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White Poppy

Ataraxia

    The concept for and palette of Crystal Dorval aka White Poppy’s ‘Paradise Gardens’ trilogy first germinated in 2016 as a notion of “paradise music” combining new age, bedroom shoegaze, and bossa nova into “transcendental Tropicalia.” As she filled tapes of recordings exploring the idea, many of the songs gradually gravitated towards the hermetic dream pop her project is best known for, becoming the albums Paradise Gardens (2020) and Sound Of Blue (2023). Dorval describes these collections as a sort of “emotional purging or shadow work,” before arriving at “the state of inner paradise:” Ataraxia.

    As the third, final, and most purist realisation of the original ‘Paradise Gardens’ vision, Ataraxia delivers. Nine instrumentals of nimble guitar, elevated bass, clean rhythm, and clear light, gliding like swans on a shimmering pond. There’s a sense throughout of playful tranquillity, of serenades at sunset, of kisses of blissful Muzak wafting along a boardwalk.

    But behind the music is a patience, grace, and levity born of Dorval’s personal journey with spiritual healing that paralleled the trilogy. A process of transmuting pain into beauty, day by day, melody by melody, cleaving the darkness from the soul and re-entering one’s rightful home in the Garden.


    TRACK LISTING

    1. Mind Garden
    2. Floral Dreams
    3. Ordinary Magic
    4. Soul Utopia
    5. Swans
    6. Pearl
    7. Himmel
    8. Ataraxia
    9. Kiss Of Peace

    On her first proper full-length album, Tokyo netscape nightingale Sapphire Slows impressively expands on the spider web tone-bank nocturnes of 2011’s True Breath EP, with headier, haunted highs and eerier, elegant depths. Patiently pieced together across all of 2012 (plus change), and inspired by everything from St. Etienne’s plasticine Euro-house, obscured J-pop memories, Blue Bell Knoll and the saddest Section 25 remixes, Allegoria swirls and spirals through ten textural electronic melancholias composed in solitude. The record grows more reflective and insular as it goes on, ebbing from the Casio ghost-dub of “Dry Fruits” and “Third Party” into the fragile sleepwalker techno of “Corekill” and “Fade Out” before dissolving into even more weightless 4 AM pop-ambient Kompakt abstractions like “Break Control” and “Meteor.”

    An effortless fusion of emotive and exploratory impulses, arranged in a blue-lit rock garden in an invisible apartment in the heart of urban infinity, Allegoria was mastered by Andrew Veres and features “piercing jewelry textile” cover artwork by celebrated Angeleno artisan Natasha Ghosn. As the artist herself puts it, “Darkness no one can enter; only listening to this album lets you into my real world.”

    TRACK LISTING

    1. Dry Fruits
    2. Third Party
    3. Rules
    4. Corekill
    5. Fade Out
    6. Break Control
    7. As You Know
    8. Can I Get Out Of This Silence
    9. Meteor
    10. Allegoria

    "NNF present the hallucinatory first LP from Rangers associate Peter Berends aka KWJAZ after a blink-and-miss-it debut cassette for the Brunch Groupe in 2010. We enter a potently warped world of decomposing ambient electro-jazz with 'Once In Babylon', ferrying us along a ferric-murky exhalation of blurry mixtape-styled moments flopping from loungey, twinkling keys to blunted synths and proggy rhythm switches to the deserted-harbour-cruising drones and soggy bossa-lite inflections of 'Righteous Wane'. His sound has been aptly compared with the more esoteric jazz of Madlib's YNQ outings and the culture mulching 4th world experiments of John Hassell, and there's certainly an affinity with the work of James Ferraro. Mind-bendingly surreal and utterly zonked."


    STAFF COMMENTS

    Matt says: This is causing me to wet my pants a little at the moment - a sure-fire MUST HAVE for fans of - Sun Araw, James Ferraro, Rangers, Olde English Spelling Bee, Matrix Metals and anyone with a penchant for smeared, hazy, lysergic psychedelia.

    TRACK LISTING

    1. Once In Babylon
    2. Frighteous Wane

    CD Only Bonus Tracks:
    3. A Certain Sprout
    4. Elevation Elation / Jah Wad

    Wet Hair

    Radiant Lines

    Amazing new pair of single sides by this ever-evolving Iowa City kraut-pop duo-turned-trio comes in a stunning full-colour 22-page pro-printed art book of brand new works by WET HAIR main-men Shawn Reed and Ryan Garbes.

    Limited to 500 copies.

    Topaz Rags

    Crown Center

    West Coast ghost squad Topaz Rags stalk back into the deadlights with a fresh vinyl single, their first new material since the "Capricorn Born Again" LP. Recorded in the heart of winter in a room with one blue light bulb, "The Crown Center" is pure nightprowler music: quaking bass, grime-jazz keys, dusty drums, witch choirs floating through the smog and into sleeping homes with the power lines cut. The sound of crime to come. The flip ("You Go On") slips deeper into the psych-psycho psyche, a bleached-brain riff-rhythm grinding away endlessly while voices and electric piano stabs arc across the stereo field, raining ash. A grimmer twist on the Topaz formula, the dreamer's dream turned dark.

    33 RPM 7-inch pressed on various colored vinyl in hand-silkscreened cardstock sleeves. Edition of 345.

    Josh Taylor's Friends Forever / Barrabarracuda

    Bleached Speeches

      Amy, Kenna, and Germaine aka Josh Taylor's Friends Forever's track here is a non-stop 18 minute junk-van thrashsterpiece of rainbow drums, headbang bass, and kool-aid keyboard plasma. Messy LA beach cruisers Barrabarracuda exercise their own fair share of western liberties across three outsider agitations, decrying (or glorifying?) Urgent social issues like Patty Hearst, Watergate mystique, and Bush-backed torture policies via bleedingly liberal guitar shred, pissed trumpet protests, and healthy freedom-of-speech abuse.


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