The fourth solo album from Angelo De Augustine, Toil and Trouble exists according to its own quixotic logic, inhabiting a psychic landscape as sublimely mystifying as a fever dream or fairy tale. In creating such an all-enveloping body of work, the Southern California-based artist spent nearly three years working alone and exploring the vast expanse of his imagination. “This album came from thinking about the madness of the world right now and how overwhelming that can be,” says De Augustine. “I used a sort of counter-world as a guide to try to gain some understanding of what’s actually going on here — I had to take myself out of reality in order to try to understand reality.” At turns bewitching and devastating and ineffably lovely, the result is the most visionary work yet from a singular songwriter, revealing his profound capacity to alchemize pain into extraordinary beauty.

TRACK LISTING

1 Home Town
2 The Ballad Of Betty And Barney Hill
3 Memory Palace
4 Healing Waters
5 The Painter
6 I Don't Want To Live, I Don't Want To Die
7 Another Universe
8 Song Of The Siren
9 Blood Red Thorn
10 Naked Blade
11 D.W.O.M.M.
12 Toil And Trouble

Composer, multi-instrumentalist and singer/songwriter Sufjan Stevens announces the album Reflections, a studio recording of his score for the ballet by choreographer Justin Peck, performed by pianists Timo Andres and Conor Hanick. 

Reflections was originally commissioned by Houston Ballet to accompany choreography by Peck and premiered March 21, 2019. Written for two pianos and eleven dancers, Reflections marks the sixth collaboration between Stevens and Peck, following Year of the Rabbit (2012); Everywhere We Go (2014); In the Countenance of Kings (2016); The Decalogue (2017); and Principia (2019).

The studio recording was engineered, mixed and mastered by Ryan Streber at Oktaven Studios. Reflections is characteristic Stevens: dynamic, melodic, memorable, emotionally resonant and playful (one track is titled “And I Shall Come To You Like A Stormtrooper in Drag Serving Imperial Realness”). It is about “energy, light and duality,” Stevens says. “I’m constantly thinking about bodies moving through space when I’m writing for ballet — that is what has informed this music, first and foremost.”

This is Stevens’ second recorded release of his compositions for piano—following The Decalogue in 2019—and his first written for two pianos. There is a long tradition of composing for duo pianos—from John Adams’ “Hallelujah Junction” to Mozart’s Sonata for Two Pianos in D Major—and Stevens was happy to further explore the form. “Although I've never taken a lesson,” he says, “the piano was my first true love. Having two of them at my disposal was an exciting opportunity and gave me a real catharsis about the expansiveness of the instrument.”

Self-taught as both a pianist and a composer, Stevens’ first instrument was the oboe, which he started playing in 5th grade. He played in orchestras from high school through college and listened voraciously to recordings of classical music alongside pop radio. But Stevens would often take breaks from the oboe by improvising on the piano, working out music he had heard in passing — pieces by Chopin, Rachmaninov and Bach. “I learned by ear, in a very rudimentary way, inspired by a wide range of music,” he says. “A lot of the work that I compose is anachronistic as it doesn't follow a genealogy of aesthetic. It can be a cornucopia of styles.” That's the case with Reflections, where listeners may detect a hint of Debussy, Stravinsky, Philip Glass and even Bruce Hornsby.

TRACK LISTING

1. Ekstasis
2. Revanche
3. Euphoros
4. Mnemosyne
5. Rodinia
6. Reflexion
7. And I Shall Come To You Like A Stormtrooper In Drag Serving Imperial Realness

Esther, the latest effort from Brooklyn duo Welcome Wagon is as much about homecoming as it is about making peace with—and a home in—uncertainty. The project had its beginnings in the summer of 2017, when the family took a two-month sabbatical to California. In reflecting upon that time, Pastor Vito Aiuto says “It felt like we had been changed, and so to go home was going to be alright.” Shortly after returning to Brooklyn, he found himself holding his guitar and allowing his fingers to play a few notes that just felt…right. Then the pandemic hit, and Vito’s strumming, lyrics, and thoughts became the soundtrack of the family’s lockdown lives. Though Monique had given up painting a decade prior, she felt an urge to go home as well, to reconnect not just with an artistic identity but with her midwestern family. She began using pieces from a collection of her late grandmother Esther’s treasures to create large-scale collages, beautiful, evocative, and almost haunting in their pastiche of the past.

Esther was born out of this wellspring of creativity and homecoming, exploring the profound knowing and equally profound mystery in both family and faith. In Esther, the questioning is the destination, and it is one where peace can be found and home—and art—can be made. There’s a salve there. There is music. There are moments of grace, large and small. Welcome.

TRACK LISTING

1 Isaiah, California
2 Bethlehem, A Noble City
3 Knocking On The Door Of Love
4 Have Mercy On Us
5 Consolation Blues
6 Matthew 7:7
7 I Know You Know
8 Noble Tree
9 Lebanon

The (seventh) new Half-handed Cloud album, ‘Flutterama’, is a record of 18 jubilant indie-pop songs by John Ringhofer that investigate spiritual incompetence with lively arrangements and radiant melodies that skilfully dissolve into deterioration using herky-jerky tape manipulation, analogue wow-and-flutter, and an animated orchestra of homerecorded sound effects.

Ringhofer’s work on ‘Flutterama’ was inspired by Frances Mary Hunter Gordon’s adolescent liturgies (recorded at Abbey Road during The Beatles era), turbid sights and sounds in Guy Maddin films, audaciously bold forms in Sister Corita Kent’s devotional printmaking, the exquisite brittleness of Elizabeth Cotten’s voice, Alberto Burri’s stitched wound burlap assemblages, Alvar Aalto church design, Andrea Büttner’s poverty-informed artwork, Lou Barlow/Dinosaur Jr’s lo-fi ‘Poledo’ sound collage (which namechecks Jesus), Julie Canlis book ‘A Theology of the Ordinary’, Wallace Berman’s visual collage, and The Raincoats’ magnificently shaky DIY aesthetic.

The album’s tape-fiddled tunes - recorded on the very same 16-track recorder last serviced by a sound technician who also worked with The Beach Boys in their home studio - employ surprisingly little synthesizer (“it felt like cheating,” says Ringhofer) - he preferred to craft most of the album’s effects the long way, frequently going behind the back of rock instrumentation by hand-feeding ½” magnetic reel recordings of chord organs, deflating balloons, some guitars, piano (occasionally tracked with a baby on his lap), brass, tablecloth swipes, and a quickly-cranked half-speed music box. He was assisted by long-time Half-handed Cloud contributor Brandon Buckner on drums, and single song backing vocals from Anacortes, WA songsmith John Van Deusen.

TRACK LISTING

Bustin' Stronghodes
Trickmonks
Swallowing The Water You Walk On
Can Shadows Praise You?
The Netherworld Squints At The Sight Of
You
Trick Leash
Anamnesis
Asking For Fish
I'm The Weakest Link
Under Your Breath
Handles 01:52
What's Illumined Becomes Visible
Someone You Can Use
About Face
Periodically Yours
We Won't Survive This
Project Yourself Alive Onto My Corpse
We Belong To You, But How Now Is Soon?

A Beginner’s Mind began when the two musicians and Asthmatic Kitty labelmates decamped to a friend’s cabin in upstate New York for a monthlong songwriting sabbatical. Watching a movie to unwind after each day’s work, they soon found their songs reflecting the films and began investigating this connection in earnest.

The resulting album is 14 songs (loosely) based on (mostly) popular films—highbrow, lowbrow and everything in between. They wrote in tandem—one person writing a verse, the other a chorus, churning out chord progressions and lyrics willy-nilly, often finishing each other’s sentences in the process. Rigorous editing and rewriting ensued. The results are less a “cinematic exegesis” and more a “rambling philosophical inquiry” that allows the songs to free-associate at will. Plot-points, scene summaries, and leading characters are often displaced by esoteric interpolations that ask the bigger question: what does it mean to be human in a broken world?

Stevens and De Augustine wrote everything with a deliberate sense of shoshin—the Zen Buddhist concept for which the record is named and an idea that empowered the pair to look for and write about unlikely inspiration without preconceived notions of what a film had to say (The I-Ching and Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies also served as incentives along the way). The movies became rhetorical prompts, with the songwriters letting their distinct reactions and creative instincts govern their process. The underlying objective was empathy and openness, absent of judgment: to observe with the eyes of a child.

The album’s artwork comes courtesy of Ghanaian artist Daniel Anum Jasper. In Ghana during the late ’80s, a novel “mobile cinema” culture emerged when enterprising film fans screened Hollywood blockbusters in the backs of pick-up trucks using portable generators. To advertise the movies, artists painted alternate posters inspired only by the scant information they had about each film. Sufjan and Angelo commissioned a pioneer of this form—Jasper—to paint a series of new works for A Beginner’s Mind (including covers for three 7-inch singles). Information about the project was deliberately kept vague so that Mr. Jasper could work without restraint.

Sufjan Stevens is an artist, songwriter and composer living in New York. He has released nine widely lauded studio albums and a number of collaborations with fellow musicians, choreographers and visual artists from the New York City Ballet and the celebrated director Luca Guadagnino to his stepfather Lowell Brams and noted dancer Jalaiah Harmon.

Angelo De Augustine is an artist and songwriter living in Thousand Oaks, California—a suburb north of Los Angeles, where he grew up. He has released three albums including his self-released debut, Spirals of Silence (2014), and two for Asthmatic Kitty Records, Swim Inside The Moon (2017) and Tomb (2019).

STAFF COMMENTS

Darryl says: Beautifully combining the distinct voices and instrumental styles of both performers into an intoxicating juxtaposition of folk and tenderly plucked indie balladry. It's haunting in parts, and elsewhere wonderfully melodic, a perfect outing for both performers.

TRACK LISTING

1. Reach Out 3:43
2. Lady Macbeth In Chains 3:42
3. Back To Oz 4:25
4. The Pillar Of Souls 4:04
5. You Give Death A Bad Name 5:11
6. Beginner’s Mind 2:36
7. Olympus 3:07
8. Murder And Crime 3:43
9. (This Is) The Thing 3:13
10. It’s Your Own Body And Mind 2:27
11. Lost In The World 3:20
12. Fictional California 3:03
13. Cimmerian Shade 5:01
14. Lacrimae 2:05

Sufjan returns with the long awaited follow up to Carrie & Lowell, featuring some of his most confident and varied work to date. We kick things off with the unassuming beginnings of 'Make Me An Offer I Cannot Refuse' before launching into a deeply electronic but airy Thom Yorkey vocal workout. It's this sort of rapid switch and thematic flexibility that both characterises the album and leads to the most surprising and satisfying moments of his career. 

'Video Game' sees some haunting organy synth leading into a deeply rythmic and pop-led verse, showcasing Stevens' iconic voice, and dedication to variety in songcraft.  

there are some more ambient moments at play, with 'Die Happy' and 'Gilgamesh' trading on the ambient electronic backdrop, but with long tailed reverbs and soaring echoes working their way around the stereo image. 

Possibly the most satisfying moments on this collection comes as the flow of the album quietens down into the euphoric redux of the latter third of the album. 'Sugar' could easily have been the background to some of the earlier, skittering electronics of Múm or the Rós, while the title track encompasses everything we love about Stevens, but imbued with a mildly melancholic but wholly relaxed atmospherics. 

It's a beautiful LP, and one that only goes to prove how essential Stevens continues to be on our musical landscape. 

STAFF COMMENTS

Javi says: From the opening choral glitches to the sea of ambience which sees the album out, ‘The Ascension’ is a patchwork of electronic experimentation, distorted lamentations, and intimate confession.

Sufjan Stevens has long been a musical chameleon: from the alt-folk expression of ‘Carrie & Lowell’, to the meticulously-researched bombast of ‘Illinois’ and digital catharsis of ‘The Age of Adz’, he’s proven time and time again that whatever the instrumentation or subject matter, he can write rich, personal, spiritual songs like no one else. ‘The Ascension’ draws on all these and more, to create an album as fragile as it is grand, as despairing as it is defiant, and as inspired (if not more so) than anything he’s done before.

‘The Ascension’ is a predominantly electronic affair: huge, distorted drums pulse throughout the album, underscoring hordes of ghostly voices and shifting synths. Celestial car alarm effects argue with auto-tuned vocal cries, while album highlight “Landslide” sees Sufjan bow to a guitar solo, of all things, teetering in-between The Durutti Column’s understated beauty and wild math-rock frenzy. Lyrically, Sufjan seems desperate for a response, making demands and pleading with us, the listener, to soothe his anxieties. Faith and certainty are out; desire and anxiety are in. Nowhere is this more apparent than on the penultimate and titular track, which sees Sufjan explore those thoughts he “couldn’t quite confess” to gut-wrenching effect.

Like Dante’s Inferno reimagined as a tour of purgatory, ‘The Ascension’ is a deeply conflicted, gloriously lost, and tentatively comforting album. It’s Sufjan’s finest hour (and twenty minutes) yet.

TRACK LISTING

1. Make Me An Offer I Cannot Refuse (5:19)
2. Run Away With Me (4:07)
3. Video Game (4:16)
4. Lamentations (3:42)
5. Tell Me You Love Me (4:22)
6. Die Happy (5:47)
7. Ativan (6:32)
8. Ursa Major (3:43)
9. Landslide (5:04)
10. Gilgamesh (3:50)
11. Death Star (4:04)
12. Goodbye To All That (3:48)
13. Sugar (7:37)
14. The Ascension (5:56)
15. America (12:30)

Aporia is a New Age album from Sufjan Stevens and his step-father and record label co-owner, Lowell Brams. In the spirit of the New Age composers who sanded off the edges of their synths’ sawtooth waves, Aporia approximates a rich soundtrack from an imagined sci-fi epic brimming with moody, hooky, gauzy synthesizer soundscapes. The album may suggest the progeny of a John Carpenter, Wendy Carlos, and Mike Oldfield marriage, but it stands apart from these touchstones and generates a meditative universe all its own. This is no mere curio in the Sufjan Stevens catalog - but a fully realized collaborative musical piece.

TRACK LISTING

` SIDE A

1.Ousia 2:33
2.What It Takes 3:23
3.Disinheritance 1:13
4.Agathon 3:02
5.Determined Outcome 2:12
6.Misology 1:49
7.Afterworld Alliance 2:47
8.Palinodes 0:32
9.Backhanded Cloud 1:26
10.Glorious You 1:49



SIDE B

11.For Raymond Scott 0:34
12.Matronymic 0:57
13.The Red Desert 2:54
14.Conciliation 1:20
15.Ataraxia 1:12
16.The Unlimited 2:14
17.The Runaround 3:35
18.Climb That Mountain 3:00
19.Captain Praxis 2:13
20.Eudaimonia 2:19
21.The Lydian Ring 1:02

A quiet heartache threads through Tomb. It’s a universal feeling, the kind that piles up over the years and yearns for resolution. The 12 songs came together quickly, out of necessity following his first true heartbreak around Christmas 2017 -- and while Tomb was born from this breakup, the album expanded to explore years of loss and disappointment. Throughout, De Augustine sings of his first love (“Tomb”), attempts to reconcile possible past mistakes (“You Needed Love, I Needed You”), and reckoning with how personal and familial history impacts present and future relationships (“Kaitlin,” “Bird Has Flown”). Like the best albums about heartbreak, Tomb transforms pain into beauty. “This album is at its core a prayer for hope and clarity, and a prayer for love,” he says.

Ultimately Tomb reflects a beginning for De Augustine -- both emotionally and in his career. It’s a motion towards positivity, addressing lost love, the worthwhile cost of honesty, and the ramifications of regret. In the end, Tomb isn’t about burying or hiding something away, it’s about opening the seal and letting something new emerge. The album’s title reveals these sentiments: “Throughout our lives we bury many dead things in our hearts and minds,” he says. “There they go to rest and hopefully are reborn as something beautiful for the world to behold.”

TRACK LISTING

1. Tomb
2. All To The Wind
3. You Needed Love I Needed You
4. I Could Be Wrong
5. Tide
6. Kaitlin
7. Time
8. Somewhere Far Away From Home
9. Wanderer
10. A Good Man’s Light
11. Bird Has Flown
12. All Your Life

Carrie & Lowell, the new album from Sufjan Stevens, is released on Stevens’ own Asthmatic Kitty Records. 

The album - named for Stevens’ mother and stepfather - is a return to Stevens’ folk roots. Thematically the 11 songs address life and death, love and loss, and the artist’s struggle to make sense of the beauty and ugliness of love.

Carrie & Lowell was recorded by Stevens alongside Casey Foubert, Laura Veirs, Nedelle Torrisi, Sean Carey, Ben Lester and Thomas Bartlett and mixed by Stevens, Bartlett and Pat Dillet.

TRACK LISTING

1. Death With Dignity
2. Should Have Known Better
3. All Of Me Wants All Of You
4. Drawn To The Blood
5. Eugene
6. Fourth Of July
7. The Only Thing
8. Carrie & Lowell
9. John My Beloved
10. No Shade In The Shadow Of The Cross
11. Blue Bucket Of Gold

The wind blows hard. We need songs for shelter and Raymond Raposa can build a shelter from almost anything: the sun-bleached bones of a drum track and a couple of spare organ chords; a carpet of creeping synth arpeggios, a scaffolding of multi-tracked harmonies, a few scraps of alto sax to prop up the whole structure. ‘Decimation Blues’, Raymond Raposa’s sixth release as Castanets, marks a decade of scavenger architecture.

‘Decimation Blues’ sees Raposa stepping out in front of the hermetic persona he’s crafted over ten years. There have always been shards of pop songs glinting in the dark corners of Castanets records. Here we get whole gleaming edifices.

‘Decimation Blues’ is the music of a man who’s learned to live and build among the wreckage - twelve seemingly offhand, secretly meticulous tracks that we can hunker down in. “Still always good to be alone in someone else’s home,” Raposa sings. Come in out of the rain, put your shoes by the fire. The walls might shake and the wind might howl but you’ll be safe here a while.

TRACK LISTING

It’s Good To Touch You In The Sunlight
Be My Eyes
Thunder Bay
Out For The West
To Look Over The
Grounds
Blackbird Tune
Cub
Pour It Tall And Pour It True
There Is A Place Up The Road There
My Girl Comes To The City
Tell Them Memphis
Somewhere In The Blue

Mozart’s Sister - the solo project of Montreal’s Caila Thompson-Hannant she started back in early 2011 - delights in making glittering, celebratory pop with an underlying strain of brittle, claustrophobic energy. By marrying the accessible with the decidedly off-kilter, she displays a similar vigor and charisma to female contemporaries Grimes and tUnE-yArDs, both of whom too learned their trade among the same fertile hometown scene as her.

Since attracting a ton of buzz for her entrancing live shows and for first EP ‘Hello’, Mozart’s Sister has been head-down in her bedroom writing her debut album. For anyone who’s been following her work - and for new listeners - ‘Being’ is Mozart’s Sister expressing macrocosmic ideas about life with panache and abundant hooks.

Inspired by ‘Discovery’-era Daft Punk, ‘Post’-era Bjork, and Betty Davis, Caila produced, recorded and wrote the album using a cheap soundcard and Ableton software, approaching it with a do-it-all-by-myself ideology.

Being is fundamentally a pop record. If you’re looking to catalogue her music more than that, you’re going to have a hard time; Caila describes Being as an intentionally fractured album. “It was far reaching. Things didn’t always connect, but that was part of the whole idea,” she says. Which is representative of the best music, and maybe the best of life: looking for order in chaos, not always finding it, and living with whatever happens next.

TRACK LISTING

Good Thing Bad Thing
Enjoy
Faif
Lone Wolf
A Move
Bow A Kiss
Salty Tear
Do It To Myself (Run Run)
Don’t Leave It To Me
My House Is Wild
Chained Together

Sisyphus is the new name for the collaboration between Sufjan Stevens, Serengeti and Son Lux (formerly s/s/s), with a self-titled album partly inspired by the art of Jim Hodges.

Take the romantic stings and catchy choruses from the Illinois era, throw in some crazed electronic percussion, melted synths, rapped verses, and autotuned vocals, and stir.

‘Psychic Temple II’ is a labour of love envisioned by Chris Schlarb to bring his most far-ranging inspirations to life - as he puts it, “a dream ensemble that could never actually exist”.

The ensemble’s sophomore release was painstakingly constructed over more than a year with the cooperation of some of the most progressive musical minds from a staggering variety of genres.

‘Psychic Temple II’ reaches beyond the long-form experiments of its predecessor for a more tightly focused yet conceptually unrestrained approach.

Schlarb also includes three cover songs by composers who share his boundary-demolishing mindset: Joe Jackson’s ‘Steppin’ Out’, Frank Zappa’s ‘Sofa No. 2’ and Brian Wilson’s ‘Til I Die’, a gorgeous, lesser-known Beach Boys song that features vocals by Sufjan Stevens, Ray Raposa (Castanets) and Nedelle Torrisi.

TRACK LISTING

Seventh House
The Starry King Hears Laughter
Solo In Place
Bird In The Garden
Til I Die
She Is The Golden World
Steppin’ Out
All I Want Is Time
Sofa No. 2
NO TSURAI
Hyacinth Thrash Quarter

A supercombo team-up between Simon Lord (ex Simian) and Rafter Roberts, the Roberts & Lord duo present their Asthmatic Kitty debut, ‘Eponymous’.

Roberts’ rough and grimy (yet complexly arranged) analog backing tracks paired with Lord's clean, digitally-recorded vocals gives these songs a tricky kind of depth that is immediately engaging. This effortless juxtaposition reigns throughout the album.

Influenced by nonsense verse poets like Ivor Cutler and Edward Lear, Lord gives us a simple, light-hearted return to innocence, the sweaty exuberance of a dance party with all your friends around you.

TRACK LISTING

1. Mosquito
2. Wild Berries
3. Bottom Of The Bottle
4. Windmill
5. Oblique
6. Knots
7. Menuhin
8. Purple Doves
9. We Rise, We Fall
10. Interior Demon
11. Spem
12. The Same Love

Helado Negro is Roberto Carlos Lange, sometime collaborator of Scott Herren in Savath & Savalas and occasional conspirator with Jaytram of Yeasayer.

Whilst his last full length, ‘Awe Owe’, was a Funkadelican mega-opus, this is a more personal beast, a solo affair built lovingly from live instruments, percussion, and field recordings, all processed through electronics, computers, and synthesizers. It is an album with very defined songs, its song-structure has been laboured over; choruses count bigtime, confident breakdowns and digi-pop bridges are all part and parcel of the greater good.

His voice recalls ‘China Girl’-era David Bowie; a relaxed and tropical Peter Gabriel (or even Peter Murphy).

TRACK LISTING

1. Globitos
2. Regresa
3. 2º Dia
4. Lechuguilla
5. Cenar En La Manana
6. El Oeste
7. Obra Uno
8. Oreja De Arena
9. Con Suerte
10. Calculas
11. Alcanzar

Continuing Asthmatic Kitty's penchant for an extremely diverse roster - rather than follow down the more, shall we say, abstract or experimental paths that some other recent artists have, Stephens delivers a true song-writers record. This is a lazy afternoon of a release, with beautiful vocals and melodies delivered over calm and tender acoustic, slightly country tinged, slightly jazzy backdrops. Its appeal is broad and its influences are myriad.

Fol Chen sound like Prince with Amon Duul II and a children's religious revival, not to mention Hot Chip, Pink Floyd, Gwen Stefani, Pere Ubu, Danielson Famile, Scritti Politti, Boards of Canada, The Blow and Pulp. Fol Chen features Samuel Bing, guitarist for The Liars, and appearances from Karin Tatoyan, Rafter, members of Castanets and Liars. Two of their songs have been featured in the major motion picture 'Noah's Arc: Jumping the Broom'. Fol Chen will also soon be heard via their remixes of High Places, Frightened Rabbit and No Kids. Cryptic and Joyful and Asking you to Dance.

Asthmatic Kitty Records presents "Achoo!" their second sampler of music released on the label – 27 tracks for the price of a CD single! Featuring songs from every artist on the label and spanning the entire breadth of the catalogue, this gives a concise and exciting introduction to one of the most interesting independent labels in operation today.

Green Water - The Curtains
Henney Buggy Band - Sufjan Stevens
High Life - Shapes And Sizes
Adventurers - Rafter
Eyes Peeled - Half-Handed Cloud
We Were Sparkling - My Brightest Diamond
Sold To The Nice Rich Man - Welcome Wagon
So Gentle Your Arms - Shannon Stephens
Poison & Snakes - Liz Janes
Strong Animal - Castanets
Twilight And Ghost Stories (excerpt) - Chris Schlarb
Year Of The Boar - Osso
Encouragement - Rafter
Say You Will - Cryptacize
Future Past Perfect - Future Rapper
Sampler Song - Rafter
Sailing The Veil-Boat - Half-Handed Cloud
Climbing Texas - Belltower
Christmas In July - Sufjan Stevens
Dancing With Someone (Privilege Of Everything) - Castanets
A Feast - Royal City
Goldenhead - Shapes And Sizes
Yes/No - Bunky
Quail - Half-Handed Cloud
Careless Love - Liz Janes & Create
Golden Star (Alias Remix) - My Brightest Diamond
As You Do - Castanets

Inspired by influences as diverse as Guided By Voices, R Stevie Moore, Fela Kuti, Lightning Bolt, Fushitsusha, Stevie Wonder, Paul Simon, and Cody Chestnutt, "Sex Death Cassette" is an album full of hope, determination and chaos. It'll leave you with sweat dripping down your face onto your swelled lip; fresh, liquid salt, the quintessential flavour of late night post-disco parties and booty slinging good times. After dancing to this album, you're heavy with it, like too much cough syrup on a stomach full of hi-quality sushi. Rafter executes the helter-skelter boogie-down production so gracefully that it is no mystery why those in-the-know recruit him, including the likes of Fiery Furnaces, The Rapture, Arab on Radar, The Album Leaf, Rocket from the Crypt, Danielson, Black Heart Procession, The Peppermints, Hot Snakes, his own band Bunky, and fellow Asthmatic Kitty artists (Castanets, Liz Janes, and Sufjan Stevens).

An album based on a Hindu fable about being trapped in an escapable fate, with death and the limitations of our physical lives closing in from all corners. "In The Vines" was written in the aftermath of a mugging, which was the climax of a year of depression and nomadic, nocturnal dislocation. But "In The Vines" is not all peril and darkness; the songs are sung with such intimacy and earnestness that it sways somewhere between the serpent, elephant, bees and rats, the honey representing a strange sense of hope and delight in the brief moments of beauty that sustain our lives. The record features guest appearances from Sufjan Stevens, Jana Hunter, Viking Moses and many others.

Shapes And Sizes return with their refined brand of experimental pop to create a cohesive, demanding and rewarding listen. Recorded with JC/DC Studios (Destroyer, New Pornographers) and mixed with Asthmatic Kitty's own Rafter Roberts (Fiery Furnaces, The Rapture) to forge a pristine decomposition. Don't turn it down – the overdrive provides the framework for equally aggressive lyrics that combine sensuality, violence and social critique. For fans of Fiery Furnaces, Deerhoof and Animal Collective.

Sufjan's last album, "Illinois" was originally conceived as a double album, culminating in a musical collage of nearly 50 songs. But as the project began to develop into an unwieldy epic, common sense weighed in – as did the opinions of others – and the project was cut in half. But as 2005 came to a close, Sufjan returned to the old, forsaken songs on his 8-track like a grandfather remembering his youth. Sufjan gleaned 21 useable tracks from the abandoned material, including three alternate versions of "Chicago". Some songs were in finished form, others were merely outlines, gesture drawings, or musical scribbles mumbled on a hand-held tape recorder. Most of the material required substantial editing, new arrangements or vocals. Much of the work was done at the end of 2005 or in January the following year. Sufjan invited many of the original Illinoisemakers to fill in the edges: drums, trumpet, a choir of singers. The centrepiece, of course, was the title track – "The Avalanche" – a song intended for the leading role on the "Illinois" album but eventually cut and placed as a bonus track on the vinyl release.

TRACK LISTING

The Avalanche
Super Computer
Adlai
Vivian
Chicago Acoustic
Henney Buggy
Saul Bellow
Carlyle
Springfield
Mistress
Kaskaskia River
Chicago AC
Inaugural Music
Your Land
Tornado
Pick Up
Perpetual Self
Pluto
Chicago OCD
Pittsfield
Undivided Self

Sufjan Stevens scales dusty prairies, steel factories, and two hundred years of history to produce his newest album "Illinois" on Rough Trade. Invoking the muse of poet Carl Sandburg (and the musical flourishes of Rodgers and Hammerstein), "Illinois" ushers in trumpets on parade, string quartets, female choruses and ambient piano scales arranged around Stevens' emerging falsetto. Whereas 2003s "Michigan" (the inaugural album of 'The 50 States' project) was rooted in memory, and 2004s "Seven Swans" was rooted in the spirit, "Illinois" is rooted in 'the world, in society, invention, civilisation, in disease, in death, in education, in business', says Stevens. And unlike "Seven Swans", Stevens surmounted the heights of "Illinois" solo, employing guest musicians but recording, engineering, and producing the album entirely on his own.

TRACK LISTING

Concerning The UFO Sighting Near Highland, Illinois
The Black Hawk War, Or, How To Demolish An Entire Civilization And Still Feel Good About Yourself In The Morning, Or, We Apologize For The Inconvenience But You’re Going To Have To Leave Now, Or, “I Have Fought The Big Knives And Will Continue To Fight Them Till They Are Off Our Lands!”
Come On! Feel The Illinoise! / Part I: The World’s Columbian Exposition / Part II: Carl Sandburg Visits Me In A Dream
John Wayne Gacy, Jr
Jacksonville
A Short Reprise For Mary Todd, Who Went Insane, But For Very Good  Reasons
Decatur, Or, Round Of Applause For Your Step-Mother!
One Last “Whoo-Hoo!” For The Pullman
Chicago
Casimir Pulaski Day
To The Workers Of The Rock River Valley Region, I have An Idea Concerning Your Predicament, And It Involves An Inner Tube, Bath Mats, And 21 Able-Bodied Men
The Man Of Metropolis Steals Our Hearts
Prairie Fire That Wanders About
A Conjunction Of Drones Simulating The Way In Which Sufjan Stevens Has An Existential Crisis In The Great Godfrey Maze
The Predatory Wasp Of The Palisades Is Out To Get Us
They Are Night Zombies!! They Are Neighbors!! They Have Come Back From The Dead!! Ahhhh!
Let’s Hear That String Part Again, Because I Don’t Think They Heard It All The Way Out In Bushnell 
In This Temple As In The Hearts Of Man For Whom He Saved The Earth
The Seer’s Tower
The Tallest Man, The Broadest Shoulders / Part I: The Great Frontier / Part II: Come To Me Only With Playthings Now
Riffs And Variations On A Single Note For Jelly Roll, Earl Hines, Louis Armstrong, Baby Dodds, And The King Of Swing, To Name A Few
Out Of Egypt, Into The Great Laugh Of Mankind, And I Shake The Dirt From My  Sandals As I Run