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Shit Robot

Where It's At (Feat. Reggie Watts)

“Where It’s At” was originally released in 2015 as a one-off 12” - Reggie Watts on a Shit Robot track is occasion enough - and it has been burning a hole in the Internet’s Most Trusted Swap Meet ever since its initial run sold out. The a-side, an industrial-ish house track made hookier by Reggie’s vocal, is worth the price of admission, but it’s the b-side remix by Johnny Aux (Quinn Whalley of Paranoid London, Decius, Sworn Virgins, and many other assorted projects) that is the stuff of legend: raw, narcotic chug that will surely spill your marbles all over that dirty floor.

TRACK LISTING

Side A Shit Robot - Where It's At (feat. Reggie Watts)
Side B. Shit Robot - Where It's At (feat. Reggie Watts) (Johnny Aux Remix)

The Rapture

In The Grace Of Your Love - 2026 Reissue

Originally released in 2011 and ultimately the swan song of the band’s core lineup, In the Grace Of Your Love marked a reset for The Rapture and a welcome return to DFA, the label that helped them make their instantly seminal debut, Echoes. The momentum and success of those years led to a major label roller coaster ride that dumped them right back where they started, scars to show but now free to push beyond the boundaries of expectation.

Guiding them there was the late, great Philippe Zdar, one-half of French dance duo Cassius and producer for the likes of Phoenix and the Beastie Boys. Zdar’s enthusiasm and technical prowess are audible within the record’s first 30 seconds: “Sail Away” is the Rapture gone widescreen and radiant, a five-minute long exhale with disco drums.

There is, of course, plenty of fodder for the dance kids - “How Deep Is Your Love” still slams barroom dance floors in New York City, “Miss You” is a bit of irresistible minor-key mischief - but overall the feeling is one of slowing down, taking stock, searching for meaning and love in more right places than wrong.

Ergo, its finale: “It Takes Time To Be a Man,” a charmingly honest, piano-plonked song about taking responsibility and helping others. It sounds like absolutely nothing else in the Rapture’s catalog and yet also perfectly ends it. Credits roll, time goes on, records still mean everything.

TRACK LISTING

Side A
1. Sail Away
2. Miss You
3. Blue Bird

Side B
1. Come Back To Me
2. In The Grace Of Your Love

Side C
1. Never Die Again
2. Roller Coaster
3. Children

Side D
1. Can You Find A Way?
2. How Deep Is Your Love?
3. It Takes Time To Be A Man

RIP Magic

5words

RIP Magic have wasted no time. In their first year, they've been dubbed "London's buzziest band" by The Guardian, played big shows with LCD Soundsystem and Fcukers and tiny ones in London bars and restaurant basements, and now they finally release a physical single, produced by James Murphy, his first production for another band in over a decade.

"5words" builds slowly into a euphoric urban epic, sounding equally indebted to the Velvet Underground, Orbital, Echoes-era Rapture, and the Dean Blunt cinematic universe, and, honestly, Nirvana. It sounds like decades collapsing into the present, enabled by frictionless discovery and resolved through the simplest method: four people in a room searching for something new, something great, a good feeling.

The b-side features a remix by none other than Maurice Fulton, his first DFA credit since those Syclops records became instant classics in 2008. Maurice is one of the greatest remixers and producers of his era and architect of a sound so singular and identifiable that even all his pseudonyms can't fool the trainspotters. This one is just the type: thrillingly off-center and unavoidably banging.

TRACK LISTING

Side A
1. 5 Words
Side B
1. 5 Words (Maurice Fulton Remix)

JJULIUS

Vol. 3

In the discourse around new albums from singular, world-building artists, the phrase “a big step forward” can often be a blinking red warning sign. You know you’re about to be pulled somewhere new against your will. Inertia is a hell of a thing. It’s nice here. Surely, the party’s not over yet?

JJULIUS’ 'Vol. 3' album is a big step forward, or a step up, out of the murky basement of the preceding two volumes. There’s no time to acclimate. A spindly violin grabs you by the hand and pulls you into the pastoral bounce of 'Brinna ut', which, in spite of its meaning ('Burn out'), creates the kind of blind positivity and warm stomach feeling less cynical people might find in self-help seminars. For us, we have records like this. And, inertia be damned, 'Vol. 3' has charm like a balm.

JJULIUS records have always arrived like meteors from another planet, an impression hammered home by the fact that they’re titled like compendiums of artifacts. And while 'Vol. 1' and 'Vol. 2' carried that notable tinge of darkness, 'Vol. 3' has (almost!) cast that shadow, adding elements of disco ('Dödsdisco') and dream-pop ('Etopisk hallucination') to his forever favorites Arthur Russell, African Head Charge, and The Fall.

Some of that new car smell could be attributed to a change in process. Each song was written over beats played by Tor Sjödén of the wild-eyed Stockholm group Viagra Boys, beats that were themselves inspired by tracks from the likes of Patrick Cowley, CAN, Count Ossie, Black Devil Disco Club and others that Julius would send to him as inspiration.

Unless you’re Mark E. Smith, fervor fades. Eventually we all crave a lie down in some nice grass, a few minutes to gaze at the sky and wonder if everything is actually all that bad. 'Vol. 3' gives you 35 of those respiting minutes. “No looking back, no misery, no talking trash, no enemies.”

RIYL: Cindy Lee, Arthur Russell, Viagra Boys, On-U Sound.

TRACK LISTING

1. Brinna Ut
2. Etiopisk Hallucination
3. Letar Efter Nya Plågor
4. Köpa Saker
5. Verkligheten Och Jag
6. Balladen Om Elpriset I Augusti 2022
7. Coral Bass Strings
8. Dödsdisco
9. Ringer å Ringer
10. Välkommen På Intervju

Weeks Island

Droste

The Weeks Island project began in 2018 when, itching for something during a break from his gig playing guitar for the Grammy-winning Cajun group Lost Bayou Ramblers, Jonny Campos ventured to his bandmate’s house and recorded a series of deep, amoebic, ambient pedal steel passages across two afternoons. It wasn’t all heavy, though: he paid that bandmate, Kirkland Middleton, in Cane’s chicken strips.

The tracks on Droste are named for bodies of water that no longer exist, their names wiped from maps thanks to the disintegrating shorelines of Southern Louisiana. That feeling of impermanence hangs over this record - the tracks don’t so much begin and end as slip in and out of your consciousness. It can be a serene passive listen or a deep one that marinates long after the runout.

Droste originally appeared on Nouveau Electric Records, run by another Rambler, Louis Michot, in 2020, digitally and on cassette. DFA picked it up via an connection from LCD Soundsystem’s Korey Richey, and began a years-long process to cut the record to vinyl, a task made difficult by the sharp pedal steel and waves of harmonic distortion that color the music. After more than a few tries and the addition of three brand new tracks, Bob Weston at Chicago Mastering Service nailed it, and it was pressed beautifully at Furnace Record Pressing in Alexandria, VA.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Gorgeous plaintive lap steel, shimmering reverb and drifting, lysergic ambience. A true triumph and yet another amazing entry into the lexicon of modern American Primitivism.

TRACK LISTING

1. Point Fortuna
2. Racoon Island
3. Fleur Pond
4. Bayou La Chute
5. Cyprien Bay
6. Yellow Cotton Bay
7. Locust Pond
8. Grace Pond

Various Artists

DFA Compilation #2

First time available on final! New York's ultra-cool and totally brilliant DFA (Death From Above) label bring us a second round up of all their twelves following on from "Compilation #1". Included are two discs of awesome punk-funk bombs from JOY, The Rapture, LCD Soundsystem and a first ever DFA-Liquid Liquid collaboration "Bellhead" (soooo good!), or more electronic and electro-punk outings from The Juan Maclean, Pixeltan, Delia Gonzalez, Black Leotard Front and Black Dice. The third disc features a DJ-mixed selection by Tim Sweeney and Tim Goldsworthy. You need this!!

“What could have been a mere anthology of the label's uniformly excellent 2004 output is, additionally, a meticulously assembled personal narrative. This is a label that balances its musical and commercial aspirations with an earthy, no-bullshit disposition and - let's say it - the world's best fucking handclaps.” - Nick Sylvester, Pitchfork, in the heady days of 2004.

Behold, "Compilation #2". A compendium what are arguably the best prime-era DFA cuts, mostly all recorded and/or remixed at the old DFA Studios on W. 13th Street (with some notable exceptions), released as 12-inches at the time, and then compiled onto a 3xCD set for convenience because, at the time, people actually bought CDs more than vinyl.

Now, in the spirit of time not really being much of a linear thing anymore, and for our own selfish desire to have this version of Liquid Liquid’s “Bellhead,” produced by the DFA, finally committed to wax, we have reverse engineered this thing back onto vinyl and presented it as a four-record boxed set.

We went back and found the master tapes or files for each song - a not insignificant effort given our habit of disorganization. We then rather painstakingly resequenced and remastered it with the guy we trust with such things: Bob Weston at Chicago Mastering Service. The lacquers Bob cut were plated and pressed at what we believe to be one of the best pressing plants in the country: QRP in Salina, Kansas.

We tell you all of this to say: we took this shit pretty seriously. Because we felt like it was important and because we felt like some folks would really appreciate it. It sounds remarkable. It looks great. (Rob Carmichael re-did the original packaging, adding a new photo from DFA OG Tim Saccenti from one of the original parties at W. 13th St.) Of course, we somehow can’t stop ourselves from making labeling errors - Pixeltan’s “That’s the Way I Like It” somehow escaped the center labels on the fourth record. It’s kind of the DFA curse. Has to be!

TRACK LISTING

A1. Black Leotard Front - Casual Friday
B1. J.O.Y. - Sunplus (DFA Remix)
B2. The Juan MacLean - I Robot
B3. The Juan MacLean - Dance Hall Modulator Dub
C1. Delia Gonzalez & Gavin Russom - Rise (DFA Remix)
C2. Black Dice - Wasteder
C3. J.O.Y. - Sunplus
D1. LCD Soundsystem - Yeah (Pretentious Version)
D2. The Rapture - Sister Saviour (DFA Dub)
E1. Liquid Liquid - Bellhead
E2. LCD Soundsystem - Yeah (Crass Version)
F1. Delia Gonzalez & Gavin Russom - El Monte
F2. The Rapture - Alabama Sunshine
G1. Pixeltan - Get Up : Say What (DFA Remix)
G2. LCD Soundsystem - Beat Connection (Extended Disco Dub)
H1. Pixeltan - That’s The Way I Like It
H2. Black Dice - Endless Happiness (EYE Remix)
H3. The Juan MacLean - Less Than Human

The Juan Maclean return to DFA with a compilation LP of 12-inch singles they’ve amassed over the past six years – re-edited, re-mastered, and ready for fans who may have missed the tracks the first time around. From the dub house sway of 2013’s “You Are My Destiny” to the high-energy stomp of this May’s “Zone Non Linear,” and featuring two never-before-released tracks, “Quiet Magician” and “Pressure Danger,” The Juan Maclean once again justify their longevity as a musical force that is more than capable of repurposing club tracks for every setting.

The Brighter The Light is put together in a way that lends itself to appreciating the sheer banging quality of the songs while simultaneously being able to dance to them in your living room. For example, take “Feel Like Movin,’” which Pitchfork called “gloriously beatific” and “pure DFA gold.” In the new remastered version, the fullness of the keys and the kicks takes over, unfurling across the listener. Deep house rhythms, sparkling synths and a certain spaciousness are what’s emphasized across the record. Gone is the slow-motion melancholy disco from their recent full-lengths – The Brighter The Light is all fierce enthusiasm and dance floor missives, perfect for those who aren’t quite ready to let go of summer.

Juan Maclean is a DJ and producer who has been a mainstay of the New York club scene, as well as maintaining a rigorous international touring schedule, since the release of his first records on DFA in 2002. Vocalist Nancy Whang is his longtime collaborator, best known as a founding member of LCD Soundsystem and a busy touring DJ. Together, the two artists have released an extensive catalogue of 12” singles and full-length albums for DFA, including 2014’s seminal In A Dream LP. The proper follow-up studio album will follow in 2020.

TRACK LISTING

1 What Do You Feel Free About?
2 Zone Non Linear
3 You Are My Destiny
4 Get Down (With My Love)
5 Feel Like Movin'
6 Quiet Magician
7 Pressure Danger
8 Can You Ever Really Know Somebody
9 The Brighter The Light

I've never met him, but I'm fairly certain Eric Copeland is a total lunatic. Don't get me wrong, he dealt in the deranged during his time in Black Dice, but since going solo on our ass, the NYC musician has disappeared through the looking glass. Wrong speed brain mulch, queasy tape loops, jacking perx, all brought together with the same narcotic glee you find at the heart of the darkweb.
This time out Eric delivers "Trogg Modal Vol. 2" pushing his 'Freakbeat 4/4' envelope further than ever before. Self-described as “late Night Flight proto tekno,” the tracks pulse with thick layers of percussion, melodic fever dreams, and riffs wrung through a taffy puller.
Opener "Beat It" is less a reference to a lately disgraced child molesting popstar, and instead a slamming combo of girthy bass and kick, red lining hats and overlapping synth work - generally as demented as it is danceable. "High Score Zed" scoots down the coin slot of a Jamaican arcade game, blasting out a high speed hybrid of digi-dancehall and 8-bit funk, while "United Banana" slides a morbidly obese bass sound under dreamy pads and crashing cymbals for some unorthodox house bizz. A-side closer "Pay Off" is optimistic, off kilter and kinda nonsensical in the best way possible - play this and put your lampshade on your head. Over on the flipside "BS Dropout" stomps and squelches like Krang in a washing machine, "Light Fantastic" flips e-funk and new wave into a new form of drug addled wrongness (Super intense!) and "Blazin" sounds like Mr Fingers after 7 bottles of cough syrup. Last but not least "Falo" picks up the videogame vibe, recreating a Sonic in the labyrinth ambiance but with way more bitrate. Top notch weirdshit from my favourite experimentalist.


TRACK LISTING

01. Beat It
02. High Score Zed
03. United Banana
04. Pay Off
05. BS Dropout
06. Light Fantastic
07. Blazin
08. Falo

Planningtorock

Powerhouse

After four years, Berlin-via-Bolton dance producer Planningtorock, aka Jam Rostron, returns to DFA with "Powerhouse". The album is a personal reflection, told via an avant-pop musical narrative that serves as a path to making peace with their family, hometown, and the ever-changing nature of identity. Written and recorded across Berlin, London, New York and Los Angeles,  ‘Powerhouse’ comes couched in the precision-tooled synths that have become Rostron’s signature, though critics and fans will hear a subtle, ear worm-y shift in style here: from the Noughties US R&B swagger of ‘Transome’ and the bubbling old school 90s house of ‘Beulah Loves Dancing’ and ‘Non Binary Femme’, to the funky, flute-laced ‘Much To Touch’ (the only track on ‘Powerhouse’ to feature a co-producer, long-time friend and collaborator Olof Dreijer of The Knife). Ultimately, ‘Powerhouse’ is a celebration of liberation, a groove-filled record that sees Rostron consolidating power both personal and artistic.

TRACK LISTING

Wounds
Transome
Dear Brother
Somethings More Painful Than Others
Much To Touch
Jam Of Finland
Non Binary Femme
Piece Of My Mind
Beulah Loves Dancing
Powerhouse

"GT Ultra" is the second full length album by Guerilla Toss on DFA Records. The album demonstrates a remarkable shift in sound, musicianship and songwriting, without ever giving up the remarkable unhinged quality that made their earlier recordings so exciting. The album title "GT Ultra" is a clever nod to Project MK Ultra, the government sponsored experiments using new experimental drugs to explore mind control, torture and forced confessions, often with LSD as their drug of choice. These tests lasted from the mid-1950s-1960s but with a new administration in the White House, government sponsored torture is fresh again on many minds. The songs on the album ricochet back and forth between hyper bouncy pop and deeper darker longer, more nuanced tracks. Peter Negroponte’s drumming, always a major highlight for the band, is in full force once again, this time bringing a Nassau / Compass Point feel to many tracks, like the classic recordings of Grace Jones and Talking Heads. Kassie’s vocals and lyrics are both more personal and more cryptic than ever (but you can hear every word this time and there is a lyric sheet). As preferred, the meaning is within the listener. It is a dream state record for sure, meant to take you along on a similar vibe that the band has been tripping on these past few years, filled with an insistence to “hydrate, gyrate, think straight, no weight,” all the while under the influence of golden beams of orange sunshine, glimmering glitter and kaleidoscopic bursts.

Adding to the authenticity, the album is wrapped in vintage blotter acid, created by legendary LSD archivist and artist Mark McCloud and The Institute Of Illegal Images, based in Francisco.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: A visceral and heavy-hitting mash-up of worldy psychedelia, funked-up soaring electronica and swirling cosmic freak-outs. Brilliantly innovative, eminently satisfying groovers.

TRACK LISTING

Betty Dreams Of Green Men
Can I Get The Real Stuff
Crystal Run
TV Do Tell
The String Game
Skull Pop
Dog In The Mirror
Dose Rate

DFA hit us up with  "Echo", the first album for the label from acclaimed Norwegian avant garde pop vocalist Nils Bech. A busy stage actor and singer already well known in his native Norway for three albums released on Oslo’s Fysisk Format, "Echo" marks a pivotal turning point for Bech and something of a radical sonic departure too. The keys to this change lie with Bech’s new collaborator, the young underground DJ, producer and beat maker Drippin’, known for his work with American rap artists such as LE1F and Cakes Da Killa. As a result, where his previous work was strange, ethereal and otherworldly - completely and utterly unique - ‘Echo’ throbs with a renewed sense of vigour and urgency, without losing any of the idiosyncratic beauty which marked Bech’s work before. 


TRACK LISTING

Waiting
Too Little Too Late
Glimpse Of Hope
Please Stay
Drip, Drip
Let Go
Echo
Jealousy
A Sudden Sickness

Panagiotis Melidis started writing music as Larry Gus (λάρυγγας [larigas], Greek for larynx) in 2006, after his previous band, the bass and drums duo Ginger, parted ways. Initially his music combined sample-based constructions and psychedelic pop melodies, merged into an infinitely dense amount of layers and polyrhythms. He soon became known for his energetic and chaotic improvised live performances that involve intricate layering of vocals, drums, and electronics… along with lively stage banter.

On his new DFA album, "I Need New Eyes" (a title inspired by a Marcel Proust misquotation), moving slowly out of his sample-based roots and using clearer songwriting structures as his starting point, he stares intensively into his obsessions, anxieties and inadequacies, namely failure, humiliation, subservience, submission, and comparisons with other musicians’ careers, always through the prism of a provincial outsider.


TRACK LISTING

1. Black Veil Of Fail
2. NP Complete
3. A Set Of Replies
4. Taking The Personal Away
5. Belong To Love
6. All Graphs Explored
7. The Sun Describes
8. Nazgonya (Paper Spike)

Delia Gonzalez

In Remembrance

DFA Records are proud to announce the release of "In Remembrance", a multimedia project by acclaimed contemporary artist Delia Gonzalez. The project originated as a 2010 solo show of the same name at Galleria Fonti in Naples, Italy, and was further realized in 2012, with additional work, as part of the exhibition I Must Not Stop To Rest Here in Cologne, Germany. The project was further exhibited in Zurich. Both exhibitions were built around four 16mm ballet dance films, accompanied by the music composed by Gonzalez. In her words, “The film is meant to re-create the fleeting sensation of inspiration - that sacred feeling when suddenly your mind clears and you know exactly what you’re meant to create and become.”

The original piano score was initially inspired by a text by Henry Miller as well as a theory by spiritual teacher George Gurdjieff, which states that “to play scales is to become more in tune with your inner self.” This coincided conceptually with the music that Delia had been making at the time.

Musically, 'In Remembrance' finds Delia Gonzalez again straddling the lines drawn between the fine art and pop worlds. This time, instead of the cosmic, arpeggiated synths of 'The Days of Mars', we are presented with something even more beautiful. The music is immediately soothing and hypnotic, yet it also maintains a sinister undertone. Suspense and tension are expressed in a deceptively simple fashion, providing a soundtrack both mesmerizing and melancholy for the dancers in the film. Delicate layers of piano wind around each other, reflected in the mirrored motions of the dancers, filmed in leering close-ups. The four compositions combine to create a 30 minute avant-classical suite, bringing to mind Satie, or something plucked from Italy’s iconic Cramps Records in the seventies (John Cage’s Cheap Imitation is an reasonable comparison), or perhaps an alternate score to the arthouse horror film Don’t Look Back by Nicolas Roeg.

The the album also features remixes by live collabator Bryce Hackford. Bryce takes Delia’s exquisite piano score and loops, stretches, and consolidates it. There’s a range of treatments at play here - some pieces are layered with gauzy left-field electronic pulses while Track IV get a 4/4 dancefloor makeover, recommended to fans of both classic Detroit techno and newer left-field stars such as Actress. Asked to briefly discuss his mission statement in creating these remixes, Bryce simply stated that he wished that his remixes “maintain the hypnotic and simple beauty of the originals while opening them up to new spaces.”.

CD and double LP formats include a DVD featuring ballet performances set to the music of "In Remembrance".

For fans of Nils Frahm, Kiasmos, Hauschka, Philip Glass, A Winged Victory For The Sullen.

TRACK LISTING

I
II
III
IV
Remix I
Remix II
Remix III
Remix IV


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