Smallville Record sub-label Fuck Reality returns with Fossar’s ‘Make Me Feel’ EP.

The Fuck Reality imprint founds it origins in 2015 as a sub label of the widely lauded Smallville label with a heavy focus on classic house music. The label kicked off with the reissue of Westbam and Nena’s iconic ‘Oldschool Baby’ with remixes from Smallpeople and Gerd Janson before going on to release music from Smallville staple Moomin, Frantzvaag - who also released the first album on the label last year - and more. Here the label welcomes Fossar, co-founder of the Feuilleton imprint, onto the imprint with his new EP.

‘Good 2 Me’ opens with airy chords, robust toms, flickers of resonant synth stabs and soulful vocals running atop snappy drums before ‘Free’ embraces a classic 90’s New York aesthetic with heavily swung percussion a jazzy bass groove, emotive piano lines and warm vocal chants.

The B-side is kicked off with ‘Make Me Feel’, diving deep with shimmering, expansive leads, looped vocal, swirling string melodies and a classic bumpy bass and snare combination. ‘Aeriel (Windy City Version)’ then rounds things out, as the name would suggest nodding to the Chicagoan roots of house and employing all the classic tropes from slick flutes, intertwined keys, glistening piano melodies and shuffled 909 drums.

STAFF COMMENTS

Matt says: New house with vintage feels. Fossar tips his hat to Chicago, London and Ibiza with a four track EP that explores all corners of the golden era.

TRACK LISTING

A1. Good 2 Me
A2. Free
B1. Make Me Feel
B2. Aeriel (Windy City Version)

From out of nowhere - if nowhere is the febrile, warped and twilit imagination of Julia McFarlane - comes Whoopee, the second album by J.McFarlane’s Reality Guest. Whoopee is an esoteric, kaleidoscopic movie in music form directed by Julia McFarlane and co-conspirator Thomas Kernot. Full of life, breakbeats and smokey vignettes on the fragile nature of interpersonal relationships, Whoopee is a stylistic evolution from everything McFarlane has done before. Surreal, beautiful in parts and replete with the aching wisdom McFarlane’s songwriting has always promised, this Reality Guest pulls back the curtain on a whole scene of naked truth. Recorded in Melbourne in bursts since the release of 2019’s Ta Da, Whoopee features a new sound palette and band member in Kernot. The duo dive deep into electronic pop tropes, mining digital synths, samples, breakbeats and deep bass grooves, largely dispensing with live instrumentation. If Ta Da took twists and turns with your expectations, offering a Dada-ist, monochromatic take on pop music, Whoopee is McFarlane’s subterranean love-sick pinks, reds, greens, purples and blues.

Becoming something of a tradition, the album starts with an instrumental intro pilfered from a 90s’ spy film or cinema intro music, puffing up the listener for the heart-squeezing bathos of Full Stops. Over a bleary backdrop of walking bass lines, jazz- inflected keys and smoked-out atmosphere, McFarlane’s poetry narrates the fragile state of a relationship: “You put a full stop where I thought there’d be a comma, I want the story to continue even with all the drama.” Over a palpable pain, the narrator is revelling in the drama of a relationship, addicted to tumult and heightened emotion. On Sensory, a space age bachelor lounge pad ballad, the converse state of the previous song is explored, here the narrator is battling the numbness of being out of the drama, stuck in a sensory-deprivation tank, anaesthesized and battling to emerge from the fog. Wrong Planet explores an otherworldly pop music, hewing a bright hook out of a sense of confusion. A bona-fide, sing-along chorus bursts out of the narrator musing on the absurdity of existing in this reality. It speaks of one of Julia McFarlane’s main talents, her knack of inspecting human relationships and states with a clear perspective, like an alien visiting Earth and realising everything we are is really, really strange. Whoopee is both more accessible than previous Reality Guest work and somehow more obfuscated. Where the production on Ta Da was dry, sharp and strange, this Reality Guest is blurred, almost smeared with the effluvium of 90s+00s culture and existence. Through it all, it’s hard to deny the undeniable pull of the songs. Precious Boy carries on the lounge theme with a whole sampler of cut up sounds fading in and out of the haze as McFarlane’s voice is right up to the speaker cooing and free- associating, maybe in love or maybe in confusion... maybe they’re the same thing? Sometimes the listener is invited to just bathe in the tone of the vocal, as on Apocalypse, where the texture and timbre of the vocal is luxurious, bathing in piano tinkles and double bass throb. On lead single Slinky, a cut up beat reminiscent of Washingtonian Go-Go drum patterns leads, the song slipping through your fingers, elusive and presenting sound as pure pleasure. Closer Caviar jumps back into the broken breakbeats of a surreal funk, fuelled by the sensory pleasure of the music, a hedonistic whirl in rapture, the narrator now living life to the fullest in all its giddy heights and deep troughs. This is the album’s main character fully-actualised and in the terrible, beautiful moment.

TRACK LISTING

1. Hotel Suite
2. Full Stops
3. Sensory
4. Wrong Planet
5. Electrix Blue
6. Precious Boy
7. Apocalypse
8. YouTube Trip
9. Slinky
10.Caviar

Each LP colour is limited to 250 copies only. Sea Blue Splatter Vinyl is for Indies Only. CD is a four panel digipack CD, 500 pressed.

Psychedelic Porn Crumpets are back with their sixth studio album, set for release on 10th November 2023. The Australian psych-rock five-piece have been working on ‘Fronzoli’ – a title meaning 'something unnecessary added as decoration’ – since the release of 2022’s ‘Night Gnomes’. ‘Dilemma Us From Evil’ is the latest single to be released from the record and is a prime example of Psychedelic Porn Crumpets’ mind-bending blend of heavy melodic guitars and harmonic lyrics and eccentric songwriting oeuvre. It follows the release of singles ‘Nootmare (K-I-L-L-I-N-G) Meow!’ and ‘(I'm a Kadaver) Alakazam’, which were released earlier this year. The album announcement arrives alongside the news that Psychedelic Porn Crumpets will be supporting Royal Blood on the Australian leg of their tour later this year. The record surges with the Perth-based band’s over-the-top, glittery sound, drawing influences from the likes of classic rock behemoths Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin and The Beatles, as well as electronic experimental jazz. These rock influences are firmly on display in ‘Fronzoli’, with thrashy grunge tracks such as ‘Sierra Nevada’ and the frenetic ‘Hot! Heat! Wow! Hot!’ showcasing the band’s hyperactive guitars and offbeat lyrics. The band, who started out as friends, before coming together to pride themselves on their joyful and unpolished messiness when it comes to songwriting and production. “This record is my favourite creation to date,” says songwriter and frontman Jack McEwan, “Every nuance has been discussed, slandered and carefully contorted into place, it sporadically colours outside the lines, so you're left with these extraverted squiggles.” “On their sixth album, Psychedelic Porn Crumpets have not only ventured into new territory but proven there’s nothing they can’t do expertly.” Rolling Stone.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: The brilliantly name Psychedelic Porn Crumpets have been at it for some time now, but on their 6th LP their balance of blazing rock riffs and psychedelic stoner groove really comes into it's own. A proud, loud triumph.

TRACK LISTING

1. Nootmare (K.I.L.L.I.N.G) Meow!
2. (I'm A Kadavar) Alakazam
3. Dilemma Us From Evil
4. Cpt. Gravity Mouse Welcome
5. All Aboard The S.S.Sinker
6. Hot! Heat! Wow! Hot!
7. Sierra Nevada
8. Illusions Of Grandeur
9. Pillhouse(Papa Moonshine)
10. Mr & Mrs Misanthrope

In the quiet surrounding the pandemic, Madeline Kenney made sonic sketches in the basement studio she shared with her then-partner. She arranged phrases that called her—the sharp knife of a synth cutting a path along a blooming arpeggio, drums stuttering firm and tight. Working this way, she amassed a collection of songs she had no particular aims for. Some formed her 2021 EP Summer Quarter, others languished.

But in 2022, Kenney’s partner left suddenly and without warning, plunging her into the solitary act of untangling what happened. In the wake of her ensuing depression, she revisited these songs and found in them something prescient. She’d already laid the foundation for A New Reality Mind.

That her relationship’s end came without warning is only half true, though. The warnings were in the feelings and fears that inspired Kenney’s criticallyacclaimed third album, Sucker’s Lunch (2020), which was co-produced by Jenn Wasner (Flock of Dimes) and centered around the idea of flinging oneself freely into the seemingly-assured destruction of new love, come what may.

If sonically Sucker’s Lunch was letting yourself be pulled into the warm bath of a good story, A New Reality Mind reflects the harsh light of truth coming to break the spell. But as sobering as morning light can be, there’s brilliance to it, too. To see in the clarity of day is a gift. A revolution. Rather than reckoning with love lost, the songs on A New Reality Mind grapple with the self that chose to fall. “I guess I only needed to look twice / Reflected in my attitude, my constant compromise,” Kenney sings on “Red Emotion,” the musical landscape screeching and gasping around her observations of how she made herself small to keep the dream of love alive.

These notions of sight and vision pervade the record as Kenney stands before the infinity mirror of selves she’s been to preserve bonds in her life. On “I Drew a Line,” Kenney contends with the stories she’s told herself to keep plodding along, and the way those stories shape her perceived reality. She invokes John Berger’s Ways of Seeing—“Everything around the image is part of its meaning,” we hear him say. “Everything around it confirms and consolidates its meaning.” Here, Kenney isn’t interested in shaming herself for being carried away by the fantasies of the heart, but rather in investigating the unavoidably human propensity to do so. “I, like everyone else, am muddling through my most ordinary disaster of a life,” she acknowledges, a sentiment which reverberates through album opener “Plain Boring Disaster.” “I don’t need to start again,” she sings at the song’s close. “But I can change when it ends.” We may all be doomed to repetitive, ordinary heartbreaks, Kenney realizes, but at least we can cultivate a capacity to witness our missteps and build new realities for ourselves.

This is Kenney’s most expansive work, while also her most solitary. Produced and recorded alone in her basement, these songs are manifestations of what it feels like to be transformed by pain. Textures collide and collude; sonic ornaments emerge and dissipate capriciously; saxophones soar untamed, as on the 80s pop elegy to self-sacrifice, “Reality Mind”. These songs beg you to dance, then pull the rug out from under you once you’ve caught the beat, leaving you dizzy like the whiplash of love’s end.

But in the propulsive power of A New Reality Mind, there’s also acceptance, self-forgiveness, and a willingness to move forward into life, with all its ways of making a sucker of you. “That way of living, I’m over it,” Kenney declares of the habits that hold her back on “Superficial Conversation”. “I do not need to be reminded of what I did,” she assures, the song opening wide and beaming, like a smile expanding to taste a new breath of air.

STAFF COMMENTS

Liam says: Wonderfully produced and with exquisite instrumentation, Madeline Kenney's 80s tinged synth-pop sure has won me over. Also occasionally dipping her toes in soundscapes akin to 'Visions' era Grimes (which is never a bad thing), this is lovely, lovely stuff!

TRACK LISTING

1. Intro
2. Plain Boring Disaster
3. Superficial Conversation
4. Reality Mind
5. I Drew A Line
6. It Carries On
7. Red Emotion
8. The Same Again
9. HFAM
10. Leaves Me Dry
11. Expectations

Natural Sciences Recs and Harsh Reality Music team up for the first reissue of Henry Hektik's Motion P. Music, booted up as a 12" sampler for DJ's not yet consumed by the candyfloss.

A figure who collaborated with M. Finnkreig and active in the 80's German underground and tape trading circuit, he disappeared off the grid, leaving few documents of his music behind, with the handful of remaining tapes swallowed by mould or fried in electrical accidents. What is left is true unhinged tracks from the edge, with six cuts of jacking proto-house (Haiwasa, T.B.A), night-stalker surveillance wave jams (Hong Kong Wedding Night), Black ops narco paranoia (Private Apocalypse) and static knuckle-dragging workouts (Here Comes Escape). A snapshot into a man on the edge!!

Limited to 300 copies worldwide with insert and fanzine.

TRACK LISTING

A1. Haiwasa
A2. Private Apocalypse
A3. T.B.A
B1. Hong Kong Wedding Night
B2. Nightwatch
B3. Here Comes Escape

The new studio album by iconic experimental ambient artist, Eluvium.

­The first Eluvium album to feature a full live orchestra.

(Whirring Marvels In) Consensus Reality is the new album by Eluvium – the renowned moniker of prolific modern composer, Matthew Robert Cooper. Taking initial inspirations from T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and Richard Brautigan’s All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace, (Whirring Marvels) inherently deals both with humankind’s need for meaning, and the emergence of algorithms reflecting the feedback loops of humankind’s interactions with machines themselves. This complicated relationship that we have with technology, automations, and algorithms – and the influence they in turn have on shaping our image of the world – is the mechanized heart and soul of an album that almost instantly establishes itself as a peak in Eluvium’s inimitable catalog.

During the writing process for (Whirring Marvels In) Consensus Reality, Cooper began experiencing shoulder and arm pain that rendered his left arm increasingly debilitated. This inspired new compositional methods that blended varying degrees of electronic automations with traditional songwriting. Lyrical themes were built using algorithms to cull content from a notebook filled with years of scribbled thoughts, poems, considerations, conspiracies, scientific notions, and notes on the spirit of existence. Employing musicians from all around the world – including members of the American Contemporary Music Ensemble (ACME), Golden Retriever, and the entire Budapest Scoring Orchestra – much of the music was conducted and recorded remotely via teleconference during the global COVID lockdowns of 2020 and 2021. This approach to composing served as an unintended but serendipitous challenge for an album inspired by the complicated convenience of technology.

(Whirring Marvels In) Consensus Reality blends an ornate combination of ingredients to construct a narrative of our dynamic invention; technological advancement; loneliness and isolationism; and unchecked idealism in a world of never-ending growth. The resulting hope that somehow emerges is itself a marvel of innovation and inspiration.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Matthew Robert Cooper produces some of the most beautiful modern-classical music around today, from the brittle solo piano of 'Pianoworks' to the more grand, expansive outings like 'Copia' or this, his most orchestrated outing yet. 'Whirring Marvels...' is playful in parts, but deeply heartfelt throughout. Rich and fun, just how I like my albums.

TRACK LISTING

1. Escapement (1:37)
2. Swift Automatons (2:37)
3. Vibration Consensus Reality (for Spectral Multiband Resonator) (8:01)
4. Scatterbrains (3:34)
5. Phantasia Telephonics (5:55)
6. The Violet Light (2:30)
7. Void Manifest (4:11)
8. Clockwork Fables (2:16)
9. Mass Lossless Interbeing (3:43)
10. A Floating World Of Demons (3:04)
11. Endless Flower (3:46)

Jahlin, whose real name is Colin Pitter, was born in Clarendon, Jamaica and moved to Canada in 1975 for his education. He graduated from high school majoring in welding in 1979 and began working as a welder in Toronto while pursuing his musical career.

In 1980, Jahlin joined the reggae band Joshua on the recommendation of a fellow musician, Gregory Frank. Later, he recorded his first single "Roots Reality" under his own label, Black Echo.

Jahlin's "Roots Reality" is a roots reggae song that was originally released on the Roots Reality label in 1983. Overall, "Roots Reality" is a powerful roots reggae song that showcases Jahlin's talent as a singer and songwriter, as well as his commitment to spreading messages through his music. Its particularity is the addition of violin which is rarely heard in roots reggae music.

STAFF COMMENTS

Matt says: More deeply dug, hard to find roots from the Jamwax firm. Another 12" that'll cost you a few ton for an OG; the label have done a great job of this repress with the original artwork included for good measure. Not often you a hear a fiddle in a reggae jam - but it works!

TRACK LISTING

Roots Reality
Roots Reality (Version)

Arriving hot on the heels of acclaimed 2022 EP ‘Credit Note’, ‘Absolute Reality’ tackles different themes of social commentary, with fiery lyrics and hard picked guitars, holding both honest confessions and tall tales, lived stories and movie-like landscapes. Showcasing the noise and texture that Holiday Ghosts love from the New York punk scene and New Wave era, ‘Vulture’ cements their flourishing status within the alt-rock scene and lays down a real marker ahead of their spring LP release.

TRACK LISTING

01 Rocket
02 Lunch
03 Again And Again
04 Limbo
05 Vulture
06 Lose The Game
07 Blue
08 Fight Or Flight
09 Absolute Reality
10 B Truck
11 Big Cold River

After a period of rest, refection and transformation, in 2021 PABH signed to their new home at Alcopop! Records for the release of their longawaited forthcoming ffth studio album 'Reality Cheques', wowing press, radio and adoring fans across the country. All big riffs, beautifully crafted song structures and full on contemporary rock hits, the next PABH chapter is inspired by late ‘70s garage rock, post-punk, and heavy weight rockers like Iggy and The Stooges, The Rolling Stones, Bowie and The Cramps... This is Pulled Apart at their very best!

TRACK LISTING

Pipe Dream
First World Problems
Sleep In Your Grave
Rinse And Repeat
Devil Inside
Rat Race
Positive Place
Fear Of Missing Out

We at Jazzman have already given legitimate release to albums that fell foul of the notorious '70s 'tax scam' practice, namely those by Sounds of the City Experience and Ricardo Marrero. It now gives us great satisfaction to present Reality's 'Disco Party' album, for the very first time in agreement with the surviving members of the band. Possibly the most obscure of all the obscurities in the TSG catalogue, 'Disco Party' isn't actually 'disco' at all, moreover it's a fully rounded excursion into mid-70s dancefloor funk and proto-disco-jazz, performed by a group of expert musicians at the height of their powers. Recorded in one long session in NYC, until now, bandleader Dr. Otto Gomez and the rest of his crew had never even heard the recordings they'd made almost 50 years ago. Indeed, none of the band even knew that their album had been released!

At Jazzman, we consider it our mission to shine new light on music that went under-appreciated at the time of its original release. There are many varied circumstances which can cause an otherwise great record to not do so well - for instance, poor budget, marketing, promo and sometimes just plain old bad luck. Perhaps the most unjust circumstance involves the tax loss releases of the mid-70s - records made purely to cheat a few dollars out of the tax man.
Here, along with restoring the music, we have dug deep into the backstory of the group, interviewing Gomez and others to find out exactly who this unheralded NYC funk orchestra were and what happened to them before and after the monumental session laid out on this record. Our liner notes tell the story of the TSG label and the 'tax loss' phenomenon, and we delve into the history of the band from their humble beginnings as the Smokin' Shades of Black(!) to the present day. We also find out exactly what it means to record some brilliant music - only to have it taken away - and discarded.

TRACK LISTING

1. Reality
2. Road
3. Disco Party (Let's Have A)
4. Welcome
5. Movin' & Groovin'
6. Let's Party People
7. You Keep Me Holdin' On
8. Clap & Hustle

Binker Golding is a musician of many talents - one half of London trailblazers Binker and Moses, skilled composer, educator at Tomorrow’s Warriors, frequent collaborator with top musicians from the London jazz scene one of the most impactful saxophonists of our times. His new album "Abstractions of Reality Past and Incredible Feathers" was recorded at Abbey Road Studios, mixed by the legendary James Farber (Michael Brecker, Joe Lovano, Brad Mehldau), and mastered and cut at Gearbox Records. The record features a distinctive quartet with Joe Armon-Jones on piano, Daniel Casimir on double bass, and Sam Jones on drums Golding’s quartet project promises to make waves as it maps a path between the more through-composed jazz fusion of previous decades and the hip hop/broken beat-influenced sound of the contemporary London jazz scene.

TRACK LISTING

A1 I Forgot Santa Monica (5:29)
A2 Exquisite She-Green (6:57)
A3 Skinned Alive, Tasting Blood  (6:48)
A4 … And I Like Your Feathers (5:37)
B1 You,That Place, That Time (7:35)
B2 Strange-Beautiful Remembered (7:57)
B3 Fluorescent Black  (6:24)

Back in 1971, "Coming From Reality" was Rodriguez's last gasp, the follow-up to "Cold Fact" and the final album he was allowed to record for the Sussex label. Unearthed, once again, it's another treat for fans new and old, designed - at the time - as Rodriguez's vision of a perfect pop album.

"Coming From Reality" found Rodriguez decamping from Detroit to London's Lansdowne Studios, where the album was recorded with some of the UK's top talent including Chris Spedding (Dusty Springfield, Harry Nilsson) and producer Steve Rowland (The Pretty Things, PJ Proby and the man who discovered The Cure), who recalls "Coming From Reality" as his favourite ever recording project.

Highlights include the super-poppy "To Whom It May Concern", the "Rocky Raccoon"-inspired "A Most Disgusting Song" and period piece "Heikki's Suburbia Bus Tour".

TRACK LISTING

Climb Up On My Music
A Most Disgusting Song
I Think Of You
Heikki’s Suburbia Bus Tour
Silver Words?
Sandrevan Lullaby-Lifestyles
To Whom It May Concern
It Started Out So Nice
Halfway Up The Stairs
Cause

Can’t Get Away**
Street Boy**
I’ll Slip Away**
**CD Only Bonus Tracks

“Ta Da” is the debut full length from J. McFarlane Reality Guest, the collective name for the trio headed by the eponymous McFarlane. As a member of the group Twerps, McFarlane has traversed guitar-centric, melodic pop music for some years while honing a highly unique, personal musical language. Ta Da is the first recorded unveiling of McFarlane’s affecting, oblique songwriting panache. Originally released in her native Australia on Hobbies Galore, Ta Da will be released worldwide by Night School in June 2019.

Wheezing into view with a troubled reed instrument set against a s of whoozy synth lines, Human Tissue Act is a foggy curtain the listener is invited to peel back. The dissonant notes are left to dance entwined, with clarinet heralding a Harry Partch-esque mallet percussion interlude. It’s a mood. With no resolution in sight, an audience dragged closer into uncertainty is suddenly drenched with the light of inter-weaving wah wah synth and saxophone. I Am A Toy introduces us to McFarlane’s vocal, an effortless and matter-of-fact, accented statement that quietly takes the reins. While McFarlane’s previous work in Twerps might reference 80s UK and antipodean guitar pop, Ta Da showcases a different influences immersed in psychedelic music and synths. It’s a brilliant, deft concoction swimming in Young Marble Giants-type minimalism washed with bare pop and harmony similar to Kevin Ayers making sense of a Melbourne suburb full of faces half-recognised in the blanching sun.

What Has He Bought begins with a Casio-keyboard rhythm pattern, palm-muted guitars and immaculately enunciated vocal give way to a burnt melodica part that elevates the spirits. Simple patterns repeated, like a well-tempered pop song that does what it needs to do and no more, build into the sound of summer leaking orange juice. They’re moments of joy, layered on top of each other like a melting cake. Do You Like What I’m Sayin’ recalls Marine Girls covering a classic ‘66 Garage nugget, organ lines fighting funk with guitar chords played just behind the percussion. “In a talking world, meanings are the same. Words want to hold on to the people they contain. Do you like what I’m sayin’?” We’re in a Beckett play perhaps, obtuse absurdities rendered pretty. Alien Ceremony is a heart-melter, given a melancholic timbre by bowed double bass it’s a tragi-comic piece that almost reeks of Robert Wyatt at his mid-whimsical twisting a fugue completely out of shape. Beneath the layers of harmony and twinkling instrumentation you sense there’s a genuine sadness somewhere even if it remains veiled.

Through out Ta Da, McFarlane plays with counterpoint and contrast to sometimes delirious effect. On Your Torturer, a simple, upbeat chord progression is hard panned, underpinning a flute solo which seems out of place, hence making it completely in place on this warmly surreal album. My Enemy is a slowly swinging eulogy to a failed relationship punctuated by analogue synth burbles, with our protagonist simply asking, in the aftermath, “can we be nice?” Here McFarlane’s vocal is straight forward, lyrically conversational but still not completely in focus, a surreal kitchen sink drama filtered through a dream where everything is in the wrong place. It’s a fine precursor to Heartburn, which similarly borrows BBC Radiophonic Workshop-style noise synths and the use of space to carve up the simple “You Will Make My Heart Burn” line. At this point, the listener has been in such close proximity to McFarlane’s show, the reality guest in a performance where they’re the sole audience member, that when Where Are You My Love rises on the horizon as a sleepy, psychedelic send off it’s uplifting. The vocal drifts away into the sunset, simple and direct. It leaves the listener slightly confused, perhaps, but grateful for the gentle surprise.

TRACK LISTING

1. Human Tissue Act
2. I Am A Toy
3. What Has He Bought
4. Do You Like What I'm Sayin??
5. Alien Ceremony
6. Your Torturer
7. My Enemy
8. Heartburn
9. Where Are You My Love?

Standout tracks on the album include the steady bopping and unquestionably cool “Ocean of Tears” and the unapologetically Echo and the Bunnymen- and The Cure-esque guitar sounds of the title track.
Once a soft-spoken singer-songwriter, Soko’s music quickly caught up with her untamable persona. Three years ago, Soko released her debut album “I Thought I Was An Alien,” that featured the track “We Might Be Dead By Tomorrow”, OST to the video “First Kiss” (about 100 million views).

The track skyrocketed to the Top 10 of the Billboard Charts and did about 11,5 million streams (No. 1 Debut On Streaming Songs). Soko has now revamped her once innocent yet morbid folk into an insolent follow-up record, “My Dreams Dictate My Reality,” .

Produced by the legendary Ross Robinson (who also produced her favorite band, The Cure) the album features the hypnotic duet “Lovetrap” with friend and lo-fi wizard Ariel Pink also.

A self-confessed method writer, Lupen Crook has spent the last two years wandering, wondering and wilfully exploring the extreme nature of the human character. Mr Crook has obsessively pursued the darker side of life; the sinful side, the secret side, those parts of ourselves that we dare not reveal. Lupen Crook's songs and lyrics are underpinned by music written and arranged in collaboration with his most trusted long-term partners in crime, Tom and Bob Langridge - collectively known as The Murderbirds. All who have seen their live shows will testify to the passion and proficiency that they bring to Crook's output. The album was recorded, engineered, mixed and mastered by Jim Riley in the earthy, analogue environment of Ranscombe Studios in Medway. Howie B (Björk, U2, Tricky) produced three of its tracks, which were mixed by Ben Thackeray alongside Jim Riley.

"Seemingly Solid Reality" is the tenth full length studio LP from Detroit rock n' roll experimentalists Outrageous Cherry. After the critically acclaimed glam/psych miasma of 2009's "Universal Malcontents", and subsequent tours in Europe and the USA, O.C. returned to their analog cave somewhere within the Detroit city limits to record Matthew
Smith's latest batch of tunes. Keeping the recording approach somewhat primitive, the group wanted to capture the energy and excitement of their recent live performances, but in a semi-controllable studio environment.

The album was recorded on a reel-to-reel 8-track in the kitchen of a house in the same neighborhood, (and with the same architectural dimensions) as the old Motown studio. Throughout "Seemingly Solid Reality", sweet melodies and harmonies soar over the gnashing of vicious, urban Motor City guitar workouts. Motown-fueled bass and drums throb hypnotically. The lyrics weave a tapestry of hallucinatory 21st century tension over all of this, punctuated by occasional blasts of music concrete synthesizer. This time, the mood is closer to the anarchistic tendencies of the Plastic Ono Band than the Beatlesque feel of more recent Outrageous Cherry records.

When he's not fronting Outrageous Cherry, Matt Smith is often producing and sometimes playing onstage with numerous other artists. Recently he's worked with Rodriguez, Andre Williams, and Scott Morgan (ex-Rationals, Sonic's Rendezvous Band). He also produced the last two albums by late Detroit soul legend Nathaniel Mayer. Guitarist Larry Ray has played with the Spike Drivers and the Ivories. Drummer Samantha Linn has played with Little Claw and her group the Arch Mystics (also featuring Larry Ray). Bassist Sean Ellwood also plays with Don Bolles' new group the Fancy Space People. Outrageous Cherry recently got a lot of love from The New Pornographers who released a EP of Outrageous Cherry covers on Matador records titled "Togetherness - The New Pornographers play Outrageous Cherry".

TRACK LISTING

1. Seemingly Solid Reality (2:13)
2. Unbalanced In The City (3:12)
3. Fell (2:52)
4. My Ghetto (2:43)
5. Self-Made Monster (3:06)
6. The Happy Hologram (3:41)
7. Nothing's Changed (3:28)
8. Forces Of Evil (3:15)
9. I Like It (3:11)
10. Unamerican Girls (3:39)
11. The Unimportant Things (4:14)

British band Circulus have almost single handedly reinvented English Psychedelic Folk Rock for the 21st Century. This, their long awaited third album, brings you more of the bands "Twisted Mushroom Pixie Rock". Circulus first made their mark on British music in 2005 with the release of "The Lick on the Tip of an Envelope yet to be Sent" which appeared in the top fifty albums of the year in Mojo, The Observer and NME. Circulus have heralded the recent 'acid folk' craze - alongside other protagonists of the genre such as Espers and Tunng - yet their sound is totally unique coming across like a mixture of medieval English Folk, Fairport Convention and Ozric Tentacles! This new album takes the band into melodic pop territory with some beautiful multi part harmonies alongside the usual bucolic mayhem!

This is The Stars 'lost' album - a record with a somewhat chequered history. Recorded on the first two days of Spring 2002, and then found to be in an impossible format, converted, confused, lost, found, forgotten, sampled, resampled, pieced together, tampered with, undone, overdubbed, redone, left on the bottom shelf of a cool oven, mashed with rare spices, buried, unearthed, sent out, forgotten again, and finally discovered by Onomatopoeia records. Numbering as many as 30 in the past, they've now trimmed down to a more manageable four-piece, but their music is still as astonishingly catchy as ever, somehow combining krautrock, space rock, free jazz, soul and funk into a pure pop concoction with brilliant titles and wonderful, hypnotic singalong tunes.

15 track compilation album from the Land Of Nod highlighting the band's choice cuts since their inception in 1997. "Reality Channel" includes tracks from the group's four albums on the UK label Ochre Records, "Translucent", "Timeless point", "Archive:02" and the current UK album "Inducing The Sleep Sphere". This also includes the full three track session recorded for Slobodan Vujanovic's show on B-92 radio show in Serbia.