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FREE LOVE

DJ and producer Gratts returns to his own imprint with the third instalment of the "Balearic but bumpin'" trilogy. Here, the Belgian puts forward a captivating piece of organic, Body & Soul NY inspired deep house, assisted by Cata Mansikka-aho on vocals. As always, an instrumental is provided for maximum nightclub daydreaming. On the flipside, British duo Faze Action up the energy levels with an equally musical disco version that hits in all the right spots. Artwork once again by Mads Cooke.

TRACK LISTING

Rhythm Of Love
Rhythm Of Love (Daydreamin' Instrumental)
Rhythm Of Love (Faze Action Remix)

A Good Christian

I Love You / Free To Be Me

Another much-needed repress from Surfin In Kansas. This one hanged ten just under three years ago and has since become one bodacious and highly sought after slice of beach grooving joy.

"I Love You" samples The Gap Band's "Big Fun", extending the percussive breaks, doing away with all the smoochy vocal bits and upping the tempo jussst a tad before adding smatterings of extra piano goodness.

On side B, Johnny Bristol 's "Love No Longer Has A Hold On Me" is reduced to a dubbed out vox and hefty raregroove lick; the Strat part chiming away over a foundation shaking b-line and manly horns. A hefty slab of soul which is perfectly snipped and tucked by A Good Christian.

This repress won't hang around long - you have been warned! 


TRACK LISTING

A. I Love You
B. Free To Be Me

Free Love

Inside

    Free Love (FKA Happy Meals) and their music are a conscious study in duality: thumping live tracks and meditational mantras, pop songs and esoteric experiments, acoustic and electronic instrumentation, lyrics in French and English, the Masculine and the Feminine, all side-by-side. Paragons of the cross-pollinating Glasgow DIY scene, their rapturous psychedelic odysseys have been emanating from the city since 2013 via esteemed labels including Night School and Optimo Music. Free Love’s debut EP Luxury Hits was released in 2018 to much critical acclaim (“a groovy fever dream” – Line of Best Fit) and saw them shortlisted for the Scottish Album of the Year Award (Suzi and Lewis’s third SAY Award nomination in all, following two under the Happy Meals moniker). It was followed in 2019 by the mini-album Extreme Dance Anthems (“music to move both body and mind” – Clash). In 2018 Free Love released a limited-edition vinyl EP, written and recorded on the isle of Eigg as part of Lost Map’s V I S I T ▲ T I O N S residency programme – strengthening a long-standing kinship between the band and the label which has seen them perform live many times at Lost Map events on Eigg and elsewhere.

    It leads to the release on Lost Map in 2023 of Free Love’s latest opus INSIDE. Written and recorded at the band’s Glasgow home studio during and after the lockdowns of 2020-2021, and completed just before the birth of Lewis and Suzi’s son Echo in the summer of 2022, its 10 tracks of house-quaking acid pop, celestial drones and yogic devotionals are a by-turns banging and blissed-out meditation on life and death, community and seclusion, worlds both outwith and within. A song about “coming back to the centre after spiralling too far and recognising you’re not the only person wondering what’s going on”, ‘Open The Door’ reaches for the fresh silicon sound of Yellow Magic Orchestra. ‘Stop’ and ‘Golden Goose’ channel the space age pop dreams of Broadcast, while ‘Le Mirage’ and ‘Dans Le Noir’ take influence from 1970s electronic dance music pioneer Patrick Cowley – the former his gay porn movie soundtracks, the latter Cowley’s game-changing hi-NRG productions such as ‘Menergy’ and ‘Megatron Man’. Transportational seven-minute album closer ‘I Become’ sees Free Love borrow lyrics from the first track Lewis and Suzi ever recorded together, ‘Crystal Salutation’. “In doing, we become.”

    “The sounds and themes on INSIDE came from the experiments we started working on throughout lockdown in our home studio, FULL ASHRAM CELESTIAL GARDEN,” says Lewis. “Sometimes we’d leave a sound running on loop until little melodies would come in and then that would start to take the form of the track. It has been a weird time for anyone to be making anything creative – to make sense of any reason to it all, we had to position creating music as an essential ritualistic part of our daily existence. We used the studio as a portal and made INSIDE.”

    Free Love’s euphoric live show has seen them tour Europe, USA, India and Russia with the likes of The Flaming Lips, Liars and James Holden and The Animal Spirits, with Suzi often tearing through the audience centring the energy in the middle of the room over the live hardware electronics operated by Lewis from the stage turning into a ritualistic communal catharsis. As well as performing their debut Boiler Room live set from their home studio during lockdown, the band remixed music for Django Django and Charlotte Gainsbourg.


    STAFF COMMENTS

    Barry says: Woozy electronic stabs and rich scattered bass weave around lysergic floating vocals. Free Love present a perfect mix between euphoric synth-pop and darkened basement dancefloor grooves.

    TRACK LISTING

    Side A
    1. Le Mirage
    2. Open The Door
    3. Fight Or Flight
    4. All The Same To Me
    5. Golden Goose
    Side B
    1. Dans Le Noir
    2. Don’t Stop
    3. Stop
    4. It’s A Feeling
    5. I Become

    Cindy

    Free Advice - 2021 Reissue

      Tough Love have partnered with West Coast imprint Mt St Mtn for the release of Free Advice, the instant slowcore/dreampop classic by San Fran four piece, Cindy. The full album is available to stream/download now, while a highly limited transparent vinyl pressing will be released on 20th November. Limited to just 250 copies, this pressing follows the long sold-out edition of 100 released earlier in the year and which was previously only available in the US.

      Free Advice offers a somber-yet-uplifting take on sobered dream pop. Imagine if Galaxie 500’s On Fire didn’t have a guitar solo or if The Trinity Session was stripped of its folk & blues roots; it’s just pure mood. Like sitting in a half-empty movie theater that’s playing Alphaville or Wild Strawberries and watching patron’s heads briefly illuminated from the screen; Free Advice (and all of the Cindy output) transfers you to these momentary worlds.

      Cindy is Karina Gill on guitar/vocals, Aaron Diko on synth/keys, Simon Phillips on Drums/Percussion, and Jesse Jackson on Bass/Keys + Simon and Jesse on backing vocals. The songs on Free Advice are these moments in mood: Phillips & Jackson’s rhythms create the foundation, while Diko’s keys rise and fall. Gill’s guitar rattles, vocals brood, and lyrics create these narratives that depict observers, not necessarily wronged rather, cautious and investigative of the world around them. 

      TRACK LISTING

      1 Discount Lawyer
      2. Falcon Heavy
      3. Seeing Double
      4. Wrong Answer
      5. Song 23
      6. Fixed Idea
      7. A Song In French
      8. CSI: Creeptown
      9. April Magazine
      10. Free Advice
      11. Lost On Me

      Sylvan Esso

      Free Love

        What started out in LA with Jon Hill and was finished back in North Carolina at Sylvan Esso’s home studio, "Free Love" asks major questions about self-image, self-righteousness, friendship, romance, and environmental calamity with enough warmth, playfulness, and magnetism to make you consider an alternate reality. These are Sylvan Esso’s most nuanced and undeniable songs—bold enough to say how they feel, big enough to make you join in that feeling.

        TRACK LISTING

        1. What If
        2. Ring
        3. Ferris Wheel
        4. Train
        5. Numb
        6. Free
        7. Frequency
        8. Runaway
        9. Rooftop Dancing
        10. Make It Easy


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