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I Heard That Noise

    Graham Jonson is drawn to the comforts of melody and noise. How the two conspire in tension, tonally and atonally, stirring up memory and mood. This quality animates the technicolor world of quickly, quickly, the psych-pop project that emanates from Kenton Sound, his basement studio in Portland, Oregon. “Everywhere your eye lands, there’s another curio to marvel over,” noted Pitchfork’s Philip Sherburne when he visited Jonson’s recording space for a Rising feature just after the release of his “strikingly original” 2021 debut LP, 'The Long and Short of It'. Since then, Jonson formed alive band, released his 'Easy Listening' EP in 2023,and navigated the up-and-downs of a young musician, the sustainability of tours and relationships.

    While shaped by personal bouts and fallouts, his highly-anticipated full-length follow-up finds Jonson making music that’s universal, open-ended, and rewarding, like great songwriters can do. He set out to make a folk album but couldn’t help coloring it in with noise; a confluence of lush instrumentation and unexpected sounds. Ambitious yet intimate, hi-fi yet homespun, the idiosyncratic songs on 'I Heard That Noise' curve around the contours of everyday life with warmth, wit, and dissonance.

    TRACK LISTING

    1. I Heard That Noise
    2. Enything
    3. Take It From Me
    4. This House
    5. This Room
    6. Beginning Band Day One
    7. I Punched Through The Wall
    8. Hero
    9. Raven
    10. Drawn Away
    11. You Are

    Goya Gumbani

    Warlord Of The Weejuns

      In his label debut on Ghostly International, Brooklyn-born, South London-based artist Goya Gumbani redefines his recording project with rich, full-band arrangements, crossing London's new jazz generation with New York City's hip-hop storytelling legacy. Warlord of the Weejuns is a triumph of taste, heritage, and pride from one of rap music's most dexterous talents. Guests include Fatima, lojii, Seafood Sam, and Yaya Bey. London-based Swedish soul singer Fatima appears in two singles; first, there's "Firefly," a cosmic R&B groove that captures the rawness of a recent breakup. "Fatima came and just laid the hook, and I was like, damn, you're embodying how I'm feeling," says Goya, who built it out with contributions from Swarvy, Omari Jazz, Les Lockheart, and his Ghostly labelmate quickly, quickly.

      TRACK LISTING

      1. Weejuns (intro) Ft. Will Stowe
      2. Beautiful BLACK
      3. One Hand Washes The Other Ft. Lojii
      4. Crossroad(s)
      5. Negroni (Skit)
      6. FireFly Ft. Fatima
      7. Nothin’ To Say
      8. UPtown Mami (Skit)
      9. Manuva(s) Ft. Joe Armon-Jones
      10. Driftin’ Interlude Ft. Pearl De Luna
      11. Chase The Sunrise Ft. Yaya Bey, Lojii, Fatima
      12. First Dates
      13. Quiz Interlude Ft. Salimata
      14. Lizards / Dancin' With The Devil Ft. Jaydon Clover & The Hotel
      15. Mind, Body, Spirit Ft. Seafood Sam
      16. FOREVER POOH

      Whatever The Weather

      Whatever The Weather II

        Across a remarkable run of releases in barely half a decade, London’s Loraine James has established her identity through a blend of refined composition, gritty experimentation, and unpredictable, intricate electronic programming. While titles released under her given name on Hyperdub tend toward IDM-influenced, vocal-heavy collaborations, James reserves her Ghostly International-signed alias, Whatever The Weather, for an inward gaze that explores innate “emotional temperature” and environment (shown in degree-based track titling).

        Her second full-length is a markedly warmer outing compared to its predecessor, as signaled by the shift from LP1’s arctic cover photo to LP2’s desert climes. Common to both albums is the mastering work of friend and collaborator Josh Eustis(aka Telefon Tel Aviv), who lends his keen ear to James’ complexities to craft a strikingly three-dimensional sonic experience. Flowing from hypnotic atmospheres to mottled rhythms to processed collages of diaristic field recordings, 'Whatever The Weather II' is a compelling union of organic and human elements from one of electronic music’s most imaginative talents.

        The lead single and closing track to Whatever The Weather’s(Loraine James) new LP, '12°C', drifts from bustling human spaces into a concrete groove, weaving melody and texture into a truly unusual, soul-stirring fullness. In its final moments, a languid acoustic guitar and gentle, finger-tapped beat join her pitch-shifted voice. 'Whatever The Weather II' is full of such passages, where formal composition appears like a film in negative, and conventions are upturned with wit, intelligence, and skill.


        TRACK LISTING

        1. 1°C
        2. 3°C
        3. 18°C
        4. 20°C
        5. 23°C (Intermittent Sunshine)
        6. 5°C
        7. 8°C
        8. 26°C
        9. 11°C (Intermittent Rain)
        10. 9°C
        11. 15°C
        12. 12°C

        HTRK

        Marry Me Tonight - 2025 Reissue

          HTRK step into their 21st year on reflective terms, launching a series of collaborations, covers/remixes, installations, and performances alongside the new repress of their full-length debut, 'Marry Me Tonight'. First released in 2009 via Blast First Petite, the album saw its first vinyl pressing in 2015 via Ghostly International and has since been out of stock.

          Few groups in history elevate mood to such singular, smoldering supremacy as the Australian duo of Jonnine Standish and Nigel Yang, aka HTRK (or "hate rock" if informed). Across two decades of work and wounds, HTRK’s sound has shape-shifted between densities and intensities, noise and nakedness, but never wavered in its delicate poetic gravity. In HTRK’s sound world, cavernous reverberations of dub techno are mixed with frosted post-punk motifs and the gravelly imperfections of industrial, reimagined in the setting of a dingy basement.

          Like all HTRK albums, 'Marry Me Tonight' was singular in sound and circumstance. It's the only album the outfit recorded from start to finish as a trio, and it's the only HTRK record that bears the co-production stamp of Rowland S. Howard. Breathy, caustic, and rife with contradiction, 'Marry Me Tonight' took the raw material recorded on 2005's 'Nostalgia' and transformed it into a pop record — pop that buckled and warped beneath the glare of Howard, fellow producer Lindsay Gravina, and the HTRK trio: Jonnine Standish, Nigel Yang and Sean Stewart. Howard died at the end of 2009; Stewart died the year after. Things would never be the same. The band would carry on and reach new heights despite it all, but as a trio, this is their definitive document.

          TRACK LISTING

          1. Ha
          2. Rent Boy
          3. Your Mistress Turns To Dust
          4. Kiss Before The Fall
          5. Waltz Real Slow
          6. Panties
          7. She’s Seventeen
          8. Fascinator
          9. Disco

          Studio

          West Coast - 2025 Reissue

            Some called Studio, the project of Swedish musicians Dan Lissvik and Rasmus Hägg, “the missing link between The Cure and Lindstrøm,” Pitchfork heard Durutti Column and Can, as the duo’s story became swept up in a loosely developing scene — adjacent first to the label Service (Jens Lekman, The Whitest Boy Alive) and later Sincerely Yours (The Tough Alliance, jj) — and a precursor to the 2010s boom at the axis of electronic and psychedelic music guided by indie greats like Caribou, Four Tet, and Darkside.

            'West Coast', their seminal 2006 debut, captured a faraway romanticism of Balearic brushed up against Krautrock, disco, dub, and afrobeat, with pop lyricism lifted from new wave, all made modern by two art school grads in Gothenburg. First pressed in a small vinyl-only run via their own Information label, the album has been notably absent from most streaming services, and the internet’s record of its initial impact is all but fossilized from a bygone blog era, while its sound is simply untraceable to any one moment in music.

            Outside of three 7” releases, they’d keep the music to themselves for several more years. In 2005, Hägg remembers, “We got our degrees and were kicked out of our studio spaces so all these recordings were just piled up. A year later we dusted them off and started to deconstruct and assemble them in a more drawn-out fashion.” In the same breadth, they cite DJ Screw, J Dilla, and Joy Division, along with early ‘80s European live DJ sets from the likes of Beppe Loda, Dj Mozart, and Baldelli as reference points. “The anything-goes mentality was very encouraging and was a big cornerstone to the Studio sound,” says Hägg. “But there’s so much more to the picture, we were not that young then and had lots of musical baggage in our suitcases, the new thing was that we finally let it all come through, not bound by any borders that was often the case with music identity in Sweden during the 90s.”

            In the afterglow of the record’s 2007 reception, Studio receded from view, clouded behind a mountain of remix requests (including one for Kylie Minogue that saw release) and label bureaucracy. “It’s easy to wish we would have done some proper recordings of our own instead,” Hägg reflects. But both artists, now well into respective careers beyond Studio, have come to peace with West Coast as their most enduring effort together. Lissvik adds, “It serves as a good reminder for me to keep to that decision and promise and to continue exploring and growing.

            TRACK LISTING

            1. Out There
            2. West Coast
            3.Origin
            4. Life’s A Beach!
            5. Self Service
            6. Indo

            Matthew Dear

            Black City (Ghostly 25 Year Anniversary Edition)

              Released in 2010, nearly a decade into his craft, Black City was a watershed moment for Matthew Dear. A steely noir set that straddled electronic dance and indie rock classification, earning him Best New Music from Pitchfork and a worldwide tour with a besuited band, the album unlocked Dear's darkest and most engrossing ideas to date. The love-obsessed songwriter of 2007's Asa Breed had given way to a more existentially paranoid entity. Creeping disco tempos, cavernous atmospherics, and strange distortions brought his signature avant-pop sound to a moodier place. Black City wasn't to be found on any map. It was a composite, an imaginary metropolis peopled by desperate cases, lovelorn souls, and amoral motives, with flashes of sweetness and hope.

              In Black City, nothing is at it seems: leadoff single "Little People (Black City)" is a nine-and-a-half minute disco odyssey, subverting its gleaming electronic lead with eerily giddy backing vocals and cryptic, ominous lyrics ("a frozen wasted heart / has died", "love me like a clown"); "You Put a Smell on Me" is a sordid sex romp set to hysterically chattering percussion and a serrated synth line that will set your teeth on edge; "More Surgery" at first recalls the barely-there Krautrock of Harmonia in its burbling minimalism, until Dear's chanted chorus of "Alter genetics / to make my body glow / I need more surgery / there's so much more to know" sends the track hurtling into a dystopian future.

              And yet, for all the foreboding moods on Black City, it's the album's sweeter moments that illustrate Matthew Dear's growing maturity as a songwriter. "Slowdance" is a futuristic lullaby in which Dear articulates a lover's helplessness ("I can't be the one to tell you everything's wrong") over breathy, Arthur Russell-esque cello swishes; the album-closing "Gem" is an achingly simple, reverb-drenched piano ballad that ends with a long, slow fade.
              "...it's not too surprising when Dear takes Reznor's ‘Closer’ pulse out for a moonless 4 a.m. test drive on ‘You Put a Smell on Me.’ With Black City, Dear offers a precisely thought-out guide to losing your mind.”
              - in Pitchfork’s Top 50 Albums of 2010

              Matthew Dear toured Black City worldwide with a full band, presenting a unique crossover between electronic and indie circles, landing support tours with Depeche Mode, Hot Chip, Interpol, and later, MGMT.

              Matthew Dear's work traverses myriad musical worlds while belonging to none; he also helped shape the sound of Ghostly's dancefloor offshoot, Spectral Sound, with several releases under his techno alias Audion and DJ Mixes for DJ-Kicks, Fabric, and more.

              Dear has collaborated with Tegan and Sara, The Drums, Protomartyr, and Ricardo Villalobos and released remix projects with Spoon, Charlotte Gainsbourg, The Postal Service, and MGMT.

              TRACK LISTING

              1. Honey
              2. I Can’t Feel
              3. Little People (Black City)
              4. Slowdance
              5. Soil To Seed
              6. You Put A Spell On Me
              7. Shortwave
              8. Monkey
              9. More Surgery
              10. Gem

              Kate Bollinger

              Songs From A Thousand Frames Of Mind

                With her proper full-length debut, Songs From A Thousand Frames Of Mind, Virginia-born, LA-based songwriter Kate Bollinger redefines and refines her craft with intention. Inspired by pop, rock, and folk songs of the 1960s, Bollinger and her band — including collaborators Jacob Grissom, Adam Brisbin, Matthew E. White, and Sam Evian — favor the eclectic, melodic, and majestic, supporting intimate, stream-of-consciousness lyricism with classic instrumentation. It's a collection of pop songs, polished yet scrappy with an underlying punk spirit, navigating life, relationships, and growing up. The release follows a run of singles since her 2022 record on Ghostly International, lauded by the likes of NPR and The Fader, contributions to friend's projects (Drugdealer, Paul Cherry), and tours with Faye Webster, Liz Phair, Devendra Banhart, and others.

                TRACK LISTING

                01. What’s This About (La La La La)
                02. To Your Own Devices
                03. Any Day Now
                04. God Interlude
                05. Lonely
                06. Running
                07. In A Smile
                08. Postcard From A Cloud
                09. I See It Now
                10. Sweet Devil
                11. All This Time

                Casey MQ

                Later That Day, The Day Before, Or The Day Before That

                  "Remembering is not the opposite of forgetting," Casey MQ sings at the start of Later that day, the day before, or the day before that, his new LP and Ghostly International debut. It's a phrase fittingly misremembered from something the LA-based, Canadian-born composer came upon as he spiraled into unconscious and subconscious-led writing sessions at the piano. Casey’s known for his 2020 breakthrough release babycasey, which gave voice to songs seen through the lens of childhood, various film score work and collaborations with artists such as Oklou (who returns here), Eartheater, and Vagabon. His gifts as a producer and songwriter are rooted in textural world-building and the excavation of personal truth. With Later that day... he questions what is true entirely, understanding our mind's tendency to bend and project onto pictures of the past. Across vivid, baroque pop balladry, Casey MQ reorients his recording project and point of view under the notion that memories are malleable. All the joy, pain, love, and loss housed within remembrance is open to interpretation and deconstruction, which he does deftly, with curiosity and complete artistic freedom.

                  "It's a memory album," Casey puts it simply, winding up for the deeper unpacking, "and it might be a breakup album, too...there are more questions than answers." Engaging his dreams and sitting with sheet music at his newly acquired piano, he looked to new and old inspirations including the works of Claude Debussy, Joni Mitchell, and Joe Hisaishi's beloved Studio Ghibli film scores. "Since I was young, I always wanted to write a piano album." babycasey's studied electronic sound isn't wholly abandoned on Later that day... instead, it comes through like an atmosphere, giving Casey's more spacious, minimal arrangements a distinct luster and sheen. The textures and tones shift from song to song as if mirroring the way our minds constantly recontextualize, remember, and forget.

                  Cathartic opener "Grey Gardens" — its title derived from a dream abstractly related to the Toronto restaurant, but not the 1975 film, which he cites as another coincidental false memory — presents the record's plaintive, haunted feeling. "Even if not reading into lyrics, sonically I wanted it to feel like you're being pulled into a universe. Not fantasy or otherworldly per se, something more tangible, of the body and mind,” Casey says. “Hearing it back, I realized this track was the key to unlocking it." His tender falsetto hovers above ambient washes and echoed keys, each word falling carefully in the crevices. "Asleep At The Wheel" unfolds on arpeggiated synth before a burst of symphonic color; the synth returns inverted to harmonize with the outro, "I love a car crash, I love a story, I love a memory, I swear it's real..."

                  Casey leans into digital imagination on the warm, introspective "Me I Think I Found It." Subdued, stuttered percussion underscores the singer as he cycles through pixelated imagery — screenshots, smiles, streetlights — searching for higher meaning through love. Built on ascendent chord distortions, "Dying Til I'm Born" gives the record one of its boldest pulses of emotion. The back half stretches out; "Is This Only Water" is sparse and foggy, "Baby Voice" is intimate and desperate for something to remain. "Words For Love" grooves on guitar, and "Tennisman9" aches in heartbreak. French musician Marylou Mayniel, aka Oklou, appears as the collection’s only guest for the closing duet, "The Make Believe," a bright and buoyant send-off that gives Later that day... both a sense of resolve and cyclical-motion. "We are young, under the sun," they sing together, a parting image brimming with lightness.

                  TRACK LISTING

                  01. Grey Gardens
                  02. Asleep At The Wheel
                  03. Me, I Think I Found It
                  04. Dying 'Til I'm Born
                  05. Is This Only Water
                  06. See You Later
                  07. Baby Voice
                  08. Words For Love
                  09 Tennisman9
                  10. The Make Believe (feat. Oklou)

                  Tycho

                  Awake - 10th Anniversary Edition

                    What we said about the album on it's initial release:

                    For over a decade, Tycho has been known as the musical alias of Scott Hansen, but with the release of Awake – his second LP for Ghostly International – the solo project evolved into a three-piece band. Relating closer to post-rock than ambient soundscapes, the record is situated in the present, sounding more like Hansen than drawing from his influences. This is, in many ways, the first true Tycho record.

                    Following 2011’s Dive LP, the San Francisco-based designer toured extensively, and with a full band on stage, his sound coalesced into a percussive, organic whole. Zac Brown (guitars, bass) rejoined Scott on the road for this tour, but it was the particular addition of Rory O’Connor’s live drumming that ultimately sent Hansen back to the studio with a more precise vision. “After the tour, I decided that I wanted to capture the more energetic, driven sound of the live show on the next album,” Hansen recalls. Bringing musicians into Tycho’s creative process was a step towards expanding his own songwriting and advancing the project beyond its current sound.

                    In a cabin near Tahoe last winter, Zac and Scott began fleshing out the structure of the new record, but it wasn’t until they set up shop in the hills of Santa Cruz with Rory that it all fell into place. “It crystallized the vision of how the drums would come to the forefront on this record,” says Hansen. The sound was much more stripped-down and concise with more organic instruments in the fold. Songs like “Montana” and “Awake” are a departure from Tycho’s previous material – unique to the group effort poured into the songs on the new record – while “See” and “Dye” echo ideas from previous works, bridging a middle ground between the old and new. Working with Count Eldridge, who also engineered Dive, the team could fixate on the pulses that Tycho might previously layer under synthesizers and exhume them with distinct bass and guitar patterns.

                    Also known for his design work as ISO50, Hansen’s visual and sonic efforts have dovetailed throughout the course of his career. “This is the first time in my life I've dropped everything to focus on one artistic pursuit,” notes Hansen. Previous Tycho releases came to fruition when an amalgam of songs were nearing completion, but Awake is where music becomes the focus and true expression becomes the result.

                    TRACK LISTING

                    1. Awake
                    2. Montana
                    3. L
                    4. Dye
                    5. See
                    6. Apogee
                    7. Spectre
                    8. Plains

                    Lusine

                    Long Light

                      Seattle-based producer Jeff McIlwain, aka Lusine, returns with his 9th full-length record, Long Light, marking twenty years since he first joined the Ghostly International roster. A cited influence for myriad electronic artists including London’s Loraine James and others, Lusine is known for visceral, kinetically-curious music that fuses techno, pop, and experimental composition. In recent years, McIlwain has pushed his craft skyward with more collaborative, song-forward work. Long Light shines the throughline; his signature looping patterns and textures are dynamic yet minimalist as ever. Structurally straightforward, tight, and bright, the material radiates as the most direct in his catalog, featuring vocal contributions from Asy Saavedra, Sarah Jaffe, and Sensorimotor collab- orators Vilja Larjosto and Benoît Pioulard. Lusine found his sound early on, but he’s never stopped pushing and pulling at its potential, patiently deconstructing the distractions and solving the puzzles. With Long Light, a laser-focused, process-driven artist reaches an exceptionally satisfying level of clarity and immediacy.

                      McIlwain sees the title, taken from the lyrical phrase “long light signaling the fall again,” written by Benoît Pioulard for what became the title track, as a guiding device that reflects several meanings. “There’s this sort of paranoia where you don’t know what is real, it’s an age of high anxiety and there are all these distractions,” McIlwain explains. “It’s like a fun house mirror situation.” Following the long light is the only true way through, and he holds that metaphor to the album’s recording, which also carried a cyclical nature akin to seasons. Like the start of fall, the album completes a period of cultivation; “Music making is a struggle and you have to have a ton of patience.” Long Light is proof that what lies beyond the noise, at the end of the figurative tunnel, is worth all the work it’s taken to get there.

                      Across the collection, McIlwain identifies the core sonic element, a vocal cut or a simple beat sequence, from which to build everything else off. On the opener “Come And Go,” he multiplies a vocal take from longtime collaborator Vilja Larjosto into a celestial choir, evoking their Sensorimotor standout “Just A Cloud.” It’s the bass hook on the single “Zero to Sixty,” curving around the voice of Sarah Jaffe, whose pliable range and cool delivery provide the source for Lusine’s unmistakable mapping. The chorus is Jaffe’s (“cold-blooded”) line repeated in step with melodic synth pulses and the buzzing deep bass. “I feel like I am dreaming / You make me feel like I am walking on a cloud / I don’t ever want to feel the ground,” sings Asy Saavedra (of Chaos Chaos) on “Dreaming.” This time McIlwain keeps the phrase intact, making subtle tweaks to the timbre and texture as chimes, clinks, and snaps oscillate. “Long Light” has it all: Lusine’s percussive mood-building, rendered with samples from drummer Trent Moorman, and a contortion of tender poetry, courtesy of friend Thomas Meluch, aka Benoît Pioulard (Morr Music, Kranky).

                      The album balances vocal pop motifs with some of Lusine’s strongest instrumental expressions, from ambient-minded foreshadowing (“Face- less,” “Plateau,” “Rafters”) to hypnotic head-nodders like “Cut and Cover” and “Transonic.”

                      It is rare to arrive at a landmark work two decades into one’s craft, but through repetition, refinement, and patience, Lusine extends a defining moment, an essential piece to his discography.


                      TRACK LISTING

                      01. Come And Go (feat. Vilja Larjosto)
                      02. Zero To Sixty (feat. Sarah Jaffe)
                      03. Faceless
                      04. Dreaming (feat. Asy Saavedra)
                      05. Transonic
                      06. Plateau
                      07. Long Light (feat. Benoît Pioulard)
                      08. Cut And Cover
                      09. Home
                      10. Rafters
                      11. Double Take

                      Twenty-plus years into his career, producer / vocalist / songwriter / DJ Matthew Dear remains artistically unpredictable in pursuit of his prescient strain of electronically-formed, organically-delivered indie pop. His work traverses myriad musical worlds, belonging to none. But these fluid moves have not been without a few forks in the road, decisive turns, and what-ifs. Most notable is the pivot-point following Dear’s acclaimed 2007 avant-pop LP, “Asa Breed”, in which he broke away from the 4/4 grid of his techno / house debut “Leave Luck To Heaven” and into something much more wild and idiosyncratic. Traveling between his adopted Detroit and his home state of Texas throughout 2008 and 2009, Dear amassed a set of personal, playful, looping guitar-centric recordings he’d consider for his next album. Given the new momentum of the hybrid electronic pop of “Asa Breed” which led to an opening slot for Hot Chip and remixes for ‘00 heroes like Spoon and Postal Service, Dear decided to shelf the material. He moved ahead to work on his watershed 2010 album, “Black City”, a steely noir set which earned him a Best New Music on Pitchfork and a worldwide tour with a besuited band. This lost album had a sound, a spirited country romp in the techno barn, and it had a rough title, a scribble on one of the CD-Rs passed to Ghostly label founder Sam Valenti IV, Preacher’s Sigh & Potion. He never fully walked away from it, and merely kept moving down the road, waiting for the audience to catch up. Over a decade later, that time is now.

                      “Preacher’s Sigh & Potion” finds Dear unknowingly at an intersection in his young run, a burgeoning songwriter at his most freewheeling and unaffected. In hindsight, there were hints of Preacher’s sound on “Asa Breed”, but the set still registers endearingly out of step with his eventual direction. This was the first time Dear tapped so directly into his late father’s influence as a fingerpicking guitar player in the 1960s and ‘70s and a gateway to the music of John Prine, Townes Van Zandt, and Emmylou Harris.

                      From the twang and tambourine stomp of album opener “Muscle Beach,” to the metronome-like pulse of “Hikers Y” complete with an unmistakable Matthew Dear dryly dismissive mantra, to the gloomy carnival-leaving-town pomp of “Gutters and Beyond”, “Preacher’s Sigh & Potion” is filled with the reckless notions of an artist dashing the history of pop and rock, the twang of country, the build and release of techno. Dear is an auteur, and in retrospect, so many of his signatures crop up in these relics from his former self. Dear remembers him well: ‘It’s crazy how music memory exists in a very deep and indescribable tangibility. I know the person who made all these, and remember glimpses of the desk, or studio set up for each recording. I know who wrote these lyrics, and where they were mentally during that process.’ Revisiting this material now also has Dear thinking about his father’s legacy.


                      STAFF COMMENTS

                      Matt says: A cosmic-acid, hillbilly-'tronica album anyone? It sounds pretty batshit, but I can't help thinking this was everything Moby was trying to achieve in 1999.

                      TRACK LISTING

                      01. Muscle Beach
                      02. Sow Down
                      03. Hikers Y
                      04. Never Divide
                      05. All Her Fits
                      06. Supper Times
                      07. Crash And Burn
                      08. Heart To Sing
                      09. Eye
                      10. Head
                      11. Gutters And Beyond

                      It was the end of 2013 and Jannis Noya Makrigiannis, the frontman and principal persona behind Choir of Young Believers, was worn out. He’d been touring the band’s last record the haunting Rhine Gold, for the better part of a year and, when it was over, he felt confused, adrift and didn’t feel like playing music. He was doubting the future of the band. The way he coped was to detach. He postponed writing in favor of traveling, deciding that instead of diving back into the creation of another record, he would allow himself to move in whatever direction he desired. His impulses guided his decisions; he wasn’t feeling very inspired by the guitar or the piano, so he started to fiddle around with a small pocket sampler his mother got him for Christmas, using it to make small soundscapes, beats and collages. Those early experiments became the building blocks for Grasque, from the warped, weird choral vocals that open “Serious Lover” to breezey, breathy R&B of “Jeg Ser Dig,” on which he sounds like a Scandinavian Sade.

                      The record pulls in a host of unlikely influences: smoky jazz on the noirish “The Whirlpool Enigma” twinkling pop on “Gamma Moth” and sun-bathed soul on “Cloud Nine.” It’s not so much a reinvention as a redirection, maintaining all of the group’s essential elements but setting them within a new context. Much of that is because, when Makrigiannis started the project, it wasn’t meant to be a new COYB record. Having been inspired by everything from experimental electronic music to Danish ‘80s and ‘90s pop, to modern hip-hop and R&B to techno and westcoast slow jams, he’d made a new, imaginary band in his head called Grasque to reflect those influences. He quickly recorded both “Græske” and “Face Melting” with Aske Zidore, who had also produced Rhine Gold, and when Choir of Young Believers reconvened to tour with Depeche Mode, he wrote a few guitar-based songs to play live. Gradually, he realized all of his new ideas and music could melt together with Choir of Young Believers. A couple of months later, he and Aske went to a small Swedish farm for a week and came back with more than 10 hours of new music.

                      The result is an album that is confident and expansive, incorporating an encyclopedia of styles while still maintaining the essential elements of Choir of Young Believers’ DNA. It’s pop music, put through a kaleidoscopic filter. “I must admit, one of the things I worried about was ‘What will people think?’” Makrigiannis says. “With almost all ofthese songs, I had been in doubt. Some, I felt, were too poppy, others too experimental some didn’t even feel like songs, but more like trips, or feelings. Some even had Danish and Greek lyrics. But now, it’s all Choir of Young Believers to me, and it feels great to have pushed the walls around the band, giving it a bit more space. It’s weird for me to think about all that doubt ”Could I do this? Could I do that? I mean, it’s my fucking band. I can do what I want with it. Right?”

                      TRACK LISTING

                      1. Olimpiyskiy
                      2. Serious Lover
                      3. Vaserne
                      4. Face Melting
                      5. Græske
                      6. Jeg Ser Dig
                      7. Cloud Nine
                      8. The Whirlpool Enigma
                      9. Perfect Estocada
                      10. Salvatore
                      11. Gamma Moth
                      12. Does It Look As If I Care

                      Tobacco

                      Ultima II Massage

                      On his third album, the Pennsylvania snake-synth-charmer deepens his approach to aural depravity. 'Ultima II Massage' widens a jagged swath through the dude’s own weird catalogue, each disparate track damaged to the point of contributing to some sort of greater, lurching Frankenstein-like state. Immediately after finishing 2010’s 'Maniac Meat', he went to work on the beat-addled series begun with 'Fucked Up Friends' in 2008. But he's saved the worst for last, amassing the most misanthropic material for 'Ultima'. To wit, SPIN dubbed early share “Lipstick Destroyer” a “junkyard takedown of Daft Punk’s beloved, pristine electro.”

                      This is easily Tobacco’s most diverse set to date - his own Stereopathetic Soulmanure, but about that 1-900 hotline life: massage parlors, plasticized sleaze, fake tans, old dial-ups to the fan clubs of dead B-actors. Fittingly, the album’s only contributor is music director Brian LeBarton who shrieks as Notrabel on the grimy freak-out “Streaker.” At 17 tracks, Ultima is stacked with beautifully perverse hits - from the sickly sticky “Eruption,” to the wobbly demon swaggerer “Face Breakout,” to the distorted punk spazz of “Dipsmack,” to the apocalyptic sepia ambience of “Spitlord.” You may hear disembodied bits of Boards of Canada, early Def Jam records, and Gary Numan, or maybe just public-access TV and bad VHS dubs of ‘80s horror flicks. Or the sun exploding and everything you’ve ever loved melting. Again, Tobacco was just trying to make meditation music.

                      But to find that rotted sweet spot, as always, he had to subvert his pop urges. Tobacco went back to the cassette decks he started off with - analog weapons of distortion to compliment his hissing vocoder and blown rhythms. Any moment that felt “just right” was brutally assaulted until ugly again. All to accomplish one end: “This might be my most purposely difficult album yet, but I promise if you let it in, it can fuck you up.”


                      TRACK LISTING

                      1. Streaker (ft. Notrabel),
                      2. Good Complexion,
                      3. Video Warning Attempts,
                      4. Eruption,
                      5. Lipstick Destroyer,
                      6. Self Tanner,
                      7. Face Breakout,
                      8. Blow Your Heart,
                      9. Beast Sting,
                      10. Dipsmack,
                      11. Creaming For Beginners,
                      12. Omen Classic,
                      13. Pool City, McKnight Road,
                      14. Spitlord,
                      15. Father Sister Berzerker,
                      16. The Touch From Within,
                      17. Bronze Hogan.


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