and was recorded in the closing months of 2015 and the Spring of 2016.

A true group effort, Peter Hammill, Hugh Banton and Guy Evans continue to follow in the tradition of Van Der Graaf Generator by delivering an album that is both powerful and possesses and emotive beauty.

“Do Not Disturb” is another highlight of the band’s career, during which their music has been influential on successive generations of musicians.

TRACK LISTING

1. Aloft
2. Alfa Berlina
3. Room 1210
4. Almost The Words
5. Go
6. (Oh No, I Must Have Said) Yes
7. Brought To Book
8. Almost The Words
9. Go 

1975s "Godbluff" saw a change of direction for Van Der Graaf Generator as they expanded on the darker introspective sound that Hammill had been developing in his solo work.

A facsimile LP edition of the classic 1975 album from Van der Graaf Generator. Newly remastered from the original first-generation master tapes. 

1975s "Godbluff" saw a change of direction for Van Der Graaf Generator as they expanded on the darker introspective sound that Hammill had been developing in his solo work.

A facsimile LP edition of the classic album from Van der Graaf Generator. Newly remastered from the original first-generation master tapes, featuring “Killer”, “House With No Door”, “Pioneers Over C”. One of the defining progressive rock releases of its era.

Originally released in 1976, "Still Life" saw Peter Hammill attempting to incorporate a more introspective mood into their sound.

A 50th anniversary release of the classic 1970 LP from Van Der Graaf Generator. Newly remastered from the original first-generation master tapes. Includes rare poster.

'The Least We Can Do Is Wave To Each Other', is technically the second Van Der Graaf Generator album, but is the first with the full band. Recorded in late 1969 at the cutting edge Trident Studios, 'The Least We Can Do Is Wave To Each Other' was listed at #15 on Q & Mojo's "Top 40 Cosmic Rock Albums". An absolute classic of British progressive space rock.

10 year annivesary edition of Sharon Van Etten's seminial record 'Are We There', pressed on black, grey and silver tri-colour split vinyl.

Review from 2014: A real step forward from the wonderful ‘Tramp’; it feels like a more confident and expansive sound. And of course the songwriting is superb, heartfelt and wonderfully melancholic.

TRACK LISTING

1. Afraid Of Nothing
2. Taking Chances
3. Your Love Is Killing Me
4. Our Love
5. Tarifa
6. I Love You But I'm Lost
7. You Know Me Well
8. Break Me
9. Nothing Will Change
10. I Know
11. Every Time The Sun Comes Up

Love Record Stores Edition available instore from 10am on Saturday September 4th, any remaining copies will be available on online from 9pm on the same day.
Limited to one per person.

For all the attention that was paid to her 2012 breakthrough ‘Tramp’, Sharon Van Etten is an artist with a hunger to turn another corner and to delve deeper, writing from a place of honesty and vulnerability to create a bond with the listener that few contemporary musicians can match. Compelled by a restless spirit, Van Etten is continuously challenging herself. Now, the result is ‘Are We There’, a self-produced album of exceptional intimacy, sublime generosity, and immense breadth.

Sharon Van Etten’s career since the release of her second album, 2010’s epic is well-known; critically lauded albums, films, and television shows have continually displayed her expanding artistry. Upon its release, epic laid a romantic melancholy over the gravel and dirt of heartbreak without one honest thought or feeling spared. Her songs covered betrayal, obsession, egotism, and all the other emotions we dislike in others and recognize in ourselves. Van Etten's grounded and clenched vocals conveyed a sense of hope--the notion that beauty can arise from the worst of circumstances.

To celebrate the 10th anniversary of this special album’s release, and to acknowledge the convergence of Van Etten’s present and past work, she asked fellow artists she admired to participate in an expanded reissue, where each artist would cover one different song from epic in their own style. Some are musicians Van Etten herself admired in her early days (Fiona Apple, Lucinda Williams, and Aaron Dessner and Justin Vernon of Big Red Machine), some are peers (Courtney Barnett, IDLES), and others are part of a younger generation of innovators (Shamir, St. Panther). What they all share is embodied by epic--a musician frankly communicating themself through the power of music.

The resulting epic Ten is a double LP featuring the original album plus the new album of epic covers and reimagined artwork.

TRACK LISTING

Album 1
1. A Crime
2. Peace Signs
3. Save Yourself
4. DsharpG
5. Don’t Do It
6. One Day
7. Love More

Album 2
1. A Crime (Big Red Machine)
2. Peace Signs (IDLES)
3. Save Yourself (Lucinda Williams)
4. DsharpG (Shamir)
5. Don’t Do It (Courtney Barnett Ft. Vagabon)
6. One Day (St Panther)
7. Love More (Fiona Apple)

Sharon Van Etten’s Are We There turns ten this year and reasserts itself as a one of her most powerful and timeless collections. It is clear from the opening chords that we are witnessing a new awareness, a sign of Van Etten in full stride, writing, producing, and performing from a place that seems almost mythical, were it not so touchable and real. Always direct, and never shying
away even from the most personally painful narratives, many of the songs deal with seemingly impossible decisions, anticipation, and then resolution. Amidst all that brutal honesty, Van Etten finds moments of levity, as she always does: 'Every Time the Sun Comes Up', now pressed to 7” for the first time, started out as a lark but lifts the album at its close, completes the world she’s let us into, and resets us gently for whatever might follow.

It has, since then, become an indelible staple of Van Etten’s live shows. This new 7” edition features that live rendition getting the studio recording treatment fans have clamored for since it materialized. And the b-side, a live
recording from the iconic Sydney Opera House, proves the song’s shapeshifting.

TRACK LISTING

1. Every Time The Sun Comes Up (Alternate Version)
2. Every Time The Sun Comes Up (Live At Sydney Opera House)

Remind Me Tomorrow comes over four years after the release of Are We There, a top 10 critically praised album of 2014, and reckons with the life that gets lived when you put off the small and inevitable maintenance in favor of something more present. Throughout, Van Etten veers towards the driving, dark glimmer moods that have illuminated the edges of her music and pursues them full force.

Written while pregnant, going to school for psychology, after taking The OA audition, Remind Me Tomorrow was written in stolen time: in scraps of hours wedged between myriad endeavors — Van Etten guest-starred in The OA, and brought her music onstage in David Lynch’s revival of Twin Peaks. Off-screen, she wrote her first score for Katherine Dieckmann’s movie Strange Weather and the closing title song for Tig Notaro’s show, Tig.

The songs on Remind Me Tomorrow have been transported from Van Etten’s original demos through producer John Congleton’s arrangement. He helped flip the signature Van Etten ratio, making the album more energetic-upbeat than minimal-meditative. The songs are as resonating as ever, the themes are still an honest and subtle approach to love and longing, but Congleton has plucked out new idiosyncrasies from Van Etten’s sound. Joined by Van Etten’s longtime collaborator and bandmate Heather Woods Broderick, plus Jamie Stewart, Zachary Dawes, Brian Reitzell, Lars Horntveth, McKenzie Smith, Joey Waronker, Luke Reynolds, and Stella Mozgawa, Remind Me Tomorrow was recorded at studios throughout Los Angeles.

For Remind Me Tomorrow, Van Etten put down the guitar. When she was writing the score for Strange Weather her reference was Ry Cooder, so she was playing her guitar constantly and getting either bored or writer's block. At the time, she was sharing a studio space with someone who had a synthesizer and an organ, and she wrote on piano at home, so she naturally gravitated to keys when not working on the score - to clear her mind. Lead single “Comeback Kid” was originally a piano ballad, but driven by Van Etten’s assertion that she “didn’t want it to be pretty,” it evolved into a menacing anthem. Remind Me Tomorrow as a whole shows this magnetism towards new instruments: piano keys that churn, deep drones, distinctive sharp drums. There are dark intense synths, a propulsive organ, a distorted harmonium.

The breadth of Van Etten’s passions (musical, emotional, otherwise), of new careers and projects and lifelong roles, have inflected Remind Me Tomorrow with a wise sense of a warped-time perspective. This is the tension that arches over the album, fusing a pained attentive realism and radiant lightness about new love.

STAFF COMMENTS

Laura says: “Sitting in a bar, I told you everything, you said ‘holy shit, you almost died’”. Album opener, “I Told You Everything” is a love song of sorts, and while it hints at her turbulent past it’s about trust, optimism and moving forward and marks a shift both musically and emotionally. The addition of synths and electronics, give a whole new dimension to her songs, at times providing rhythm and melody, at others a jarring tension and an air of menace. As ever her writing is deeply personal, but whereas previously the past was filled with regret and self doubt, this time around she reflects on it with an air of nostalgia and knowing. There’s still a sense of fragility when she writes about love, but you get the impression that she’s more at ease with her place in the world now and this has given her the confidence to write her most ambitious and assured album yet.

TRACK LISTING

Side A
1. I Told You Everything
2. No One's Easy To Love
3. Memorial Day
4. Comeback Kid
5. Jupiter 4

Side B
6. Seventeen
7. Malibu
8. You Shadow
9. Hands
10. Stay

Silent Night was recorded in 2018 for the Holiday Short Film, “The Letter” by Eric Paschal Johnson and received a Vimeo Staff Pick Award.

Van Etten’s cover of the holiday classic “Blue Christmas,” was originally recorded for a benefit album called Do You EAR what I Ear in 2009 for the Association to Benefit Children, an outstanding New York-based service dedicated to permanently breaking the cycles of abuse, neglect, sickness and homelessness among disadvantaged children and their families.

Both of these tracks are now available on vinyl for the first time.                                 

TRACK LISTING

Silent Night
Blue Christmas

“Dear Reader,

“About a year or two ago, Naomi Yang (of Galaxie 500) reached out to me after she rediscovered a video that we had made together in 2011, during the making of ‘Tramp’, just before the album’s release. It was for the song ‘Serpents’.

“The timing was uncanny, approaching the anniversary of ‘Tramp’. Thinking about my time in New York while in the bubble of Los Angeles and my home. Thinking about how restless I was, and now settled down and stable. Thinking about how Aaron Dessner took a chance on me after I messaged him with a fury of demos. He could see through the hiss and crappy vocals on my GarageBand demos, and that I had something to say. He gave me the confidence to be loud and to scream my rage and feel founded and justified in my own pain. He gave me more tools to find catharsis in my work. I have carried that with me ever since.

“Being on the West Coast the last two years, I look back on my community in New York and am forever grateful. I had so many friends and peers step up and help me unfold these demos. The album that it became. Doug Keith and Ben Lord from my original touring band, Logan Cole, Peter Silberman from The Antlers, Jessica Larrabee from She Keeps Bees, Thomas Bartlett of Doveman, Rob Moose of yMusic, Jenn Wasner of Wye Oak, Julianna Barwick, Zach Condon of Beirut, Matt Barrick (of the Walkmen), Clarice Jensen, Ben Lanz, Bryce Dessner, and Bryan Devendorf (of The National).

“I had almost forgotten about a song titled ‘This Is Too Right’ that didn’t make it onto the record. It was one of the first guitar ‘riffs’ I had ever written and Jenn Wasner sang on it with me. A song about not believing how good I had it, like the other shoe was about to drop. I hope everyone that helped make this record and supported it, feel the love and admiration that I continue to hold for all of you. I hope that in sharing this record again, with a new video and this forgotten track, that new listeners are brought into this album and find meaning and relevance in it today. All of the musicians on this album helped me come to life and perform in ways I never had before.

“May these songs find you well. Sending all my love, Sharon.”

Sharon Van Etten has always been the kind of artist who helps people make sense of the world around them, and her sixth album, We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong, concerns itself with how we feel, mourn, and reclaim our agency when we think the world - or at least, our world - might be falling apart. How do we protect the things most precious to us from destructive forces beyond our control? How do we salvage something worthwhile when it seems all is lost? And if we can’t, or we don’t, have we loved as well as we could in the meantime? Did we try hard enough? In considering these questions and her own vulnerability in the face of them, Van Etten creates a stunning meditation on how life’s changes can be both terrifying and transformative. We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong articulates the beauty and power that can be rescued from our wreckages.

We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong is as much a reflection on how we manage the ending of metaphorical worlds as we do the ending of actual ones: the twin flames of terror and unrelenting love that light up with motherhood; navigating the demands of partnership when your responsibilities have changed; the loss of center and safety that can come with leaving home; how the ghosts of our past can appear without warning in our present; feeling helpless with the violence and racism in the world; and yes, what it means when a global viral outbreak forces us to relinquish control of the things that have always made us feel so human, and seek new forms of connection to replace them.

We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong is intensely personal, exploring themes like motherhood, love, fear, what we can and can’t control, and what it means to be human in a world that is wracked by so much trauma. The track “Home To Me,” written about Van Etten’s son, uses the trademark “dark drums” of her previous work to invoke the sonic impression of a heartbeat. Synths grow in intensity, evoking the passing of time and the terror of what it means to have your child move inevitably toward independence, wanting to hold on to them tightly enough to protect them forever. In contrast, “Come Back” reflects on the desire to reconnect with a partner. Recalling all the optimism of love felt in its infancy, Van Etten begins with the plain beauty of just her voice and a guitar, building the arrangement alongside the call to “come back” to anyone who has lost their way, be it from another person or from themselves. Hovering between darkness and light, “Born” is an exploration of the self that exists when all other labels - mother, partner, friend - are stripped back.

The ten tracks on We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong are designed to be listened to in order, all at once, so that a much larger story of hope, loss, longing and resilience can be told. This is, in itself, a subtle act of control, but in sharing these songs it remains an optimistic and generous one. There is darkness here but there is light too, and all of it is held together by Van Etten’s uncanny ability to both pierce the hearts of her listeners and make them whole again. Things are not dark, she reminds us, only darkish.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: There are few artists around that are as eminently talented as Sharon Van Etten, and her latest outing has all of the acoustic nuance and juxtaposing heft we've come to expect from her. There are moments of minimalist beauty, but they fit in perfectly with the crashing waves of synth and her uncompromising vocals, pulling together all the disparate parts seamlessly. Gorgeous.

TRACK LISTING

SIDE A:
1. Darkness Fades
2. Home To Me
3. I’ll Try
4. Anything
5. Born

SIDE B:
6. Headspace
7. Come Back
8. Darkish
9. Mistakes
10. Far Away

Bonus Tracks (deluxe LP)
Side C:
Porta
Used To It
Never Gonna Change
When I Die

Handwritten Etching On Side D

For all the attention that was paid to her 2012 breakthrough ‘Tramp’, Sharon Van Etten is an artist with a hunger to turn another corner and to delve deeper, writing from a place of honesty and vulnerability to create a bond with the listener that few contemporary musicians can match. Compelled by a restless spirit, Van Etten is continuously challenging herself. Now, the result is ‘Are We There’, a self-produced album of exceptional intimacy, sublime generosity, and immense breadth.

For this album, Van Etten found a kindred spirit in veteran music producer Stewart Lerman. Originally working together on ‘Boardwalk Empire’, they gently moved into new roles, rallying around the idea of making a record together in Lerman’s studio in New Jersey. Lerman’s studio expertise gave Van Etten the freedom to make ‘Are We There’ the way she imagined. Van Etten also enlisted the individual talents of her band, consisting of Heather Woods Broderick, Doug Keith and Zeke Hutchins and brought in friends Dave Hartley and Adam Granduciel from The War On Drugs, Jonathan Meiberg (Shearwater), Jana Hunter (Lower Dens), Peter Broderick, Mackenzie Scott (Torres), Stuart Bogie, Jacob C Morris and Mickey Freeze.

It is clear from the opening chords in the first song ‘Afraid Of Nothing’ that we are witnessing a new awareness, a sign of Van Etten in full stride, writing, producing and performing from a place that seems almost mythical, were it not so touchable and real. Always direct, and never shying away even from the most personally painful narratives, Van Etten’s songwriting continues to evolve. Many of the songs deal with seemingly impossible decisions, anticipation, and then resolution. She sings of the nature of desire, memory, of being lost, emptiness, of promises and loyalty, fear and change, of healing and the true self, violence and sanctuary, waiting, of silence.

“Her voice is breathtaking throughout the record, altering to inhabit every emotional extreme.” - Uncut (9/10), “She seems to set her voice no boundaries” - Mojo (4 stars), “Van Etten goes several layers deeper, and faster, than most songwriters. ‘Are We There’ is the kind of album that many people have been trying to make for years and only a dozen or so have pulled off; words, voice and heartbreak.” - The New Yorker.

TRACK LISTING

1. Afraid Of Nothing
2. Taking Chances
3. Your Love Is Killing Me
4. Our Love
5. Tarifa
6. I Love You But I'm Lost
7. You Know Me Well
8. Break Me
9. Nothing Will Change
10. I Know
11. Every Time The Sun Comes Up

2014 was a stellar year for Sharon Van Etten, with her critically acclaimed and best selling album ‘Are We There’ plus extensive touring and a Later With Jools Holland performance consolidating her position in the UK.

Jagjaguwar release a five track EP of non album songs in conjunction with her  landmark Glastonbury performance.

Van Etten and a sterling crew of collaborators offer documents of surrender and disappointment, admission and longing. The gorgeous ‘Just Like Blood’ manages to capture all four facets in less than five minutes.

Produced by Van Etten and Stewart Lerman, who also helmed ‘Are We There’, these songs are as sophisticated and evolved as anything Van Etten has ever done.

The shimmering sound of Sharon Van Etten's Jagjaguwar debut album, 'Tramp', both defies and illuminates the unsteadiness of a life in flux. Throughout the 14 months of scattered recording sessions, Van Etten was without a home - crashing with friends and storing her possessions between varied locations. The only constant in Van Etten's life during this time was spent in Aaron Dessner's garage studio.

A two year journey brought her to that point of instability. Upon the release of epic (Ba Da Bing; 2010), Sharon Van Etten surprised the music world with a touching embrace. Having established herself as a reliable performer around New York, and coming off the release of her spartan first effort, 'Because I Was In Love' (Language of Stone; 2009), Van Etten created a short album of diverse songs connected by a shared goal of expanded sound and her unmistakable voice. Fans quickly picked favorites, discovered their choices changing, then changing yet again. That is the magic of epic; the intricate, understated record covered so much ground within its 33 minutes, it required more than an initial half hour to absorb. Since epic's release, she has opened the Pitchfork Music Festival, played The Hollywood Bowl with Neko Case and at Radio City Music Hall with The Antlers, sung on new records for Beirut and Ed Askew, and collaborated with Bon Iver's Justin Vernon and Megafaun on the Songs Of The South project.

Dessner, a member of The National, heard Van Etten early on, and in collaboration with Justin Vernon, performed a cover of "Love More" at the 2010 MusicNow Festival in Cincinnati. Van Etten heard about this and contacted him. Almost immediately they formed plans to work together, with Dessner offering both a location for Van Etten to record new songs, as well as the opinions of a wise producer.

Now, one year later, Van Etten unveils Tramp, an album showcasing an artist in full control of her powers. Tramp contains as much striking rock (the precise venom of "Serpents," the overwhelming power of "Ask"), as pious, minimal beauty (the earnest solemnity of "All I Can," the breathtaking "Kevins," "Joke or a Lie"); it can be as emotionally combative ("Give Out") as it can sultry ("Magic Chords"). Contributions from Matt Barrick (Walkmen), Thomas Bartlett (Doveman), Zach Condon (Beirut), Jenn Wasner (Wye Oak), Julianna Barwick, and Dessner himself add a glowing sheen to the already substantial offering.

Van Etten has travelled far, and if her displacement took an emotional toll, she offset those setbacks with a powerfully articulated vision. And so, once again, each listener will discover their own moments along the way, and the debates as to the best song start anew.

STAFF COMMENTS

Laura says: This is Sharon Van Etten’s third album, but even if you’ve missed out on her previous two, you really can’t afford to let this one pass you by. With The National’s Aaron Dessner at the controls, and an impressive cast of contributors, including Julianna Barwick , Zach Condon (Beirut), Bryce Dessner (The National), Matt Barrick (The Walkmen) and Jenn Wasner (Wye Oak) she has created an absolutely stunning album. Dressner’s production creates the perfect space within her songs for her vocals to really shine, whether they’re stark acoustic tracks ("Give Out", "We Are Fine") or powerful atmospheric rockers ("Serpents", "All I Can") or ones that fall somewhere between the two ("Leonard") the range of her voice covers everything from fragile and fractured, to strong and defiant, somewhere between Cat Power and PJ Harvey. Add to that, superb emotive songwriting and you have all the ingredients for a truly wonderful album.

TRACK LISTING

1. Warsaw
2. Give Out
3. Serpents
4. Kevin’s
5. Leonard
6. In Line
7. All I Can
8. We Are Fine
9. Magic Chords
10. Ask
11. I’m Wrong
12. Joke Or A Lie

“Don’t Look Back”, repeats one of several voices within Mark van Hoen’s The Revenant Diary, his fifth solo album and first release on Editions Mego. Surrounded by weighted beats, analogue synthesizer drones and granular dirt, the unidentified, siren-like female voice’s advice is as much seduction as warning. Tellingly so, for as well as being both Van Hoen’s most ambitious and his most accessible work, The Revenant Diary is an eloquent meditation on the allures and dangers of memory, regret and nostalgia.

The album's foundation was shaped by a memory and a chance encounter. While remastering some of his early 90s releases and Peel Session tracks, Van Hoen - a founding member of Seefeel, who also worked as Locust and in Seefeel offshoot Scala and has collaborated with Slowdive, Robert Fripp, Edison Woods & Esben and the Witch amongst others - happened upon a track he had recorded in 1982. Attracted by its simplicity, he was inspired to record the basis of "The Revenant Diary" on 4-track tape, using a minimal set-up, reminiscent of his first early 80s musical adventures as a young teenager. The recollection of one of these - a 13 year old Van Hoen's experiment in reel-to-reel tape recording of an ineffectual pop song playing on the radio, which spuriously transformed it into a spooky amalgam of backwards church organ and unintelligible voices - provided an evocative inspiration.

"The Revenant Diary" pivots on this combination of complex reflection and simplified technology. A determinedly analogue affair, it brims over with Van Hoen’s signature sounds: immersively decayed drones, almost broken ambient surfaces and lulling rhythms, with granular crackle providing spectral grit. Fragments of female vocals pepper the album, and notably dominate the 10-minute epic “Holy Me”, one of Van Hoen’s most complex compositions, in which non-verbal sounds rub delicately against each other in an otherworldly choral composition.

TRACK LISTING

1. Look Into My Eyes
2. Garabndl X
3. Don't Look Back
4. I Remember
5. No Distance (Except The One Between You And Me)
6. 37/3d
7. Where Were You
8. Why Hide From Me
9. Unknown Host
10. Laughing Stars At Night
11. Holy Me

“I like to work with a variety of instruments and set ups,” says Mark Van Hoen, sometimes known as Locust or Autocreation but here working under his own name on the excellent Plan For A Miracle, his first physical release of solo music since 2018’s Invisible Threads. ”Sometimes it’s literally in my studio, with all the hardware electronics available. Sometimes the laptop, using software instruments. Some of the tracks on this record were recorded in the desert (Joshua Tree) using a 4-track tape machine and small modular synthesiser set up. Each track was recorded in different location using different instruments, which accounts for the distinction between each piece. It’s also about my own reaction to my environment, and what’s going on in my life at the time.”

The Croydon-born Van Hoen started musical life in the early 1990s, signing for R&S records in 1993 but developing his own, myriad and distinctive style across a range of releases on Touch, Editions Mego and other labels, using a battery of instruments, including analogue synthesizers and taking a number of different approaches to recording, rather than ploughing a single sonic furrow. He has worked on a number of collaborations, including with Nick Holton and Neil Halstead of Slowdive, under the moniker of Black Hearted Brother - their Stars Are Our Home was released in 2013. “I have known Neil Halstead since 1992,” says Van Hoen. “He shared a house with me for a couple of years, and the music I was making and listening to along with clubs I was attending had an influence particularly on Pygmalion, the final Slowdive album on Creation.”

Each track on Plan For A Miracle does indeed sound like a world unto itself, a mini-environment, a weather condition, an ecosystem created for the moment. It’s a collection of tracks recorded over the past few years, released on Bandcamp - despite his apparent absence, Van Hoen works constantly. Opener “Climates”, in its exquisite limpidity, feels like a homage to Brian Eno, one of his most formative influences in his teen years, commencing with Music For Films, which he bought in 1979. “This Is For Them”, feels like a ghostlike throwback to early drum & bass or electronica, reminiscent of his own, earliest outings. “There have been a number of requests from labels to make some more music like my very early releases on R&S,” says Van Hoen. “This is part of ‘letting go’ and realising that there’s nothing less creative about going back to those styles again.”

“Pencil Of Spheres” is something else again, a magnificent, imaginary glass structure, shimmering, refracting, without visible means of suspension, a thing of impossible beauty. “Electric Lights” evokes an abandoned fairground, its lights still pulsating, its music lingering. “The Underpass”, meanwhile, insofar as it reminds of anything at all, is faintly reminiscent of Cluster or Neu’s! West German ambience, the urban mundane rendered magical, the sodium lights, the whitewashed walls. The reverberant, faintly oriental chimes of “Insight” transport us yet again, burgeoning and intensifying.

The landscapes, the skyscapes rendered on Plan For A Miracle feel unpopulated as a rule - but when he does introduce vocal elements, Van Hoen has a history of doing so to spectacular effect - think of “Real Love” from 1998’s Playing With Time, the seductive intonation of its title recurring throughout like a series of massive holograms, echoing, stuttering, breaking up, surging. Here, there are just the faintest of vocals, barely distinct, disquieting. “There’s been a bit of a game changer in recent times,” explains Van Hoen. “AI software that enables you to extract vocals and instrument parts from virtually any recording. That means sampling individual parts from existing sources is no longer limited to the original mix exposing certain parts soloed. The vocal parts I use are from multiple sources and often pitch shifted altered rhythmically and melodically.“ There’s further vocal chatter on “I Really Do”, proceeding at a faster pace as if giving chase, or being pursued - distant, enigmatic. “The Music”, meanwhile, its beat tolling, lost in its own fog of static, features a curious intonation, like the ghost of a lost Walker Brother.

Sadly, the album’s title is in reference to a personal tragedy on Van Hoen’s part - the loss of his wife. Titles such as “I Won’t Give Up”, which faintly reminds of another Eno masterpiece, Another Green World, in its nautical hurly-bury, or the pastoral strains of “Mrs Who”, heavily clouded with sadness, seem to allude to this. “In fact the record was recorded entirely before she passed away,” says Van Hoen, “most of it before she even became very ill. The title was given to the album when it started to look like she wasn’t going to make it beyond a few months. It was something Osho said - “plan for a miracle” - so it was a statement of hope. Unfortunately it was not to be.” Although the album is non-thematic, non-specific in its atmospheres, sound paintings, elegant structures it most certainly stands as a magnificent monument to Osho’s memory.
-David Stubbs.

TRACK LISTING

Side A:
1) Climates
2) This Is For Them
3) Pencil Of Spheres
4) Mrs Who
5) I Won’t Give Up
Side B:
1) Electric Lights
2) The Underpass
3) Insight
4) Redwood
5) I Really Do
6) The Music

Leeds shoegaze outfit Van Houten release their debut album. After the huge success of the lead single, ‘Coming of Age’, the band have been branded as a BBC 6Music’s artist tip of the year 2024 on Tom Robinson’s New Year’s Day show.

Reminiscent of artists like Deerhunter, DIIV or Yuck with an unmistakable Yorkshire edge, Van Houten open up a unique sonic world. A cavernous shoegaze affair, filled with woozy psych, sincere storytelling and a bag full of earworms. Van Houten have honed a truly unique, melding a 90’s & alternative sound & aesthetic with true pop sensibility, crafting their own blend of lo-fi indie, psych rock, shoegaze and garage rock.

‘The Tallest Room’ marks a brand new release from the exciting new partnership between Clue Records and EMI North, the first physical major label office to open outside London. 

STAFF COMMENTS

Liam says: From one listen, this is easily one of my albums of 2024! A bit of shoegaze, a bit of krautrock, a bit of woozy psych, this debut from Van Houten is properly, properly mega and you should all get on it - TIPPY TIPPY TIP TIP!!!

TRACK LISTING

Side A
Black And White
Never Did Come Back
Coming Of Age
Panoramic View

Side B
Note To Self
I Only Wanna Be With You
Head Straight
I Let You

Dinked 7” Tracklisting:
A Side: I Only Wanna Be With You - Acoustic Version
B Side: Panoramic View - Acoustic Version

Berlin based drummer, composer and producer Janek van Laak was born in the fashion-fuelled metropolis of Düsseldorf in 1995, and briefly spent time as a toddler in the music loving municipality of Leipzig before settling in the country’s capital in 1998 whilst it was in the midst of its post Berlin Wall cultural explosion.

Under the influence of his punk loving father and cabaret / comedy performing mother, Janek moved from singing in his school choir to learning to play drums and piano. Now, as well as producing music under his own name, Janek is also one of the founding members of the Neukölln based outfit Liquid Brain Orchestra, and one half of off-kilter duo Tutu Amuse with guitarist, vocalist and actor Rosa Landers.

Janek’s debut solo album “Circle Of Madness” is a record that is best described by himself as a snapshot of “something at some point” and encourages the listener to “stay curious while trying to maintain a balanced and non toxic relationship with perfectionism on this discovery of new land through music, channelling self expression and learning”.

The album opener “a little GOLD” encourages all of those feelings with delicate synths and percussion making way for fuzzy guitars and wordless vocals that anticipate the wide ranging, diverse and experimental sounds to follow.

“Here To Slay” is something of a statement of intent and features the rasping, bold vocals of Australian artist Madeleine Rose to great effect. The horn section takes centre stage on the sinister “Saints Blow” which, like the percussive frenzy of “Daiamondo”, which highlights the voice of Japanese singer and multi-instrumentalist Shiomi Kawaguchi, was a track originally sketched for the Tutu Amuse and Liquid Brain Orchestra projects respectively. On other tracks, Janek takes on lead vocals himself, such as the evocative “Above Your Head” with its almost Latin feel.

Elsewhere, the instrumentation tells the story with Janek’s drums vying for attention against percussion, horns and electronics on “Sloppy Dreams” and “Left 4 Dead” and there are sweeter, softer moments too such as on the shimmering “Glintstones”, the guitar led “The Last Stylebender” and the moody “Garlic Brown Junior”. And then there are the singles. The Afro-jazz inflected “The Killah Gorilla” - a piece that takes its name from the U.S. Ultimate Fighting Championship Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) professional, Jared ‘The Killa Gorilla’ Cannonier; and “OCTAPUSSY” - a ten minute epic that begins with a delicate interplay between dreamy keys and drum rolls which are then joined by silky guitars to create an effortless modern fusion sound.

With “Circle Of Madness”, Janek intends to continually push musical boundaries and possibilities. Look out for him on the road, pushing those boundaries with his upcoming live shows. 

TRACK LISTING

1 – A Little GOLD
2 - Here To Slay Feat. Madeleine Rose
3 - Saints Blow
4 - Above Your Head
5 - Daiamondo Feat. Shiomi Kawaguchi
6 - Sloppy Dreams
7 - Left 4 Dead
8 - Glintstones
9 - The Last Stylebender
10 - The Killah Gorilla
11 - OCTAPUSSY
12 - Garlic Brown Junior 

After twenty-five years of waiting, New York City cult indie favourites The Van Pelt have announced a March 17th release date for their upcoming fourth studio full-length, titled 'Artisans & Merchants'

Reunion show soundchecks revealed that this band has a voice that was prematurely muted by their inability to see clearly in the thick of their rise.

More than two decades later, The Van Pelt has returned to explore what was left behind with a new collection of songs, 'Artisans & Merchants.' This is not a reunion album. This is vindication. For lovers of The Van Pelt, listening to 'Artisans & Merchants' is like hearing the voice of a dear friend you haven't seen in years -- a friend you used to share countless beers with over banter that went nowhere other than delivering a solid night. Your friend is older, they've changed. In some ways you're worried for them, looks like they might be teetering on the brink of something. In other ways, it's the same old them, a nugget of a soul too unique to ever be altered. It's for those unfamiliar with The Van Pelt though for whom we should be truly jealous. This is a stand-alone album, incredible vital songwriting in and of itself regardless of the long history this band has. The climax of the single "Image of Health" perhaps describes the beautiful desperation best: "And you never felt more alive / Than when the priest came to read you your rites!"

TRACK LISTING

1. We Gotta Leave
2. Image Of Health
3. Artisans & Merchants
4. Punk House
5. Old Souls From Different Epochs
6. Grid
7. Cold Coconuts
8. Did We Hear The Same Song
9. Love Is Brutal

Van She are back! And indeed back with a bang as they invite you to enjoy their sophomore record, their 'Idea Of Happiness' out now on Modular Recordings.

So uplifting it’s practically levitational, 'Idea Of Happiness' is Van She’s most focused, joyous musical excursion to date. An album stirred by sunbaked travels and fleeting truths, and shaken with the sands of time, 'Idea Of Happiness' was recorded, engineered and produced by the band themselves in Kings Cross, Sydney.

Their self-sufficient approach to the record allowed them the time and space to not only fine tune to the nth degree each cymbal splash and crashing wave sample, but also left them free to give ideas the time and space to hang loose. They may have walked a slow, deliberate path to realising album #2 but the result is all the better for it.

The record was mixed in Los Angeles with Tony Hoffer, the perfect man for the job with a resume that includes work with Beck, Air, Phoenix and M83.

TRACK LISTING

1. Idea Of Happiness
2. Calypso
3. Jamaica
4. Sarah
5. Radio Waves I
6. You're My Rescue
7. Tears
8. Coconuts
9. Beat Of The Drum
10. Radio Waves II
11. We Move On

After thoroughly pleasing our ears with a little woodland Balearic and motorik folk as part of Bambi Davidson, German musician Robin Van Velzen arrives on 9pm with a gorgeous solo debut. Stripped back and strung out, the self titled set boasts eight cryptic guitar ballads, as in debt to the gloomy poetry of Leonard Cohen as the sultry dub production of Lee Scratch Perry. Atmospheric, evocative and intimate, this moonlight music comes from a true bedroom troubadour.

STAFF COMMENTS

Andy says: Beautiful, reflective, late night vibes permeate this gorgeous record from the Bambi Davidson guitarist and singer. The perfect blend of mood and melody.

TRACK LISTING

Demon
Maandag
Navy Blue
Lay Down In The Dark
Gershwin
Nude
Leave The Lights On
Phoney

“Behold! I Make All Things New “ is all instrumental and consists of sparse works for lute and electronics. There are no vocals this time. It is more a return to the minimal neo-classical style of his early work. It was written and recorded in lockdown in Warsaw and Rotterdam between 2019 and 2021. Van Wissem lived in Brooklyn since the early nineties. He left New York because of Trumps Immigration Policies. There was no need for singing.Bio Jozef van Wissem is an avant-garde composer and lutenist playing his all black, one-of-a-kind custom-made baroque lute all around the world. The titles and the nature of his works often have a Christian-mystical appeal and the music he creates is simply timeless. In 2013 van Wissem won the Cannes Soundtrack Award at the Cannes Film Festival for Jim Jarmusch’s “Only Lovers Left Alive “. In December 2017 Jozef van Wissem was invited to perform the madrigal depicted in Caravaggio’s painting The Lute Player (1596) at the Hermitage museum of Saint Petersburg.

An autodidactic author, a Renaissance talent in the cruelty of the 21st century, who switched the intense lifestyle of a new wave artist and bar owner from Groningen to a modern-age thinker who studied lute in New York, and later became one of the most influential contemporary songwriters, known for his solo and cinematic works.

Van Wissem has earned much critical acclaim for his work, the ‘ liberation of the lute’ as he calls it. According to the New York times “Van Wissem is ‘both an avant-garde composer and a baroque lutenist, and thus no stranger to dichotomy”.

According to The Quietus “Van Wissem is possibly the best know lute player in the western world. To get into van Jozef Van Wissem’s world is to surrender to the inevitability – and timelessness – of a strange music created at its own pace, in a manner wholly of its creator’s making. He sets the listener into a private world, looking out through a glass darkly, such is the intense quality of the music. Brevity, simplicity, directness is the key. (The Quietus) His completely unique musical world can be easily verified by his collaborations, especially that these relationships are also strengthening his own musical character. He worked together with Zola Jesus, Tilda Swinton, Jarboe as well as with his long-time collaborative partner, also his friend, Jim Jarmusch.

The timeless value of his work can be described by one of his previous interviews: “… the lute goes against all technology and against all computers and against all the shit you don’t need.” While, at the same time, no matter if we’re talking about his cinematic works, remarkable collaborations or his own full-lengths, the honest, pure, yet frightfully peccable sound of Jozef van Wissem can always remind us to our true selves, and also our deepest fears. “Jozef van Wissem starts his set in the magnificent baroque interior of the medieval Budolfi church. His pizzicato looks so effortless that the ancient lute with three pegboxes at first seems to be a prop. Occasionally giving a piercing look towards the audience, the musician skillfully steers the course between the past and now. One of the time-travel themes is You Know That I Love You, a 16th century madrigal by the Renaissance composer Jacques Arcadelt. Three years ago van Wissem was commissioned to perform this piece at St Petersburg’s Hermitage museum which displays Caravaggio’s The Lute Player which also depicts a young man reading the notes of the same madrigal… The further this lute player travels, the more intense these shamanic charms are. Having performed a few minimalist instrumentals, van Wissem starts singing. The effect of these enchanting loops is enhanced by the mantra-sounding lines “Do you feel like you want to? Do you ever feel like you want to?”. Later, for the encore, he plays another piece including all-the-more hypnotising lyrics “Love destroys all Evil and frees us” multiplied and intensified.” – Louderthanwar at Northern Winter Beat Festival 2020, Aalborg (DK)

TRACK LISTING

1. The Cool Shade Of Eternity
2. What Hearts Must Bleed, What Tears Must Fall
3. All Become One One Become All
4. A New Earth
5. Your Flesh Will Rise In Glory On The Day Of The Future Resurrection
6. Enter Into The Joy Of Our Lord
7. The Adornment (CD Bonus Track)

After the release of 2016's 'When Shall This Bright Day Begin', Jozef Van Wissem returns to Consouling Sounds for the follow-up album 'Nobody Living Can Ever Make Me Turn Back'. The album is inspired by a Vanitas painting by the Belgian artist Cindy Wright, which is also the cover of the album. This inspiration is beautifully reflected in the music of the album: Jozef Van Wissem's lute arrangements sound fragile, his sparse vocals delicate, as if the vanity, the temporality and senselessness of everything has been rendered audible. 

A Far Cry From Dead is a posthumous collection that presents new versions of several of Van Zandt’s best songs. He cut the vocals for these tracks at a neighbor’s home studio in the early 90s; the instrumental accompaniment was added after his death by some of Nashville’s hottest pickers.

TRACK LISTING

1. Dollar Bill Blues
2. To Live's To Fly
3. Rex's Blues
4. Sanitarium Blues
5. Ain't Leavin' Your Love
6. Greensboro Woman
7. Snake Mountain Blues
8. Pancho & Lefty
9. For The Sake Of The Song
10. Waitin' Around To Die
11. Many A Fine Lady
12. Tower Song
13. Squash

Sky Blue, a collection of unreleased songs by one of the most celebrated songwriters of the twentieth century, is a time capsule that Townes Van Zandt created forty-six years ago, and we’re only now just unearthing and opening it to find the treasures inside. Scheduled for release by TVZ Records and Fat Possum Records on March 7, 2019—which would have been his 75th birthday—this album shows the artist working out some of his most iconic songs in an intimate, comfortable setting with one of his lifelong confidantes. - Unreleased acoustic recordings from 46 years ago - Two new songs never before heard - Being released on Townes Van Zandt's 75th birthday - Available in a gatefold vinyl - Liner notes from John Lomax III, Townes Van Zandt's former manager.

TRACK LISTING

1. All I Need
2. Rex's Blues
3. The Hills Of Roane County
4. Sky Blue
5. Forever For Always For Certain
6. Blue Ridge Mtn. Blues (Smoky Version)
7. Pancho And Lefty
8. Snake Song
9. Silver Ships Of Andalar
10. Dream Spider
11. The Last Thing On My Mind

A compilation of the best songs released from Townes Van Zandt over his career.

TRACK LISTING

1. For The Sake Of The Song
2. Pancho& Lefty
3. To Live Is To Fly
4. Fare Thee Well, Miss Carousel
5. I'll Be Here In The Morning
6. St. John The Gambler
7. If I Needed You
8. Black Widow Blues
9. Tecumseh Valley
10. Flyin' Shoes
11. Waiting Around To Die
12. Lungs
13. You Are Not Needed Now
14. Tower Song
15. Nothin'
16. Rex's Blues

Vana is a true Estonian lowkey gem, a duo (Ajukaja & Edith Karslon) who deal boldly with pop music clichés. On their debut 7” they cue up a track by beloved 80’s Estonian beachtown band to give it some new attire. A version & context of their own. They manage to lift a pseudo reggae track to present day & make it resonate here & now. Easy does it.

The B–side sees Vana on a pop trek. “Kuu Maa” is a real heart melter with its dreamy vocals, arousing piano line, guitar licks & funky bass. Grab that dictionary to catch each & every chunk of emotion on here. Or just let it slowly sink in. Lets go!

TRACK LISTING

Viimne Ratsu
Kuu Maa

Kalita are proud to announce the first ever official reissue of the holy grail of disco 12” singles, Vance and Suzzanne’s ‘I Can’t Get Along Without You’. A record that deserves its space on the shelf of every collector, DJ and dance music connoisseur, and with original copies now regularly fetching triple figures, it’s time to share this masterpiece with the world once more. In addition, here Kalita accompany the release with a never-before-seen press photo and interview-based liner notes. 

Originally privately released in 1980 on Vanton Records, this is the first time that both the record and the label’s story has been told. The product of two members of Crown Heights Affair (Richard Vance Turner and Eleton Johns), the label was established as a way to protect both their musical freedom and copyright that they would have lost had they signed to a major label. With Vanton, they sought to create a sound that combined Eleton’s love for Philadelphia with Richard’s love for New York-based productions. 

Vance & Suzzanne consisted of Richard and his childhood friend and fellow band member Suzzanne Slaughter, who was a background singer for many bands in New York including Sister Sledge. The result of a late night writing session between Richard and Eleton and recorded to tape the following day, the record was finished in just twenty-four hours. Yet it’s legacy lives on as one of the most sought-after disco singles in existence. 

Two thousand copies of ‘I Can’t Get Along Without You’ were originally pressed to test the market, with the initial plan being to re-record it again at a later date with additional strings. However, the record received such great acclaim by DJs such as Larry Levan that the idea of a re-recording was put on ice. 

Sadly, due to academic and familial commitments of both Richard and Eleton, only one other single was ever released on Vanton Records in 1985. However, we hope that this definitive reissue helps to celebrate one of the best disco records ever put to wax. 

TRACK LISTING

1. I Can’t Get Along Without You 
2. I Can’t Get Along Without You (Inst.)  

Limited edition 7” of this choice cut from John Vanderslice’s "Romanian Names" album. On "D.I.A.L.O" he takes a more electronic  direction than the average singer-songwriter while on the flip, exclusive track "Do What You Want" is a heavier more rockin number.

Nine new and wildly impressive JV songs captured live over three days in a unique collaboration with the Magik*Magik Orchestra, a collective of classically trained musicians in the Bay Area led by artistic director Minna Choi.

The Magik*Magik Orchestra have a comprehensive mastery of classic performance and repertoire, but also have a full appreciation of the aesthetics of indie and underground music.

Choi arranged and conducted "White Wilderness" with 19 members of the Magik*Magik playing strings and horns, vibraphone, pedal steel and piano, an assortment of reed instruments, and much to JV's benefit, the voice of Minna Choi singing backup at key moments throughout the album.

Recorded in San Francisco, "White Wilderness" was produced by John Congleton, whose resume includes albums by St Vincent, The Walkmen, Explosions in the Sky, Bill Callahan and many more.

Distinctively exotic drifts of library music suffused with psych and next wave ambience, all collected from Joel Vandroogenbroeck's cult-classic Coloursound releases of the 1980s. Leagues beyond the top-shelf work he'd done throughout the 70s with kraut-progsters Brainticket: these were new musical idioms to be explored. All tracks remastered from their original analog tapes!

Far View is a compilation of tracks from Joel Vandroogenbroeck’s series of library music releases for the Coloursound label — a uniquely trippy catalog of music vignettes long overdue for their day in the library music sun, remastered from the original analog reels!

The late Joel Vandroogenbroeck was among that rare breed of musician who defy all categorization, using music conventions to explore the far reaches of human and cosmic consciousness. After passing through the jazz and rock worlds from the 1950s through the 70s, Joel found new outlets for his expansive vision in the 80s with the Swiss library music label Coloursound. Far View draws tracks from these releases, which form a unique entry in the genre of library music. For the uninitiated, this is just one way to begin a brilliant musical trip through Vandroogenbroeck’s undersung career.

A musical prodigy from youth, Joel arrived at Brussels’ classical Music Conservatory in the early 50s, but his studies were curtailed by the revelation of jazz. Soon, Joel was touring in groups around Europe and beyond with luminaries like Eje Thelin, Stan Getz, Bob Brookmeyer and Zoot Sims. As time passed, his musical consciousness continued to expand: time spent in Africa sparked a deep exploration of the music of the Middle East. The new rock sounds from England, like The Beatles and Jimi Hendrix, were mind-blowing. And from Germany came the krautrockers, with something completely else again.

Vibing on the eclectic energies of the day, Vandroogenbroeck formed Brainticket, whose approach to composition fused jazz, rock, and a mélange of global musical traditions, combining a western rhythm section and analog synthesizers with an astonishing array of acoustic instruments; ethnic flutes, sitar, harp, kalimba and all manner of percussion. Steeped in diverse approaches of playing and listening, Brainticket drew from prog rock and psych, traditional sounds and minimalist music, all of which passed through their hands like the tributaries that formed the basis of what would soon be known as New Age music.

In the late 1970s, Vandroogenbroeck began composing for sound libraries, with recordings to be used as underlay music in films, radio and television. Gunter Greffenius’ Coloursound Library was formed in 1979 with an inclusive vision of music, including experimental, progressive rock, and some of the earliest examples of ambient music — styles not well represented in other libraries. Coloursound gave Joel the freedom to create music in any style or genre, and over the next decade-plus, he embarked on a musical journey that is unmatched anywhere in the world of library music. Working under the pseudonyms VDB, Joel, and Eric Vann, his output on Coloursound is some of his most sublime and otherworldly — ranging from dark electronics to imagined music of the ancient past to ethereal ambient sounds of the future, which makes sense, as JoelJoel’s records were always ahead and in and out of their time.

Joel VandroogenbroeckJ passed away in in December 2019, while work was being done assembling this collection. Curated by David Hollander, whose Unique Sounds album and book of the same name delightfully explore the library music world, Far View draws from ten of Joel’s Coloursound albums with lovely cohesion. Featuring brilliantly remastered sound, liner notes from David Hollander, album art designed by Robert Beatty and reproductions of the Coloursound album jackets, Far View is an entry point to Joel Vandroogenbroek’s mind-bending body of work — sonic soma to expand your consciousness and vibrate with the cosmos.

TRACK LISTING

Fairy Tale
Rocks
Group Meditation
Summer Clouds
Mutation
Oil Tankers
Biblical Band
Papyrus Of Ani
Easy To Love
Procession
Wono Sari
Rock Program
Chipland Liquids
New Wave Rock
Far View

Nobody cared about their old heads, because the new ones work just fine now, don't they?.... they have the same size mouth and eyes.

The song “Old Heads” is a sci-fi space anthem to technology that constantly replaces itself, proving both necessary and unnecessary at the same time. It’s also a jangly pop gem, a trip through the fantastical that is ultimately warm and relatable. 

For an album that’s about “not feeling comfortable with really anything,” as VanGaalen says, Light Information is nonetheless a vivid, welcoming journey through future worlds and relentless memories. The rich soundscapes and sometimes jarring imagery could only come from the mind of a creative polymath--an accomplished visual artist, animator, director, and producer, VanGaalen has scored television shows, designed puppet characters for Adult Swim, directed videos for Shabazz Palaces, Strand of Oaks, METZ, Dan Deacon, and The Head and the Heart, and produced records for Women, Alvvays, and others.

While alienation has always been a theme of VanGaalen’s music, Light Information draws on a new kind of wisdom--and anxiety--gained as he watches his kids growing up. “Being a parent has given me a sort of alternate perspective, worrying about exposure to a new type of consciousness that's happening through the internet,” he says. Throughout the dark-wave reverb of Light Information are stories of paranoia, disembodiment, and isolation--but there’s also playfulness, empathy, and intimacy.

The product of six years’ work, going back even before 2014’s Shrink Dust, Light Information emerged from the experimental instruments that fill VanGaalen’s Calgary garage studio. As always, VanGaalen wrote, played, and produced all of the music on Light Information (save Ryan Bourne’s bass part on “Mystery Elementals” and vocals on “Static Shape” from his young daughters Ezzy and Pip), and designed the cover art.

TRACK LISTING

Mind Hijacker’s Curse
Locked In The Phase
Prep Piano And 770
Host Body
Mystery Elementals
Old Heads
Golden Oceans
Faces Lit
Pine And Clover
You Fool
Broken Bell
Static Shape

The Blade Runner soundtrack was composed by Vangelis for Ridley Scott's 1982 film considered one of the finest sci-fi movies ever made. It is mostly a dark, melodic combination of classical compositions and synthesizers which mirrors the futuristic film noir envisioned by Scott. The soundtrack holds legendary status and at the time was well-received by fans and critics including Best Original Score nominations for a BAFTA and Golden Globe yet, except for a few cuts, it was not released until 1994.

The movie remains a classic film with a long list of popular movie stars including Harrison Ford, Daryl Hannah, Rutger Hauer, Sean Young, and Edward James Olmos most of whom appear on this record in movie dialog samples mixed into the 12 tracks of nearly one hour of music. Vangelis makes each track flow into one another. The soundtrack features vocal contributions from Demis Roussos and the sax solo by Dick Morrissey on "Love Theme." 

Debut single.

First single taken from third full album from highly acclaimed four piece, Norfolk based melodic punk outfit. The single features two exclusive tracks not featured on the album.

Third full album from highly acclaimed four piec, Norfolk based melodic punk outfit. "Third Time Lucky" has received superb reviews from Kerrang / Rock Sound / Metal Hammer / Big Cheese / Fracture & Maximum Rock N'Roll.

'Vanishing Twin is songwriter, singer and multi-instrumentalist Cathy Lucas, drummer Valentina Magaletti, bassist Susumu Mukai, synth/guitar player Phil MFU and visual artist/film maker Elliott Arndt on flute and percussion; and on this album they have made their first artistic statement for the ages. Some of its great power comes from liberation. The album was produced by Lucas in a number of non-standard, non-studio settings. ‘KRK (At Home In Strange Places)’ summons up the spirit of Sun Ra’s Lanquidity and Broadcast And The Focus Group Investigate Witch Cults Of The Radio was simply recorded on an iPhone during a live set which crackled with psychic connectivity on the Croatian island of Krk. The magical Morricone-esque lounge of ‘You Are Not an Island’, the blissed-out Jean-Claude Vannier style arrangement of ‘Invisible World’ and burbling sci fi funk ode to a 1972 cult French animation, ‘Planète Sauvage’, were all recorded in nighttime sessions in an abandoned mill in Sudbury.

The only two outsiders to work on the recording were ‘6th member’ and engineer Syd Kemp and trusted friend Malcolm Catto, band leader of the spiritual jazz/future funk outfit The Heliocentrics, who mixed seven of the tracks (with Lucas taking care of the other three). Vanishing Twin formed in 2015 - their first LP, Choose Your Own Adventure, which came out on Soundway in 2016; followed by the darker, more abstract, mostly instrumental Dream By Numbers EP in 2017. The band explored their more experimental tendencies on the Magic And Machines tape released by Blank Editions in 2018, an improvised session recorded in the dead of night, offering a glimpse into their practice of deep listening, near band telepathy, and ritually improvised sound making. These sessions formed the basis of The Age Of Immunology.

STAFF COMMENTS

Emily says: Vanishing Twin have returned this year with a second album of transcendent psychedelic pop. Drawing on far reaching influences in a similar manner to Stereolab, they incorporate elements of krautrock, tropicália and lounge into their expansive soundworld. The comparisons which can be drawn between the two bands are abundant - you can even hear echoes of Lætitia Sadier in Cathy Lucas’ pure, unaffected lead vocals. But the output of Vanishing Twin is not simply derivative. Its members are unique artists in their own right, and their collective sound already bears its own significance.
Listening to ‘The Age Of Immunology’ feels like drifting off to a strange, mythological world somewhere in the unknown depths of space. Each track glides effortlessly into the next and is steeped in dreamlike imagery. In “KRK (At Home In Strange Places)” Lucas’ vocals weave around a loose, polyrhythmic groove and soaring string arrangements. The acoustic guitar steadily sets the pulse in “You Are Not An Island”, suspended above gently glowing electronics and hints of Reichian minimalism. And “Planète Sauvage” is an ode to the cult animated sci-fi film of the same name, featuring a french spoken word monologue which gives way to cinematic strings and a curious synth-organ solo.
It seems Vanishing Twin are a group intent on creating music that defies borders and dissolves genre into genre. Perhaps they fit into an alternative definition of “World Music”, with their influences which reach as far around the globe as their combined nationalities - Belgian, Japanese, Italian, French and American. Who knows where their psychedelic voyage will take them next? For now, let’s delight in their twinkling, cosmic splendour.

TRACK LISTING

1 KRK (At Home In Strange Places)
2 Wise Children
3 Cryonic Suspension May Save Your Life
4 You Are Not An Island
5 The Age Of Immunology
6 Magician’s Success
7 Planète Sauvage
8 Backstroke
9 Invisible World
10 Language Is A City (Let Me Out!)

Vanishing Twin furthers their exploration of decidedly experimental territories with Afternoon X. Crafted with a playful balance of humour and rigour, with each member embracing the role of the multi-instrumentalist and process, over outcome.

Following a series of line-up changes, Vanishing Twin is now the tightly honed collective of singer and multi-instrumentalist Cathy Lucas, drummer Valentina Magaletti (Holy Tongue, Tomaga, Moin) and bassist Susumu Mukai (Zongamin). Harnessing the diverse touchstones of its members; Lucas’ left-field song-craft, Magaletti’s singular approaches to experimental percussion, and Mukai’s long history in the production of electronic music, the band has refined a hypnotic sound at the juncture of minimalism, kosmische, post-punk, and dream-laden, psychedelic pop.

These eight fluttering abstractions, culled, collaged, and built upon from a vast constellation of instruments, samples, and unclaimed sources. Lucas employs her voice as an instrument and a generator of raw sound, weaving surreal imagery and uncanny juxtapositions amongst the dance and propellant drive. From infectious grooves of the album’s title track and the constrained minimalism of “Subito”, to the ambitious heights of pieces like ‘The Down Below’ and Lazy Garden, which unfurl a psychedelic avant-gardism on the scope and scale of David Axelrod and Scott Walker.

Vanishing Twin embark upon a new multifaceted journey that collectively culminates as the bands most forward-thinking and groundbreaking release to date.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Vanishing Twin take all the best elements of easy listening and psych-pop and wraps them in a veil of mystery and woozy unease. It's got gothic charm, but it's also got a litany of perfectly written hooks and masterfully crafted atmospheres. Yet another giant leap forwards for a brilliant band.

TRACK LISTING

Side A
A1 Melty
A2 Afternoon X
A3 Brain Weather
A4 Lotus Eater
A5 Marbles
Side B
B1 The Down Below
B2 Lazy Garden
B3 Subito

This week sees gruesomely named London ensemble Vanishing Twin release their debut album "Choose Your Own Adventure" via Soundway Records. The band enlisted the help of producer Malcolm Catto (Heliocentrics, DJ Shadow, The Gaslamp Killer) and began work at his London studio, Quatermass Sound Lab, last spring. Recording the basis for eight tracks, they blended structure and improvisation in pop songs that describe a personal mythology through the adventures of Lucas' vanished twin. Formed in 2015, Vanishing Twin came together to make an exploratory record that marries oblique English pop with a palette of arkestral sounds. Having previously released a string of conceptual cassettes under the name Orlando, founder Cathy Lucas (Innerspace Orchestra) named the group after her vanishing twin, an identical sister absorbed in utero, when they were both still a cluster of cells. Drawing on sounds outside of the usual pop vocabulary, the group used forgotten drum machines, home-made electronics, vibraphones, tablas, and harp to invoke the esoteric psychedelia of lost soundtracks, radiophonic experiments and minimal music orchestras. In a studio that Catto built for maximum atmosphere and minimum interfere, and crammed with obscure vintage equipment, he brought his own distinctive sonics to the table, informed by outsider jazz, Italian library music and ethnographic field recordings. Vanishing Twin is made up of singer Cathy Lucas (Fanfarlo, The Oscillation) drummer Valentina Magaletti (Raime, Tomaga, Uuuu, Neon Neon), bassist Susumu Mukai (Zongamin, Floating Points), library music head Phil M.F.U. (Man From Uranus, Broadcast) on strange sounds, and film maker and visual artist Elliott Arndt on flute and percussion. 

TRACK LISTING

Vanishing Twin Syndrome
Telescope
Floating Heart
Eggs
Under The Water
The Conservation Of Energy
Choose Your Own Adventure
Truth Is Boring
It Sends
My Heart Into A Spin

There’s a mystery to Vanishing Twin – from their name to the multitude of sounds that inhabit their music. They don’t sound like many but they hint at plenty. ‘Ookii Gekkou’ (Japanese for Big Moonlight) is the sound of ordinary life under a different set of rules, a record conceived and created in dark times – a sort of dream catcher for all the madness of the past year.

Vanishing Twin explore new ground on ‘Ookii Gekkou’ incorporating elements of afrofunk, outer jazz and avant-garde, all while referencing Sun Ra to Alice Coltrane, Martin Denny to Morricone, Can’s Holger Czukay to meditative Gamelan, or The Free Design, to library music of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. Locked into their strangely-accessible groove is a history of ‘other’ sound, a crafted hauntology that evinces something completely new.

Hurricanes, organisms, vibes, bells, and percussive rallies purvey throughout ‘Ookii Gekkou’, each infiltrated with influences as diverse as Piero Umiliani, Art Ensemble of Chicago and ELO among others. Indeed, even a cursory earful adds to an ever-expanding palette of sound, no mean feat for the newly-trimmed quartet of songwriter, singer and multi-instrumentalist Cathy Lucas, drummer Valentina Magaletti, bassist Susumu Mukai, and synth/guitar player Phil MFU, this reduction resulting in no fewer ideas and even bigger steps. Vanishing Twin is a conundrum in these fragmenting times; familiar, yet different; appealing to this world, but from another, parallel one.

“A band that fearlessly floats in the hazy space between the real world and an imagined one, blurring the line between warmly nostalgic and eerily haunted” Pitchfork.

“One of the most original and exciting acts of the moment” The Quietus.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Both 'Choose Your Own Adventure' and 'Age Of Immunology' were big hits in the shop, and the superb new one from is sure to go down similarly well, though it further diversifies the psychedelic wooze of both into loungy jazz, avant pop and bright proggy synth. It's a wonderful progression and a superb, typically brilliant listen.

TRACK LISTING

Side A
A1 Big Moonlight (Ookii Gekkou)
A2 Phase One Million
A3 Zuum
A4 The Organism

Side B
B1 In Cucina
B2 Wider Than Itself
B3 Light Vessel
B4 Tub Erupt
B5 The Lift

Vanishing Twin’s expansive and magical psychedelic epic with lyrics adapted from A.E. Housman’s 1922 poem, ‘Tell Me Not Here, It Needs Not Saying’ was initially commissioned by The Quietus before being released as part of state51's Singularity Series. Here it's presented in transparent vinyl, over two sides.

Vanishing Twin fly deeper into their sonic universe, blending elements from an improvisational session, raw recordings of the natural world, and early 20th century poetry to create sublime, cosmic pop. This twenty-minute piece has embellishments of sparkling synth and lyrical vignettes that are reminiscent of English folk melodies. 

TRACK LISTING

Side A
[Part 1] Tell Me Not Here
Side B
[Part 2] Tell Me Not Here 

Vanishing Twin’s seminal LP, The Age Of Immunology, receives a LTD edition pressing on None ‘Pink’ and Sine ‘Teal’ vinyl, limited to 500 units each and paired with matching sleeve art. As essential take on psych-pop futurism and a must for fans of Broadcast, Sun Ra and Ennio Morricone.

Establishing the band as innovators in their field, the record was declared “a masterpiece” by The Line Of Best Fit, while The Quietus asserted Vanishing Twin as “one of the most original and exciting acts of the moment”.

This was the group’s first LP for Fire Records, at the time of recording the band’s evolving lineup consisted of songwriter, singer and multi-instrumentalist Cathy Lucas, drummer Valentina Magaletti, bassist Susumu Mukai, synth/guitar player Phil MFU and visual artist/film maker Elliott Arndt on flute and percussion.

The album was produced by Lucas in a number of non-standard, non-studio settings. ‘KRK (At Home In Strange Places)’ summons up the spirit of Sun Ra’s Lanquidity and Broadcast And The Focus Group Investigate Witch Cults Of The Radio and was simply recorded on an iPhone during a live set which crackled with psychic connectivity on the Croatian island of Krk. The magical Morricone-esque lounge of ‘You Are Not an Island’, the blissed-out Jean-Claude Vannier style arrangement of ‘Invisible World’ and burbling sci fi funk ode to a 1972 cult French animation, ‘Planète Sauvage’, were all recorded in nighttime sessions in an abandoned mill in Sudbury.

TRACK LISTING

1. KRK (At Home In Strange Places)
2. Wise Children
3. Cryonic Suspension May Save Your Life
4. You Are Not An Island
5. The Age Of Immunology
6. Magician’s Success
7. Planète Sauvage
8. Backstroke
9. Invisible World
10. Language Is A City (Let Me Out!)

BONUS TRACKS: Download ONLY
1. The Age Of Immunology (Version)
2. Magician’s Success (Live)
3. Backstroke (Live)
4. Language Is A City (Let Me Out!) (Live)
5. You Are Not An Island (Version)
6. Cryonic Suspension May Save Your Life (Extended Life Version)

Vanishing Twin’s seminal LP, The Age Of Immunology, receives a Ltd edition pressing on Yellow vinyl, paired with matching sleeve art. As essential take on psych-pop futurism and a must for fans of Broadcast, Sun Ra and Ennio Morricone.

Establishing the band as innovators in their field, the record was declared “a masterpiece” by The Line Of Best Fit, while The Quietus asserted Vanishing Twin as “one of the most original and exciting acts of the moment”.

This was the group’s first LP for Fire Records, at the time of recording the band’s evolving lineup consisted of songwriter, singer and multi-instrumentalist Cathy Lucas, drummer Valentina Magaletti, bassist Susumu Mukai, synth/guitar player Phil MFU and visual artist/film maker Elliott Arndt on flute and percussion.

The album was produced by Lucas in a number of non-standard, non-studio settings. ‘KRK (At Home In Strange Places)’ summons up the spirit of Sun Ra’s Lanquidity and Broadcast And The Focus Group Investigate Witch Cults Of The Radio and was simply recorded on an iPhone during a live set which crackled with psychic connectivity on the Croatian island of Krk. The magical Morricone-esque lounge of ‘You Are Not an Island’, the blissed-out Jean-Claude Vannier style arrangement of ‘Invisible World’ and burbling sci fi funk ode to a 1972 cult French animation, ‘Planète Sauvage’, were all recorded in nighttime sessions in an abandoned mill in Sudbury.

TRACK LISTING

1. KRK (At Home In Strange Places)
2. Wise Children
3. Cryonic Suspension May Save Your Life
4. You Are Not An Island
5. The Age Of Immunology
6. Magician’s Success
7. Planète Sauvage
8. Backstroke
9. Invisible World
10. Language Is A City (Let Me Out!)

Bonus Tracks: Download ONLY
1. The Age Of Immunology (Version)
2. Magician’s Success (Live)
3. Backstroke (Live)
4. Language Is A City (Let Me Out!) (Live)
5. You Are Not An Island (Version)
6. Cryonic Suspension May Save Your Life (Extended Life Version)

55°N, 5°E sees Smith presenting a multi-format representation of a naval disaster in 1904 that saw took the life of his great-grandfather in the North Sea. Russian Warships fired upon a fleet of British fishing trawlers, mistaking them for Japanese Warships killing two, and injuring six of the fishermen. This recording sees an audio narrative unfolding, representing the various stages of the incident, and skilfully moving between a fractured vocal narrative and a slowly building suite of modern-classical composition that falls somewhere between chamber classical and experimental music concrete.  

It's best listened to as a continuous piece of work (download available as detailed on the supplied insert), and results in a wildly absorbing work, both foreboding and beautiful. Definitely a must for fans of Constellation Records, or any of the more shadowy Gizeh records outings (Aiden Baker et. al.)

A superb collaborative outing from some of the top artists working in and around the bustling Northeast avant-ambient scene, and a thoroughly spellbinding listen

TRACK LISTING

1. 55°N, 5°E 06:54
2. Shell 05:22
3. Crane 04:59
4. Compass 09:21
5. Statue 08:03

Tombed visions newest beautifully crafted outing comes in the form of 'Vanishing', featuring Paddy Shine of Gnod fame and a host of talented and likeminded drone soldiers. 'Brighton' presents a softly spoken northern monologue draped liberally over a dark backdrop of chamber classical strings, gothic organ swells and earth-shaking percussion. Presented like dark ambient, but showing the grace of classical music and the melodic intonations of soaring post-rock buried under a shroud of gloom. As we move into 'Night Vision', the pensive vocal flourishes turn quickly into beastlike distorted whispering, while the percussion steps up a notch into syncopated distorted mayhem, gating airy swells and cavernous basses into an amalgamation of industrial and electronic influence. 

Moving further along and 'The Forger' is once again led by a bleak spoken monologue, but the backing has progressed into an echoic chamber of lengthy plate verbs applied to squeaks of noise and what sounds like train sounds, all underpinned by a heartfelt but shadowy piano refrain. 'Bronze Misnomer' threatens to break into full electronic meltown at any point, with droning feedback and Paddy's free-jazz sax noodlings providing relief to the stark electronic backbone. 

It really is brilliant this one, it takes time to devlop and it demands your attention, turning from a noisy drone into a nuanced and impeccable ambient masterstroke with repeated listens. Bleak, bold and stunningly beautiful. 

TRACK LISTING

1. Brighton 84 04:29
2. Night Vision 04:29
3. Fountain 07:49
4. The Forger 04:37
5. The Cleaners 04:44
6. Bronze Misnomer 02:59
7. The World Paused 03:57
8. Glacier 08:21

The Vanity Set are a side project of Bad Seed's men James Sclavunos and Thomas Wydler, along with a collection of guest musicians - Kid Congo Powers, Sally Norvell, Larry Mullins (Iggy Pop), Daria Klotz (God Is My Co-Pilot), Pete Shore (Boss Hog) and Chris Pravdica (The Gunga Din). Sally Norvell is well known for her previous recordings and tours with outfit Congo Norvell featuring legendary ex-Gun Club guitarist Kid Congo Powers and her duets with Mark Eitzel.

To mark 10 years of Finders Keepers the label present a new and improved pressing of the album where it all began. Within the last 10 years the resurgence of sixties Gallic pop, once known as Ye-Ye music, has escalated beyond an inter-stellar dizzy height. What might have been a waning, embarrassing genre destined for a shelf life / death gathering dust amongst the Eurovisions of yesteryear, the ‘jerk-beat’ psych-sploitation records of the latter day French disco had soon found new floor space in some of the most credible nightspots in London and Japan.

Without a shadow of doubt, the flagship LP with best odds on becoming a discerning household object was. An inimitable, 45-minute concept LP handcrafted by a bassdriven psychedelic rock group and a heaven sent, 1001 piece orchestral and choral symphony. The album left hip hop producers alongside progressive rock aficionados crying out for more and more for years to come. This LP was in a league of its very own… or was it?

The seldom-sung musical arranger for the classic ‘Histoire de Melody Nelson’ by Serge Gainsbourg has become one of the most enigmatic names in Frenchfunk; lorded by many as the French David Axelrod, Jean-Claude Vannier’s name is the lesser-spotted, tell tale seal of sample-friendly quality when it comes to crate-digging ‘en Francais’. Suitably, when rumours amongst French record dealers claiming “the band who played ‘Melody Nelson’ recorded a follow-up LP” became a legend of psychedelic folklore. Another unconfirmed rumour about Jean-Claude Vannier taking the remaining outtakes of the beloved ‘Melody Nelson’ to create a promo-only experimental rock LP left sample hungry producers and DJs in turmoil.

For those in the know the answers to these mysteries lay between the anonymous gatefold sleeve of an undiscovered conceptual album bizarrely entitled ‘L’Enfant Assassin des Mouches’ by a custom-built avant-rock entourage called Insolitudes. The treasure hunt began. For record collectors looking for that special something, this LP contains everything.

For those in the know the answers to these mysteries lay between the anonymous gatefold sleeve of an undiscovered conceptual album bizarrely entitled ‘L’Enfant Assassin des Mouches’ by a custom-built avant-rock entourage called Insolitudes. The treasure hunt began. For record collectors looking for that special something, this LP contains everything.

History denotes that when ‘our man in Paris’ Msr. Gainsbourg first heard the initial bones of this LP he took his poetic pencil to paper providing bizarre liner notes, thus consummating the most extraordinary concept album of all time. The story ‘The Child Assassin Of The Flies’ was to be included as the only information to grace the LP’s highly collectible concertina gatefold sleeve. The story in full is reproduced in its native-tongue on this very special re-release package.

DJs and producers such as Jim O’Rourke, Stereolab’s Tim Gane and David Holmes have spent sleepless nights in perusal of original copies of this perfect release and now regard it as one of the best. Recent copies on eBay have commanded ridiculous price tags and is now one of the most sought-after articles amongst the vinyl hungry hip hop community.

Lovingly remastered and repackaged in an authentic gatefold sleeve to celebrate the 10th birthday of Finders Keepers Records.

Featuring updated liner notes this is the album where it all began. Available once again, having been out of print for a number of years.

Precisely four decades since the original release of the 1971 album ‘Histoire De Melody Nelson’, Serge Gainsbourg’s most celebrated composer, arranger and composer Jean-Claude Vannier now returns to the same artistic territory that has since come to represent his most iconic period and continually inspire almost five generations of experimental rock luminaries.

This all new album comprises a personnel of the legendary European session players that appeared on classic Vannier and Gainsbourg scores such as ‘Cannabis’, ‘La Horse’, ‘Slogan’ and ‘Les Chemins de Katmandou’, as well as ‘Histoire De Melody Nelson’ itself, and his own mythical follow up, the truly bizarre 1973 avant-garde ballet ‘L'Enfant Assassin Des Mouches’ (which was finally rescued from obscurity in 2005 by Finders Keepers as the label’s debut release).

Recorded partly in Paris and partly in the UK (not unlike the classic Gainsbourg LPs) the album ‘Roses Rouge Sang’ ('Blood Red Roses') hears JCV taking care of vocal duties in his own unique style combining the macabre and the optimistic with ingenious world play and expert poetic use of the French language. Flourishing from initial rehearsal sessions for the first-ever live performance of 'Histoire De Melody Nelson', ‘Roses Rouge Sang’ captures the authentic line-up just weeks after their initial reunion.

Jean-Claude Vannier and Finders Keepers finally liberate two previously unreleased and fabled soundtracks.

This one black vinyl disc release features the only existing original historic recordings to his first ever 1968 collaboration with Serge Gainsbourg, as well as the entire lost musical score for Vannier’s first major star-stuffed solo film commission.

As longtime custodians, Finders Keepers Records are proud to present both the hallucinogenic orchestral music to Robert Benayoun’s ‘Paris n’existe pas’ and the rhythmic onslaught and cyclic waltzes from Patrick Chaput’s ‘La bête noire’, complete with an extensive booklet of essays, interviews, secrets and rare images from both of these mythical cinematic obscurities.

TRACK LISTING

La Bête Noire (Intro)
Chasser La Bête Noire
Histoire De Daniel
The Black Beast (Effets Cords)
Rythme De La Bête Noire
Danse De La Bête Noire
Le Dealer
Karen/Antonia
The Black Beast 2 (Effets Cords)
The Writer/Yves
Chasser Bête Noire (Revenir)
The Juvenile Judge
La Bête Noire (Generique)
Paris N’existe Pas (Opening Titles)
Angela En Ambré
Télékinésie En Turquoise
Simon Slips
La Chambre Rose
Fantôme Félicienne
Le Feu
La Tête
Les Chemins N’existent Pas
Fantôme Soirée
Le Temps Passe
Flipbook
Fantôme Soiree (Outtake)
Flipbook (Outtake)

In 1984, Jasper Van’t Hof, a prominent European jazz pianist, propelled to fame with the energetic ‘Pili Pili’ a 15-minute trance collaboration with Guinea's Isaac Tagul Group. Inspired by a fiery red pepperoni, the track sold over 100,000 copies, leading the group to adopt the name Pili Pili, becoming a hit in the club and disco scene.

Pili Pili's musical roots trace back to Van’t Hof's 1982-83 tour in Central Africa, where he discovered a love for African music. The band embraced authenticity by collaborating with diverse African musicians from Mali, Congo, Senegal, and Guinea. In 2000, Van’t Hof initiat-ed a project with the young Zulu choir Phikelela Sakhu-la from Durban, South Africa.
Pili Pili's style, described as experimental fusion, blends intricate African rhythms with jazz, fusion, funk, and dance. Van’t Hof emphasized the importance of groove over complex solos, stating that intellectual approaches are lost in their music.

The band's performances, marked by their energetic fusion of jazz and African rhythms, gained acclaim across Europe. Regular tours and festival appearances, such as the Jazz Festival of Montreux, solidified Pili Pili's reputation as an excellent live band. Reviews praised the band's dynamic and explosive music, turn-ing every performance into a rhythmic and fiery expe-rience.

Pili-Pili is essential, every home should have one, and to that end NuNorthern Soul are doing a legit reissue (the album and 12 have been out of print since 1984). On the A-side of the new single is an edit from the mid-90s, which does a terrific job of tightening up the OG album mix, losing the Burundi breakdowns and fuzz guitar washes, but still rolling and building beautifully for over 15 minutes. That’s backed by a Coyote remix, which is full of subtle twists to keep old heads on their toes. The cowbell and chants are dropped into echo, the drumming further doubled by delay. Loops, filtering and phasing, adding to the track’s trance-inducing properties. The duo’s dubwise trickery pulling in favourable comparisons to Adrian Sherwood’s seminal seismic shake of the aforementioned Unknown Cases’ Ma Simba Belle.

STAFF COMMENTS

Matt says: Real deal cosmic musica here, with the original penned at the peak of Baldelli-era afro funky, whilst the edit (from '95) sets itself amongst the sunshine and sun loungers of the Balearics - expanded on by Coyote who drops a brand new edit for 2024.

TRACK LISTING

A1. Original New 1995 Edit
B1. Coyote Double Drop 2024 Edit

VANT release their eagerly anticipated debut album ‘DUMB BLOOD’ on Parlophone. The fiery punk and visceral alt-rock that pulsates throughout ‘DUMB BLOOD’ is music that incites moshpit bedlam and their lyrics demand discussion – on environmentalism, inequality, racism, religion, social media isolation and the all-out self-destruction of mankind. 

“Each song is an exhilarating, blood-pumping punk thriller. This is a band on a rapid upswing, ascending at lightning speed, and the world will have to do their bit to be able to keep up.” – DIY – review of 29/11/16 Scala gig.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Crashing full-force melodic punk anthems, replete with fuzzed-out guitars, snarling vocal delivery and lo-fi solos. Melodic, dynamic fist-pumping anthemic rock, pushing through with a combination of catchy hooks and hefty production. Highly recommended.

Belgium-based composer Christina Vantzou’s fourth full-length for Kranky ventures further into the uniquely elusive and evocative mode of ambient classical minimalism which has become her signature: a fragile synthesis of contemplative drift, heady silences, and muted dissonance. In regards to the new album she speaks of focusing particular attention on the effects of the recordings on the body, and of “directing sound perception into an inner space.”

No. 4 took shape across roughly two years, incorporating a diverse array of musical and conceptual collaborators, including fellow Kranky artists Steve Hauschildt and John Also Bennett (of Forma) as well as Angel Deradoorian (ex-Dirty Projectors), Clarice Jensen, Beatrijs De Klerck, and members of Belgium’s Echo Collective. During the creation process Vantzou wanted to “blur lines of hierarchy,” and thus allowed all ensemble members and technical assistants to add or delete elements. Despite such a spectrum of input the eleven tracks feel distinctly cohesive, weaving elegant textures and resonant open spaces within a twilit landscape of eclectic instrumentation: piano, harp, vibraphone, voice, strings, marimba, synthesizers, gong, and bells.

Vantzou describes the recording process as one of prepared spontaneity: that is, “having plenty of ideas ready to explore going into the session, but with enough time to depart from those ideas and see what happens.” This mindset of premeditated exploration informs the album’s emotive textural intuition, with hushed drones and delicate gestures eliding in the periphery of the mix. She cites sleep and “the loosening of time” as two formative practices in her private and professional life, which manifests in the quietly hallucinatory properties of Vantzou’s music. No. 4 feels both endless and ephemeral, immersive and immaterial. It’s a music of horizon lines and half-light, mapped with feeling and foresight.

Recorded in New York City and Brussels. Mixed in Berlin.

TRACK LISTING

1. Glissando For Bodies And Machines In Space
2. Percussion In Nonspace
3. At Dawn
4. Doorway
5. Some Limited And Waning Memory
6. Staircases
7. No4 String Quartet
8. Sound House
9. Lava
10. Garden Of Forking Paths
11. Remote Polyphony (feat Steve Hauschildt) 

While on the island of Syros in the Aegean Sea for a film festival performance, Christina Vantzou experienced what she characterized as “a moment of focus”—a specific vision for the sprawl of raw recordings she’d been amassing for her fifth album. Upon relocating to the Cycladic island of Ano Koufonisi, she situated herself outside at a patio table with a laptop and headphones, taking brief breaks to swim, and began the “reductive process” of shaving and shaping the source material into uneasy but lyrical movements, alternately austere and adorned with strange inflections: glottal groaning, cavernous water, glittering eddies of modular synth, languorous silences. Mixing the pieces herself without outsourcing to an engineer compounded the intimacy and autobiographical dimension of the music; she refers to No5 as “almost like a first album.”

Drawing on sessions staged in February 2020, Vantzou’s editing instincts emphasize process and isolation, spotlighting resonance and restraint, liquidity and long tails. Fleeting configurations of piano, wind, strings, synthetics, and field recordings, these are spaces as much as compositions, surreal grottos of shifting light, suffused with a sense of invisible divinity. Although seventeen musicians appear on the record, the proceedings feel minimalist and malleable, sculpted from interstitial moments and oblique synchronicities. The definition of a composer as “one who joins things” is here both plumbed and proven; Vantzou describes No5 as “a letting go,” a place of “soft borders,” unfixed and undefinable.

TRACK LISTING

1. Enter
2. Greeting
3. Distance
4. Reclining Figures
5. Red Eel Dream
6. Dance Rehearsal
7. Kimona
8. Tongue Shaped Rock
9. Memory Of Future Melody
10. Kimona II
11. Surreal Presence (For SH And FM)

Engineered by Adam Bryanbaum Wiltzie (Stars of the Lid / A Winged Victory for the Sullen) who also added some of his signature sound texture, at his studio in Brussels, Belgium.

Developed over a four year period, and entirely funded by a part time job working as a SAT university entrance exam mathematics tutor, Nº2 was composed using synthesizers and a variety of unidenti?ed samples that were manipulated beyond recognition.

Christina Vantzou then collaborated with Minna Choi of the San Francisco based Magik*Magik Orchestra. Vantzou and Choi worked on the notation and arrangements and recorded the compositions with a 15-piece ensemble at Tiny Telephone studios in San Francisco.

The chamber layer on Nº2 follows a similar pattern as her ?rst record with the addition of bassoon, oboe, and an enhanced string section. Vantzou spent four months premixing the album before Adam Bryanbaum Wiltzie (Stars of the Lid / A Winged Victory for the Sullen) engineered the ?nal mixes,

Perhaps a better title for the album would be “Symphony Nº2” as it was composed as a cohesive whole, much like her ?rst album “Nº1”. Dense layers of strings are augmented by angelic voices, piano, woodwinds, & various synthesizers. Instrumental music, especially that which is scored with strings & horns, is invariably described as “?lmic”. This is even more likely when the composer is a ?lmmaker such as Christina Vantzou.

Welcome to the future, which luckily for us is ?lled by a woman?s voice with a beautiful narrative. A recording that is a meeting of personalities is like the contact of chemical substances: if there is any reaction, all are transformed.

Austin boogie-funksters The Vapor Caves follow up that killer "Message From The Stars" cover with a very rare Detroit boogie holy grail popularized by the West Coast funk scene. "Knock U Out" gets suitably squelch-i-fied by these modern whiz kids, complete with hefty Linn drum battery and some token vocodorization. It's a modern boogie masterpiece which we've come to kinda take for granted from the Tugboard / Star Creature firm. Comes with instrumental. 

TRACK LISTING

A. Knock U Out.
B. Knock U Out (Instrumental)

Deluxe edition limited to 500 copies - comes packaged with glorious artwork in a gatefold sleeve.

Vaporous Light are the latest signings to Manchester's influential Akoustik Anarkhy Recordings. A Manchester-based three piece, the band came together during 2010 due to a mutual love of cinematic soundscapes and obscure soundtracks. With magic in their melodies, the eponymous debut album is full of finger picked steel strings teamed with a lovely palette of synths and percussion and offers the listener a rich selection of songs, sounds and textures to soundtrack summer days and autumn nights.

STAFF COMMENTS

Darryl says: Excellent debut from this Machester three piece on the Akoustik Anarkhy label, A rich mix of strings, synths and a rolling percussion.

Suffolk-based singer songwriter James Varda’s fourth and final album before his death from a long battle with cancer in 2015, Chance And Time, reissued on Unspun Heroes is an astonishing aural document of a creative, forward -thinking musician coming to terms with a life slowly evaporating away. There is hubris, melancholy and an undeniable weight of sadness in these ten songs but, miraculously, there is also a stoic realisation and acceptance from Varda that is both heart-wrenching and deeply affecting. On Chance And Time Varda reconnects the human spirit to the land, a heavy, fearful heart to an optimistic soul, and in a beautiful poetic flourish gives a real tangible sense of loving and hope to his family and friends offering genuine reassurance and even, at times, a green light for celebration.

Carrying a certain air of mystique, that same sense of a ‘other worldliness’ if you will of say a Karen Dalton or a Jeff Buckley, Varda’s delivery and tone carries huge emotional weight here and an unique ability to add an honest perspective and warmth to the starkest of realities. The hard hitting impact of the opening tracks is blunt and sharply defined. There is pain, hardship, and fear wrapped in these tales - ‘The Doctor Spoke, Two Hearts Broke” - made all the more hitting as this is a real life journey in the here and now being catalogued. As we move towards the second half of the record there is something even deeper and truly incredible at play. Varda’s whole demeanor is one of understanding and acceptance - hear the celebratory shamanic vibe of the extraordinary ‘Pass It On’ and the poignantly reflective, chokingly sad finale ‘We Won’t Dream’ - bringing to an end a record that will leave a mark on everyone who hears it. Real art is both timeless and omnipresent, these songs from James Varda will hang in the air forever and be there for those who look to find understanding, joy and a sense of hope. Chance And Time is both an extraordinary record and poignant study of life and living, of death and what comes after.

James Varda released four albums between 1988 and his death in 2015. A fledgling career beginning on the singer-songwriting folk scene where his arrival was met with both curiosity and critical acclaim as was his debut, the John Leckie produced Hunger. Any momentum was lost however as it would be ten years before the next, In The Valley was met with a ruffle of applause. Cancer took hold of the troubadour and for a number of years Varda lived life and wrote songs until The River And The Stars appeared like a phoenix from the flames as he began to wrestle with the realities of his situation. It’s a record that beautifully lays the ground for this his masterpiece that was to follow.

Unspun Heroes, a new label set up by Simon White, has the sole purpose of finding and reissuing albums that he considers both undervalued and seemingly ignored. All releases will be on vinyl only complete with Obi strip and extensive liner notes. Each will be individually numbered and limited.

TRACK LISTING

1) It’s Not Quite Too Late
2) May This Moment Ever Glow
3) The Doctor Spoke
4) Our Love Will Never End
5) Only Love
6) Let My Place
7) One Thing After Another
8) Pass It On
9) Beside The Sea
10) We Won’t Dream

More than 18 years since he left the public spotlight, mysterious mad-genius David Baker, legendary frontman of the original incarnation of Mercury Rev, is back with new band Variety Lights. The masterful new album 'Central Flow', due for release in May, is a collaboration between Baker and fellow vintage synth addict Will MacLean and demonstrates that Baker has lost none of his flair for the extraordinary, the experimental and the exceptional. As co-founder and vocalist of Mercury Rev, Baker helped to forge their revolutionary sound with their first two (and most critically acclaimed) albums; 'Yerself Is Steam' (1991) and 'Boces' (1993).

The band were highly innovative and weren't afraid to experiment but above all they were loud, fun and hugely influential. In the UK, the critics embraced enthusiastically, as Chris Roberts in Melody Maker said (in his review of 'Yerself Is Steam'): "At last, one of those rare records that revolve along once in a blooming moon and have something new to struggle to say... A daring, brazen, and demented juxtaposition of voice and guitars and timpani flings Mercury Rev, lemming like at your more responsive caches of fear."

Having left the band in 1993, Baker went on to release a solo album 'World' under the moniker Shady, which featured members of the Boo Radleys, Rollerskate Skinny, Swervedriver and Th' Faith Healers. At times soaringly catchy and lightheartedly loony, 'World' is a sonic adventure which Vox described as "... awash with fragments of dense noise, stumbling, narcotic-laced tempos and lyrics from outer space... that mutate into spiky, bittersweet pop." Although there has been much speculation about his life during his time away from the public eye, Baker has continued to make recordings and is an avid music fan, working as a producer for various artists.

Now he is back, morphed and transmogrified into Variety Lights (a name lifted from Fellini's first film). When he met Will MacLean, Baker found a songwriting partner who shared a passion for analogue synths and electronic psychedelia. Initial experimentation together live to tape – to see how big and crazy just the two of them could sound – started to reveal melodies and Variety Lights was born. Much of Variety Lights’ debut was recorded by Baker at his own Over the Trees studio. The sound was created using a mixture of chained around-the-room 80's era midi expanders as well as the duo's collection of vintage keyboards and combining them with an array of drum machines and effected guitars. In creating 'Central Flow's sound, Baker says that "personal adventure is and always has been the most important thing". Baker and MacLean found themselves using references to colours, pictures and describing film scenes to help them communicate about their music. As in his early work, Baker took a richly layered approach, using multiple vocals in a search to find emotion in noises and sounds.

TRACK LISTING

1. Starlit
2. Establishment
3. Sea Faraway
4. Invisible Forest
5. Silent Too Long
6. Oh Setting Sun
7. Sell Your Soul
8. You Are So Famous
9. Crystal Cove
10. Feeling All Alone
11. Infinity Room

Cassette Store Day 2014 release. '80N7' features 20 previously unreleased tracks by some of Rough Trade New York's favourite emerging acts from across the US and UK, including Manchester's Spring King, Denver's Sunboy, and London's Happyness. Operating under the premise that things sound 'better homemade,' the aim is to showcase bands that the shop feels capture the magic of DIY - they want you to hear the fingers sliding, the tiny imperfections, and most importantly, the passion that went into making them. Digital download card included. Limited to 150 copies.

Various Cruelties had an amazing year in 2011, one that will only be eclipsed by whats to come in 2012. Fronted by Leeds Local Liam O'Donnel, Various Cruelties proudly display their fondness of Northern Soul blended with their unmatched ability to write a pop hook.

Having released their debut single 'Chemicals' in the summer the band were immediately asked to perform on Later with Jools Holland which aired in the Autumn. Follow up single 'Great Unknown' continued to grow Various Cruelties popularity earning them an addition on the R1 playlist and support slots with Noah and the Whale and Kasabian.

TRACK LISTING

1. Chemicals
2. Great Unknown
3. If It Wasn't For You
4. Magnetic Field
5. Cold As You
6. Dry Your Tears
7. Beautiful Delirium
8. She Is The One
9. Capsize
10. Thrill Is Gone
11. Neon Truth

The tenth album from this highly regarded Finnish band. With probably one of their most exciting line ups to date "Iki" captures all the excitement of their live sound. Superb female vocals backed by instumental textures of fiddle, guitars, accordion, bass and percussion.

Brand new release from this classic band. They have been making punk records since 1981 and this is their first in five years. Pure old skool punk.

Fresh produce from the man behind the synths. "8008 EP" is the sixth edition in Varum's discography. Showcasing his signature style of bouncy beats with just the right hint of breaks thrown in. True to its creator, this EP is not playing it shy when it comes to bold synth-lines and making the best of the drum machines at hand. A wild ride in various tempi and vibes

TRACK LISTING

1 8008 2
2 Get Funky
3 303 Test
4 Asty
5 8008
6 Esm

Eugene Kelly and Frances McKee formed The Vaselines in 1986, they later added James Seenan and Eugene's brother Charlie Kelly on bass and drums respectively. In 1989 they released their first album, Dum-Dum on 53rd and 3rd Records, the band breaking up shortly after it’s release. They briefly reformed in 1990 to open for Nirvana when they played in Edinburgh. Though they were not widely known outside Scotland during their short career, their association with Nirvana brought exposure to the band. Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain once described Kelly and McKee as his "favourite songwriters in the whole world".

With their tracks "Son of a Gun" and "Molly's Lips" covered on Nirvana's album Incesticide and "Jesus Doesn't Want Me for a Sunbeam" covered on MTV Unplugged in New York, the band gained a new audience. At the 1991 Reading Festival, Kelly joined Nirvana on stage for a performance of "Molly's Lips". This exceptional album was released, by special arrangement with Sub Pop Records, for Record Store Day 2018. Due to popular demand, it has been re-pressed for its final run of 1000 copies, making it ever more collectible.

This final pressing is on 180g heavy weight vinyl in a cool milky clear colour with matt black inner sleeve, the artwork remains true to the original and RSD 2018 versions.

Glaswegian musician, producer, DJ and curator Rebecca Vasmant announces her debut LP ‘With Love, From Glasgow’, showcasing the breadth of the incredible jazz talent the city has to offer. Having made a name for herself with a residency at Sub Club, Rebecca took the lead in curating the first live jazz showcases at the venue, also running a popular record fair with the venerable venue and a spot on BBC Radio Scotland and Worldwide FM. Rebecca also airs this facet of her irrepressible musical passion at key events like Worldwide Festival Sete, Glasgow Jazz Festival, EFG London Jazz Festival, Jazz Cafe London, Kasheme Zurich, Brilliant Corners, Casper Montenegro and the Baltic Soul Weekender, and a new residency at Ronnie Scott's as part of the Panro collective.

While promoting and touring in over 22 countries constantly over the last five years, Rebecca has honed her craft on production projects which feature world class musicians from The Scottish National Jazz Orchestra and more, her talents are not only in spinning records, but in composing, producing and performing. Though known for its rich musical heritage, Glasgow is not a city perhaps synonymous with jazz. However, on ‘With Love, From Glasgow’ this is all about to change, as Rebecca and her cohort of hand picked musicians set out to change people’s opinions. Rebecca explains: “There is such crazy wealth of talent in this city of Glasgow and I wanted to make an album that helped to demonstrate this and which captures my own love and passion for deep and spiritual music. This album highlights just some of the exciting things that are happening here in Scotland and it's been a real honour and pleasure working with the hugely talented musicians who came together to collaborate in such a free and beautiful way. During the time spent working on this music an amazing family formed, something for which I am so grateful.”

TRACK LISTING

A1. Start Of Time
A2. Timing'S End
A3. Freefall (Ft. Nadya Albertsson)
A4. Jewels Of Thought (Ft. Harry Weir)
B1. Autumn Leaves (Ft. Emilie Boyd)
B2. Morning (Mourning)
B3. Pride Of Winter
B4. Internal Dispute (Ft. Paix)
B5. Idealists (Outro)

Venturing off course from his Post-Punk / Dark Wave project, The Soft Moon, Los Angeles born composer and multi-instrumentalist Luis Vasquez, embarks intonew territory with A Body Of Errors, a bold reimagining of the soundtrack genre.With this album, Vasquez felt the urgency to break away from The Soft Moon realm and deliver an even more intimate, self-reflecting body of work, while further unveiling inner demons & vulnerability. He continues to explore his notorious angst and visceral pain, but places them in the context of his own physical being, creating the deeply personal, yet relatable and compelling oddity that is A Body Of Errors, which Vasquez describes as a collection of themes to living in the human body.

Opening track “Interno” with its crushing synthesizers, is a blast off into the abyss of self. Sinister gasps introduce “Poison Mouth” stomping you with relentless torment before spiraling into oblivion. Halfway, we reach the mechanized rhythms and throbbing cardiac pulse of “Surgery” expressing Vasquez’s phobia with the body itself. “No Longer Human” with its hallucinogenic flutter and distant cries, imagines a fantastic universe beyond, with a nod to David Lynch’s Twin Peaks. The only lyrical appearance on A Body Of Errorsis “Used To Be” a gut-wrenching wall-of-sound ballad romanticizing the struggle between one's good side & bad side. Pulling you into armageddon, A Body OfErrors closes with “World On Fire” an epic post-apocalyptic battle-storm painted vividly through symphonic devastation.

TRACK LISTING

1 Interno
2 Poison Mouth
3 Under My Teeth
4 Decomposition (Part 1)
5 This Guilt
6 The Wasp
7 Surgery

Side B
8 In A Cage
9 No Longer Human
10 Decomposition (Part 2)
11 Used To Be
12 From The Drain
13 Arms & Legs
14 World On Fire

Heels & Souls Recordings roll into reissue number eight with a double dose of early '90s UK street soul magic, splitting the sides between two sought-after cuts from Elaine Vassell and 3rd Zone.

Step back to 1993, house music has hit, UK Soul is in full flow and its rawer, DIY street soul sibling is making its mark across the UK’s underground. Fuelled by accessible, affordable production gear and ignited through enthusiasm and an influx of ideas and sounds, two acts drew inspiration from a melting pot of genres they were exposed to, providing their take on soul as they saw it.

Up first, Elaine Vassell - ‘Never Give Up’. A rough breakbeat-driven, mid-tempo groover from a North West London production triple threat, made up of Longsy D, Pinky and Murray. Utilising Pinky’s home studio with its DX7, Juno 106, LinnDrum and 808, they masterminded a track that sits at the intersection between soulful house, hip hop and R&B. Its crunching drum loop, chest-rattling low-end and serene synth lines, lay the foundation for Elaine’s powerful yet emotive voice to take centre stage. ‘Never Give Up’ should have been a future classic, but never quite found its feet.

On the flip side another 1993 gem, as Sansel Ali and twin brothers Mark and Stephen Anglin joined forces to form 3rd Zone. Conceived in Mark’s makeshift bedroom studio, the trio laid down their first foray into recorded music, ‘You Stole My Heart’. Originally promoed as a limited whitelabel in 1991, it officially landed on the group's one and only EP ‘No Real Reason' in '93.

Armed with a handful of synth modules, a drum machine and a Korg M1, Mark, Stephen and Sansel hit with a tough but tender, underground triumph. Part dance, part romance, layering synth strings, chunky breaks and M1 stabs underneath Sansel’s heartstrung vocals and Stephen’s hip house rap interlude, it provides another perfect example of house seen through the street soul prism.

Two timeless tracks that fly the flag for the fact that big studios and big budgets aren't necessary to create songs that really resonate. Each side also contains an alternate version, with the A housing a beatless reprise of ‘Never Give Up’ and the B a tougher, bassier remix of ‘You Stole My Heart’.

Licensed from Pinky Music and 3rd Zone respectively and remastered from the original DATs by Justin Drake.

TRACK LISTING

A1. Elaine Vassell - Never Give Up
A2. Elaine Vassell - Never Give Up (Chill Zone Mix)
B1. 3rd Zone - You Stole My Heart (Vinyl Mix)
B2. 3rd Zone - You Stole My Heart (Remix)