In 'Cape Forestier', Angus and Julia Stone express their extraordinary journey through heartfelt songs, emphasizing the universal language of music that feels like home to them. The concept of home has evolved beyond a physical place for Angus and Julia, becoming a deeper connection that grew from their shared musical experiences. Julia reflecis on how creating music brings them peace, acting as a common language that transcends the complexities of life.

The duo's musical journey has taken them across the globe, from childhood beginnings to record deals in London, collaborations with Rick Rubin in LA, and the establishment of a studio in the hinterlands of NSW

'Cape Forestier' serves as a narrative from the hearts and minds of Angus and Julia Stone. Each song unfolds as a different page in their storybook, covering themes from love stones to societal observations. Regardless of labels like folky, acoustic, or indie-rock, the siblings prioritize authenticity over stylistic choices.

The album features tracks like 'Cape Forestier,' 'Losing You,' 'The Wedding Song,' and 'County Sign,' each showcasing the duo's inherent musicality. Angus and Julia Stone acknowledge that this is their most stripped-back album, returing to their roots whlle incorporating the branches of experence gained over the years.

Despite their modesty about their talents, they are of everything good and natural about song writing, as they seem to constantly capture the essence of honest music. Angus and Julia recognize the charm of their innocence in earlier records. However, they also acknowledge their present curiosity and naivety in the face of the world's mysteries, traits evident in 'Cape Forestier'. Through their unspoken connection, they continue to speak the same language, reaffirming the timeless and universal power of music in their lives.

TRACK LISTING

1. Losing You
2. Down To The Sea
3. My Little Anchor
4. Cape Forestier
5. County Sign
6. City Of Lights
7. No Boat No Aeroplane
8. The Wedding Song
9. I Want You
10. Somehow
11. Sitting In Seoul
12. The Wonder Of You

Recent years brought about for Julia Holter an existential focus on human connection, amid the staggering change that came with the death of loved ones (including her young nephew, to whom the album is dedicated) and the birth of her daughter. On Something in the Room She Moves, Holter vividly processes the complexity, gravity, and awe of this confluence of experience. She calls the music “sensual,” “flowing,” and “nocturnal” - a testament to how love, with all of its challenges, “reroutes neural pathways.” The cover art by Holter’s childhood friend, artist Christina Quarles, highlights the multiplicity of intimate connection: are the figures embracing or in battle?

The title Something in the Room She Moves came to Holter spontaneously as she was naming the Logic project file for an early demo of what would become the album’s title track on her computer for the first time. Coincidentally, a few months later, she found herself mesmerized by the eight-hour Beatles documentary Get Back in 2021. Her titular phrase flips the gaze of the Beatles lyrics (“Something in the way she moves…”); the woman is no longer passively observed, but actively augmenting space. Holter has loved the Beatles since childhood, but sees the title less as a tribute than as a semi-surreal bit of automatic writing from her subconscious. (She had been singing Beatles tunes to her daughter at night.)

After a string of dream pop albums that established her searching voice in independent music—from 2012 breakthrough Ekstasis to Loud City Song and Have You in My Wilderness—Holter released the sprawling and thrillingly experimental Aviary in 2018. Since then, she has scored films like Never Rarely Sometimes Always, performed a commissioned live score for The Passion of Joan of Arc with the Chorus of Opera North, and collaborated with her partner, the musician Tashi Wada, who plays synth and bagpipes on her new album. Something in the Room She Moves is a remarkable progression in Holter’s oeuvre, synthesizing her free, improvisatory energy with her signature eloquence.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: 'Have You In My Wilderness' was the shop's favourite album all the way back in 2015, and she's even moved on significantly since that, to her bafflingly complex but melodically rich new album. Organic instrumental swells and glitched reverb tails ensconce her enduringly gorgeous vocal direction, while the scattered glitch and ambient wooze of new perfectly suit her dreamy composition style.

TRACK LISTING

1. Sun Girl
2. These Morning
3. Something In The Room She Moves
4. Materia
5. Meyou
6. Spinning
7. Ocean
8. Evening Mood
9. Talking To The Whisper
10. Who Brings Me

Debut Solo Album From Julia Kugel (The Coathangers).

If you can’t trust yourself, who can you trust?

This is the crucial question at the core of Julia, Julia, the moniker for Julia Kugel, founding member of garage punk icons The Coathangers and the dream pop duo Soft Palms. On her first solo full-length album Derealization, Kugel shifts her focus from collaboration and band dynamics towards a singular artistic vision and private self-discovery. Steeped in the beguiling pop elements of her past work, Derealization is a meditative deep dive into the mind of a person struggling to understand a crumbling internal and external world. The album traverses a landscape of ethereal folk, atmospheric deconstructed pop, and dubbed-out country ballads, all centered around straight forward and direct lyrics. This juxtaposition of nebulousness and lucidity gives the album a sense of clarity emerging from the haze, an apt refection of Kugel's personal growth and journey toward self-acceptance.

Derealization is based on weaving the unreal, unsaid, and unknown into an undulating sonic fabric. Vocal layering and abstract instrumentation convey a blurred desperation to connect to an emotional and psychological focal point. Moody, dark, and sumptuous, the record is a flow chart of Julia Kugel coming into herself as an artist and songwriter. The album finds Julia playing almost all the instruments and taking her first stab at engineering at COMA, her and her husband's home recording studio in Long Beach, CA.

“You know how touring musicians often speak of whether home is real or tour is real? Well, it can lead you to lose grasp on ‘reality,’ especially when touring is taken away and you are left to wonder if anything was ever real, including yourself. Like you we're just playing a character,” Kugel says of her headspace leading up to the creation of Derealization. “Honestly, I kinda lost it, and through making this record I made peace with it and reconciled myself as a real person. I forgave myself and in turn forgave those around me. The song ‘Forgive Me’ is the apology I wanted to say and to hear. I wrote every song from that place and gained the confidence I was pretending to possess.”

This raw and personal approach to the lyrics is present throughout Derealization. On the opening track "I Want You," Kugel creates a woozy sense of space with reverb-soaked drums and spaghetti western guitars while she lists off her desires for a mysterious “you.” Is she actually listing off her desires for herself? For the people around her? As she repeats "do you feel it?" in the song’s chorus, it feels as if she’s conjuring a magical thread by which we are all connected, showing us how our desires are all the same. On "Fever In My Heart" the listener is treated to a lush, acoustic techno track detailing the exhilarating madness of an emotional breakdown. Simple truths percolate to the surface on "Words Don't Mean Much,” as if clearing away the murk of platitudes and empty gestures. The journey continues on the detached and conflicted "Do It Or Don't,” an alluring walk through the winding road of lonely choices.

The name for the project Julia, Julia is a look in the mirror, a refection of what is hidden and unanswered, of what is real and what is transient. The experience of living life not as you planned it but as it unfolded, and the mysterious, magical pain that creates meaning.

TRACK LISTING

1. I Want You
2. Forgive Me
3. Impromptu
4. Fever In My Heart
5. Words Don’t Mean Much
6. Do It Or Don't
7. No Hard Feelings
8. Big Talkin'
9. Paper Cutout
10. Where Did You Go
11. Corner Town

'Pre Pleasure' is the breath-taking third album from Australian singer-songwriter, Julia Jacklin. Co-produced with Marcus Paquin (The Weather Station, The National), 'Pre Pleasure' sees Jacklin as her most authentic self, delivering the most intimate, raw and devastating ten songs of her career to date. An uncompromising and masterful lyricist, always willing to mine the depths of her own life experience, and singular in translating it into deeply personal, timeless songs. 

TRACK LISTING

1. Lydia Wears A Cross
2. Love, Try Not To Let Go
3. Ignore Tenderness
4. I Was Neon
5. Too In Love To Die
6. Less Of A Stranger
7. Moviegoers
8. Magic
9. Be Careful With Yourself
10. End Of A Friendship

Debut album from Manchester-via-Italy singer, songwriter and guitarist Julia Bardo.

Produced and mixed by Younghusband’s Euan Hinshelwood, the record firmly establishes Bardo’s musical adventurousness and prowess, and marks a cathartic and self-affirming moment for an artist who found her voice by realizing it's been there all along.

The album is best summed up by the woman who wrote it all: “Bauhaus, L’Appartamento is about loneliness, solitude, separation...but also unconditional love,” Bardo reveals of the record’s overarching themes. “Family, emotional dependency, mental health issues, feelings of emptiness and numbness, feelings of not being enough, inability to be in control of my own emotions, self-doubt, self-reflection, past traumas and dealing with them.”

Named after the apartment complex she lived in when demoing the album’s recordings, but with an Italian twist.

Follows the release of two EPs, Phase and The Raw EP, which saw her experiment further with her wistful and mysterious sound to become the alternative pop artist she is today.

Her musical journey began in Brescia in Northern Italy, where she sang and wrote lyrics for a local band between shifts at her father’s bar. A free spirit craving new inspiration, she relocated to Manchester and it was here she developed her striking style as a solo musician before also meeting and joining post-punk band Working Men’s Club. Never losing her strong desire to have full creative control over her music, she returned to become a solo artist again.

STAFF COMMENTS

Emily says: Julia Bardo: Local talent alert!! Gorgeous, off kilter pop songs which have more bite to them than you might expect. Sonorous vocals and deft melodic interplay met with moments of jangling dissonance. FFO Cate Le Bon and Aldous Harding!

Zorked (adj.) - what happens when you end up thunderbaked, as in extremely stoned or in any situation where you feel not sober. You can feel so tired you’re zorked. In fact, any state, so long as you’re a little out of it, quali­fies. And Julia Shapiro, of Chastity Belt, Childbirth, and Who Is She? much like everyone on this earth with a pulse was zorked on more than one occasion in 2020. In March, she packed up her things and traded Seattle’s late-winter gloom for the perennial sunshine and seemingly endless opportunity of Los Angeles only to be forced into near-total isolation. With nowhere to go and nothing to do, she began working on her second solo album, Zorked. On the resulting batch of songs, we’re given Julia’s vision of Los Angeles: a wasteland melting in slow-motion, a place to commune with ghosts and warped legacies.

Living within earshot of a man who spent his entire 2020 singing karaoke for over 10 hours a day, Julia could write, record, and play an album’s worth of instruments without fear of noise complaints. Her roommate Melina Duterte (Jay Som) transformed their house into a viable home studio, making it easy to fully realize the sound in her head, even at the height of a global lockdown. Taking things a step further, Melina agreed to co-produce the record, pushing Julia to make these new songs sound less like Perfect Version, her ­rst solo album, or like the songs she performs in Chastity Belt. At the peak of her uncertainty and discomfort, she jumped into the deep end in search of something new and found power in heavy sounds.

This is evident in the fi­rst few seconds of album opener “Death (XIII).” Taking newfound inspiration from the namesake Tarot card, drone metal, and shoegaze, Julia layers walls of guitars, bass chords, and programmed drums. “Come With Me,” the album’s lead single, takes inspiration from a mushroom trip gone bad. “Take me to awful places now,” she sings, envisioning heat death as her own eyes stare directly into the sun. On “Wrong Time,” shimmering guitars smolder and levitate, yet she fi­nds herself “stuck inside this hole I’ve dug.” That said, these songs aren’t unbearably sad, nor has Julia become any less of a merciless observer of human behavior. By album closer “Hall of Mirrors,” she’s come full circle. Over ­fingerpicked guitar, the sense of lost identity becomes all-encompassing.

It’s the sound of a life lived in servitude to digital screens and the psychic damage invisibly done along the way.

Though Julia Shapiro found herself in a near hermit-like existence, writing and recording almost all of the album’s instruments herself and struggling to navigate her place in a city and world rendered nearly comatose, she maintains a sense of humor about all of it. At the very least, “It’s funny to force people to have to say Zorked out loud. Any other title sounded pretentious.”

TRACK LISTING

1. Death (XIII)
2. Come With Me
3. Wrong Time
4. Someone
5. Reptile! Reptile!
6. Pure Bliss
7. Hellscape
8. Do Nothing About It
9. Zorked
10. Hall Of Mirrors

New York-based cellist / composer Julia Kent’s celebrated second album, Green and Grey (2011), is to be released on vinyl for the very first time for Black Friday 2019. Across two discs, on green and grey coloured vinyl (naturally), this expanded edition features the preceding Last Day in July EP (2010) and two previously unreleased tracks. The gatefold sleeve features a new interpretation of the original artwork.

Green and Grey explores the intersections between the human world and the natural world, the melding of the technological and the organic using Kent’s now trademark looped and layered cello, electronics, and field recordings. It references the patterns and repetitions that exist in nature often mirrored in human creations and also the complexity and fragility of our relationships, with one another and with the world that surrounds us. Without collaborators - other than the insects, weather, and wind sounds that create a sort of exoskeleton for the music - she has created an intensely personal landscape that references the way nature, however subverted and endangered by our modern world, still retains its power.

When Julia Shapiro flew home from a cancelled Chastity Belt tour in April 2018, everything in her life felt out of control. Dealing with health issues, freshly out of a relationship, and in the middle of an existential crisis, she realized halfway through a tour supporting her band’s third album I Used to Spend So Much Time Alone that she was going through too much to continue. “I was really struggling; I was really depressed. I felt like I couldn’t sing or be a person,” Shapiro recalls. “At that point I couldn’t even imagine playing a show again, I was so over it.”

Returning home to a newly empty Seattle one-bedroom apartment, Shapiro had wanted for a long time to learn how to record and mix her own music, and out of the uncertainty of the future of her music career and her health, she began to record the songs that would become Perfect Version, her solo debut for Hardly Art. What she created in the space of ten songs is an intimate and beautifully self-aware examination of feeling lost in the life you’ve created for yourself. It’s an album of shimmering guitars and layered vocals that feels vast in the emotional depth it conveys and masterful in the way each song is intentionally crafted and recorded.

Over the course of a tumultuous year of trying to find stability amidst depression and surgery, Shapiro ultimately rediscovered the parts of music that she loved through the process. Her perfectionist qualities create an album that shines in tiny lyrical moments and meticulous guitar parts. “When the rest of my life felt out of control, I felt like this was my chance to be in control of everything,” says Shapiro. She plays all the instruments (save for a mouth trumpet solo by Darren Hanlon and guest violin by Annie Truscott) and after recording and mixing the first batch of four songs at the Vault studio with Ian LeSage decided to record the final six tracks alone in her apartment, adding drums in the studio later and learning to mix them with the help of her friend David Hrivnak. Perfect Version is a fully realized vision from a gifted songwriter finding a more intimate voice. “So what comes next?” she questions on the album closer “Empty Cup” which explores the quiet satisfaction of being alone with yourself and creating a blank slate. “A lasting sense of self,” she concludes.

TRACK LISTING

Natural
Parking Lot
Shape
Tired
Harder To Do
Around The Block
A Couple Highs
Perfect Version
I Lied
Empty Cup

Julia Meijer is a Swedish-born singer, song-writer and guitarist based in Oxford, UK. Julia is gearing up to release her debut album, Always Awake, which will also be the debut album release by Oxford-based music agency and label PinDrop. Always Awake features star musical turns from Julia's band, including former Guillemots drummer Greig Stewart, guitarist Andrew Warne and keyboard player and composer Sebastian Reynolds. Julia has appeared at festivals such as Rob da Bank's Common People, Wilderness, Truck and Wood, and performed shows in Oxford and London. Single Train Ticket received a premiere from Clash Music, and support from Gideon Coe and Lauren Laverne on 6Music, and with the release of Always Awake it seems only a matter of time before Julia stops being Oxford's best kept music secret.

The second full-length album from Julia Jacklin, Crushing embodies every possible meaning of its title word. It’s an album formed from sheer intensity of feeling, an in-the-moment narrative of heartbreak and infatuation. And with her storytelling centered on bodies and crossed boundaries and smothering closeness, Crushing reveals how our physical experience of the world shapes and sometimes distorts our inner lives. The follow-up to her critically acclaimed 2016 debut Don’t Let the Kids Win, Crushing finds Jacklin continually acknowledging what’s expected of her, then gracefully rejecting those expectations. As a result, the album invites self-examination and a possible shift in the listener’s way of getting around the world—an effect that has everything to do with Jacklin’s openness about her own experience.

Discussing the record, Jacklin offered the following;

I really like this album, I worked hard on it and I really like listening to it. That's not usually how I feel after making something. I've finally come to accept that right now for me, making records is about capturing a time; who I am at that time, what I need to say in the best way I can say it, with minimal studio frills to cover it up. So I'm really happy to announce this one and ready for whatever things get thrown my way because of it. The cover was hard to figure out, seemed like I couldn't think of what kind of image would represent the music in the right way. Hard deadlines always make me more creative surprisingly. I was on tour in the states with my best bud Nick Mckk who takes a lot of my photos, he took my first album cover. We pulled off the highway in Pennsylvania and found a town called Krumsville. There was an antique store with a very friendly owner who let us run free inside. I got the jumper made the day before in NYC, same day I decided on the album name. I think it works.

Produced by Burke Reid (Courtney Barnett, Liam Finn) and recorded at The Grove Studios, Crushing sets Jacklin’s understated defiance against a raw yet luminous sonic backdrop. “In all the songs, you can hear every sound from every instrument; you can hear my throat and hear me breathing,” she says. “It was really important to me that you can hear everything for the whole record, without any studio tricks getting in the way.”

On the album-opening lead single “Body” - released last month - Jacklin proves the power of that approach, turning out a mesmerizing vocal performance even as she slips into the slightest murmur. A starkly composed portrait of a breakup, the song bears an often-bracing intimacy, a sense that you’re right in the room with Jacklin as she lays her heart out. And as “Body” wanders and drifts, Jacklin establishes Crushing as an album that exists entirely on its own time, a work that’s willfully unhurried.

And whilst a moving and complex listen, Crushing unfolds with an ease that echoes Jacklin’s newfound self-reliance as an artist. “With the first album I was so nervous and didn’t quite see myself as a musician yet, but after touring for two years, I’ve come to feel like I deserve to be in that space,” she says. Throughout Crushing, that sense of confidence manifests in one of the most essential elements of the album: the captivating strength of Jacklin’s lyrics. Not only proof of her ingenuity and artistic generosity, Jacklin’s uncompromising specificity and infinitely unpredictable turns of phrase ultimately spring from a certain self-possession in the songwriting process.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: It's no surprise that 'Crushing' shares a producer with the most recent Courtney Barnett opus, with it's infectious hooks and Jacklin's singular vocal talent shining through in a rich, sumptuous sea of satisfyingly crunchy guitar and thick percussion. All of this merely highlights Jacklin's unmistakable ear for melody and perfectly constructed melodic indie-rock. This is an absolute winner, and an undoubtable career high.

TRACK LISTING

1. Body
2. Head Alone
3. Pressure To Party
4. Don’t Know How To Keep Loving You
5. When The Family Flies In
6. Convention
7. Good Guy
8. You Were Right
9. Turn Me Down
10. Comfort

Asperities is the fourth solo album by acclaimed Vancouver-born, New York-based cellist Julia Kent.
Her extensive résumé includes recent work with Swans, Aidan Baker, Rachel Grimes, Rutger Zuydervelt, Barbara Morgenstern, Library Tapes and Khan of Finland. Utilising treated cello and electronics, Kent creates a world where the technological and the organic merge in perfect symbiosis, the layers of sound peeling back to reveal a beating, bloody human heart at its centre.
Accurately described as “elegant and intense” and “deeply personal”, Kent draws from a rich well of emotion. There is tension, darkness and masterful restraint in this work. Julia Kent rose to prominence with cello trio Rasputina and as arranger and performer in Antony & The Johnsons.

Julia Kent has also composed for film, theatre and dance. Recent cinematic work includes the documentaries The Boxing Girls of Kabul and Rwanda, L’Impossible Pardon, American feature AShort History of Decay, as well as the award-winning short film Oasis. Her first solo albums, Delay (2007) and Green and Grey (2011), were released by Important Records in North America. Her most recent solo record, Character (2013), was released to critical acclaim on The Leaf Label. As a solo artist Julia has toured extensively in Europe and North America and performed at festivals including Primavera Sound, Reeperbahn, Unsound, and Meltdown. Kent surrounds a fabric of gorgeous cello melodies with excerpts of burbling brooks and chirping cicadas, letting the sounds sit closely but distinctly in one same ruminative space. Strangely and surprisingly intimate.

TRACK LISTING

1. A1.Hellebore
2. A2. Lac Des Arcs
3. A3. The Leopard
4. A4. Flag Of No Country
5. B1. Terrain
6. B2. Empty States
7. B3. Heavy Eyes
8. B4. Invitation To The Voyage
9. B5. Tramontana

Temporal is the elegantly restrained new album by Canadian cellist/composer Julia Kent. Following the dissonance and tension of her previous album for Leaf, 2015’s Asperities, Temporal is a meditation on the transitory and fragile nature of existence.

Much of the music that comprises Temporal was originally written to accompany theatre and dance productions. “The initial inspiration was more external than internal, in that many of these pieces began as a response to a text or a choreographic concept,” Julia explains, “but they all seemed to be coming from the same emotional world and it made sense to weave them together into a record.”

After the threat of violent release on Asperities, Temporal’s relationship to the physical world manifests itself in a more organic, human sound. The electronic manipulations are subtler, with Julia sampling voices from a theatre production and processing them into unrecognisable textures: ghosts of the source material. “I included the processed voices to acknowledge the genesis of the music and also because I wanted to incorporate vocals in a way that turned voice into texture, and blurred the lines between sonic elements.”

TRACK LISTING

1. Last Hour Story
2. Imbalance
3. Conditional Futures
4. Floating City
5. Sheared
6. Through The Window
7. Crepuscolo

Aviary is an epic journey through what Julia Holter describes as “the cacophony of the mind in a melting world.” It’s the Los Angeles composer’s most breathtakingly expansive album yet, full of startling turns and dazzling instrumental arrangements. The follow-up to her critically acclaimed 2015 record, Have You in My Wilderness, it takes as its starting point a line from a 2009 short story by writer Etel Adnan: "I found myself in an aviary full of shrieking birds." It’s a scenario that sounds straight out of a horror movie, but it’s also a pretty good metaphor for life in 2018, with its endless onslaught of political scandals, freakish natural disasters, and voices shouting their desires and resentments into the void.

“Amidst all the internal and external babble we experience daily, it's hard to find one's foundation,” says Holter. “I think this album is reflecting that feeling of cacophony and how one responds to it as a person - how one behaves, how one looks for love, for solace. Maybe it’s a matter of listening to and gathering the seeming madness, of forming something out of it and envisioning a future.”

“In a lot of the songs, when I mention love, it’s about a seeking for compassion and humility in a world where it feels like empathy is always being tested,” Holter says. In Aviary’s case, that search for sweetness - that bridging of the gulf - becomes a metaphor for the creative process itself, cutting through the hierarchies of history, language, and musical form to offer something more fluid, more inclusive, more idiosyncratic.

Aviary combines Holter’s slyly theatrical vocals and Blade Runner-inspired synth work with an enveloping palette of strings and percussion that reveals itself, and the boundless scope of her vision, over the course of fifteen songs.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Since her 2015 album, 'Have You In My Wilderness' (voted our #1 album of 2015) Holter has gone from strength to strength. Treading a similar path to her more recent forays into arty ambience and brittle electronics, 'Aviary' is an epic of Holter's mesmerising vocal talent, backed with an absorbing and progressive instrumental backdrop.

TRACK LISTING

1. Turn The Light On
2. Whether
3. Chaitius
4. Voce Simul
5. Everyday Is An Emergency
6. Another Dream
7. I Shall Love 2
8. Underneath The Moon
9. Colligere
10. In Gardens’ Muteness
11. I Would Rather See
12. Les Jeux To You
13. Words I Heard
14. I Shall Love 1
15. Why Sad Song

Domino is proud to launch Documents, an irregular new series of live studio recordings designed to capture the ever-evolving arrangements of our artists and their bands in high fidelity. Taking its inspiration from classic BBC sessions, each Documents release will be recorded in no more than a day or two at a world class studio in London. Or at least that’s the plan.

The first official Documents release is In The Same Room by Julia Holter, although Domino count Villagers’ Where Have You Been All My Life? as the honorary inaugural Document in all but name.

In The Same Room is named after a song from Holter’s 2012 album Ekstasis, and this new career-spanning collection is the fruit of two days recording by Julia and her tremendous band (Corey Fogel – drums/vocals; Dina Maccabee - viola/vocals and Devin Hoff - stand-up bass) at RAK Studios in the days after their main stage performance at Green Man Festival in Wales.

Comprised of new arrangements of songs from all four of her studio releases to date (Tragedy, Ekstasis, Loud City Song and 2015's breakthrough Have You In My Wilderness), Holter's Domino Documents is an essential release for anyone who has witnessed her brilliant, beguiling band on tour around the world in the last five years as well as the perfect introduction to a truly important and innovative young artist.

In the 15 months since Have You In My Wilderness, Julia has gone from strength to strength, including playing the biggest headline show of her career in the UK last month – at London’s Shepherd’s Bush Empire – and scoring the soundtrack for the new Miles Teller film Bleed For This.

STAFF COMMENTS

Sil says: 2015 Piccadilly Records record of the year gets partially revisited together with her three other albums in the form of live studio recordings. An already stunning discography is given the live treatment for maximum effect.

TRACK LISTING

1. Horns Surrounding Me (Live At RAK)
2. So Lillies (Live At RAK)
3. Silhouette (Live At RAK)
4. How Long (Live At RAK)
5. Feel You (Live At RAK)
6. Lucette Stranded On The Island (Live At RAK)
7. In The Green Wild (Live At RAK)
8. City Appearing (Live At RAK)
9. Vasquez (Live At RAK)
10. Betsy On The Roof (Live At RAK)
11. Sea Calls Me Home (Live At RAK)

Julia Jacklin releases her highly anticipated debut album, ‘Don’t Let The Kids Win’, on Transgressive Records.

Hailing from the Australian Blue Mountains, Julia Jacklin’s music courses with the aching current of alt-country and indie-folk, augmented by her undeniable calling cards: her rich, distinctive voice and her playful, observational wit.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Sadly sung vocals are placed delicately atop swooning country instrumentals and jazzy slide guitars, elsewhere stripped back to the bare bones of Jacklin's soulful voice over a softly picked acoustic guitar backdrop. Heartfelt and touching to the end, and a great sign of what's to come.

TRACK LISTING

Pool Party
Leadlight
Coming Of Age
Elizabeth
Motherland
Small Talk
L.A. Dream
Sweet Step
Same Airport
Hay Plain
Don’t Let The Kids Win

THE PICCADILLY RECORDS ALBUM OF THE YEAR 2015.

'Have You In My Wilderness' is the fourth full length album by Los Angeles artist Julia Holter and her most intimate album yet. Recorded in her hometown over the last year and once again crafted with Grammy-winning producer and engineer Cole Greif-Neill, the album follows 2013's 'Loud City Song' and two much-lauded previous titles - 'Ekstasis' (2012) and 'Tragedy' (2011).

'Have You in My Wilderness' was written from the heart - warm, dark and raw - and explores love, trust, and power in human relationships. While love songs are familiar in pop music, Holter manages to stay fascinatingly oblique and enigmatic, with some of the most sublime and transcendent music she has ever written. Like Holter's previous albums, 'Have You in My Wilderness' is multi-layered and texturally rich, featuring an array of electronic and acoustic instruments played by an ensemble of gifted Los Angeles musicians.

'Have You in My Wilderness' is also Holter's most sonically intimate album, with her vocals front and centre in the mix, lifted out of the layers of smeared, hazy effects. The result is striking: clear and vivid, but disarmingly personal.

STAFF COMMENTS

David says: 'Have You In My Wilderness’ is Julia Holter’s fourth and most accessible album to date, but given that previous records have looked to Greek Philosophers and French novelists for their inspiration, this perhaps isn’t the boldest of statements.
Holter, a music and composition graduate, approaches her craft in a cerebral, conceptual way that is still very much apparent on the album’s arrangements and time signatures. However, on ‘Have You In My Wilderness’, her more exotic tendencies have been tamed by producer M Cole Grief-Neill. He’s convinced Holter to shake off the shackles of reverb in which her otherworldly voice has always been chained and let it take centre stage on the record. It’s a master stroke that’s culminated in a sonically direct, shimmering, leftfield pop classic that everyone at Piccadilly Records has been willing her to make since first hearing 2013’s ‘Loud City Song’.
Dark and lovely, exploring pop’s universalities of love and relationships, ‘Have You In My Wilderness’ is the perfect soundtrack to winter’s long nights. Where previously Holter could be accused of being cold and aloof, she now revels in a new found warmth and intimacy. It’s like the girl on the bus that’s been ignoring you for months suddenly walking over and saying “hi, fancy going for a drink later?” - Completely unexpected and all the more wonderful for it.
But wait, don’t go! I know what you’re thinking. ‘Love and relationships? Surely ballads are the end credit to a thousand, desperate Saturday nights; certainly nothing new in pop music?’ BUT, and it’s a big but, Holter’s take on this, the most clichéd of pop clichés, is brilliantly oblique. Flitting from orchestral chamber music to Laurel Canyon introspection, it’s a schizophrenic record, whose many competing voices have combined to make ‘Have You In My Wilderness’ Piccadilly’s favourite album of 2015.

Andy says: Finally Julia Holter does what she's been threatening to do for ages: combines all her arty, classical, jazzy, ehtereal, avanty otherness into one near-pop masterpiece! Definitely one of the best records this year.

TRACK LISTING

1. Feel You
2. Silhouette
3. How Long?
4. Lucette Stranded On The Island
5. Sea Calls Me Home
6. Night Song
7. Everytime Boots
8. Betsy On The Roof
9. Vasquez
10. Have You In My Wilderness

Since January 2010, Spencer Krug has used Moonface as a venue for home-recorded instrumental and conceptual experimentation, expanding the ideas he developed collaboratively with Wolf Parade, Sunset Rubdown, and Frog Eyes. Releases under this moniker have come quickly, each distinct from the other. The ‘Dreamland’ EP and ‘Organ Music Not Vibraphone Like I’d Hoped’ were conceptual excursions merging instrumental and thematic fixations. After moving from Montreal to Helsinki, Krug teamed up with the Finnish band Siinai to create a lush rock record - 2012’s ‘Heartbreaking Bravery’ - driven by the dark despair of a breakup. Staying in Helsinki, Krug set off on yet another creative departure, driven by a rediscovery of love and a reconsideration of the Moonface persona he’d created for himself.

The quietly stunning ‘Julia With Blue Jeans On’ is the fourth Moonface release, bringing a degree of intimacy and self-reflection unlike anything Krug has produced to date.

There are only two sonic elements on this latest album: Spencer Krug’s voice and his piano. Richly recorded, they interact seamlessly with one another. On the opening track, ‘Barbarian’, the piano unfolds with the hypnotic energy of Keith Jarrett’s Koln Concert, Krug’s right hand doubling his vocal melody. On the closing track ‘Your Chariot Awaits’, Krug’s voice recedes after a minute as the piano swells for an extended showcase with modern classical undertones.

After nearly a decade, across a number of guises, we are well-acquainted with Krug’s inimitable town-crier vocals; on ‘Julia…’ we are introduced to a facet of his musical skill that feels conservatory-trained. This is Krug as singer-songwriter, moving beyond star poses to a vision that is at once more elegant and comfortable. Or, in Krug’s own language, on ‘Barbarian II’: “I have chewed through my beautiful narrative.” Much of Julia is taken with this chewing. ‘Love The House You’re In’ opens by masquerading as self-pity, with a statement that reads like a press release from someone who’s given up. “I regretfully withdraw my offer to try and improve myself,” Krug gently sings, establishing a self-reflexive foundation upon which he builds the album’s most universal, humanistic sentiment, and which he delivers via its most soaring melody.

Purposeful self-evaluation is one tactic for reinvention, but as Krug illustrates on the title track, everyday occurrences can prove transformative as well. The sight of a woman, clad in denim, briefly visible at the bottom of a staircase, he learns, is capable of “obliterating everything I’ve ever written down.” ‘Julia…’ is an ode in the classical sense, pivoting around the beauty inherent in the most simple, taken-forgranted sights. Krug acknowledges this, opening the song by admitting that “it’s a madman’s game, making the commonplace unreal.” What he leaves out in this admission, however, is the key to the countless charms of ‘Julia With Blue Jeans On’ - by expertly playing this ridiculous game, he can erase the madness that spawned it.

Spencer has garnered critical praise and a rabidly loyal fanbase in the Moonface realm, as well in other incarnations, including Wolf Parade, Sunset Rubdown, Swan Lake, and Frog Eyes.

TRACK LISTING

Barbarian
Everyone Is Noah, Everyone Is The Ark
Barbarian II
November 2011
Dreamy Summer
Julia With Blue Jeans On
Love The House You're In
First Violin
Black Is Back In Style
Your Chariot Awaits

The third studio album from singular artist Julia Holter.

New album of avant-pop experimentation from the LA based singer / composer that blends influence ranging from Joni Mitchell to Arthur Russell and the poetry of Frank O’Hara into a daringly unique work as conceptually strong as it is immediately affecting.

‘Loud City Song’ follows, and progresses brilliantly from ‘Ekstasis’, one of last year’s most critically lauded records.

STAFF COMMENTS

Andy says: Julia Holter's Domino Records debut fittingly feels like the start of something new, honing as it does, everything that's special about her. Dark and dreamy.

TRACK LISTING

World
Maxim’s I
Horns Surrounding Me
In The Green Wild
Hello Stranger
Maxim’s II
He’s Running Through My Eyes
This Is A True Heart
City Appearing

Long-awaited reissue of Los Angeles based artist Julia Holter’s debut album.

Originally released in November 2011 on Leaving Records in two runs of 500 copies only, this modern masterpiece proved to be the most inspired, captivating and unique debut album of the year, and has been out of print - and much coveted - ever since.

Inspired by Euripides’ ‘Hippolytus’, the sheer scope and scale of ambition evident in ‘Tragedy’s fifty minutes is staggering.

Comprised of voice, synths, drum machines, piano, cello, saxophone, samples, vocoders, ensemble musicians and a chorus, ‘Tragedy’ is a transcendental amalgamation of avant garde and pop conventions, and of organic and electronic compositional forms - an entire universe of a record blessed with its own beautifully peculiar logic.

TRACK LISTING

Introduction
Try To Make Yourself A Work Of Art
The Falling Age
Goddess Eyes
Interlude
Celebration
So Lillies
Finale

Character should appeal to fans of artists like Nils Frahm, Low, The Dirty Three, Hildur Gudnadóttir, Colleen, Hauschka, Rachel’s, Olafur Arnalds…

Character is New York-based cellist and arranger Julia Kent’s third solo album, and first for The Leaf Label

Her richly layered cello and environmental recordings coalesce into a gorgeous, cinematic whole – an instrumental oasis in a cluttered musical world. Accurately described as “elegant and intense” and “deeply personal”, her work possesses an emotional resonance that sets it apart.

Vancouver-born Kent first rose to prominence in the mid ‘90s in the original line-up of all cello trio Rasputina. Since then she has worked with numerous groups and musicians, both as a cellist and arranger.

Her previous solo albums, Delay (2007) and Green and Grey (2011) were released by Important Records in North America. Her music has been heard in film soundtracks and as accompaniment to theatre and dance performances around the world.

Domino are to reissue ‘Ekstasis’, the second album by Julia Holter. The release, the artist's inaugural for the label, will also mark the first time the collection of songs has been widely available domestically since being released to phenomenal critical acclaim in north America earlier this year.

The double gatefold vinyl will be limited to 300 copies and pressed on deluxe heavyweight vinyl.

The album has just been confirmed as one of Mojo’s Top Ten Albums Of The Year.

The most fully-realised glimpse of Holter's steadilydeveloping, beautifully singular vision so far, ‘Ekstasis’ follows on from the playful searching nature of 2007's home-recorded ‘Eating The Stars’ EP and 2011's underground masterpiece ‘Tragedy’.

STAFF COMMENTS

Andy says: Like an even more esoteric Laura Veirs, this drifts and shifts like fractured lullabies, casting its spell on the way.

TRACK LISTING

Marienba
Our Sorrow
In The Same Room
Boy In The Moon
Für Felix
Goddess Eye II
Moni Mon Amie
Four Garden
Goddess Eyes I
This Is Ekstasis