The Big Moon are excited to announce the deluxe edition of their third album Here Is Everything. The album features remixes from Marika Hackman and Art School Girlfriend, brand new tracks ‘Summer Still Comes’ and ‘Round Forever’ (which sees bassist Celia Archer on lead-vocals duty for the first time), as well as some exclusive live versions of album tracks.

Celia Archer on ‘Round Forever’ –
"Round Forever is about all the time and energy we spend trying to understand ourselves and other people so that we can properly communicate and what a gift that can be. It’s also about how sometimes that’s all a total waste of time and you need to stop working and overthinking and let it go!"

Following a storming summer of festivals, including a packed slot at Glastonbury in June, The Big Moon recently announced a run of UK + EU shows for December this year. The tour kicks off in Genk on 5th December, taking in Paris, Glasgow, Manchester, Leeds, Birmingham, Bristol and Oxford, finishing up at London’s Union Chapel for a very special stripped-back performance on 18th December. Tickets are on sale now.

Here is Everything focuses on motherhood, with lead vocalist Jules Jackson giving birth during its inception. The rest of the band doubled-down in the studio, taking Jules’ embryonic song frameworks and stepping forward as one, revelling in an innate, giddy togetherness and with a clutch of genuinely fantastic tunes.

Here Is Everything was mostly self-produced, with the expert guidance and expertise of co-producers CECIL (Self Esteem, Jehnny Beth, PJ Harvey) and the Grammy Award winning producer Ben Allen (Gnarls Barkley, Deer Hunter, and the producer of Walking Like We Do).

TRACK LISTING

1. 2 Lines
2. Wide Eyes
3. Daydreaming
4. This Love
5. Suckerpunch
6. My Very Best
7. Ladye Bay
8. Trouble
9. High And Low
10. Magic
11. Satellites

BONUS TRACKS
1. Summer Still Comes
2. Round Forever
3. 2 Lines (Live At The HAC Bow)
4. This Love (Live At The HAC Bow)
5. Satellites (Live At The HAC Bow)
6. Suckerpunch (Marika Hackman Remix)
7. Trouble (Art School Girlfriend Remix)

Back to Moon Beach (Verve Records) is an EP by no one’s definition but Kurt Vile’s. For Kurt, this collection is an expression of just how deep his well of non-album material runs.

The vinyl edition includes six tracks culled from various sessions over the last four years, representing a wide swath of the inspirational musical community Kurt surrounds himself with.

“[Kurt Vile is] the beloved and reliable purveyor of a hazy, zoned-out, weirdo brand of classicist rock.” - Stereogum.

“Vile remains our era’s great inheritor of the Neil Young/Meat Puppets/Dinosaur Jr. tradition of bending chords, spooling out hypnotic solos, and chilling with your demons until they start feeling like drinking buddies.” - Rolling Stone.

“Loose, sprawling, and filled with spacey but intimate jams that couple drum machines, smoke-curled guitars, and off the cuff vocals, [(watch my moves)] feels like being invited into Vile’s head to sit down and hang out a spell.” - Aquarium Drunkard.

“Vile’s sprawling new album captures the magic, loss and wonderment of being alive.” - AV Club

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Is it an EP? Is it'nt? It really doesn't matter, it's classic Vile, lagging instrumental groove and slow guitar twangs below KV's stoned drawl. Rich, melodic and heartfelt.

TRACK LISTING

CD (9 Tracks)
1. Another Good Year For The Roses (5:34)
2. Touched Somethin (caught A Virus) (6:31)
3. Back To Moon Beach (8:15)
4. Like A Wounded Bird Trying To Fly (5:29)
5. Blues Come For Some (5:09)
6. Tom Petty’s Gone (but Tell Him I Asked For Him) (8:15)
7. Must Be Santa (5:12)
8. Passenger Side (3:10)
9. Cool Water (Single Mix) (4:29)

VINYL (6 Tracks)
Side A:
1. Another Good Year For The Roses (5:34)
2. Touched Somethin (caught A Virus) (6:31)
3. Back To Moon Beach (8:15)
Side B:
1. Like A Wounded Bird Trying To Fly (5:29)
2. Blues Come For Some (5:09)
3. Tom Petty’s Gone (but Tell Him I Asked For Him) (8:15)

Dave Matthews Band’s first album in four years, largely written throughout the pandemic, is as much a reflection on the current times as an urge to find common ground. The twelve-track album was recorded with producer Rob Evans in studios throughout Seattle, Charlottesville, and Los Angeles. “Monsters” was produced by longtime collaborator John Alagia. “'Walk Around The Moon' touches on my children, the futility of our struggles as a human race, gun violence, love, modern political discourse, gratitude.” - Dave Matthews

TRACK LISTING

1. Walk Around The Moon
2. Madman’s Eyes
3. Looking For A Vein
4. The Ocean And The Butterfly
5. It Could Happen
6. Something To Tell My Baby
7. After Everything
8. All You Wanted Was Tomorrow
9. The Only Thing
10. Break Free
11. Monsters
12. Singing From The Windows

Johnny Flynn’s sixth album, and the second co-written with his friend Robert Macfarlane gathers songs that Johnny and Robert have written together since finishing their first joint album, Lost In The Cedar Wood (2021). At its heart are the oldest themes of all: death and renewal, darkness and light. The first five tracks are songs of burial, shadows and memory, while the final four are songs of awakening, light and love. The album turns around a central song, ‘The Sun Also Rises’, which stands with a foot in both dark and light.

Fuses poetry, story, landscape, history, nature and myth into a series of rich, strange songlines that criss-cross time and place, joining winter to spring, ancient to present and birth to death. As the Sun sets, so the Moon rises as its echo; as one light dies, another, altogether different light is born.

Partly recorded in an old Methodist chapel –now the home of Johnny and Rob’s friends, Cosmo and Flora Sheldrake.

Produced by Charlie Andrew (Alt-J, Marika Hackman).

BIOG
Johnny Flynn is a singer, composer, musician and actor. His musical releases to date include the studio albums A Larum (2008), Been Listening (2010), Country Mile (2013), Sillion (2017) and Lost In The Cedar Wood (2021). He has released two full live albums, Live in Washington DC (2014) and Live at the Roundhouse (2018) and various EPs and soundtracks. As well as touring the world with his band, Johnny regularly composes music for film, TV and theatre –– including work for period instruments at the Globe Theatre. Johnny’s recent acting projects include Hangmen and True West (for which he also composed the music) on stage and Emma, Beast and The Dig on film. He is currently appearing as Richard Burton in Jack Thorne’s sell-out play The Motive and the Cue, directed by Sam Mendes.

Robert Macfarlane is a writer of books about nature, people, place and landscape including Underland (2019), Landmarks (2015), The Old Ways (2012) and, with Jackie Morris, The Lost Words (2017) and The Lost Spells (2020). He also writes films (inc. Mountain and River, both starring Willem Dafoe), operas, plays and screenplays, and collaborates widely, including with artist Stanley Donwood, and musicians Cosmo Sheldrake, Jocelyn Pook and Karine Polwart. His work has been widely adapted for film, stage, television, radio, dance, music and performance, and his books have been published in more than thirty languages. In 2023 he was awarded the inaugural Weston International Award for Non-Fiction.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: A rousing collection of songs from the neo-folk troubador Johnny Flynn (whose Detectorists theme is forever etched in my brain) and frequent collaboration partner Robert Macfarlane. It's a warming, bucolic selection that's every bit as beautiful as 2021's stunning 'Lost In The Cedar Wood'.

TRACK LISTING

Side A
1. Uncanny Valley
2. Song With No Name
3. Burial Blessing
4. No Matter The Weight
5. Coins For The Eyes
Side B
6. The Sun Also Rises
7. The Wild Hunt
8. Through The Misty With You
9. Year-Long Winter
10. River, Mountain And Love

The good moon comes after the full moon, when everything comes down and you can finally get some work done - be it building a house, or a boat, or recording an album). It's the most achieved album Stanley Brinks ever made. Stanley Brinks is renowned for his unique anti-folk style: both playful and suggestive, insightful and entertaining. Brinks was born in Paris, France, in 1973. He studied a bit of biology and worked as a nurse for a while. Half Swedish, half Moroccan, strongly inclined to travel the world, he soon began spending most of his life on the road and developed a strong relationship with New York. By the late 90s he’d become a full time singer-songwriter – André Herman Düne – as part of three piece indie-rock band, Herman Düne alongside his brother, David-Ivar. Several albums and Peel sessions later and after a decade of touring Europe, mostly with American songwriters such as Jeffrey Lewis, Calvin Johnson and early Arcade Fire he settled in Berlin. The early carnival music of Trinidad became a passion, and in the early 21st century he became the unquestioned master of European calypso, changing his name to Stanley Brinks. Under this moniker he has recorded well in excess of 100 albums, collaborated with the New York Antifolk scene on numerous occasions, recorded and toured with traditional Norwegian musicians, and played a lot with The Wave Pictures.

TRACK LISTING

If I Can Bring It To My Lips
This Is The Day
Always The Same
Take It To The Street
Last Bar
Good Moon
I Didn’t Come Here To Love You
Dead Bug
Cold Noise
No Trouble
Don’t Go
So Easy
Out Of Nowhere

Pink Floyd announced the upcoming stand-alone release of the newly remastered ‘The Dark Side Of The Moon’ on CD, LP and Blu-ray. These versions will be released on October 13th.

First released as part of ‘The Dark Side Of The Moon’ 50th Anniversary Box Set, this is the first time that the new mix of the classic album will be available on its own in physical formats. The Blu-ray contains the Dolby Atmos mix, a 5.1 Surround mix and the remastered Stereo mix. The package comes with commemorative postcards, stickers and a 24-page booklet.

Originally released in 1973 and becoming one of the most iconic and influential albums ever, Pink Floyd’s ‘The Dark Side Of The Moon’ continues to find new audiences globally. The famous sleeve, which depicts a prism spectrum, was designed by Storm Thorgerson of Hipgnosis and drawn by George Hardie. ‘The Dark Side Of The Moon’ has sold over 50 million copies worldwide.

To celebrate the 50th Anniversary year of ‘The Dark Side Of The Moon’, Roger Waters releases his homage to the original, ‘The Dark Side Of The Moon Redux’

Waters says ‘when we recorded the stripped down songs for the Lockdown Sessions, the 50th anniversary of the release of The Dark Side Of The Moon was looming on the horizon. It occurred to to me that The Dark Side Of The Moon could well be a suitable candidate for a similar re-working, partly as a tribute to the original work, but also to re-address the political and emotional message of the whole album. I discussed it with Gus and Sean, and when we’d stopped giggling and shouting ‘You must be ****ing mad’ at one another we decided to take it on. It’s turned out really great and I’m excited for everyone to hear it. It’s not a replacement for the original which, obviously, is irreplaceable. But it is a way for the seventy nine year old man to look back across the intervening fifty years into the eyes of the twenty nine year old and say, to quote a poem of mine about my Father, “We did our best, we kept his trust, our Dad would have been proud of us”. And also it is a way for me to honor a recording that Nick and Rick and Dave and I have every right to be very proud of.’

As founding member, lyricist, and principal composer of Pink Floyd during the band’s most influential and creative period, Roger Waters has achieved global success and global renown.

Waters co-founded Pink Floyd in the mid-1960s. Under Waters’ guidance, Pink Floyd made a series of best-selling albums during the 1970s, of which the most successful and iconic were The Dark Side Of The Moon, Wish You Were Here, Animals and The Wall. Roger Waters left Pink Floyd in 1985 and is now one of the most successful solo artists in the world.

TRACK LISTING

1. Speak To Me
2. Breathe
3. On The Run
4. Time
5. Great Gig In The Sky
6. Money
7. Us And Them
8. Any Colour You Like
9. Brain Damage
10. Eclipse

Marquee Moon is the debut album by American rock band Television. It was released on February 8, 1977, by Elektra Records. In the years leading up to the album, Television had become a prominent act on the New York music scene and generated interest from a number of record labels, eventually signing a record deal with Elektra. The group rehearsed extensively in preparation for Marquee Moon before recording it at A & R Recording in September 1976. It was produced by the band's frontman Tom Verlaine and sound engineer Andy Johns.

A mythic tone always accompanies the subject of Half Moon Run’s genesis. The musical chemistry of Devon Portielje, Conner Molander, and Dylan Phillips is a continued source of wonder, even to the band, and even now - a decorous decade on. Half Moon Run’s collaborative power has remained constant and unsuppressed and their new album Salt sees them revisiting the site of their bond’s first forging, bringing visions to light that’ve been there in waiting since the beginning.

“While making this record, it felt as if we were boiling down a huge cauldron of musical ideas, trying to reduce it to something elemental,” Molander explains in examination of the album’s title. “And what we were left with was Salt.”

The unbelievably prolific Haruomi Hosono is one of the major architects of modern Japanese pop music. With his encyclopaedic knowledge of music and boundless curiosity for new sounds, Hosono is the auteur of his own idiosyncratic musical world, putting his unmistakable stamp on hundreds of recordings as an artist, session player, songwriter and producer. Born and raised in central Tokyo, his adolescent obsession with American pop culture informed his early forays into country music, which he would revisit later in his career. Hosono made his professional debut in 1969 as a member of Apryl Fool, whose heavy psychedelia was somewhat at odds with his influences, which leaned towards the rootsy sounds of Moby Grape and Buffalo Springfield. The latter was one of the main inspirations for his next group, Happy End, whose unique blend of West Coast sounds with Japanese lyrics proved to be highly influential over the course of three albums. After the band’s amicable break up in 1973, Hosono began his solo career with Hosono House, an intimate slice of Japanese Americana recorded inside a rented house with recording gear squeezed into its tiny bedroom. Hosono’s solo career would take many twists and turns from this point forward, with forays into exotica, electronic, ambient, and techno, culminating in the massive success of techno pop group Yellow Magic Orchestra (YMO).

Released in September 1978, a mere two months before YMO’s debut, Cochin Moon is a clear precursor to the groundbreaking synth and sequencerdominated sounds that would come to define the iconic trio. Credited to Hosono and Pop Art legend Tadanori Yokoo (who created the cover art), Cochin Moon is a fictional soundtrack to a journey into unknown worlds, inspired by Hosono and Yokoo’s trip to India. Initially the album was to be a kind of ethnographic musical document, using found sounds and field recordings made by Hosono himself. Instead, after Yokoo introduced Hosono to the sounds of Kraftwerk and krautrock during the trip, Cochin Moon became something much stranger. Created almost entirely on synthesizers and sequencers with the help of future YMO collaborators Ryuichi Sakamoto and Hideki Matsutake, the music on the album is the perfect encapsulation of Hosono’s concept of “sightseeing music,” transporting the listener to an exotic place that may or may not exist. This highly sought-after album sees its firstever official release outside of Japan.

Admired by artists ranging from Van Dyke Parks to Mac DeMarco, Hosono continues to forge ahead as he heads into his fifth decade as a musician. With the re-release of his key albums for the first time outside of Japan, his genius will be discovered by a whole new generation of fans around the world.

TRACK LISTING

1. "Ground Floor···Triangle Circuit On The Sea-Forest" 
2. "Upper Floor···Moving Triangle" 
3. "Roof Garden···Revel Attack" 
4. "Hepatitis" 
5. "Hum Ghar Sajan" 
6. "Madam Consul General Of Madras" 

To celebrate the 45th anniversary of iconic Dutch jazz label Timeless Records, Music On Vinyl is releasing a series that features albums that are part of the Timeless Records legacy. Part of this series is Pharoah Sanders' Moon Child from 1990, which bookended a decade of musical soul searching for Sanders. The acclaimed free jazz player is known to have a raw and abrasive sound, but reinvented himself on this album as a more traditional improviser capable of thoughtful deliberations. Moon Child is a grand old time throughout, and Sanders has never been more eminently sing-along-able as he is on its title track. The record was co-written with Horace Silver, George Gershwin and Abdullah Ibrahim and recorded with William Henderson, Stafford James, Eddie Moore and Cheikh Tidiane Fall.

TRACK LISTING

Side A
1. Moon Child
2. Moon Rays
3. The Night Has A Thousand Eyes

Side B
1. All Or Nothing At All
2. Soon
3. Moniebah

When Sacred Bones first began their Mort Garson reissue project in 2019 with a proper reissue of Plantasia, the Garson-naissance began in earnest. Soon after, you could hear Mort Garson and his Moogs bubbling up on TV shows, documentaries, podcasts, hip-hop tracks, or anywhere else, the man a cultural phenomenon once more. Like a perennial that returns with each new spring, the Mort Garson archives have brought to bear yet another awe-inspiring bloom. Journey to the Moon and Beyond finds even more new facets to the man’s sound. There’s the soundtrack to the 1974 blaxploitation film Black Eye (starring Fred Williamson) alongside some newly unearthed music for advertising. Just as regal is “Zoos of the World,” where Garson soundtracks the wild, preening, slum- bering animals from a 1970 National Geographic special of the same name. The mind reels at just what project would have yielded a scintillating title like“Western Dragon,” but these three selections were found on tapes in the archive with no further information.

The crown jewel of the set is no doubt Garson’s soundtrack to the live broadcast of the 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing, as first heard on CBS News. That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for Moogkind. But for decades, this audio was presumed lost, the only trace of it appearing to be from an old YouTube clip. Thankfully, diligent audio archivist Andy Zax came across a copy of the master tape while going through the massive Rod McKuen archive. So now we get to hear it in all its glory. Across six minutes, Garson conjures broad fantasias, whirring mooncraft sounds, zero-gravity squelches, and twinkling études. It showcases Mort’s many moods: sweet, exploratory, whimsical, a little bit corny, weaving it all together in a glorious whole.

Maybe at the time it scanned as crass and opportunistic for Garson to apply his keyboards to subjects like astrological signs, the occult, hippiedom, houseplants, or the moon landing. But more than most other electronic music pioneers of his ilk, Garson foresaw the integration of such electronics into our daily lives, how they would allow us to engage with the world.

TRACK LISTING

1 Zoos Of The World
2 The Big Game Hunters See The Cheetah
3 Western Dragon (Pt 3)
4 Western Dragon (Pt 2)
5 Moon Journey
6 Music For Advertising #6
7 Black Eye (Main Theme)
8 Western Dragon (Pt 1)
9 Music For Advertising #7
10 Captain DJ Disco UFO (Pt II)
11 Three TV IDs
12 Music For Advertising #8
13 Love Is A Garden
14 The D-Bee's Cat Boogie
15 Black Eye (End Credits)

Limited edition sampler from Japanese producer CALM. These two tracks have been taken from the Japan only Music Conception release 'Quiet Music Under The Moon' that came out early 2023 . Featuring his signature ambient musical meditations. Mukatsuku has worked with Calm several times over the years releasing music on Exceptional Records plus compilations on Fuego (Moshi Moshi) & Kriztal (Sakura Aural Bliss) but this is the first time to release his output on Mukatsuku. Limited to 400 only hand-numbered copies.

TRACK LISTING

1. Moon Shower
2. Oyasumi, Ohayo

New Heavy Sounds has had its radar pointing at the stars for quite a while now. MWWB (Mammoth Weed Wizard Bastard) was our first contact with the dream side of the cosmic. Now we prepare to welcome the second. Hailing from Kansas, They Watch Us From The Moon have landed to present their first magnum opus ‘Cosmic Chronicles: Act 1, The Ascension’ A band with riffs as heavy as Osmium and melodic lead guitar lines (think Gilmour meets Buck Dharma) as strong as spider's silk, it’s a wonder they managed to escape the atmosphere. Perhaps it’s because the sublime vocals of TWUFTM's twin 'Space Angels' Luna Nemesis and Nova 10101001 guide you beautifully through the clouds. In fact their vocals are a total highlight throughout and lift this record far above any genre pigeonholing. TWUFTM are also a band that has a concept behind the groove. Sci-fi space opera, a love for Bowie and Queen, brought to the fore visually, in their mashing of comic book narratives and Funkadelic style alter ego’s. TWUFTM are truly an immersive experience on every level. As to the music … the colossal weight of riffs on this first-contact missive are made so gloriously enjoyable by memorable hooks, honed repetition and and an agile rhythm section that can make each one of their (sometimes 10 minute) stargaze rides feel like an epic odyssey. Fellow space travellers Hawkwind and Pink Floyd, and even Spacemen 3, have been in similar orbits before, but never this heavy. Now, alongside a trajectory charted by Monster Magnet and maintained by The Sword, Ufomammut, White Hills and Witch Mountain .... TWUFTM don't just breathe new life into cosmic tones, they take it to a different level. ‘Cosmic Chronicles: Act 1, The Ascension’ is space opera for Heavy Psych Doommers and Shoegazers alike. This is something new within Heavy Psychedelics, in fact it’s something new anywhere. The epic single 'Return to Earth' last December, following their 'Moon Doom' EP, had the scene talking, and the few album snippets that have been secretly disseminated, has created much anticipation. "A phenomenal blending of doom, psych and spacious rock'n'roll that is as heavy as it is accessible” Desert Psychlist. Cosmic Chronicles contains 5 immense tracks chock full of weight and brimming with melody. ‘On The Fields Of The Moon’ is like fresh oxygen in bright sunlight - chiming lead guitars and angelic twin vocals (almost like Fleetwood Mac … imagine that) melodies draw you in like gravity itself. Complete with a space-bound chorus and a ripping guitar only 250 seconds into our flight. It sets the tone perfectly. 'Space Angel' is literally that. The band's angel’s Luna and Nova are simply mesmerising, weaving through the heaviest of space-kraut riff grooves. With 'MOAB', the mood is darkening. 'Days of destruction, days of disease' - a warning for our times - the pace has slowed, it’s black and doom laden, yet our vocal angels still give us reason for optimism. And there, fellow travellers, we suggest that you take a moment to take in what you’ve just heard, and imbibe whatever is your drug of choice before tackling the final two ten minute space flights. 'Creeper AD' is a psychedelic trip to lose yourself in. Shifting chord progressions, cool guitar breaks and again, those vocal harmonies, entwined and bewitching. 'Return To Earth' does just that, and is pretty much the summation of what we have experienced. An epic, gorgeous space symphony.

TWUFTM are: Luna Nemesis - Lead Vocals / The General Shane Thirteen - Guitar and Vocals / Adryon Prahktaur- Drums / Zakkatron- Bass / R. Benjamin Black- Lead Guitar and Vocals / Nova 10101001- Vocals.

TRACK LISTING

On The Fields Of The Moon
Space Angel
Mother Of All Bastards
Creeper A.d.
Return To Earth

THIS IS A RECORD STORE DAY 2023 EXCLUSIVE, LIMITED TO ONE PER PERSON.

The Big Moon’s highly acclaimed debut album - shortlisted for the Mercury Music Prize and one of 2017’s albums of the year according to both NME and Rough Trade - has been pressed on mint green vinyl along with brand new artwork, exclusively for Record Store Day 2023.

Steve Gunn and David Moore’s Let the Moon be a Planet is a volume of improvisatory exchanges between classical guitar and piano, and a meeting place where two artists become acquainted through instrumental dialogue without a single expectation distracting them from the joy and open field possibility of collaboration.

A project enveloped by an aura of reciprocity, Let the Moon Be a Planet unfolded from an invitation to connect between two New York-based musicians who admired each other’s work but had never intersected: guitarist and songwriter Steve Gunn, whose solo, duo, and ensemble recordings represent milestones of contemporary guitar- guided material, and pianist and composer David Moore, acclaimed for his minimalist ensemble music as the leader of Bing & Ruth.

The exchange began remotely as Gunn and Moore responded to one another’s solo improvisations, embarking on a synergistic progression of deep listening and connection through musical conversation. “We were both fans of each other’s music and this was a chance to try a different process which was much more open,” says Moore. “It felt like something I needed personally as an artist, to not be so controlling over the final output, and to truly collaborate with somebody else.”

Similarly for Gunn, who was exploring new pastures and passages in classical guitar when the dialogue began, the project was an invitation for pure conversation and exchange, creating space for him to revisit foundational forms with his playing: “I was trying to break out of what I was doing, to have something that just pulled away all the elements of usual structured things.”

Let the Moon Be a Planet intertwines the trajectories of two musicians acclaimed for pushing the boundaries of their instruments, unified by a shift away from what they recall as more “detail- oriented” approaches to composition. Fueled by the magnetism of their call and response exercise, Gunn and Moore set out on a nomadic songwriting venture without an intended destination.

“We didn’t know it was going to be an album,” Gunn explains. “There was never pressure on us to complete or make something. It was interesting to start realizing that this could be an album and to take a step back... to arrive at a project after the fact.”

Calibrating their focus to connect with a spectrum of inner and external emotional realities, the duo found their way into a world where the most subtle of gestures can eternally flow. Let the Moon be a Planet is an ode to experimentation over outcome; it holds a candle light to the corners of introspection and captures the patterns that flicker within.

Cast across the compositions of the album is a gritty, filmic grain — a quality that emerged partially from recording “without the greatest microphones” or their usual studio environments. For both artists, this lo-fi sensitivity felt integral to the record and its production, and they worked closely with engineer Nick Principe to preserve its otherworldly haze in the final mixes.

Across the record’s eight compositions, the rippling impulses of Gunn and Moore’s inner worlds converge in the spirit of two strangers wandering the same path, engaged in a daydream state of natural back and forth. Melodic tableaux arise, drift and disperse across serene open spaces, painted in earthy hues of nylon string and balmy, undulating keys — side by side, the duo converse in tessellating motifs and gestures of lucid introspection, cultivated by a shared desire for intuitive play.

“This project was such a simple idea,” says Gunn. “It got down to the very core of where I am or where I was, and where I’m trying to be as a musician. Making this record became a very beneficial ritual for me, almost a meditative process.” As Moore recalls, “Our only motivation for making these tracks was that it felt good to make them and there was nothing else behind it... I don’t know that I’ve ever made a record that came about so naturally.”

While Let the Moon Be a Planet was envisioned through a deeply collaborative process, it uncovered a path for Gunn and Moore to respectively return home as musicians. Imbued with the forces of interconnection and balance, the record is an exploration of creative synergy while following the currents of inner experience — of looking outwards to arrive at one’s natural self.

The album represents the first volume of Reflections, a new series of contemporary collaborations orchestrated by RVNG Intl. A portion of the proceeds from this release will benefit St. John’s Bread and Life, whose mission is to respect the dignity and rights of all persons by ensuring access to healthy, nutritious food and comprehensive human services resulting in self-sufficiency and stability. 

TRACK LISTING

A1. Over The Dune
A2. Painterly
A3. Scattering
A4. Basin
B1. Morning Mare
B2. Libration
B3. Paper Limb
B4. Rhododendron 

One of the most iconic and influential albums ever, Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side Of The Moon celebrates its 50th Anniversary. The album was partly developed during live performances, and the band premiered an early version of the suite at London’s Rainbow Theatre several months before recording began. ‘The Dark Side Of The Moon’ is the eighth studio album by Pink Floyd, originally released in March 1973. The new material was recorded in 1972 and 1973 at EMI Studios (now Abbey Road Studios) in London. The iconic sleeve, which depicts a prism spectrum, was designed by Storm Thorgerson of Hipgnosis and drawn by George Hardie. ‘The Dark Side Of The Moon’ has sold over 50 million copies worldwide. The new deluxe box set includes CD and gatefold vinyl of the newly remastered studio album and Blu-Ray + DVD audio featuring the original 5.1 mix and remastered stereo versions. The set also includes additional new Blu-ray disc of Atmos mix plus CD and LP of ‘The Dark Side Of The Moon - Live At Wembley Empire Pool, London, 1974’.

The Box Includes:

CD1 – THE DARK SIDE OF THE MOON (50th Anniversary) [2023 Master]
Remastered by James Guthrie
in gatefold sleeve with 12-page booklet

CD2 – THE DARK SIDE OF THE MOON
LIVE AT WEMBLEY EMPIRE POOL, LONDON, 1974
Mixed by Andy Jackson
in gatefold sleeve with 12-page booklet. Cover design by Aubrey Powell/Hipgnosis and Peter Curzon/StormStudios. Original 1973 line drawn cover artwork by George Hardie

LP1 – THE DARK SIDE OF THE MOON (50th Anniversary) 2023 Remaster
Remastered original studio album
180G Heavyweight 1LP in gatefold sleeve, with original posters and stickers

LP2 – THE DARK SIDE OF THE MOON
LIVE AT WEMBLEY EMPIRE POOL, LONDON, 1974 (2023 Master)
180G Heavyweight 1LP in gatefold, with 2 posters featuring design by Ian Emes and Gerald Scarfe. Cover design by Aubrey Powell/Hipgnosis and Peter Curzon/StormStudios. Original 1973 line drawn cover artwork by George Hardie

BLU-RAY 1 (AUDIO)
Original album 5.1 and high-resolution remastered stereo mixes,
1. 5.1 Surround Mix – 24bit/96kHz Uncompressed
2. Stereo Mix – 24bit/192kHz Uncompressed
3. 5.1 Surround Mix – dts-HD MA
4. Stereo Mix – dts-HD MA

BLU-RAY 2 (AUDIO)
Original newly remastered album Atmos and high-resolution stereo mixes,
1. Dolby Atmos Mix
2. Stereo Mix – 24-bit/192kHz Uncompressed
3. Stereo Mix – dts-HD MA

DVD (AUDIO)
Original album 5.1 and remastered stereo mixes,
1. 5.1 Surround Mix – Dolby Digital @448 kbps
2. 5.1 Surround Mix – Dolby Digital @640 kbps
3. Stereo Mix (LPCM) – 24-bit/48 kHz Uncompressed

160-PAGE THAMES & HUDSON HARDCOVER BOOK
with rare black and white photographs from the 1973 – 1974 tours of the UK and the USA taken by Jill Furmanovsky, Peter Christopherson, Aubrey Powell, Storm Thorgerson

76-PAGE MUSIC BOOK
Complete songbook of original album

REPLICAS OF 2×7” SINGLES
7" Single 1 Money/Any Colour You Like
7" Single 2 Us and Them/Time

Plus replica of pamphlet and invitation to the preview of The Dark Side of The Moon at the London Planetarium on 27th February 1973

TRACK LISTING

1. Speak To Me
2. Breathe (In The Air)
3. On The Run
4. Time
5. The Great Gig In The Sky
6. Money
7. Us And Them
8. Any Colour You Like
9. Brain Damage
10. Eclipse

The Dark Side Of The Moon - Live At Wembley Empire Pool, London, 1974. Cover design by Aubrey Powell/Hipgnosis and Peter Curzon/Storm Studios. Featuring original 1973 line drawn cover artwork by George Hardie.

TRACK LISTING

Sie One:

Speak To Me
Breathe (In The Air)
On The Run
Time
The Great Gig In The Sky

Side Two:

Money
Us And Them
Any Colour You Like
Brain Damage
Eclipse

Originally released in 1994, Mighty Joe Moon is the second release from Grant Lee Buffalo Appearing in the midst of the grunge movement, the trio took raw emotion and embraced it with just as much abrasion but toned it down into a more singer/ songwriter tone, thanks to Grant Lee Phillips' mix of glaring guitars and hushed vocals, that was unlike anything else at the time. With a nod to its predecessor, it is a more complex affair drawing in the listener on a more personal level. The fre burning in him, Phillips blazes through the themes of politics, love, the human spirit, and ends the album with a very chilling take on his own version of the old hymn Rock of Ages.

TRACK LISTING

Lone Star Song
Mockingbirds
It's The Life
Sing Along
Mighty Joe Moon
Demon Called Deception
Lady Godiva And Me
Drag
Last Days Of Tecumseh
Happiness
Honey Don't Think
Side By Side
Rock Of Ages

'Turning (Inside Out)' is the new 12" dance single from Arbutus Records, a collaboration between Canadian synthpop artist Moon King and Baltimore production team Visors, with added vocals from fellow Bmore rapper DDM and, in a surprising turn of events, saxophone from the Neptunes' Chad Hugo, under his St Charles alias.

The 'pandemic-era online collab' has given us some strange and unlikely gems, of which this record is certainly one - a mesmerizing mid-tempo groove with Moon King and DDM's call and response vocals floating above, culminating in a catchy chorus: 'feels like turning inside out, when I need you there, you're not around'.

TRACK LISTING

A1. Turning (Inside Out)
A2. Turning (Inside Out) (instrumental)
B1. Out Of Control
B2. Out Of Control (instrumental)

Milan Records release this tribute to legendary Japanese composer, artist, producer & environmental activist Ryuichi Sakamoto. A 13 song collection of songs from Sakamoto's vast catalogue, newly reworked & remodelled by contemporary artists & collaborators, including David Sylvian, Thundercat, Devonte Hynes, Hildur Guonadottir, Cornelius, Alva Noto, Liam Giong & more... 

ill Records are proud to present the latest project from HART. The Sheffield-bred, Bangor-based producer continues her run of releases, following on from the Little Black Book EP, which emerged in 2020.

While Moon Jazz follows in similar footsteps to its predecessor, this latest offering is a more jazz focused affair. The album explores the point where the contemporary and the classic coalesce, as vaguely obscure vocal samples, wandering basslines and woozy horns, blend with electronic elements and hip hop-tinted drum patterns.

HART's aim for the album was to examine the relationships between people, art, feelings and moods, which she achieved through experimentation within the jazz realm and the formation of a storyboard of samples.

As much as the album is grounded in the worlds of jazz and hip hop, there is still a rich variation of sound that cuts across the entire listening experience. From the short burst of undiluted jazz strains on the intro and the looming bass / pitched down vocal amalgamation on Struttin', to the multi-layered beauty of Vocabulary and the obscenely laid-back vibe of Cruisin, this is an album that showcases the full breadth of HART's dexterity behind the boards.

And while the trend in 20-minute albums and minute-long tracks continues unabated in hip hop, here we find a call back to the sprawling soundscapes of years past. At 13 tracks deep, with some of those running beyond the four-minute mark, this is a project that sits firmly outside traditional beat tape territory and affirms its status as a full-bodied work of art.

Five singles off Moon Jazz have already been released into the world, music videos for which you can find below, and all created by HART herself. The album is now available to own on vinyl, and will be released digitally 30/10

TRACK LISTING

1. Moon Jazz Intro
2. Struttin
3. Scotch N Carrot
4. Key Tickler
5. 504
6. Vocabulary
7. Sugar Tea Time
8. Off On
9. Nature's Rhythm Interlude
10. Cruisin
11. Tone Fidelity
12. Jazzman
13. Elevate
14. Memory Ft Violentlyill
15. Moon Jazz Outro

‘Under This Hunger Moon We Fell’ is the new album from the uniquely talented, multi-instrumental artificer Lomond Campbell, the third and final instalment of his experiments using tape loops at the heart of his music making process.

The album ranges from soft, delicate atmospheric musings such as ‘Bastard Wing’ and ‘Leave Only Love Behind’ to the dark electronics of ‘And They Are Afraid Of Her’ and ‘Phonon For No One’, which Campbell describes as “akin to a massive machine starting up, like a huge sinister power mobilising”. During its gloomier moments, ‘Under This Hunger Moon We Fell’ buries tonally ambiguous ambience underneath hazy, distorted textures created via the gradual degradation of the tape. It creates a dream-like backdrop with a moody undertone created by deep basslines and hulking percussive elements, blended with orchestral sounds that add an air of humanity.

“Visual beauty, tactility and mesmeric kinetics are just as important to his creations as the sounds their movements facilitate” Electronic Sound

“He’s a bit of a genius I think. Based up in the highlands, maker of machines, music and art” Mary Anne Hobbs (BBC 6Music)

TRACK LISTING

Bastard Wing
Phonon For No One
Sister Rena
The Mountain And The Pendulum
Under This Hunger Moon We Fell
Leave Only Love Behind
And They Are Afraid Of Her
For The Uncarved
Even Songbirds Suffer
Alters

Lucifer on the Moon is the anti-gravity companion to Spoon’s Lucifer on the Sofa. A top-to-bottom rework of the Austin band's tenth album, it was created by On-U Sound founder and UK dub icon, Adrian Sherwood.

Moon first took shape as a few heady remixes for the singles from Lucifer on the Sofa. Frontman Britt Daniel offered Sherwood two suggestions: “Avoid things that would not be possible on tape” and “Add whatever you want to add, the less modern the better.” The collaboration shouldn't come as a surprise: dub-inspired production is wound through Spoon’s classic tracks, from "Finer Feelings" to "Inside Out." Sherwood is a proven collaborator whose resume includes partnerships with seminal artists like The Fall, Jah Wobble, and Mark Stewart. The initial results pleased both parties and Sherwood was invited to work on additional songs. And then a few more. “I got into the melody and the thoughts it evoked in me,” the producer explains. “It just evolved and we eventually found ourselves with a whole album.”

Moon flips Lucifer on the Sofa’s rhythm tracks inside-out, and often rebuilds them wholesale. Sherwood supplied extensive additional instrumentation via On-U’s extended family of session players, including bassist Doug Wimbish and drummer Keith LeBlanc (both of whom performed in Sugarhill Records’ early ’80s in-house rhythm section). He dug deep into the album’s multi-tracks, surfacing forgotten details and elements not present in the final album mixes.

The result airlifts Spoon’s trademark melodies into lush alien terrain, replete with vibrant echo and rumbling low-end. “It wasn’t just a thing where you pick apart this and that and you stay on the grid and you add a delay,” explains Daniel. “He added so much more instrumentation to the tracks that they became completely different versions of the songs. Not just remixes, but companion pieces. A ‘Part II.’”

Released in February, Lucifer on the Sofa is Spoon’s purest rock ’n roll record to date. Texas-made, it is the first set of songs that the quintet has put to tape in its hometown of Austin in more than a decade. Written and recorded over the last two years – both in and out of lockdown – the songs mark a shift toward something louder, wilder, and more full-color. "It’s the best thing they’ve ever done,” wrote Rolling Stone. “More than exceeding their usual quotient of fire guitars, killer choruses, and crafty rock-history updates.” The band has hit the road hard this year and recently wrapped a coast-to-coast co-headline US tour with Interpol. NJ.com called Spoon’s Asbury Park performance a “70-minute foil of raw emotion and bounding humanity.”

TRACK LISTING

1.  My Babe
2.  On The Radio
3.  Held
4.  The Devile & Mister Jones
5.  Lucifer On The Sofa
6.  Astral Jacket
7.  Feels Alright
8.  Wild
9.  The Hardest Cut
10.  Satellite

Takuya Kuroda is a highly respected trumpeter and arranger born in Kobe, Japan and based in New York City. 'Midnight Crisp' is Takuya's seventh studio album, entirely self-produced and following 2020's highly acclaimed 'Fly Moon Die Soon', also released on UK label First Word (winner of the Worldwide Award's Label of the Year in 2019). Consisting of six new tracks, this once again sees Takuya displaying his unique hybrid sound, blending soulful jazz, funk, post-bop, fusion and hip hop.

After following the footsteps of his trombonist brother playing in big bands, he relocated to New York to study jazz & contemporary music at The New School in Union Square; a course he graduated from in the mid-noughties. It was here that Takuya met vocalist José James, with whom he worked on the 'Blackmagic' and 'No Beginning No End' projects.

Following graduation, Takuya established himself further in the NYC jazz scene, performing with the likes of Akoya Afrobeat and in recent years with DJ Premier's BADDER band. Premier said "The BADDER Band project was put together by my manager, and an agent I've known since the beginning of my Gang Starr career. He said, 'What if you put a band together that revolved around a trumpet player from Japan named Takuya Kuroda? He's got a hip-hop perspective and respect in the jazz field…"

Takuya Kuroda is already incredibly prolific, releasing six albums in the past decade and fortifying a solid reputation in the global jazz scene. 2011 saw the release of Takuya's independently-produced debut album, 'Edge', followed by 'Bitter and High' the following year and 'Six Aces' on P-Vine in 2013. Takuya was signed to the legendary Blue Note Records in 2014 for his album 'Rising Son', as well as appearing on their 2019 cover versions project, 'Blue Note Voyage'. He released his 5th album 'Zigzagger' on Concord in 2016, which also featured Antibalas on a reimagining of the Donald Byrd classic 'Think Twice'.

His last album was the afore-mentioned 'Fly Moon Die Soon' on First Word, which appears on the second disc here on CD for the very first time, and received plays and support from the likes of Pitchfork, Earmilk, Bandcamp Weekly, Worldwide FM, All About Jazz, Apple Music, Tidal, Stereogum, Treble, Brooklyn Vegan, FIP (France), Tony Minvielle, Jazz FM, Huey Morgan (BBC 6 Music), BBC Radio 3, Novena Carmel, KCRW and tons more DJs, tastemakers, selectors, radio stations, bloggers & magazines.

TRACK LISTING

1. Midnight Crisp
2. Time Coil
3. It's Okay
4. Dead End Dance
5. Old Picture
6. Choy Soda
7. Fade (feat. Corey King)
8. ABC
9. CHANGE (feat. Corey King)
10. Do No Why
11. Fly Moon Die Soon
12. Moody
13. Sweet Sticky Things
14. Tell Me A Bedtime Story
15. TKBK

THEMES: Motherhood, parenthood, birth, lockdown, friendships, love.

The last time you heard them it was welcoming the release of their dazzling second album, Walking Like We Do, back in January 2020, when life was very different to how it is now. That was a coming-of-age record, bold songs for Saturday nights and sad songs for Sunday mornings. So much has changed, continues to change, and promises to change some more. And in this world of constant change, we yearn for the familiarity of a constant. Thankfully, one constant remains the unique, jubilant, unassailable bond that sews this brilliant London band together and what that does for their music, too. Another such constant is their collective ear for melody and knack for writing smart, sharp, and infectious indie-pop knockouts.

Like so many records landing in store and on streaming services right now, Here Is Everything was conceived during the weight and worry of lockdown in a pandemic. Worlds were turned upside down and inside out. Lives became seismically different, whilst every day a carbon copy of the last. So, whilst Covid pulled the duvet tightly up over our heads and sat on it whilst we muffle-screamed that we could not breathe, it was also the unlikely backdrop to welcoming new life. Vocalist Juliette Jackson might have started lockdown teaching fans how to play guitar on Zoom to help pay the rent (including, to her eternal bemusement, one Courtney Love), she ended it as mother to a super little human being.

Here is Everything documents the arrival of that fragile but mighty baby in real time, and the excitement and fear felt by this fragile but mighty mother. Meanwhile, the rest of the band doubled-down in the studio, taking Jules’ embryonic song frameworks and stepping forward as one, revelling in an innate, giddy togetherness and with a clutch of genuinely fantastic tunes.

The record is introduced today by Wide Eyes, a pure, uplifting song of collective jubilance. It sounds like a band in the form of their lives, having the time of their lives, and against all the odds. It sounds instantly like The Big Moon whilst sounding unlike any of the music that’s gone before it.

Here Is Everything was mostly self-produced, with the expert guidance and expertise of Adam Cecil Bartlett (Self Esteem, Jehnny Beth, PJ Harvey) and the Grammy Award winning producer Ben Allen (Gnarls Barkley, Deer Hunter, and the producer of Walking Like We Do).

TRACK LISTING

1. 2 Lines
2. Wide Eyes
3. Daydreaming
4. This Love
5. Sucker Punch
6. My Very Best
7. Ladye Bay
8. Trouble
9. High & Low
10. Magic
11. Satellites

A.A. Williams returns with new album 'As The Moon Rests', her second album with Bella Union. It's the follow up to 2020's Forever Blue, the London-based singer-songwriter’s album debut, a brilliantly dramatic, unique and intimate walk on the dark side that fused bold and smouldering hues of post-rock and post-classical. By turns, it was glacial and volcanic, blissful and violent, through moments of disarming quiet and explosive volume, equally appealing to alt-rock and metal camps.

“Traditionally, your second album is the worry: you don’t want to create something that people don’t like as much,” A.A. Williams contends. “But I must create music I like myself, and I’ve had more time on this record; I’ve felt more confidence and conviction. As The Moon Rests is heavier and softer, there’s more texture and weight, and a string ensemble. It’s Forever Blue times ten!”

TRACK LISTING

1. Hollow Heart
2. Evaporate
3. Murmurs
4. Pristine
5. Shallow Water
6. For Nothing
7. Golden
8. The Echo
9. Alone In The Deep
10. Ruin
11. As The Moon Rests

The first Austin Psych Fest was held in March 2008, and expanded to a 3 day event the following year. From there the festival quickly developed into an international destination for psychedelic rock fans, with lineups spanning the fringes of indie rock, from up-and-comers to vintage legends, and capped off with headlining performances from The Black Angels each year. The Black Angels and Levitation helped spark a movement, inspiring the creation of similar events across the globe and a burgeoning psych scene that would soon ignite. The series captures key moments in psychedelic rock history, and live music in Austin, Texas. The artists and sets showcased on Live at Levitation have been chosen from over a decade of recordings at the world-renowned event, and document key artists in the scene performing for a crowd of their peers and fans who gather at Levitation annually from all over the world.

These recordings capture Moon Duo as they rose to prominence as one of the defining creative forces of the psychedelic rock scene, with Sanae at the helm of their signature cosmic synth boogie + mind melting guitar work from Ripley Johnson. Side A showcases the band in its original incarnation, at Austin Psych Fest 2012, the band rose as a powerful two piece filling a sonic space with a pulsating and driving wall of sound. Side B shows the bands 2014 return and growth, now as a trio joined by John Jeffrey, live drums mix’d perfectly with their distorted synth sound creating a propulsion unlike any other and very distinctly Moon Duo. Working closely with the band to ensure an authentic listening experience, this show has been mixed and mastered for vinyl.

TRACK LISTING

SIDE A
1. Run Around
2. Dead West
3. Motorcycle, I Love You
4. Set It On Fire
SIDE B
1. Sleepwalker
2. I Been Gone
3. In The Sun
4. Goners

Criminal, The Soft Moon’s fourth studio album, is a confessional work. Through the stark lens of shame and guilt that has followed Luis Vasquez since a violent childhood growing up within the humming ambient sprawl of ’80s Mojave Desert, here he documents the gut-wrenching sound of going to war with himself.

Criminal marks a striking and important chapter in his self-exploration, both artistically and emotionally. As a young musician living in Oakland, Vasquez began to try and process the narrative of his difficult upbringing veiled through musical exploration.

Working with producer Maurizio Baggio at La Distilleria in Bassano Del Grappa, Italy, Criminal sees Vasquez further explore putting his lyrics at the forefront and letting his raw emotions flow.

Sacred Bones is now repressing this favourably received record in a bunch of new colors in celebration of the label’s 15th year anniversary.

“His bleakest - and most cohesive - music yet” - All Music

“On his fourth album as The Soft Moon, post-punk auteur Luis Vasquez finally breaks from a whisper into a scream.” - Pitchfork

“There are plenty of deliciously bitter pleasures here for anyone who similarly loves brooding in that blacked-out, candlelit bedroom of the mind.” - A.V Club

TRACK LISTING

01. Burn
02. Choke
03. Give Something
04. Like A Father
05. The Pain
06. It Kills
07. ILL
08. Young
09. Born Into This
10. Criminal

“The whole point of this record was to share every emotion that I feel,” says The Soft Moon’s Luis Vasquez. “No two songs are the same. It’s about existing in the world as a human being and experiencing many emotions and experiences throughout life.”

And so hence the title Exister, a record rooted in the ecstatic joys and crippling lows that life can throw up and how just hanging on and existing is sometimes all we have. “Exister is my way of saying ‘I’m here, deal with it.’” Vasquez says.

Sonically, this expression is a vast, expansive and potent one. The opening ‘Sad Song’, which unfurls with a dense brooding atmosphere, Vasquez describes as almost a ballad, while tracks such as ‘The Pit’ capture the opposite end of the musical spectrum, exploding as a thundering piece of industrial techno complete with gut-churning levels of bass.

‘Monster’ - a song that follows a human metamorphosis into an unrecognizable and destructive being - seamlessly combines a deeply melodic, almost electro pop, vocal hook with a slow build atmospherics to create something equally beautiful and unsettling. ‘Become the Lies’ explores the devastating consequences of being lied to by your own family and is a post-punk stomper, merging charging basslines, pummelling drums and snaking guitars, all of which combine explosively. Elsewhere the album runs the gauntlet of everything from ambient to dark wave - features ferocious guest contributions from fish narc and Special Interest’s Alli Logot on ‘Him’ and ‘Unforgiven’ - all while retaining that distinct tone that unmistakably The Soft Moon.

TRACK LISTING

1.Sad Song
2. Answers
3. Become The Lies
4. Face Is Gone
5. Monster
6. The Pit
7. NADA
8. Stupid Child
9. Him (Feat. Fish Narc)
10. Unforgiven (Feat. Alli Logout)
11. Exister

Music for the Moon and the Trees by classical guitarist Morgan Szymanski and experimental musician Tommy Perman is the result of a long-held wish that the two childhood friends would get the chance to create an album together. It's a meditative album; a gentle thing of serene beauty and quiet innovation.

All of the sounds heard on the album were recorded in the woodland surrounding the cottage. There was a childlike sense of wonder as the duo recorded the sounds of the trees, birds, bats and an assortment of found percussion. Convolution reverbs were created by snapping twigs and pinging spruce branches. Much of the music was improvised with live single-take performances by Morgan combined with Tommy's computer generative improvisations.

Limited edition of 300 copies pressed on12" eco-mix vinyl (each copy is unique)

Born in Mexico City in 1979, Morgan was a scholar at the Royal College of Music in London and Conservatorium van Amsterdam. He was the first solo guitarist to be selected by the Young Classical Artist Trust and the first guitarist to be awarded a Junior Fellowship at the RCM, where he completed his Masters with distinction.

Morgan regularly broadcasts live on TV and radio worldwide. He can often be heard on BBC Radio 3 and has recorded to critical acclaim for Sarabande Records and Signum labels.

Tommy is an artist, designer and musician with an interest in the spaces where these three disciplines meet. He has exhibited and released lots of records. His visual work has been projected onto the Sydney Opera House and permanently installed in Edinburgh World Heritage Site historic closes and the National Museum of Scotland.

His recent projects include Emergent Slow Arcs (2019), an audio-visual reimagining of Modern Studies' Welcome Strangers LP for Fire Records, Sing The Gloaming (2020), a collaborative project by Simon Kirby, Tommy Perman and Rob St John and Positive Interactions, an album made entirely from happy sounds sent to Tommy by 50 friends from all over the world.

TRACK LISTING

1. Moonrise (Luna De La Rosa)
2. The Road To The Cottage
3. Danza Del Fuego
4. Canción De La Luna (Homage To Debussy)
5. In The Pines
6. Fibonacci Dusk
7. Pipistrellus
8. Dance Of The Trees
9. Sarabande For The Souls
10. Moonset (Pine Spectrals)
11. Mémento (Homage To Lorca)
12. Down By Paddy's Burn

LIFE are anchored by their hometown; the geography, history and community has always been the inspiration behind their creativity and on their third LP, North East Coastal Town, the band pay homage to Hull and its folk. North East Coastal Town is mature; it finds the band at the height of their powers as they carve-up a wide-screen, brooding body of work that is drenched in a sense of belonging and reflection but still impressively maintains their trademark swagger and ear for pop sensibilities and guitar hooks.

“Hull and the surrounding area runs through our DNA and has shaped us, weathered us, empowered us, embraced us and made us feel accepted.

North East Coastal Town is our love letter to the city. The album is an ode to kinship and relationship with its musical and lyrical spine picking out themes of love, desire, beauty, horror, chaos, pride and most importantly the sense of belonging.

Upon writing and recording this album it was important to us that this sense of belonging was also reflected in the album’s craft and therefore we used locally based studios, equipment, gear, and the community around us to establish what it means to belong in a North East Coastal Town.”

When the pandemic gripped the world in March 2020, LIFE were in the midst of promoting their acclaimed second album – A Picture Of Good Health (Sept 2019); they had just completed an arena support tour with Kaiser Chiefs in the UK, a triumphant main stage appearance at Rockaway Beach and flown to New York for New Colossus Festival ahead of a packed SXSW and a US tour with IDLES. They scrambled home on the last plane back from New York on 17th March.

The album was BBC 6 Music’s Album Of The Day, BBC Radio 1’s Album Of The Weekend and was one of BBC 6Music's Albums of The Year; all four singles from the album were play-listed at 6Music, and the band were nominated for two AIM Awards 2020 - Best Live Act and Best (Difficult) Second Album and they played major UK festivals including Glastonbury, Latitude, Reading Festival and many more.

They began rebuilding with ‘Friends Without Names’ – the shapeshifting first glimpse from the album – which was added to the A-List at BBC 6Music, and was recorded in the dead of night and hums with a dark, brooding and passionate atmosphere.

“Friends Without Names is the anchor and blueprint for our next record. In a remote part of Eastern England, close to the river Humber, we performed this track as if we were in trance; vibrating in a constant musical crescendo. Our aim was to push ourselves and harness differing time zones whilst giving in to the moments of beauty, horror, love and chaos depicted by the song’s lyrics.” (Mez Green, vocals)

TRACK LISTING

SIDE A
1. Friends Without Names
2. Big Moon Lake
3. Incomplete
4. Almost Home
5. Duck Egg Blue
SIDE B
6. Shipping Forecast
7. Poison
8. Self Portrait
9. The Drug
10. Our Love Is Growing
11. All You Are

Leipzig, Germany-based experimental group Flying Moon In Space will release their second album, ‘ZWEI’, on June 24th. Due out via Fuzz Club Records and preceded by UK and EU tour dates through Spring/Summer, the latest album from the six-piece will arrive off the back of their highly-praised and sold-out self-titled debut album and a recent remix 12" that featured reworkings of tracks from the S/T album courtesy of kindred spirits Xiu Xiu, Suuns, A Place To Bury Strangers, Minami Deutsch, Camera and Warm Graves.

Where Flying Moon In Space's debut album was an extension of their live shows, long improv performances that would last hours at a time, the arrival of the Covid-19 pandemic and lockdown restrictions meant they were forced to reinvent their creative approach on its follow-up. Adopting the childhood game 'Stille Post' (or 'Telephone'), the six members would each send the demos around in a circle, recording a single line or changing up the tempo, until the songs took on a life of their own.

These demos were then taken into a studio deep in the forests of the Czech Republic and 'ZWEI' was born. "Musically it turned out to be somehow something completely new to us. As a result ZWEI has a more structured, poppy side compared to our debut, even though soundwise we opened up to more experimental layers - using synthesisers for the first time, as well as loops and field recordings of the church and surrounding forest. I guess generally you can say that the process behind this LP was manifold - testing out personal and aesthetic borders, and carrying on our idea of what Flying Moon In Space can be sonically.”

TRACK LISTING

1) Traum Für Alle
2) Optimist
3) This Exists
4) Power
5) The Day The Sun Was Made
6) Illl Ill Ill
7) Dissoziation
8) Prophet 

Höga Nord Rekords kindly welcomes Teecwa back to the label, following up his last full length-album “Beyond the Altai” with “Elysian on Moon Lake”. He is still exploring the intersections between house, electro, techno and dub and once again he manages to harness the analogue electronics in his machines to produce modern psychedelia.

“Elysian On Moon Lake” is rawer, less airy and not as sparkling as his last album. This is a tighter, and slightly darker experience than Teecwa’s previous work, maybe caused by being in quarantine for extensive time during production, letting some of the dreaminess aside for the harsher reality in a pandemic world. Still, you get a mind-altering experience in a lot of tracks since the album starts off in a lighter tone than how it later develops. Switching from the A to the B-side works as a rite of passage going from dusk to night; the sun rays through the blinders are replaced by neon light dancing on the walls and ceiling.

Regarding the dramaturgy of “Elysian On Moon Lake”, this album has movielike qualities; a well-directed piece from the opening impact and setup through the confrontational part where intensity builds up to the climax in “Hythmdoser” to the cooling down effect of the peaceful closer “Celestial Trails”. The trip eventually ends up in a safe and happy place after the cathartic finale.

This is not a just collection of songs, this is an album made to experience in full length without interruptions. 

TRACK LISTING

A1. Never, There. Was
A2. Tropic Notations
A3. No Lies To Her Fire
A4. Hunting Lights
B1. Solar City
B2. Welcome Dystopia!
B3. To Reach Apogee
B4. Hythmdoser
B5. Celestial Trails

“His music filled me with the urge to connect with the world,” Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith says of Emile Mosseri. She first heard his work while watching the 2019 film The Last Black Man In San Francisco; just minutes in, she paused it to look up who did the score and wrote to him immediately. “I love Emile’s ability to create melodies that feel magically scenic and familiar like they are reminding you of the innocence of loving life.” Those talents saw recognition in 2020 with an Oscar nomination for Mosseri’soriginal score to the film Minari. He was already a fan of Smith’s and became increasingly intrigued by her impressionistic process as they started to talk. “The music feels so spiritual and alive and made from the earth,” Mosseri says. “I think of her as the great conductor, summoning musical poetry from her orchestra of machines.” I Could Be Your Dog / I Could Be Your Moon, their two-part collaborative album, introduces an uncanny fusion of their sonics. Constructed using synthesizer, piano, electronics, and voice, this soft-focus dream world is lush, evocative, and fleeting. It finds two composers tuning their respective styles inward as an ode to mutual inspiration, a celebration of the human spirit and its will to surrender to the currents of life.

Early into their correspondence, Smith and Mosseri realized they were neighbors in Los Angeles and met up for a few hikes. Their conversations led to a musical exchange over email. The exercise became a sketch, the start of their first song together, “Log In Your Fire,” with Mosseri finding flourishes in Smith’s cathartic synth lines to intonate and harmonize alongside. Lyrically, it’s a beautiful, open-ended sentiment. “Being a log in someone’s fire, to me, means letting go, and surrendering to that feeling,” says Mosseri. From there, the pair composed a series of musical foundations, trading files from afar, nurturing the eventual expansion as the remote days of 2020 set in. Smith likens the collaborative experience to the exciting uncertainty of starting a garden, “doing what I can to facilitate growth while enjoying the process of being surprised by what will actually grow.”

In the summer of 2021, the duo finished work on the sequel, I Could Be Your Moon, expanding their musical language as the first part reached its September release. Songs from these more recent exchanges find them even more synced, forging into percussive and harmonic experiments, leaning further into their “unused musical muscles,” as Smith and Mosseri put it. A unified vocal presence emerged. “As the friendship grew I think we both learned how to support each other more and musically that was communicated through singing together,” adds Smith.

Now taken as a full album set, I Could Be Your Dog / I Could Be Your Moon moves fluidly from track to track, panning through textural vi- gnettes. Two roughly 17-minute halves, the set evokes the bittersweet sense of something too bright or rare to last, a short-lived glimpse into a golden hour. There is a dreamy, elemental intention to this music, which Smith and Mosseri say came naturally, as they both embraced intuitive interplay throughout their creative back-and-forth. The stylistic threads of each composer are recognizable yet become more ambiguous as the album progresses, sewn into a singular vision. “I’m so grateful that my musical ideas could dance with hers with some grace and harmony,” says Mosseri. Smith adds that this experience helped her “remember that mu- sic can be a connecting layer of friendship, especially in a time when the usual ways were out of reach.”

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: An absolutely stunning collection of nigh-choral electronic pieces, imbued with Aurelia Smith's mastery of the synthesiser and Mosseri's expertise in the soundtrack field. A collection of unexpected, organic compositions that are from neither one world nor the other but perfectly at home in both.

TRACK LISTING

01. Log In Your Fire
02. Moon In Your Eye
03. Brush
04. I Could Be Your Dog
05. Glendora
06. Blink Twice
07. Moonweed
08. Green To You
09. Amber
10. Standing In Your Light
11. Shim Sham
12. Golden Cow
13. Radio Replacement

Yoshino Shigihara came into 2019 needing a change. The Japanese artist had been based in Bristol ever since co-founding the now defunct Maloya-infuenced raucous psychedelia collective Zun Zun Egui. She then blossomed on her own across an EP and two albums of more meditative but no less territorially transcendent records as Yama Warashi. As in her music, though, Yoshino has always had a sense of wanderlust and it was perhaps no surprise that she’d eventually want to move again – this time to London.

“Moving to London gave me the chance to work with more diverse musicians” Yoshino says. “And I wanted to be here too because of the high creative energy, the diversity of the music and art here and the people who live here.”

The first material to come out of her relocation is a bold advancement of her sound, her third album Crispy Moon. Recorded at the Total Refreshment Centre in London with Kristian Claig Robinson, with most of the mixing coming from Hannes Plattmeire and mastering by Zun Zun Egui guitarist Stephen Kerrison, there are new contributing members, including Cathy Lucas of Vanishing Twin (with whom Yama toured with in 2021), Aletta Verwoerd on drums and Mermaid Chunky’s Moina Walker on sax. Compared to the more lo-fi, homespun feel of early releases such as Moon Zero and Moon Egg, there’s larger brush strokes at play, a bigger sound and an understated but self-assured grandeur.

Much of the move to London and Yoshino’s experiences of being in the capital have made their way into the themes of the record. For Yoshino, though, while the lyrics are important, they’re also largely personal. The drive for her is to get across the universality of her music, to keep an open ear and absorb everything that she can before returning it back out into the world. Moving to London has only strengthened that for her, with new collaborators, fresh experiences and altered perspectives. Crispy Moon is the colourfully brilliant end result.

TRACK LISTING

Side A
1. Makkuroi Mizu
2. Dividual Individual
3. Saku Saku
4. Umi No Mon
Side B
1. Ha Ha No Uta
2. Makai No Keyaku
3. Dou Dou Meguri
4. Yuru Yuru

In 2011 Gazelle Twin self-released ‘The Entire City’, a debut album that gathered rapid acclaim and sparked a decade of creativity during which its creator, Elizabeth Bernholz has built big upon her foundation of dark, cinematic energy. The album is now set to be reissued on deluxe CD, together with ‘The Wastelands’, a mini “twin” album of material made around the same period, though never released commercially. Where 'The Entire City’ remains intact with its original master and tracklisting, ‘The Wastelands’ expands on this shadowy, futurescape, featuring foreboding, percussive songwriting, with euphoric choral swells. The release features the captivating photo collage artwork of British artist, Suzanne Moxhay

TRACK LISTING

1 The Entire City
2 Concrete Mother
3 Men Like Gods
4 I Am Shell I Am Bone
5 Far From Home
6 Changelings
7 Bell Tower
8 When I Was Otherwise
9 Obelisk
10 Nest
11 Fight-or-Flight
12 View Of A Mountain

CD Version - CD 2 The Wastelands

1 Wastelands
2 Adrenalin
3 Hole In My Heart
4 Ascent
5 The Future
6 I Hear You Call

'The Wastelands' is an album of material made around the same period as 'The Entire City' though never released commercially. The album expands on 'The Entire City's shadowy, futurescape, featuring foreboding, percussive songwriting, with euphoric choral swells. 'The Wastelands' also features the captivating photo collage artwork of British artist, Suzanne Moxhay.

TRACK LISTING

1/Wastelands
2/Adrenalin
3/Hole In My Heart
4/Ascent
5/The Future
6/I Hear You Call

Nicole Faux Naiv is a Berlin-based dream-pop artist whose debut album ‘Moon Rally’ is released on British label Bronzerat Records (Gemma Ray, Jon Spencer Blues Explosion).

After self-releasing two singles, including one in her native Russian tongue, producer Robbie Moore (LA Salami, Little Simz, Florence & The Machine, Anika) invited her to his Impression Studio in Berlin to record the 10 songs that make up the album.

The result is a playful, poly-sonic expo abundant with dream-pop hooks and grooves, with her voice and synth at its halcyon heart. Born in the German Sauerland in 1995 to parents from the Soviet Union (from the Kyrgyz and Kazak regions to be exact), her upbringing was especially musical, and the trajectory of her influences is apparent on her debut.

From 60s and 70s Russian movie soundtracks, to Russian post rock such as Agatha Christie and Kino, through to The Cure and French pop such as Air, the result is curious and inherently unique, though her song writing is simple and precise.

Her music and imagery reflects her background, where she admits she never quite fitted in to the mould, instead finding retreat in nature, her own imagination, and ultimately her songs. Her live band feature Sally Brown (Gurr) on bass, Tobias Humble (Gang of Four/Ghostpoet) on drums, and Francisco Parisi (Minimal Schlager) on guitar.

Following the release of their self-titled debut album in December 2020, Flying Moon In Space – a Leipzig-based group that deal in an experimental melting pot of psychedelic pop, krautrock, techno and math-rock – are now releasing a new EP made up of remixes of tracks from the debut album by the likes of Xiu Xiu, Suuns, A Place To Bury Strangers, Minami Deutsch, Camera and Warm Graves.

On the new EP, which is released digitally and on 12" vinyl by London-based label Fuzz Club, Jamie Stewart of prolific American experimental group Xiu Xiu pushes the industrial 4/4 psych of 'Faces' to IDM extremes, Brooklyn noise-rock heavyweights A Place To Bury Strangers give 'The Observer' a feedback-blasted redux and Montreal art-rockers Suuns turn 'Steam Water Solid' into an 81-second assault on the senses. Elsewhere, German group Camera transform 'Where Lovers Meet' into a piece of hedonistic synthesised krautrock and Japanese band Minami Deutsch inject the sinister 'Ardor' with a motorik dark disco groove. Closing the EP is a beautifully slow-burning and atmospheric reworking of 'Baustelle' courtesy of fellow Leipzig experimentalists and Fuzz Club label-mates Warm Graves.

TRACK LISTING

1) Flying Moon In Space - Where Lovers Meet (Camera Remix)
2) Flying Moon In Space - Faces (Xiu Xiu Remix)
3) Flying Moon In Space - The Observer (A Place To Bury Strangers Remix)
4) Flying Moon In Space - Ardor (Minami Deutsch Remix)
5) Flying Moon In Space - Steam Water Solid (Suuns Remix)
6) Flying Moon In Space - Baustelle (Warm Graves Remix)

An extension of the two’s chart-topping four-song Texas Sun journey, Texas Moon is an introspective stroll through the dark. “Without joy, there can be no real perspective on sorrow,” says Khruangbin. “Without sunlight, all this rain keeps things from growing. How can you have the sun without the moon?”

Crediting their mutual home state for inspiration, Texas Moon pensively examines Texas’ musical perception, while paying homage to the marriage of country and R&B that’s become synonymous with the lone star state. Propelled by rolling guitar licks, conga and bongo, lead single “B-Side” meditates on meeting in a dream and frolics across the nearing contemplative nighttime state with its longing’s joy.

Elsewhere on Texas Moon, the artists channel a newly intimate musical scope that’s illustrated most dramatically when the spacy sensuality of the minimalistic “Chocolate Hills” leads into the stark spirituality addressed on “Father Father,” a reminder of both acts’ gospel roots. Over a simple rolling guitar figure, Bridges pleads with the heavens—“Look at the mess that I made/Just a man with unclean hands”—only to be reminded of God’s eternal love.

For Khruangbin, one song in particular was indicative of the trust that Bridges put in them. “The song ‘Doris’ is about his grandmother making the transition from this world to the next realm,” says Johnson. “It’s a very somber, very deep record. And when someone places that kind of work into your hands, the last thing you want to do is junk it up, overproduce it, or do too much. We treated it with the respect it deserved, and treated Doris with the respect she deserves.”

“It’s like a short story...,” Lee says of the music. “And it leaves room to continue having these stories together. It’s not Khruangbin, it’s not Leon, it’s this world we created together.”

Upon its release, Texas Sun soared to the No. 1 slot on Billboard’s Emerging Artists Chart along with landing the No.1 on spot on “Americana/Folk Albums,” No. 2 on “Vinyl Albums,” No. 4 on “Top Rock Albums” and No. 6 on “Top R&B Albums.” Significantly, both parties’ musical directions were deeply affected by their time working together on Texas Sun.

Khruangbin’s most recent studio album, Mordechai, moved their own vocals to the forefront, a change they readily admit was a direct result of working with Bridges. Their sound was also tapped for remix/reinterpretation of a Paul McCartney song for the McCartney III Imagined project. Meanwhile, in addition to his genre-defying Grammy-nominated album Gold-Digger’s Sound, Bridges has put out several other challenging, shared collaborative tracks, including work with John Mayer, Lucky Daye and most recently Jazmine Sullivan. Each of the artists appeared recently on Austin City Limits and will tour throughout the new year.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: The last Khruangbin album with Leon Bridges was a perfect distillation of their respective sounds into a familiar sounding, but entirely new concoction. This latest offering continues that effortless melting pot of downbeat, Balearic and soul but with a woozy, crepuscular groove. You really can't go wrong here.

TRACK LISTING

1. Doris
2. B-Side
3.Chocolate Hills
4. Father Father
5. Mariella

Perhaps best known as the frontman of South London indie pop / power pop outfit Bromide or being the worst salesman in Cargo Records…, Simon Bromide (aka Simon Berridge) releases his solo album 'Following The Moon' via Scratchy.

‘Following The Moon’ is essentially a solo album - with a lot of help. It was recorded at Bark Studios in Walthamstow by Brian O’Shaughnessy (Primal Scream, My Bloody Valentine, Beth Orton), who had worked with Berridge on the last two Bromide albums. The album features drummer Fells Guilherme (Children of The Pope), bassist Ed ‘Cosmo’ Wright, multi-instrumentalists Dave Hale, Dimitri Ntontis and Stephen Elwell as well as folk-pop chanteuse Katy Carr on piano and Terry Edwards (Nick Cave, Tom Waits, P.J.Harvey) on trumpet.

Scottish singer Julie Anne McCambridge joins Simon on the closing track, the William Blake penned ‘Earth’s Answer’. This is Berridge's first output since Bromide's 'Ancient Rome' and 'I'll Never Learn' singles, both released in 2020. Their most recent album 'I Woke Up', with singles 'Magic Coins' and 'Two Song Slot', was met with popular acclaim, receiving positive reviews and airplay in dozens of countries. Influenced equally by The Beatles, Neil Young, Mark Eitzel and Bob Mould, Simon Berridge creates ultra-catchy, jangly acoustic pop / electric rock. Album track ‘The Skehans Song’ pays homage to the club and features the ‘Easycome choir’ with Andy Hankdog, Scarlett Woolfe and Vincent Davies. “A febrile soul who can do pop in many voices” ~ Melody Maker "Simon Berridge's voice is as strong as ever, with the songwriter only gaining in sound and fury” ~ Clash Magazine “Romping, indie-pop blast“ ~ The Times "This is catchy, upbeat, well-structured and impeccably delivered – with a winner of a debut release, Simon Bromide has our attention" ~ The Spill Magazine “Memorable slices of acoustic whimsy” ~ Q magazine “Berridge has an ear for a canny tune and a keen lyrical eye for detail... Ray-Davies-meets-Lloyd-Cole crooning”

TRACK LISTING

Side A

1. The Waiting Room
2. Chinua Achebe
3. The Skehans Song
4. Not That Type Side

Side B

1. The Argument
2. Slow Release Love
3. Following The Moon
4. Reflections Of Seating
5. Earth’s Answer 

"We want to make people feel good about things that we feel terrible about." says David Brewis, who has co-led the band Field Music with his brother Peter since 2004. It's a statement which seems particularly fitting to their latest album, Flat White Moon released via Memphis Industries.

Sporadic sessions for the album began in late 2019 at the pair's studio in Sunderland, slotted between rehearsals and touring. The initial recordings pushed a looser performance aspect to the fore, inspired by some of their very first musical loves; Free, Fleetwood Mac, Led Zeppelin and The Beatles; old tapes and LPs pilfered from their parents' shelves. But a balance between performance and construction has always been an essential part of Field Music.

By March 2020, recording had already begun for most of the album's tracks and, with touring for Making A New World winding down, Peter and David were ready to plough on and finish the record.

The playfulness that’s evident in much of Flat White Moon's music became a way to offset the darkness and the sadness of many of the lyrics. Much of the album is plainly about loss and grief, and also about the guilt and isolation which comes with that.

Those personal upheavals are apparent on songs like Out of the Frame, where the loss of a loved one is felt more deeply because they can't be found in photographs and compounded by the suspicion that you caused their absence, or on When You Last Heard From a Linda, which details the confusion of being unable to penetrate a best friend's loneliness in the darkest of circumstances.

Some songs are more impressionistic. Orion From The Streets combines Studio Ghibli, a documentary about Cary Grant and an excess of wine to become a hallucinogenic treatise on memory and guilt.. Others, such as Not When You're In Love, are more descriptive. Here, the narrator guides us through slide- projected scenes, questioning the ideas and semantics of 'love' as well the reliability of his own memory. For the most part, the album has fewer explicitly political themes than previous records, though there is No Pressure, about a political class who feel no obligation to take responsibility if they can finagle a narrative instead. And there's I'm The One Who Wants To Be With You which skirts its way around toxic masculinity through teenage renditions of soft-rock balladry.

On Flat White Moon Field Music take on the challenge of representing negative emotions in a way that doesn't dilute or obscure them but which can still uplift. The result is a generous record of bounteous musical ideas, in many ways Field Music's most immediately gratifying to date.

STAFF COMMENTS

Laura says: I'm a bit late to the Field Music party, I have to admit. Always quite liked them when I heard them, but never really got into them properly, despite people telling me I should (yes Marc Riley, you were right!)
But I thought the last album 'Making A New World' was amazing and this one is equally as good.
Flat White Moon is full of intricate, multi-layered songs. They're arty and clever (but not in an annoying smart-arse way) and they know how to write a pop song too!

TRACK LISTING

1. Orion From The Street
2. Do Me A Favour
3. Not When You're In Love
4. Out Of The Frame
5. When You Last Heard From Linda
6. No Pressure
7. In This City
8. I'm The One Who Wants To Be With You
9. Meant To Be
10. Invisible Days
11. The Curtained Room
12. You Get Better

The Fratellis return with the news of a brand new album 'Half Drunk Under The Full Moon' out on 8th May, and the launch of their first track 'Six Days In June', an upbeat and foot-stomping anthem that sure to put a big smile on the face of any Fratellis' fan! “Some days you sit on the couch watching daytime TV and along comes a song like Six Days In June to remind you that you’re still alive!" - Jon Fratelli 'Half Drunk Under The Full Moon' follows their critically acclaimed album 'In Your Own Sweet Time', their first top 5 UK album in 10 years, and this new album very much continues on this upward trajectory and is likely to become a signature moment in the band's career.

TRACK LISTING

1. Half Drunk Under A Full Moon
2. Need A Little Love
3. Lay Your Body Down
4. The Last Songbird
5. Strangers In The Street
6. Living In The Dark
7. Action Replay
8. Six Days In June
9. Oh Roxy
10. Hello Stranger

Recorded and mixed April 2, 2020 through June 27, 2020 at Hyde Street Studios and Rancho Rivera, San Francisco.

Guest musicians include Tad Piecka, Petra Haden, Mimi Parker, Chris Connolly and Ben Boye.

Additional recording in Los Angeles and Duluth, Minnesota.

TRACK LISTING

Angela
Welcome To Sparks
The Johnny Cash Trail
William McGirt
Long Slow Spring
Young Road Trips
Elk Grove
Lemon Balm
Morning Cherry
Hugo

One of Bert Jansch’s later recordings, ‘Crimson Moon’ is some of his finest work and sees the musician at the top of his game, with appearances from Johnny Marr, Bernard Butler and many more. Earth Recordings revisits the album on its 20th Anniversary with its first standalone cut to vinyl. Originally released in 2000, there is a brooding resonance in ‘Crimson Moon’ centred around his accomplished guitar style that brings his contemplative songwriting to the fore. Traditional ballads have touches of jazz and blues adorned by contributions from guitarists Johnny Marr, Bernard Butler and Johnny “Guitar” Hodge along with guest vocals from Bert’s wife Loren Auerbach (‘My Donald’).

The addition of electric guitar subtly compliments Bert’s percussive fingerpicking bringing new depth to his compositions. Title track ‘Crimson Moon’ is a take on traditional song ‘Omie Wise’ and was written about his wife Loren, ‘Caledonia’ conjures pastoral images of Scotland alongside covers of The Incredible String Band’s ‘October Song’, Guy Mitchell’s ‘Singing The Blues’ and Owen Hand’s ‘My Donald’. Otherworldly tale ‘Neptune’s Daughter’ sees a mermaid-like creature recount the death of her relatives from a poison in the sea. Passionate about nature, the song carries an underlying ecological message. Released in his 60s, ‘Crimson Moon’ proves Bert Jansch to still be an innovator and a unique talent

TRACK LISTING

A1 Caledonia
A2 Going Home
A3 Crimson Moon
A4 Downunder
A5 October Song
A6 Looking For Love

B1 Fool's Mate
B2 The River Bank
B3 Omie Wise
B4 My Donald
B5 Neptune's Daughter
B6 Singing The Blues

THIS IS A RECORD STORE DAY 2020 RELEASE AVAILABLE ONLINE ONLY AS PART OF THE AUGUST 29TH DROP DAY AT 6PM.
LIMITED TO ONE PER PERSON.

Red colour vinyl.Limited to 500 copies.A seminal work now available for the first time on vinyl! MOJO "Chamber pop pastoralists make great leap forward...Who knew that what the music of Steve Reich has been crying out for all these years is a Krautrock makeover?" North Sea Radio Orchestra; born in the alleys and lanes of the City of London, then spreading out across the metropolis, performing shows in churches, concert halls, galleries and festivals, two album releases with glowing reviews and several BBC6 sessions.This is their third album; 'I a moon'. Written throughout the Autumn and Winter of 2010/2011 by band leader and guitarist Craig Fortnam with a pencil and paper, guitar and piano and recorded 'at various locations in southern England on his laptop', 'I a moon' retains the unique NSRO line-up of strings, woodwind, percussion, guitars, keyboards and voices but with a darker, less pastoral sound, with synth and percussion taking a more prominent role than on their previous two albums.Another departure is a move away from using poetry to the more personal use of self-penned lyrics : 'I a moon, orbiting myself.Sometime gravity pulls me closeÖ.'. On this release, the influences apparent on the first two albums (Britten, Vaughan Williams, Reich, ISB, 70's prog) have been augmented by a distinct whiff of Krautrock (on the instrumental 'Berliner Luft') while the angular guitars of 'Ring Moonlets' show a debt to the dual guitar textures of Deerhoof.NSRO continue to blend their influences in a highly imaginative and unusual way, while all the time having an ear for the beautiful, be it in melody, texture or chord.North Sea Radio Orchestra - 'I a moon'; beautiful, redolent, ancient and modern, English and world, unique.

Taking inspiration from the original concept behind the founding of Saddle Creek, as an attempt to highlight our home city through music and art, we began the Document Series in 2017. Each release featured in the Document Series is comprised of an exclusive record featuring unreleased music from artists outside of the label's roster, along with a specially curated zine created by the artist. The tenth installment in the series comes from New York based The Big Net.

An exercise in simplicity, The Big Net is the musical project of Kevin Copeland (guitar, vocals) Andrew Emge (drums) and Logan Miley (bass). Attempting to maximize the emotive power of the trio, the band’s style drives down the highway somewhere between drone and country, folk and rock. With Corey Rubin on bass and secondary vocals, their first self-titled record explored more of those rock roots: recorded live in two days with minimal overdubs, trying to capture the freewheeling magnetism that can come alive in a room.

Released as part of Saddle Creek’s Document Series, the band’s two new songs - "Big Moon" and “Rufus" - were recorded that same weekend. The idea of The Big Net is and has always been immediacy, letting that tangible thing in the air be itself and tuning into “song” at its most genuine. Both songs make good on those aspirations. “Big Moon” is quite literal. Written during a particularly lonely period in Copeland’s life, he would sing so that he could fall asleep and from that process the song seemed to “float in all at once.” “Sometimes all you have is yourself, and the moon, or a guitar, or a bed, or the ground under your feet, and that's ok. Those things will always hold you,” Kevin says of the song.

Suitably, "Rufus" was tuned into to the same kind of frequency, pulled from the ether as if it had somehow always existed. “When our friend Corey was playing bass with us, most rehearsals before everyone’s gear was even set up; someone was off and everyone else would catch up,” Copeland says. “Somewhere in that soup, an idea would come through. I remember latching onto what became the verse of “Rufus” and, when Andrew and Corey were out getting some air, I just played it over and over and that melody seemed to float right in.”

The band have just finished recording a new, more exploratory LP, again captured in a single room over two days. With Copeland as the primary songwriter, the group continues to interpret earnest emotion in song through their hypnotic and dynamic sensibilities. For now, though, we have this new 7” single; an exercise in vulnerability, in trusting your impulses, in the magic that can be found within.

TRACK LISTING

A1. Big Moon
B1. Rufus 

Rebecca Foon, the composer and musician behind Saltland and Esmerine (and former longstanding member of Silver Mt. Zion) presents a new album entitled Waxing Moon. While best known as an incomparable cellist crafting textural soundscapes and instrumental chamber-rock in the aforementioned projects (and more recently recognized for her creative and organisational work as cofounder of Pathway To Paris), this new collection of songs finds Foon emphasizing piano and voice with striking intimacy and elegance, showcasing a captivating evolution in her always resplendent songwriting. The climate crisis has profoundly framed Foon's political and artistic life for many years now, and Waxing Moon finds her writing and singing her most arrestingly direct yet poetic words, tapping universal and personal heartbreak in both despair and hope.

With Waxing Moon, Rebecca sets side the Saltland moniker - her electronically-tinged string-centric project from the past five years - to release this more personal new work under her own name. The album's ten songs are predominantly minimal and delicate, immersive and hauntingly beautiful - with vocal-driven tracks booked-ended by piano-based instrumentals, along with one up-tempo guitar-driven number ("Wide Open Eyes") that closes out Side One. While piano figures most prominently on the record, Foon continues to play cello on several tracks, complemented by gentle touches from a close coterie of musical guests including Richard Reed Parry (Arcade Fire) and Mishka Stein (Patrick Watson) on acoustic and electric basses, Sophie Trudeau (Godspeed You Black Emperor) on violin, Jace Lasek (The Besnard Lakes) on electric guitar, and Patrick Watson as co-vocalist on the dreamlike "Vessels". Foon co-produced the album with Lasek at Montreal's Breakglass studio and it sounds glorious. Waxing Moon is Rebecca Foon's first eponymous release: a sublimely stunning, bracingly intimate, glimmeringly full-hearted new chapter in her celebrated musical catalog

TRACK LISTING

A1 New World
A2 Pour
A3 Another Realm
A4 Ocean Song
A5 Wide Open Eyes

B1 Waxing Moon
B2 Dreams To Be Born
B3 Vessels
B4 This Is Our Lives
B5 New World Reprise

'Singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and collaborator; the mighty Ásgeir returns with highly anticipated third album ‘Bury The Moon’. The Icelandic artist returns to his folk roots for lead single ‘Youth’ written in collaboration with his admired poet father, the song documents his childhood growing up in his small Icelandic town, unburdened by worry and full of unbridled joy. The stunning new track swells with horns and hushed acoustic guitars, Ásgeir’s unmistakable honey-soaked vocal soaring across weaving instrumental melodies, culminating in a anthemic peak that exudes nostalgia. 

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Imagine the gorgeous vocal prowess and melodic inclination of the great John Grant, mixed with a more meditative folky instrumental focus, and you're something close to the swooning beauty of Asgeir. It's a triumph of an album, and absolutley enhanced by the duality of the English / Icelandic versions.

TRACK LISTING

Pictures
Youth
Breathe
Eventide
Lazy Giants
Overlay
Rattled Snow
Turn Gold To Sand
Living Water
Until Daybreak
Bury The Moon

Honouring the prolific output that is historically embedded in the DNA of this band, Brix & The Extricated release their third studio album in as many years. 364 days after the release of their second record “Breaking State”, the band have changed gears once again. This album sees the band decimate dimensional boundaries resulting in a body of work that is sure to resonate. Super Blood Wolf Moon is both challenging and addictive in equal measure. This record shows growth of a band who have stepped clearly out of the confines of the shadow of the past. At times it touches on dark emotional pain and at other points reaches euphoric bliss. This is an album that has diversity with a focused thread throughout. The record combines top level musicality with deep hypnotic grooves and elements of unforgiving brutality. As has come to be expected this record is loaded with melodic hooks, riffs and infectious choruses. These musical devices however simply act as a portal to the beating heart of this band which is the art of songwriting itself. The guitar work is at times dangerous, edgy and transcendent. The conversational relationship between Jason Brown and Steve Trafford shows a high level of musical intelligence and an intuitive sense of freedom.

The legendary Hanley Brother rhythm section are true to form as the engine room of this band. Additional strings and harpsichord arranged by Sarah Brandwood-Spencer bring a rich spectral elegance. Lyrically Smith Start speaks honestly about the uncomfortableness of depression, drug addiction, death and loss. There is more social commentary on this record than its predecessors with songs like “Dinosaur Girl” (over medicating culture), “Strange Times” (global feeling of despair) and “Wasteland” (climate change and destruction of the environment). Smith Start reflects on pack mentality and the freedom to show your scars in the song “Wolves” and the juxtaposing “Crash Landing” deals with drug overdose and suicide. The album closes with the epic, glorious and deeply moving “The God Stone” which breaks all bounds of expectation. 

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: More superb material here from Brix & The Extricated, with equal moments of fiery, melodic punk and delicate, well-woven melodies. Understandably political but without ever losing their focus on huge, anthemic tunes. No shortage of talent here, and we can only hope they keep them coming!

TRACK LISTING

01 Strange Times
02 Hustler
03 Wolves
04 Waterman
05 Dinosaur Girl
06 Crash Landing
07 Wintertyde
08 Wasteland
09 Tannis Root
10 The God Stone 

"Singer-songwriter" is a frustratingly confining term; to truly understand exactly just how confining, look no further than the recorded works of Simon Joyner, an artist whose work consistently transcends the narrow parameters of genre classifications and record shop bin cards. Though his music has always honoured, reckoned with-wrestled with-the tradition set forth by his songwriting forebears (Cohen, Van Zandt, Ochs, Dylan, Reed to name a few), Joyner can always be counted on to defy expectations; as a lyricist, melodicist, and arranger, Joyner likes to keep us on our toes.

Stars Are the Light, the luminous seventh album by the American psych explorers Moon Duo, marks a progression into significantly new territory. From a preoccupation with the transcendental and occult that informed Ripley Johnson and Sanae Yamada’s guitar-driven psych rock, and reached its apotheosis in the acclaimed Occult Architecture diptych, Stars Are the Light sees the band synthesize the abstract and metaphysical with the embodied and terrestrial.

Branching out from Occult Architecture Vol. 2, the album has a sonic physicality that is at once propulsive and undulating; it puts dance at the heart of an expansive nexus that connects the body to the stars. These are songs about embodied human experience — love, change, misunderstanding, internal struggle, joy, misery, alienation, discord, harmony, celebration — rendered as a kind of dance of the self, both in relation to other selves and to the eternal dance of the cosmos.

Taking disco as its groove-oriented departure point, Stars Are the Light shimmers with elements of ’70s funk and ’90s rave. Johnson’s signature guitar sound is at its most languid and refined, while Yamada’s synths and oneiric vocals are foregrounded to create a spacious percussiveness that invites the body to move with its mesmeric rhythms. With Sonic Boom (Spacemen 3, Spectrum) at the mixing desk in Portugal’s Serra de Sintra, (known to the Romans as “The Mountains of the Moon”) the area’s lush landscape and powerful lunar energies exerted a strong influence on the vibe and sonic texture of the album.

On embracing disco as an inspiration, Yamada says, “It’s something we hadn’t referenced in our music before, but its core concepts really align with what we were circling around as we made the album. Disco is dance music, first and foremost, and we were digging our way into the idea of this endless dance of bodies in nature. We were also very inspired by the space and community of a disco – a space of free self-expression through dance, fashion, and mode of being; where everyone was welcome, diversity was celebrated, and identity could be fluid; where the life force that animates each of us differently could flower.”

STAFF COMMENTS

Andy says: Formed in 2009 by Wooden Shjips' main man Ripley Johnson and his wife Sanae Yamada, Moon Duo had been chugging along quite nicely until 2017's two records in a month opus (‘Occult Architecture’ Volumes 1 and 2) signalled a slight detour, but here we are a further two years hence at a veritable fork in the road. Moon Duo now groove! Not rockin' grooves like Hawkwind of old (very cool still, obviously), but proper, disco and funk inspired, pitter-pattering grooves like Peaking Lights. Helped in no small part by Spacemen 3's Sonic Boom, a lot of the sounds here do actually recall the late 90s UK post rave scene in their blissed out, bubbling buoyancy and hippie, repetitive, lose yourself in nature vibes. This record glides! Synths are further to the fore but Ripley's ever evolving infinite ether guitar flickers and dances around them to maximum effect. Apart from one throbbing song which is a throwback to their previous records (“Eye 2 Eye”) this albums glows with a kind of contained euphoria, languid and laid back, looping and luscious. The beats here are never obtrusive, it still sounds exactly like them, but them that's swapped pot for ecstasy, a couch for a field! There has been the sneaking suspicion, of late, that Ripley Johnson was squirelling his better songs away to this, his so-called band on the side, and now, finally, with ‘Stars Are The Light’, the proof is in the pudding; he does! It's a majestic record.

TRACK LISTING

Flying
Stars Are The Light
Fall (In Your Love)
The World And The Sun
Lost Heads
Eternal Shore
Eye 2 Eye
Fever Night

Whereas the band’s debut album ‘Popular Music’ was broadly political, the new album takes a more personal approach with beguilingly honest and brave lyrics that are bold in both sound and feeling, whilst also retaining the core DNA of their previous material.

Going on to speak about the album Mez says “A Picture of Good Health is not a collage of work but rather a snapshot of time; our time and the time of those around us. It’s political, but in a personal way. It’s a body of work that explores and examines the bands inner-selves through a precise period; a period that has brought pain, loneliness, blood, guts, single parenthood, depression and the need for survival and love. It is the sense and need for belonging that is the resounding endnote!”

TRACK LISTING

1 Good Health
2 Moral Fibre
3 Bum Hour
4 Hollow Thing
5 Excites Me
6 Never Love Again
7 Half Pint Fatherhood
8 Grown Up
9 Niceties
10 Thoughts
11 It's A Con
12 Don’t Give Up Yet
13 New Rose In Love

Only the Blues is an introduction deferred, and it is the debut album by Dylan Moon. Across its 35 minutes, we are rarely made to understand what, exactly, the source of Moon’s blues is, how that feeling has mutated, or whether there is a life beyond the small rooms and cramped spaces where this music was made. If not opaque, this first meeting with Moon is at least hazily translucent.

This makes Only the Blues something of an esoteric response to an age of radical transparency. Broadly speaking, Moon works in the field of folk music. But from this pasture, he glances pathways to digression; seeking scenic routes and counterintuitive cartography, trusting that even the most aimless trip becomes lucid if the foggy details are documented well enough.

On this trip, images spill from Moon, and most of them seem foreboding. We are given the sense - both from his lyrics and from the viscous mood he creates, using electronic manipulation to send his songs down compositional egresses, from which they emerge with a mysterious residue - that things have not been going well. Even the most saccharine memories, dancing before a freshly lit fire or hanging out with childhood cartoons come to life, feel caked with a hidden history.

Moon studied electronic production and sound design at music school, and then moved to Los Angeles in hopes of working in the film industry. While simultaneously graduating from pop to psych to prog to beat-making, he returned to traditional songwriting on the west coast, working out his ideas over a pair of self-released EPs. He also stumbled upon an ancient drum machine with scratched contact points and seventy years spent under restless thumbs, finding a kind of sonic entropy in its past-futurist rhythm signals that serve as Only the Blues’ spiritual center.

The album was recorded in Moon’s bedrooms in L.A. and Boston, small spaces made more claustrophobic by the soundproofing he hammered into the doors and the bedding he leaned against the walls. A single soul, spinning away (and out) in a cramped room: It’s a state of mind — and being — that Moon used his formal training to refine across Only the Blues. This is an album ornate with so many musical ideas to express that it teeters between ecstasy and anxiety.

That anxious quality is also what makes Only the Blues endlessly captivating. Moon moves quickly, courting the madcap at the center of his songs and just as quickly retreating to the fray. Processed guitars appear for a measure and disappear. His voice, a brittle croon reaching reedy highs and bottoming out into throaty baritone, wears tape hiss like a scarf while gently interlocking instrumental figures go nude below. The drum machine melts into a puddle of reverb.

Only the Blues uses obfuscation as a mode of confession, so long as we mean “confession” in the conventional sense. Moon is not hiding, but he is deliberately deciding: choosing how to be vulnerable, how to reveal, when to let go, when to move on. It’s not the way we usually meet one another. Maybe it should be.

TRACK LISTING

A1. Hope Dog
A2. Death Warmed
A3. Rosy
A4. Chimneys
A5. A Witch
A6. Analog
A7. Blue Jean
B1. Collapse
B2. Song For Jerry
B3. Interlude
B4. Lines
B5. Faraway Places
B6. Morning Limbo
B7. Mind Troubles

Commemorating the 50th Anniversary of the Moon landing (July 20 2019) Axis Records unleashes a brand new Jeff Mills LP, which showcases the legendary producer's interpretations of Earth’s Moon.

In his own words...

“There are influences of the Moon we can detect, measure and document as scientific facts. If these are perceived as rational explanations, then it should raise questions about the possibility of other unseen mental and metaphysical connections humans have, not just with the Moon but with all other celestial bodies in and outside this Solar System. On the flipside, as we recognize that our Sun gives us light and a lifespan, what does an even greater force in the Cosmos, perhaps the darkness [or absence of anything] affects us.

If we look at the Moon as a component in a vast configuration of integral connected parts, then an intuitive sense might lead us to a wider understanding about how deeply our relationship lies.

This album and the imagination that helped to produce it should be considered as a proposition with open-endedness and no foreseeable conclusion. It is a chemistry of facts and feelings based on then, now and forever”.

TRACK LISTING

Vinyl
A. Control, Sattva And Rama (7’03”)
B1. Stabilising The Spin (5’04”)
B2. The Tides (4’25”)
C1. Sleep-Wake Cycles (8’32”)
C2. Erratic Human Behavior (4’45”)
D1. Lunar Power (5’20”)
D2. Electromagnetic (5’35”)

CD
1. Control, Sattva And Rama
2. Stabilising The Spin
3. The Tides
4. Sleep-Wake Cycles
5. Erratic Human Behavior
6. Lunar Power
7. Electromagnetic
8. Decoding The Lunar Sunrise
9 Peaks Of Eternal Light
10. Measuring The Doppler Shift
11. Theia
12. 180-Degree Repositioning Phase
13. Absolute
(total Timing: 69 Min)

Alongside a killer long player from label mainstay Lexx, Phantom Island treat us to a new solo effort by Zurich based Drummer and Multi Instrumentalist Domi Chansorn. He is best known for playing in and producing numerous Swiss bands like Fai Baba or Evelinn Trouble. Everything you hear was written, played, sung, arranged, produced, recorded and mixed by Domi Chansorn. With "Strawberry Moon" he has created a timeless psychedelic Pop-Opus which takes the listener on a trip to another sphere. The aforementioned Lexx pops up on remix duties, dropping a typically Balearic mix combining dub swelter, open hearted melodies and an irresistible day time disco groove.

TRACK LISTING

A1. Strawberry Moon
B1. Strawberry Moon (Instrumental)
B2. Strawberry Moon (Version By Lexx) 

“A dusty plain, a red sky, sand in your teeth - ‘I don’t feel so great’ - a post-apocalyptic hooptie jeep-jammer. ‘Why is everything in ruins? There must be others like us out here somewhere…’

“This fine sizzling grease pit of cyber punk comes to us from psychic veteran Rick Pelletier (of Six Finger Satellite, Landed, La Machine), always bringing an interesting, bent and lurid account of visions to wax for the hungry ear bone. This time around the equipment scavenged is guitar, drums, synth and vocals. The beat goes full lotus climbing out of the goo, like men with sap gloves slapping the hulls of the remaining clubs, keeping the peace during live actions, gorgeous nauseating synthesized harmonies blowing through the ceiling vents, frickle-fried guitar belly slish and vocals delivered over the P.A. at Barter Town (sometimes from the workers in the pit, in unison).

“Picture a bucket of molten metal with gobs of scalp sizzling and sinking away-dance music for the infected. Be sure to double up on your dose before driving around on this one so you can wipe the chum smear off your wind screen.” - John Dwyer.

TRACK LISTING

1. Hope Will Pass
2. Baby Chiffon
3. Sully
4. I'm On A Roll
5. Borderline
6. Bill Fill
7. Shazzamatazz
8. Blowin My Mind

REISSUE / REPRESS of NSRO's critically acclaimed third album from 2011.

"Chamber pop pastoralists make great leap forward... Who knew that what the music of Steve Reich has been crying out for all these years is a Krautrock makeover?" MOJO 4**** 'What makes the North Sea Radio Orchestra so special is Fortnam's gift for orchestration, the deft and original way he puts deceptively simple materials in the hands of sophisticated performers. Melody pours from his pen on every page.' The Guardian *****

On this release, the influences apparent on the first two albums (Britten, Vaughan Williams, Reich, ISB, 70's prog) have been augmented by a distinct whiff of Krautrock

Black Peaches follow up their acclaimed 2016 debut with a dazzling display of musicianship on their explosive new album Fire In The Hole.

“Black Peaches existed inside me before I was aware of it,” says the band’s Rob Smoughton, also known as a member of Hot Chip and Scritti Politti. “It’s the culmination and continuation of the music I love. I started to notice how Brazilian rhythm, funk, soul, classic country and pop were all combining in the music I was writing, and I looked for other band members to join me to bring it alive.”

And he found other members to bring that combination alive in Susumu Mukai, Charlie Michael, Nick Roberts and Thomas Greene. Together they released 2016’s acclaimed Get Down You Dirty Rascals and now return with an album that continues to throw genres together with all the seamless grace of a seasoned cocktail maker but free of the postured affectations associated with such moves.

Black Peaches are a place where genres collide and musical eras meld. On their second album the band has absorbed all the tropical sounds, glistening melodies and funk-ridden grooves into a sound that is truly their own. “I wanted the combination and layering of our influences to be organic,” says Smoughton. “To create Black Peaches music. To take the ideas from the first record further into our own place.”

The result is a record that skips with the vibrancy and buoyancy of a band still in love with the idea of bringing their record collection to life, but the band now understand themselves as much as the music that inspires them and have created something new and refined.

Given the eclectic styles rooted in the make-up of the band, to enter into the world of Black Peaches is often to feel like one is flying from country-to-country with each new song. For Smoughton this musical traversing is a key part of the experience of the band. “I find the combination of mythology, history and geography to be romantic and I want our music to elicit the same thrill. I think the album conjures up the adventure of moving from one place to another; from Spain into Northern Africa, where North America tips into the South. Narratively the songs inhabit a place between the conscious and subconscious - between dreams and waking life.”

This globetrotting sonic voyage creates a sense of the unknown in the record, where each track exists as a new and unpredictable path. This is all done under the mission of creating a record that is capable of pure musical transcendence. “I really believe that music has the ability to transcend and move people emotionally and spiritually,” Smoughton says. “Our music is not about the separation between musician and audience but about the space in between.”

Yet the album also works on an intuitive and physical level. On top of its narrative of the world between the conscious and the subconscious, it is also simply a collection of songs to make you dance and move. Whether it’s the Delta blues influenced strut of “Lemonade”, the “slinky and naughty” dance floor pounce of “The Black Peach Boogie” or the Afro-Brazilian skip of “Cuatro Berimbau.”

Perhaps the most emblematic song of all when it comes to capturing the essence, power and groove of the album is the title track “Fire in the Hole”. “It comes from a phrase that miners would shout it to warn others that they had charged an explosive,” Smoughton says. “It’s to tell you something is about to explode. In this case it’s about being unable to resist the urge to dance. About giving over to rhythm and sound.”

TRACK LISTING

1. Cuatro Berimbau
2. Lemonade
3. Fire In The Hole
4. Barracuda
5. The Black Peach Boogie
6. Spice Route
7. Pillars Of Hercules

Bonus Dinked 7”
Side A
Bad Luck
Side B
Dub Peach Boogie

‘Small Moon’: Originally released in 1999. A pulsing classic that takes you down to the nightclub and floats you home. Double vinyl in gatefold sleeve with bonus track ‘Small Moon Redux’ from 2018.

TRACK LISTING

Arcadia
Praxiz
Klypp'D
Non-Pop
Reazymn
Soho… 3am
Small Moon Redux

Shana Cleveland has been beguiling listeners for years in her role as the superlative frontwoman for elastic surf rockers La Luz. Now Cleveland is evolving her sound on the new solo full-length Night of the Worm Moon, a serene album that flows like a warm current while simultaneously wresting open a portal to another dimension. As much a work of California sci-fi as Octavia Butler’s Parable novels, Night of the Worm Moon incorporates everything from alternate realities to divine celestial bodies. Inspired in part by one of her musical idols, the Afro-futurist visionary Sun Ra (the album’s title is a tip of the hat to his 1970 release Night of the Purple Moon), the record blends pastoral folk with cosmic concerns.

Cleveland dreamt up this premise while living in Los Angeles, a city where--as deftly explored on La Luz’s recent Floating Features--reality and fantasy casually co-exist. Abetting Cleveland during the recording process was a familiar gallery of co-conspirators: multi-instrumentalist Will Sprott of Shannon & the Clams, original La Luz bassist Abbey Blackwell, Goss, pedal steel player Olie Eshelman, and Kristian Garrard, who drummed on Cleveland’s previous solo effort (with then-backing band The Sandcastles), 2011’s Oh Man, Cover the Ground.

But whereas that album was internal and contemplative, Night of the Worm Moon occupies a different, vibrant kind of headspace. UFO sightings, insect carcasses, and twilight dimensions are all grist for Cleveland’s restless creativity, and they and other inspirations collide beautifully on the album’s 10 kaleidoscopic tracks--a spacebound transmission from America’s weirdo frontier.

STAFF COMMENTS

Javi says: ‘Night of the Worm Moon’ is as much an album of acoustic lullabies as it is of shifting ethereal nightmares - and it’s this balance between the beautiful and the unnerving which allows Shana Cleveland’s ruminations on sleep, love, and identity to be so beguiling.
“Don’t Let Me Sleep” pulls us gently into this nocturnal world full of harps, zithers, vibraphones and lutes before second track and album highlight “Face of the Sun” trembles in, lilting between Latin guitar rhythms and wailing slide guitar. There are such nods to spaghetti western soundtracks throughout the album, in both the instrumentation and the slow, trundling tempo of tracks like “Solar Creep” and masterful “Invisible When The Sun Leaves”.
That’s not to say the album is a wholly analogue affair, though - the synth bass and eerie affected whistles of “The Fireball” are just as poignant as the more stripped back moments. At times the bass sounds like it’s going to swallow the song whole, lending a sense of intense anxiety to the proceedings, sucking the listener in.
If La Luz are the sound of bright summer days spent surfing and swimming in the sun, then ‘Night of the Worm Moon’ - the debut solo offering by frontwoman Shana Cleveland - shows us a parallel world that only appears once the sun has set and the stars have taken its place in the sky. From the first tender plucks to the final twilit twinkles, Cleveland has crafted an album as warm as it is melancholy, and as intimate as it is intoxicating.

TRACK LISTING

1. Don’t Let Me Sleep
2. Face Of The Sun
3. In Another Realm
4. Castle Milk
5. Night Of The Worm Moon
6. Invisible When The Sun Leaves
7. The Fireball
8. Solar Creep
9. A New Song
10. I’ll Never Know

“What species is this? What century?” Forged in a rural idyll in Middle-England, the new album Pastoral, by Gazelle Twin, exhumes England’s rotten past, and shines a torch over its ever-darkening present. Told through a troupe of multi-gender voices, in vernaculars old and new; from the shrill echo of folksong to tabloid-tinged jaunts, the artist aka Elizabeth Bernholz, presents the notion that “there is horror in every idyll, and danger lurking beyond the “quaint” ”.

The village square - once host to centuries of public torture - becomes a floral framed postcard, dolled-up for the Summer Fête. A sunny, afternoon walk over the hills unsettles a cloud of angry flies feeding from unidentifiable remains. Bigoted vitriol gently murmurs amidst tearoom chatter, as the neatly framed pastoral picture dissolves into a solemn ennui.

Four years in the making, amidst life-changing events, including a move far out of the city, Pastoral will be the first major release by the artist since her widely acclaimed LP UNFLESH (2014, Anti-Ghost Moon Ray) and is seamlessly on-theme, together with Bernholz’s J.G. Ballard-inspired A/V show ’Kingdom Come’ (soundtrack released November 2017, Anti-Ghost Moon Ray) - a fascism-infused hellscape, this time set in deepest Old England.

As its sole creator, Gazelle Twin “The Composer, Musician and Producer” has crafted an album overflowing with a frenzy of traditional and contemporary musical tropes; from early music instrumentation - the harpsichord and the humble recorder, fed through myriad electronics - to the compelling, ritualistic application of found sample-looping. Beyond Bernholz’s signature choral-infusions, here reverberating like a warped Sunday Service, there are even shades of ‘90s house and the once-thriving rural rave scene, albeit recalled as a watery, second-hand memory.

In its consummation it is an album that feels pan-century, even pan-species. Set against a verdant backdrop of hedgerows and steeples, Gazelle Twin “The Artist and Performer”, constructs an eccentric and commanding visual embodiment of all-of-the-above - a costume fit for a court Jester of the 21st Century.
The colours of Neo-Nationalism. Coke cans, and DANGER. “It” (not “she”) hints at folkloric traditions with a footy mascot twist. The “Ye Olde” and “The Everyman” of the English cliché. Brandishing a sneer and a hobby horse. A riddle and a recorder. A jeer and a square dance in red, Adidas Gazelle’s, and a mad, fixed GRIN - first glimpsed in the single, ‘Hobby Horse’ (22 June, Anti-Ghost Moon Ray). A deranged, absurd reflection of deranged and absurd times.

STAFF COMMENTS

Martin says: Bernholz returns for another brilliantly off-piste collection of post-NIN industrial scree, thudding glitches and bit-crushed vocal abstractions, filtered through a rosy, synth-pop filter and smashed into a thousand pieces before being reformed, Burrough-style. Completely baffling but thoroughly brilliant.

TRACK LISTING

1/ Folly
2/ Better In My Day
3/ Little Lambs
4/ Old Thorn
5/ Dieu Et Mon Droit
6/ Throne
7/ Mongrel
8/ Glory
9/ Tea Rooms
10/ Jerusalem
11/ Dance Of The Peddlers
12/ Hobby Horse
13/ Sunny Stories
14/ Over The Hills

Bunnymen Classics Transformed & New Songs With Strings & Things Attached.

‘I’m not doing this for anyone else. I’m doing it as it’s important to me to make the songs better. I have to do it.’ Ian McCulloch

This new studio album sees The Bunnymen, still lead by the indominable Ian McCulloch and Will Sergeant, revisit some of their greatest songs to rearrange and transform them with co producer Andy Wright…and strings and things. Also included is two brand new tracks to accompany the classics.

Echo & the Bunnymen's dark, swirling fusion of post-punk and The Doors/The Velvets-inspired pop psychedelia has brought the group twenty top 20 hits and nine top 20 albums in the UK so far in their 40 year career. The band have come a long way from the group's infamous first concert as a three-piece with a drum machine in 1979 at the legendary Erics club in Liverpool, The Bunnymen still perform sell-out concerts across the world today.

Their seminal albums 'Crocodiles', 'Heaven Up Here', 'Porcupine' and 'Ocean Rain' have been a major influence for acts such as Coldplay, The Killers and The Flaming Lips whilst later albums 'Evergreen' and 'What Are You Going To Do With Your Life?' and 'Siberia & Meteorites' demonstrate what an amazing body of work the band have.

The Bunnymen are still revered by those in the best of popular culture. In the past year alone, the highly acclaimed and culturally phenomenal Netflix series 'Stranger Things' has used the song 'Nocturnal Me' whilst the equally comparable '13 Reasons Why' has used 'The Killing Moon', a song also used on another Netflix show, 'Dead of Summer'. 

TRACK LISTING

Bring On The Dancing Horses
The Somnambulist
Nothing Lasts Forever
Lips Like Sugar
Rescue
Rust
Angels & Devils
Bedbugs & Ballyhoo
Zimbo
Stars Are Stars
Seven Seas
Ocean Rain
The Cutter
How Far?
The Killing Moon

"Cochin Moon" (コチンの月 Kochin no Tsuki) is Haruomi Hosono's fifth solo album. Initially intended as a collaboration with illustrator Tadanori Yokoo, who traveled to India alongside Hosono (as part of a group) for inspiration; Yokoo ended up only drawing the cover, having been the worst victim of an outburst of severe diarrhea amongst the group during the trip, rendering this as a Hosono solo album. Cochin Moon was conceptually written as the soundtrack of a non-existent Bollywood film, a trait inspired by the artists' trip. The album includes performances by Tin Pan Alley keyboardist Hiroshi Satō and Yellow Magic Orchestra members Ryuichi Sakamoto & Hideki Matsutake. Despite being Hosono's first completely electronic solo album (at the time YMO's debut was still being recorded, making this Hosono's first electronic album to be released), the exotica feel of Hosono's previous solo work is still present. The first half of the album (named after an Indian hotel that the group was in for the trip, a picture of the hotel's front appears in the back of the album's packaging) consists of three thematically themed songs, the second half of the album (and Hosono's keyboard performance) is credited to "Shuka Nishihara" (西原朱夏), a pseudonym Hosono created as a play on Hakushū Kitahara's pseudonym.

TRACK LISTING

1. "Ground Floor···Triangle Circuit On The Sea-Forest" 
2. "Upper Floor···Moving Triangle" 
3. "Roof Garden···Revel Attack" 
4. "Hepatitis" 
5. "Hum Ghar Sajan" 
6. "Madam Consul General Of Madras" 

Following the release of FELT’s first five albums in February, the band’s reissue campaign continues with the second half of their discography. During the ‘80s Felt recorded ten albums and ten singles for the Cherry Red and Creation labels. This gorgeously-produced series explores the work of one of the greatest indie groups in recent memory.

TRACK LISTING

Disc: 1
1. I Can’t Make Love To You Anymore
2. Mobile Shack
3. Free
4. Budgie Jacket
5. Cartoon Sky
6. New Day Dawning
7. Down An August Path
8. Never Let You Go
9. She Deals In Crosses
10. Get Out Of My Mirror

Disc: 2 (7”)
1. Space Blues
2. Tuesday’s Secret

Optimo Music treat all fans of indie miserablism, bedroom gloom and post punk groan to the new album from Jacob Yates (Uncle John and Whitelock). Not only is he one of the label's all-time favourite artists from Glasgow, but he is one of their favourite artists from anywhere. Criminally unknown except to a few who have been long transfixed by his recordings and performances, we hope this release will open a few more ears to his wondrous musical world.

“The Hare, The Moon, The Drone” is the gloom auteur's third LP. This recording finds the band exploring dark hawthorn hedged lanes, moors and suburban, new build estates. There's something more earthy about the songs but the menace and darkness remains. Musically there is a big shift on this album, a field recording of a folk band from a dark, pine filled glen. The opener, The Car sets the scene for the rural side of the album, dank and stone cold. The tracks then shift through the woods, people turn into animals, we pass a sunlit glade, do you hear a love song? Cassie Ezeji closes the side sweetly lamenting in Gaelic as the snow falls.

Side two is a more urban affair opening with despair in a bedroom in Belgium, we visit a faith healer and drop in on your lonely mother. Lovatt recounts the story of a karaoke addicted murderer before we finally go home to our new build just outside of town where the pylons tower over Michael and his sister Rachel. It's a journey you can go on, looking out of the window of the bus, glimpses of lives glide by, cards on seats promise to help you. Ding! It's time to get off.

TRACK LISTING

The Car
The Human
The Hare
The Moon
The Drone (Part 1)
The Drone (Part 2)
Mr. Marouf
A Scene From An Empty Living Room
Outside The Needle Exchange
Michael

‘Earth Loop’, the debut album by BEAK> keyboardist William Young’s Moon Gangs project, is set for release via Village Green Recordings.

A classically-trained pianist, Young composed ‘Earth Loop’ “half and half in a classical sense,” some played live on keyboards, with ideas notated traditionally, the other half created using analogue sequencers with random voltage sources.

“Earth Loop mainly came out of jamming with synths. The mixer I use is an old Tascam 144 so if things are sounding good I just hit record and get it to tape. Everything started as big long rambles recorded live that are then trimmed down into something more concise. Inspiration-wise I’d been listening to more classical stuff, a lot of chamber music for strings, and I think that shows in the string section-y bits. Although they’re all synths, not actual strings. It was recorded all over the place over quite a long time which I guess is why there are a lot of different ‘moods’ on it, rather than it being a document of a specific period of time/place. I also started building a field recording library over the last couple of years so there’s quite a bit of that in there, but they’re generally processed and run through synths so they’re not too recognisable.” - William Young, Moon Gangs

Young’s introduction to synth music came from listening to film scores when he was a teenager, such as ‘Terminator’, ‘Videodrome’, ‘Zombie Flesh Eaters’ and ‘Phantasm’. Scores from kosmische pioneers Tangerine Dream and Popol Vuh also played a large part in these formative musical years.

Not going out much as a child, Young spent a lot of time indoors playing video games. Instead of a SNES, his mum bought him a Commodore 64 as she thought the keyboard made it seem more educational. Certain games and their soundtracks also struck a chord, such as ‘The Last Ninja’, ‘Dante’s Inferno’, ‘Stormlord’ and ‘Castle Master’.

Moon Gangs officially began in 2011, with the release of ‘Sea/Sky’ on cassette tape via the incipient Where To Now label. Friends from his time spent in Brighton, it was both Young’s and the label’s first release and set the tone for his later output with ambient, analogue synth loops and foreboding, cinematic drones. Subsequent releases followed, such as 2014’s self-titled EP, mixed by Hookworms’ MJ, and an appearance on the Blanck Mass-curated film score ‘The Strange Colour Of Your Body's Tears’, released via Death Waltz.

A triple CD set of archive / unreleased / unearthed MWC sounds to celebrate their 10th year of functionality. The first disc, A Field Full Of Sunken Horses hearkens back to MWC’s earliest phase c. 2003-2009, including the titular fan fave which was issued as 128kbps MP3 only by The Wire in 2005, and now appears in high quality along with the flanging, bubbling magick of Rotten Druid and the bandy-legged swagger of Owd Lad Night. The 2nd disc, Tripping In The Elizabethan Sense brings us up to the period surrounding Clutch It Like A Gonk, namely variations on a "dance” music theme and the results spell out an array of eerie-step beats and mystic foxtrots.

The final disc We In This Hill Are Alive relinquishes a further 22 tracks of undulating soundscapes, taking inspiration from rugged Northern English hills and valleys to render a series of deep topographical studies mapping plasmic links between stone circles, hill mounds and ancient folk dressed in cutting edge couture. This is a music and upside down world unto itself, one where clocks go backwards and anthropomorphic fancies are an everyday occurrence ~ familiar to many, and seductive to many more.

TRACK LISTING

A - A Field Full Of Sunken Horses (GEPH010CDA)

1-1 Planting By The Signs
1-2 Peel Of Bees
1-3 A Central Variation
1-4 The Moontower
1-5 Magpie Mine
1-6 He've Got Saint Lawrence On The Shoulder*
1-7 Wolves In My House
1-8 The Potting Shed
1-9 Return To Shoebox Garden
1-10 Penfriends
1-11 Rotten Druid
1-12 Marshlight No. 2
1-13 Squire Skipling's Horrible Hobby
1-14 The Rabbit's Warning
1-15 Shopping In Fog
1-16 Curdled Footpath
1-17 Carousel Jack
1-18 13 O'Clock Hallucinations 2
1-19 Owd Lad Night
1-20 Autumn Fair Advertisement
1-21 10,000 Frozen Steps
1-22 Music In The Woods

B - Tripping In The Elizabethan Sense (GEPH010CDB)

2-1 Autumn Theatricals
2-2 Galaxy Class
2-3 Circle Of Power
2-4 Infernal Devices (Electrickery Mix)
2-5 Gonk Electric
2-6 Original Wolf Bounce
2-7 Gonk Operetta (Phantom Mix)
2-8 Gonk Stealth
2-9 Sly Gavotte (Dizzy Mix)
2-10 Special Nougat (Ghastly Nougat Mix)
2-11 Antiques Roadshow (Lost Somewhere Mix)
2-12 Spellcasting Summat (Could Be Hiding Mix)
2-13 Gonk Woozy
2-14 Always A Party (Fancy Fizz Mix)
2-15 Teatime Tick-tock Club
2-16 Gonk Materialize
2-17 Tudorbethan Jobbernowl (Full Jobbernowl Mix)
2-18 History Of Light Entertainment
2-19 Gonk Express
2-20 Strangewood Fair (Flaming Candyfloss Mix)
2-21 Hunted By Sentient Topiary
2-22 Ponder Ye (Extra Ponder Mix)

C - We In This Hill Are All Alive (GEPH010CDC)

3-1 Another Another Dreame
3-2 Endless Library
3-3 Location Spell
3-4 Eye Spy The Grey World
3-5 Refined Treacle Scryer
3-6 Nine Decaying Castles
3-7 Eternal Lovebirds (Midnight Mix)
3-8 Scorpio Pankenmannikins
3-9 Dispatch The Courtiers (Body Switcher)
3-10 Fine Big Hats
3-11 Exit Magic Control
3-12 Meadow Signals
3-13 If You Had The Key *
3-14 Midsummer Visitation
3-15 Silver Wolves
3-16 Creeping Into The Kitchen
3-17 Time Means Nowt
3-18 Redcaps In Barley
3-19 Absurd Games Night
3-20 A New Face On An Old Friend (Blazing)
3-21 Coaxing Zeus Into Bird Parallel *
3-22 Answer The Silent Question

Criminal’ is a confessional work. Through the stark lens of shame and guilt that has followed Luis Vasquez since a violent childhood growing up within the humming ambient sprawl of 80s Mojave Desert, here he documents the gut-wrenching sound of going to war with himself. Battling with his own sanity, self-hatred, insecurity, self-entitlement and grappling with the risk of these things transforming him into a person he despises, Vasquez has laid his feelings bare with this: his confession and most self-reflective work to date.

“Guilt is my biggest demon and has been following me since childhood. Everything I do strengthens the narrative that I am guilty” Vasquez reflects. “The concept of ‘Criminal’ is a desperate attempt to find relief by both confessing to my wrongdoings and by blaming others for their wrongdoings that have affected me.”

‘Criminal’ marks a striking and important chapter in his self-exploration, both artistically and emotionally. As a young musician living in Oakland, Vasquez began to try and process the narrative of his difficult upbringing veiled through musical exploration. Taking krautrock's motorik beats and Post-Punk deconstructions and honing them into a hushed percussive incantation, The Soft Moon's self-titled debut album took shape. The album was released in late 2010 by Captured Tracks and was praised by critics and emulated by contemporaries.

In 2012 the apocalyptic conceptual work of 'Zeros' emerged, shortly followed by Vasquez moving to Venice, Italy in 2013, acting as a catalyst for 2014’s release, ‘Deeper’. While previous albums were primarily instrumental records, where Vasquez’s voice was diffused amidst the music as another instrument, ‘Deeper’ marked the beginning of a new musical direction where vocals and lyrics became something more than a mere presence. ‘Deeper’ was a descent into the womb of childhood trauma, anxiety and fear, and although Vasquez survived this dark exploration of himself, he did not return alone.

Working once more with Maurizio Baggio, who produced ‘Deeper’, at La Distilleria in Bassano Del Grappa, Italy, ‘Criminal’ sees Vasquez further explore putting his lyrics at the forefront and letting his raw emotions flow. The album is Vasquez's way of holding himself accountable and seeking redemption for the abuse he inflicts on himself and others, and acknowledges roots in the abuse which, inflicted upon him as a child, broke him.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Thudding drum machines, screaming distorted guitars and barely-there vocal abstractions fed through a wall of effects. It's a delicate but perfectly achieved bout of melodic suggestions and visceral, white-hot emotion.

TRACK LISTING

1. Burn
2. Choke
3. Give Something
4. Like A Father
5. The Pain
6. It Kills
7. ILL
8. Young
9. Born Into This
10. Criminal

In the final year of the sixties and in the final year of his teens, Nick Garrie made an album that should be regarded as one of the great classic albums of the decade: 'The Nightmare of J.B. Stanislas'. It's packed full of smart, romantic, melodious baroque-pop story telling songs with killer string and woodwind arrangements.

Back to 2017 and now there is a new album by Nick Garrie. It's a thing of great and rare beauty. It's still very much the same Nick Garrie who made that incredible 1969 debut and the 2009 album too, but this time round it's Nick Garrie in a more reflective mood.

Noel Gallagher takes some time out from feuding with shirty brother, Liam to put together a brand new full-length album with his High-Flying Bird cohorts. We kick things off with the decidedly 'D'You Know What I Mean'-y percussive scree, backed with distant shouting, thundering bass and growing shadowy reverbs on 'Fort Knox', obviously setting up a grand and extended entrance piece. From there we move into the stabbing horns and distorted bass of 'Holy Mountain', perfectly displaying his keen ear for melody, and almost irritating ability for penning a ruthless earworm. From there we move into the sleazy rock and roll of 'Keep On Reaching', owing as much to classic rock as it does disco with the harmonising backing vox and effervescent synth-brass. 

'She Taught Me How To Fly' presents a truly diverse set of influences, from dreamy synths to the airy ducked bass and dusty snappy percussives, providing a perfect balance between Noel's brilliantly robust compositional techniques and the more avant construction of mesmeric Krautrock or psychedelia. 'Black & White Sunshine' couldn't possibly be any more geared towards Oasis' fans, with that legendary vocal harmony NG does so well making an appearance, as well as the three-chord progressive lift we've heard once or twice before. 

What is most impressive is that the High Flying Birds have managed to step away from the considerable shadow that Oasis cast, whilst still retaining the melodic elements that made it resonate with so many people.   

TRACK LISTING

CD TRACK LISTING (STANDARD & DELUXE)
1. Fort Knox
2. Holy Mountain
3. Keep On Reaching
4. It’s A Beautiful World
5. She Taught Me How To Fly
6. Be Careful What You Wish For
7. Black & White Sunshine
8. Interlude (Wednesday Part 1)
9. If Love Is The Law
10. The Man Who Built The Moon
11. End Credits (Wednesday Part 2)
(Bonus Track) Dead In The Water (Live At RTÉ 2FM Studios, Dublin)

LP TRACK LISTING
A SIDE
1. Fort Knox
2. Holy Mountain
3. Keep On Reaching
4. It’s A Beautiful World
5. She Taught Me How To Fly
B SIDE
6. Be Careful What You Wish For
7. Black & White Sunshine
8. Interlude (Wednesday Part 1)
9. If Love Is The Law
10.The Man Who Built The Moon
11.End Credits (Wednesday Part 2)

Shining sounds from the dawn of the Sun Ra Arkestra. "El is A Sound of Joy" was recorded in 1956 and appeared the following year on the very first Saturn LP, Super-Sonic Jazz. Incredible is the fact that saxophonist Charles Davis, here providing the soulful baritone anchor line (counterpoint to Ra's formidable left hand), remains in the front-line of today's Sun Ra Arkestra directed by Marshall Allen. Shuffle swing breakdown jets leisurely, casually, masterfully, painting lush, post-modern impressions of ancient future worlds, of space, of time … of Chicago's elevated trains … Reaching for the sky, for Joy …. The “Joy” coda dovetails magically into the intro theme of "Black Sky And Blue Moon," before downshifting into another dimension of romantic outrospection. We follow The Nu Sounds, aka Cosmic Rays, on a faraway journey to the land of late-50s Chicago singing groups, the Arkestra supporting with quiet grace, pulsing in Nubians of Plutonia mode. An uncanny blend of antique blackness and bright satellites, ethereal voices perfectly in tune; thanks to Ra's disciplined coaching (plus Modern Harmonic's expert re-mastering), their sweet dynamics and exact harmonics are crystal clear. Flute solo from Marshall Allen. Hearts swelling like the full moon, ripening in the darkness to the point of bursting.

Optimistic recluse Mike Gale and his Winchester/Oxford collective return with eclectic indie-alt-prog opus "Moon Lagoon", their 4th album in 4 years. Farm Music is a new label run from Farm Music studio in Oxfordshire, known for recording many acclaimed alternative albums (Black Nielson, Goldrush, Danny & the Champions of the World, Electric Soft Parade, The Dreaming Spires, Ralfe Band & Co-pilgrim). ‘Still Life Hear Me’ by Black Nielson was the first of these back in 2000, so it seems fitting that the label's first release should be from ex-Black Nielson frontman Mike Gale's present combo, Co-pilgrim. Opening track ‘Turn It Around’ is a clear statement of intent. Gentle acoustic strums swept along by synth and then blown away by power-fuzz guitar; a different Co-pilgrim to the harmony-pop exponents of yore, grittier and more robust, informed by past travails (Gale's recent loss of a parent and an often debilitating agoraphobia) yet resolute and optimistic in pursuit of the yearned-for mythical utopia of the 'moon lagoon'.

Both the second song, ‘You'll Look Pretty As a Picture When The Acid Rain Hits Ya’ and title track, ‘Moon Lagoon’ feed 90s American alt-rock through Copilgrim's pop filter (check the almost Kim Deal-esque BVs). However, it is first single and album centre-piece ‘Cylindrical Fire Escapes’ which really showcases the ambition of the record; producer & multi-instrumentalist Joe Bennett (Dreaming Spires, Goldrush, Saint Etienne, Danny & the Champs) paints an ethereal soundscape of swirling synths and chiming guitars, driven by Andy Reaney's rolling bass and bursts of pulsating rhythm from drummer/percussionist Mike Monaghan (Willie J Healey, Gaz Coombes, Man Without Country, Ralfe Band), and beautifully transcended at the finale by Claire Bennett's soaring vocals. 

TRACK LISTING

SIDE A

Turn It Around,
You'll Look Pretty As A Picture When The Acid Rain Hits Ya,
Cylindrical Fire Escapes,
Moon Lagoon,

SIDE B

Thank My Stars,
I'm Not A Wallflower,
I'm The Wall,
Digging Holes In The Whites Of Your Eyes,
Wouldn't You Like To Dance?

Lifetime of Love is the debut album by Moon Diagrams, the solo recording project of Deerhunter co-founder and drummer Moses John Archuleta. Gradually pieced together over a ten-year period, it finds Archuleta processing various stages of love, loss and regeneration via forlorn outsider pop, minimal techno and warm, weightless experimentation. Hymnal opener “Playground” has echoes of Eno and Grouper; lengthy workouts such as “The Ghost and the Host” recall long-lost Harmonia outtakes, or something from one of Warp’s Artificial Intelligence compilations; the bitter pill pop of “End of Heartache” has the scratchy guitar of New Order circa Brotherhood and the square pegness of Dazzle Ships-era OMD. Several songs are instrumental, while “Bodymaker” features Sian Ahern (Eaux, Sian Alice Group). Subtly grandiose and quietly epic, Lifetime of Love really does live up to its title: a hopeful and curious beginning makes way for a morose middle, before a bittersweet, optimistic end. 

TRACK LISTING

1. Playground
2. Moon Diagrams
3. Nightmoves
4. Blue Ring
5. The Ghost And The Host
6. Magic Killer
7. Bodymaker
8. End Of Heartache

Received a 7.6 rating from Pitchfork. Following the release of COLD BEATS Worms/Year 5772 EP via bandleader HANNAH LEW’s (GRASS WIDOW) Crime on the Moon imprint, Over Me is the Bay Area act’s debut album. Propulsive and taut performances from guitarist KYLE KING and drummer BIANCA SPARTA (ERASE ERRATA) bely Lew’s glassy vocal melodies.

A cathartic album, Lew sourced difficult personal experiences to create an immersive lyrical world sometimes fraught with paranoia, anxiety and impending doom, and also an exploration of hope and imagination—themes felt ever more acutely by a native San Franciscan artist in the midst of tech boom cataclysm once again. Over Me was recorded by PHIL MANLEY at Lucky Cat Studios in San Francisco, and mixed and mastered by MIKEY YOUNG in Australia. As a Crime on the Moon release, a percentage of sales benefit Charity: Water, an organization committed to eliminating privation in developing nations.

Received a 7.7 rating from Pitchfork. Less than a year after COLD BEAT's debut LP, Over Me, the band is set to release Into The Air on bassist, vocalist, and primary songwriter HANNAH LEW's label Crime On The Moon. Moving past the themes of grief and loss prevalent on Over Me, Into the Air explores ideas both earthly and celestial. Some songs are attempts at describing complex emotional landscapes, while others playfully wonder about physics and astronomy, often delving off into deep fantasy. But it doesn’t stop with the personal or metaphysical.

With the exodus of artists and musicians leaving San Francisco due to increased rent prices and overall cultural changes, Cold Beat has persevered through the city’s metamorphosis into a place less and less hospitable to artists. One can pick up on a sense of discontent in the face of a rapidly growing techie millionaire culture on Into The Air. There is a sense of fighting to survive. One can almost hear the struggle represented on the record as guitars face off against increasingly prevalent synths. 

The brainchild of The Strokes' bassist, Nikolai Fraiture, Summer Moon is a music and arts collective that features Stephen Perkins of Jane's Addiction (drums), Camila Grey of Uh Huh Her (keyboards/vocals) and Noah Harmon of The Airborne Toxic Event (guitar), as well as Fraiture himself on bass and lead vocals.

Starting out as an "underground supergroup" (NME), the band's debut single, 'With You Tonight' immediately struck a chord with press and fans alike, becoming NME's 'Track Of The Week' and featuring as the soundtrack for Alexa Chung's collaboration with AG Jeans.

Without the pressure of having to deliver an album within a certain period of time, coupled with the free-spirited nature of the band, Summer Moon has given Fraiture the freedom to experiment and expand his own musical horizons. Once the demos became fully formed songs, Summer Moon's wanderlust took them from their New York roots to Austin and back again.

"We did most of the basic tracking at Vacation Island Studios with Matt Boynton, who did MGMT. The studio was tucked away in Brooklyn next to an overgrown parking lot filled with Puerto Rican Day parade floats and run-down classic cars. I then reached out to Brad Bell (Arcade Fire, The War On Drugs) at Public Hi-Fi Studios in Austin who helped produce some of the early tracks."

With Fraiture playing many of the parts himself on the album, it resulted in heavy experimentation in order to discover new sonic landscapes and fully capture how the songs should sound.

TRACK LISTING

Happenin'
With You Tonight
Cleopatra
Class A
Chemical Solution
L.I.T.A.
Girls On Bikes
Car Vs Bldg
Into The Sun
Walk Out Music

Simbad (aka SMBD) is a stalwart of the underground music scene in the UK; this multifaceted producer can turn his hand to a number of sounds and styles. Since his 2007 album "Supersonic Revelation" and his acclaimed dancefloor hit "Soul Fever", the London based Frenchy has been constantly travelling the five continents entertaining delighted clubbers with his super energetic DJ skills or producing and recording various artists from many different genres including deeper dubstep don Mala (DMZ), UK Hip Hop star Roots Manuva, Cuban songstress Dayme Arocena, Detroit House producer Kai Alce, Berlin based deep Techno artist Fred P, Seun Kuti from Afrobeat's most famous family, Brazilian superstar artist/actor Seu Jorge and being production mentor for the king of cool, radio DJ Gilles Peterson (who made him one of the resident at his Worldwide Festivals). With the "Moon Theory" EP Simbad demonstrates his talent on some deep analog frequencies for the very solid & ever growing label that is Apron Records. As the music wizard puts it himself : ‘I'm just trying to make some timeless shhhhh man, soul in all forms really, trying anyway! And I guess that the best is yet to come.' Recommended.

STAFF COMMENTS

Matt says: Apron continues to remain completely crucial through 2017. Funkinevin's uncompromising label constantly offering up gritty, real life alternatives to the gloss'n'polish fakery of this world.

TRACK LISTING

A1. Message
A2. Nuwhat
A3. Message 406Y

The elusive Famous Moon King smash out a cassette for Manchester odd-noise/electronic stalwarts Tesla Tapes. 'Crumbling Towers' starts us off with an insectoid infusion of warbling synths and swooping ambience, over a slow-mo throbbing bass, before moving onto the syncopated delayed synth-work of 'Fudge Palace', sending found sounds and industrial hum headfirst into the tightly woven net of saw-waves and staggered gate-pulses. 

'Meancing Urges' sees more of the fractured skittering beats spread beneath cosmic space-station ambience and gloomy dread-pads, before moving into the rhythmic instability and delectable unpredictability of the flourishing electronic noise of 'Mao Mao' 

TRACK LISTING

1. CRUMBLING TOWERS 04:02
2. FUDGE PALACE 05:47
3. Menacing Urges 03:42
4. MAO MAO 04:30
5. Champion Lover 05:12

Prince's eighth studio album and the last to feature his backing band The Revolution, Parade was, essentially, the soundtrack to his second film 'Under The Cherry Moon' and was viewed at the time as a creative comeback after what many people perceived as it's disapponting predecessor 'Around The World In A Day'.

Containing probably his biggest hit and scourge of every dj the world over 'Kiss' and a couple of lesser known, but absolute MONSTERS in 'Girls And Boys' and 'Sometimes It Snows In April' , 'Parade' is the sound of an artist at his creative peak.

TRACK LISTING

1 Christopher Tracy's Parade 2:12
2 New Position 2:20
3 I Wonder U 1:40
4 Under The Cherry Moon 2:57
5 Girls & Boys 5:30
6 Life Can Be So Nice 3:14
7 Venus De Milo 1:55
8 Mountains 3:58
9 Do U Lie? 2:44
10 Kiss 3:38
11 Anotherloverholenyohead 4:01
12 Sometimes It Snows In April 6:49

Having announced themselves to the world with their acclaimed self-titled debut in 2014, Arc Iris return with their second album, ‘Moon Saloon’, released on Bella Union.

‘Moon Saloon’ constitutes a natural progression from the first album’s whimsical explorations. Produced by the group and mixed by electronic producer David Wrench of FKA Twigs and Caribou fame, the album showcases beat-heavy melodies and textural, grooveriding rhythms. It developed from the band’s distillations of musical influences, combining traditional elements with percussive structures and dense, beguiling harmonies.

In many ways this second album captures Arc Iris’ musical odyssey as a band. “It has a heavier sound, more intense,” says Arc Iris keyboardist Zach Tenorio- Miller, who makes liberal use of sampling in many of the songs. The group matches an unusual array of organic acoustic instruments with layered electronic sounds.

“Though they are only a three-piece, they have a large arsenal of sounds and sensibilities to work with, and they use every bit of it to make beautifully textured soundscapes difficult to box into any genre.” - Stereogum

TRACK LISTING

Kaleidoscope
Kingdom Come
Paint With The Sun
Pretending
She Arose
Lilly
Johnny
Saturation Brain
Rainy Days
Moon Saloon

‘Blood Moon’, M. Craft’s third full length album, is very much a score for seclusion. Inspired by witnessing the titular lunar event twice during his time as a desert resident, ‘Blood Moon’ began life in a studio in nearby Los Angeles as a series of unstructured, experimental piano pieces.

Constructed from those piano recordings with additional percussion from another temporary desert dweller, Seb Rochford (Polar Bear) and occasional orchestration, ‘Blood Moon’ is a stunning fusion of freeform instrumental explorations and properly pure songs.

TRACK LISTING

New Horizons
Blood Moon
Chemical Trails
Afterglow
Midnight
Love Is The Devil
Me And My Shadow
Morphic Fields
Where Go The Dreams
Love Is All

Radiohead's ninth LP proper sees them once again couple with mega-producer Nigel Godrich. Together they have created possibly the band's most coherent record of their whole career.  Some of these songs date well back in time and that coupled with the accessibility of comeback single Burn The Witch and their recent  dare-I-say fan-pleasing set-lists suggest a group finally comfortable in their own skin, embracing all that they really are.  So you do still get electronica, but less of the fractured kind. Sure, Thom still sings of alienation, doubt and paranoia, but  in the most beautiful way imaginable. These songs  build and build, swept into shape by Johnny Greenwood's London Contemporary Orchestra strings, peppered with psych-folk and even dub reggae vibes. It's heavy, (let's face it) depressive, but eminently listenable. One for diehards, but crucially, the casual listeners too. 

STAFF COMMENTS

Andy says: These songs build and build, swept into shape by Johnny Greenwood's London Contemporary Orchestra strings, peppered with psych-folk and even dub reggae vibes. It's heavy, (let's face it) depressive, but eminently listenable. One for diehards, but crucially, the casual listeners too. One of the last bands standing that truly matter to their people. They just don't disappoint!

TRACK LISTING

Burn The Witch
Daydreaming
Decks Dark
Desert Island Disk
Ful Stop
Glass Eyes
Identikit
The Numbers
Present Tense
Tinker Tailor Soldier Sailor Rich Man Poor Man Beggar Man Thief
True Love Waits

Blue Moon includes tracks mixed by Victor Van Vugt - best known for his work with Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds and PJ Harvey - and Drostan Madden best known for his work with The Cocteau Twins. Breathless' singer Dominic Appleton contributed lead vocals to 3 tracks on This Mortal Coil's 'Filigree And Shadow' which resulted in Ivo Watts Russell helping with the tracklisting on Breathless' 2012 album Green To Blue and leading him to proclaim 2Without exaggeration Dominic Appleton is by far, my favourite living male vocalist. He has such a beautiful, sad voice and comes up with melodies that do the same".

Originally only released as a 50 minute CD in jewel case. Blue Moon is now available both as a Double Vinyl LP in lavish gatefold sleeve and also as a Double CD in a mini gatefold version of the LP.

Both formats include the extra tracks 'Moonstone 3' and 'Blue Moon', previously (despite the latter's title), only available as obscure B Sides.

'Exquisite Melancholic indie pop.' THE GUARDIAN. 
'A Lovely tearful noise' THE TIMES. 
'The group shimmer darkly' THE OBSERVER.
'Desolate romanticism... Outstanding' THE WIRE. 
'Melancholy Delights' TIME OUT. 

Incredible, idiosyncratic and obscure early 80s French futurist DIY project led by Jean-Luc Aime (Univers Zero) this feature-length album of elusive recordings marks the bone fide axis point where Zeuhl-Skool meets synth pop, dark ambient and early electro culled from rare vinyl and disparate cassette co-op releases for this first ever LP release.

A lost art-ifact from a micro genre where ZED, Eskaton and Heldon share outernational tape space with Vox Populi! The Normal, Colin Potter and Luc Marianni this record occupies a unique place on the shelves of fans of early DIY electro and post punk while ticking the boxes of 80s VHS OST enthusiasts and the growing interest in European cassette zine projects. These melodic macabre tape experiments fuse multi-track cassette experiments with home-made special effects at the hand of an accomplished multi-instrumentalist working on the outer reaches of disenfranchised progressive-pop and reluctant techno defining then deconstructing genres that have yet to exist. Fuelled by futurist gothic imagery and operating on a parallel plain to his European and American contemporaries there are few artists like Stabat Stable and virtually none more enigmatic. This benchmark record is the first signpost to a darker part of your musical want-list as the invisible glue for fans of the aforementioned anti-genres. File under “Not Yet”.

A collaborative studio album by American indie folk act Sun Kil Moon and British experimental act Jesu. The album also features guests Will Oldham aka Bonnie "Prince" Billy, members of Low, Rachel Goswell of Slowdiveand Isaac Brock of Modest Mouse.

Jesu and Sun Kil Moon including drummer Steve Shelley of Sonic Youth will play five shows in February and March 2016 to support the album. 

EL VY is the collaboration between Matt Berninger, vocalist and lyricist of The National, and Brent Knopf, the Portland musician and producer best known for his work in Menomena and his more recent band, Ramona Falls.

Their debut album, Return To The Moon, is a project Berninger and Knopf have been thinking about for years. Their friendship spans nearly a decade, starting back when The National and Menomena played small half-empty clubs along America’s west coast. Feeling an immediate musical kinship, the pair kept in touch, Brent sending Matt occasional rough sketches of music and Matt responding with ideas and lyrics. Finally, in the winter and spring of 2014-115, they got together to make an album.

Return to the Moon sounds exactly like you'd hope a collaboration between these artists would: Berninger's darkly funny, lyrical storytelling and his immediately identifiable sense of melody offset by Knopf's playful, architectural arrangements and inventive production.

Singer/songwriter Alela Diane and guitarist Ryan Francesconi have uniquely collaborated to create Cold Moon. The two musicians talked at a friend's show in October 2014, chatting about how they were both experiencing creative standstills.

Ryan was lacking inspiration to make more instrumental music, and Alela was at a loss for how to dive into writing a new record after the birth of her daughter. A few days later, Ryan asked Alela if she would be into collaborating and then sent her several recordings of intricate, beautiful guitar pieces. Alela listened on repeat while staring out the window at the changing leaves, initially unsure how to sing even a note over what she heard.

Eventually, something clicked. Words came first, and with words, melody followed. Throughout the winter, Alela made trips across town to Ryan's house to woodshed the songs over cups of tea. Before they knew it, they had a record-a collaboration of voice and guitar with intangible moods and resonances-a collection that calls you to reflect and be hopeful.

A wintry music born in December. And so rose the Cold Moon.

Alela Diane is a critically-acclaimed singer/songwriter from Nevada City, CA currently living in Portland, Oregon. She’s released four albums including “The Pirate’s Gospel” in 2007, “To Be Still” in 2009, “Wild Divine” in 2011 and “About Farewell” in 2013.

Ryan Francesconi is a composer, guitarist, balkan musician, programmer, and cyclist living in Portland, Oregon. Recent projects include arranging Joanna Newsom's "Have One On Me", a solo guitar record "Parables", and "Road To Palios" - his latest album of duets with Mirabai Peart released by Bella Union.

After lighting up our lives with the superb Barthel, Bohm & Bauer retrospective last time round, Basso hooks the tape deck up to the Growing Bin lathe and delivers a vinyl edition of Moon B's "Lifeworld", previously only available on cassette via Vancouver's 1080p. Where the Atlanta producer's previous releases on PPU delivered the saturated boogie and grainy house synonymous with the label, strolling casually in step with Mood Hut or the more stoned end of the Beautiful Swimmers catalogue, "Lifeworld" sees Wes Gray don a safari suit for an exploration of the tropical undergrowth. Operating in much the same way as a hip hop mixtape, the LP sees the producer cycle through a well segued selection of sketches, motifs and moods, exploring tranquilised g-funk, subcontinental film themes and tropical interludes without letting any track outstay its welcome. The result is an intoxicating listening experience which pulls you into its distinct universe from start to finish, while sounding like a slightly heat-warped tape discovered on a Jamaican beach. Joining the dots between the psychedelia of Baldelli's cosmic scene and the dranked out slank of his hometown's chopped & screwed scene, Moon B's delivered one of the freshest albums of recent memory, typified by the horizontal oddness of bonus cut "Moments In Slank". Clear a space next to your turntable because you'll have this one on heavy rotation.

TRACK LISTING

A1: Lifeworld Part I
B1: Lifeworld Part II
B2: Moments In Slank (Exclusive Bonus Track)

Air's Nicolas Godin and Jean Benoit Dunckel were a couple of cerebral keyboard geeks from Versailles, France, where they obviously don't get out of the studio much. Their space-pop debut, "Moon Safari", was a truly obsessive hommage to easy listening, a sublime Eurocheese omelet. They built their music out of classic 60s French schlock: bongos, castanets, vintage electric piano, dream-weaver synths and shag-carpet organ straight from the soundtracks of movies like Un Homme et Une Femme. The music is full of hidden jokes, as when "Remember" replicates the distorted drum intro from the Beach Boys hit "Do It Again"; Air's Brian Wilson allusion isn't some "Smile"-era obscurity - it's a beach-party blowout. Loads of American bands tried to emulate the fab tackiness of 1960s French pop. But Moon Safari proves that the French really do it better themselves.

To coincide with the deluxe reissue of “The Virgin Suicides”, Warner / Parlophone will also release remastered versions of Air’s five album discography on 180-gram vinyl with original artwork – their first EP 'Premiers Symptômes' (1997), 'Moon Safari' (1998), '10,000 Hz Legend' (2001), 'Talkie Walkie' (2004), and 'Pocket Symphony' (2007). 

“Different things are happening in my life now, so there is no doubt that it will be a very different album.” - Mark Kozelek

‘Universal Themes’ includes ‘The Possum’, a nineminute track featuring Sonic Youth drummer Steve Shelley about dead possums and hanging out with Godflesh.

Guitars and vocals by Mark Kozelek. Percussion by Steve Shelley.

Recorded in San Francisco, 2014 / 2015. Additional recording in Hoboken, 2015.

TRACK LISTING

The Possum
Birds Of Flims
With A Sort Of Grace I Walked To The Bathroom To Cry
Garden Of Lavender
Cry Me A River 
Williamsburg Sleeve
Tattoo Blues
Ali/Spinks 2
Little Rascals
This Is My First Day And I’m Indian And I Work At A Gas Station

“Dream pop with fangs, packing their reverblayered surfaces with punchy playing and swooning melodies” - SPIN

Toronto duo Moon King, made up of songwriter Daniel Benjamin and singer / guitarist Maddy Wilde, have crafted a raw, rapturous and emotional new record, which documents their ascent from an intimate conceptual project into a powerful live band.

Following a year of touring in support of their ‘Obsession I’ and ‘II’ EPs, Daniel and Maddy relocated to a cottage in northern Ontario to record the album with a group of Toronto music scene luminaries, all of whom had played in various incarnations of the live band.

Mostly recorded live off the floor, there is a deep sense of loss and longing in ‘Secret Life’. Moon King channel desperation and project it outwards, each song carrying with it both a weight and a sense of urgency.

TRACK LISTING

Roswell
Secret Life
Impossible
Come Back
Hexe
Threads
Apocalypse
Golden Age
Medicine

Sonic Youth’s second full-length LP Bad Moon Rising was originally released on Homestead and Blast First in 1985. The album is a fascinating examination of “the junction where hippie idealism [meets] the cold hard world,” says guitarist Lee Ranaldo, “where Woodstock [meets] Altamont—Death Valley, Charles Manson, Brian Wilson, musicians, murderers, heroes and villains.” Its original eight-song tapestry of droning guitar feedback, distant clattering percussion, and sullen vocals, all held together with interstitial noise loops and shadowy haze, ambles through a long, dark night before the feverish “Death Valley ’69,” driven by runaway guitar riffs and a frantic Thurston Moore / Lydia Lunch vocal duet, pounds the capstone into place.

Sonic Youth’s big leap forward from Confusion Is Sex and Kill Yr Idols “reflects the spirit of the time,” to quote All Music Guide. Bad Moon Rising views “American gothic through the glassy eyes of wilful moonlit paranoia.” Back in print on Goofin’ Records, this reissue includes bonus tracks “Flower” and “Halloween,” both from a 12”single of the same era. The sound collage morsels “Satan Is Boring” and “Echo Canyon” are your cue to begin moving toward the exit and get out while you can. 

TRACK LISTING

1. Intro
2. Brave Men Run (In My Family)
3. Society Is A Hole
4. I Love Her All The Time
5. Ghost Bitch
6. I’m Insane
7. Justice Is Might
8. Death Valley ’69

Bonus Tracks On CD / Digital Download:
9. Satan Is Boring
10. Flower
11. Halloween
12. Echo Canyon

Talk about high concept: 'Dub Side Of The Moon' features the house band of noted New York reggae label Easy Star covering Pink Floyd's 'Dark Side Of The Moon' in the same sequence and in recognisable but reggae fashion. Here, the All Stars turn Floyd's strangely surreal world even stranger and more surreal, adorning the band's dark psychedelic music with slow reggae beats and head-spinning dub-style production that is both inspired and effective. "Money" opens with the sound of bong hits and coughing instead of the cash register, then grooves to a reggae beat as guitar and organ churn out the classic riff - there's even the mandatory sax break in the middle. The group hits it just right on "Great Gig in the Sky", retaining the soaring gospel voice, while the remake of the chiming bells on "Time" reveals a bit of irreverent humour. Tearing away at the alienation of the original, this infusion of new personality makes it all work, elevating the album's concept from the half-baked to visionary.

Celebrate a decade plus of this timeless and ingenious musical experiment with this release, which includes two new bonus tracks (including a new version of “Breathe” that features Rebelution’s Eric Rachmany along with Metric Man, Ruff Scott and Sluggy Ranks) and new artwork.

TRACK LISTING

1. Third And Seneca – 07:41
2. Tomorrow Is Already Here – 2:10
3. Natural Light – 1:38
4. I’ll Be There – 2:20

Seth Sutton has been ripping the shit out of terse Telecaster-sharp riffs and Devo-indebted angular rhythms with Useless Eaters since dude was 18 years old. A young protégé of Jay Reatard, Sutton’s home-fried concoctions are sharp, corrosive mini-masterpieces that drive you to flick cigarettes and push strangers. Psycho-sexual, serrated vocals; thin, acidic guitars; rubbery bass and hot-to-tape traps lather the whole disc. Sutton delivers a really ripping crew of tunes this time around, kicking off with the supremely heavy “American Cars” and not letting up ’til the side break—these are glass-crunching gems with just the right amount of crud to cut your lip a little. A great alienated vibe flows throughout, along with some really sticky melodies, too. Going out under the neon tonight? Take this with you.

As King Krule, 18 year old south east London based singer / producer / songwriter Archy Marshall has quietly and stealthily crafted a reputation for himself as one of the most raw and startling voices of a new generation. With his unexpectedly deep and mournful baritone tracing fissures of disappointment and social disorientation to devastating effect, Marshall has harnessed the inchoate frustration and fury of youth and translated it into a series of brilliant singles released on the likes of True Panther Sounds and Rinse over the past couple of years.

Now comes ‘6 Feet Beneath The Moon’, his first full-length on XL Recordings / True Panther Sounds, and with it, the much anticipated unveiling of the full scope and scale of Marshall’s vision. Over the course of 14 tracks, Marshall’s passions and confusions are rubbed raw and laid bare, the only connective tissue throughout it all being one of searing lyrical clarity paired with a confounding musical deftness which utterly belies his tender years.

From the opening clarion call of ‘Easy, Easy’ it is abundantly clear that this is a breathtakingly bold and arresting sonic worldview, as his songs, produced by Marshall along with Rodaidh McDonald (The XX, Savages), open up to become a loose knit meditation on regret and discontent, loss of faith and renewal of hope, and optimism in the face of desperation.

Eschewing much of his previously released material, ‘6 Feet Beneath The Moon’ firmly yet soundly rejects any notion of contemporary trends or peers to occupy its very own unique place on the music landscape, oscillating gently between the classic 50s soul of Gene Vincent and Elvis Presley to the minimal, avant-garde experimentation of Penguin Café Orchestra, to even the electronic smog and dub textures of Marshall’s beloved Rinse FM. This is a record where the nakedly bluesy stomp of the likes of ‘A Lizard State’ and ‘Easy, Easy’ sit effortlessly next to the low-end frequency and shimmering beats of ‘Neptune Estate’ and ‘Will I Come, after all. It is reflective as much of Marshall’s own eclectic tastes as it is of the frenetic pulse and rhythm of the city around him, particularly the rapidly changing south east areas in which he grew up.

There is a genuine grittiness and world weariness ingrained here, as exemplified so succinctly when Marshall sings, “Hate… runs through my blood” on the stunning ‘Out Getting Ribs’, the track which started all the fuss.

All these esoteric textures and fidgety, off-kilter rhythms make perfect sense as an album however, especially when you consider that incredible voiceWhether he is singing ruefully of youthful disaffection and “the heat of my own treason” (‘Ceiling’), or spitting out venomous lines like “I’m not going to crack like you cracked… I don’t want to be trapped in the black of your heart” over the jittery ‘A Lizard State’, its clear that something which marks Marshall out is his stunning ability to turn intense emotional peaks and troughs into spectacular pieces of artful, atmospheric and anthemic balladeering.

Some of the imagery is disturbing to be sure (as on the closer ‘Bathed In Grey’ where he offhandedly murmurs that “there was blood… found a body in the dark”) but the songs are also imbued with genuine heart as well. Taken as a whole, ‘6 Feet Beneath The Moon’ is the sound of a young man growing up - not for nothing is this album being released, unconventionally enough, on Saturday, which also marks Marshall’s 19th birthday - and attempting to grapple with the realities of the world he inhabits, an unsparing dissection of the social decay that has begun to set in around him - and a fascinating, brutal journey it is too.

THIS IS A RECORD STORE DAY 2013 EXCLUSIVE.

Limited to 750

Celebrating the release of Ian McCulloch’s new album ‘Pro Patria Mori’ this rare coloured 7” features two tracks from bonus live album in the package paying homage to the original Killing Moon 7” sleeve

TRACK LISTING

Killing Moon Pro Patria Mori

*Based around ex-patriot Englishmen Oliver Baroni and Duncan James together with chanteuse Emanuela Hutter, they’ve long been showing Zurich how to rock’n’roll. Now having conquered both their domestic residence and neighbouring France, they return to the UK as part of a Europe-wide tour for dates in early May and August. As their name suggests The Hillbilly Moon Explosion’s roots are in rockabilly; however they’ve always been just as comfortable with 60’s pop and smoky ballads. They’ve now have widened their template to embrace all roots Americana.

‘Damn Right Honey’ features two distinctive guest singers joining them for duets. Rockabilly stalwart Paul Ansell, the chosen vocalist of Scotty Moore, contributes to the single ‘Flying High, Moaning Low’. And Sparky Phillips returns to duet with Emanuela on ‘Northern Crown’. For the first time they’ve engaged a brass section, and are also aided and abetted by BJ Cole and Geraint Watkins amongst others.