January 20, 2020 saw the surprise release of David Lynch’s short What Did Jack Do? on Netflix. If you watched the grainy, police procedural over the last few days, you most likely found yourself saying aloud ‘who is Jack Cruz and how can I get more of his music?’ Sacred Bones is announcing the release of the short’s featured original song “True Love’s Flame” by the primate star crooner of yesteryear; Jack Cruz. Not much is known about Cruz’s career prior to his involvement with Lynch, but fortunately, we have not just one song, but two: ’Dancin’ in the World of Love’ is the B-side to the short’s single…uncovered recently and an excellent example of Cruz’s emotional prowess and magical, gold-dipped vocal cords. Both songs were written by Lynch and Dean Hurley.

TRACK LISTING

1. True Love’s Flame (1:47)
2. Dancin’ In The World Of Love (3:28)

Sacred Bones has long been closely linked with tight-knit regional punk scenes, with roster artists representing everything from the icy precision of Copenhagen (Vår, Lust for Youth) to the acid-fried psych vibes of Tempe, Arizona, (Destruction Unit) to the grimy lawlessness of New York City (The Men, Pop. 1280, Anasazi). Institute stands at the center of another thriving scene in Austin, Texas, and we’re proud to be releasing their Salt EP.

Formed in Austin in March 2013, Institute includes members of Wiccans, Glue, Blotter, Recide and more. Before they were even a proper band, singer Moses Brown had a couple of raw post-punk songs sitting on a four-track at his house. Once the lineup solidified, the band touched up one of those songs (“Dead Sea”) for a demo, then quickly wrote enough material to flesh out that demo (re-released on Deranged), a seven-inch (on Katorga Works), and now their debut EP for Sacred Bones.

We fell in love with this band as soon as we heard those early demos, and then saw a blistering set from them in their hometown earlier this year. The Salt EP is as sharp as the band’s earlier work but suggests longer, more experimental forms (“An Absence”) and a more incisive lyrical perspective, dealing with topics from existentialism to Brown’s experience as a closeted youth. Institute have already toured with their new labelmates in Destruction Unit , and we’re stoked to officially welcome these young men into our family.

TRACK LISTING

1. Salt
2. Nausea
3. Familiar Stranger
4. Immorality
5. An Absence

Stemming out of an offer from Roadburn Festival organizer Walter Hoeijmakers, mutual acquaintances, and a shared love of each other’s output, May Our Chambers Be Full is the first recorded document of collaboration between Emma Ruth Rundle and Thou. While their solo material seems on its face to be quite disparate, both groups have spent their respective careers lurking at the outer boundaries of the heavy metal scene, the artists having more in common with DIY punk and its spiritual successor, grunge. May Our Chambers Be Full straddles a similar, very fine line both musically and thematically.

While Emma Ruth Rundle’s standard fare is a blend of post-rockinfused folk music, and Thou is typically known for its downtuned, doomy sludge, the conjoining of the two artists has created a record more in the vein of the early ’90s Seattle sound and later ’90s episodes of Alternative Nation, while still retaining much of the artists’ core identities. Likewise, the lyrical content of the album is a marriage of mental trauma, existential crises, and the ecstatic tradition of the expressionist dance movement. “Excessive sorrow laughs. Excessive joy weeps.” Melodic, melancholic, heavy, visceral. The visual art accompanying this work was created in collaboration with preeminent New Orleans photographer Craig Mulcahy. The faceless, genderless models are meant to emphasize this pervasive state of ambiguity and emotional vacillation, the images falling somewhere between modern high fashion and classical Renaissance

TRACK LISTING

1. Killing Floor (6:47)
2. Monolith (3:23)
3. Out Of Existence (3:43)
4. Ancestral Recall (3:55)
5. Magickal Cost (4:10)
6. Into Being (5:16)
7. The Valley (8:58)

Red velvet curtains draw back to reveal a cosmic wheel of fortune, floating in the deep black star-studded theater of infinite space. A whirl of timbres, personalities, and stories. The Turning Wheel revolves around themes of human unity, the future, divine love and the enigmatic ups and downs of being a part of this carnival called Life.

Venturing to push the boundaries of her primarily synth-based work, Spelling took on the ambitious task of orchestrating and self-producing an album that features an ensemble of 31 collaborating musicians. The Turning Wheel incorporates a vast range of rich acoustic sounds that cast Spelling’s work into vibrant new dimensions. The double LP is split into two halves - “Above” and “Below.” Lush string quartet shimmer combines with haunting banjo and wandering bassoon leads, as the album progresses from the more jubilant, warm, and dreamy mood of the “Above” tracks to the more chilling and gothic tone of the “Below” tracks. This progression is anchored by Spelling’s familiar bewitching vocal style that emphasizes the theatrical and folkloric heart of her songwriting.

TRACK LISTING

1. Little Deer (5:39)
2. Always (5:15)
3. Turning Wheel (3:33)
4. The Future (3:28)
5. Awaken (4:32)
6. Emperor With An Egg (3:09)
7. Boys At School (7:29)
8. Legacy (3:52)
9. Queen Of Wands (5:22)
10. Magic Act (5:41)
11. Revolution (6:00)
12. Sweet Talk (3:34)

Have you ever felt like you’re being watched? Have you felt unseen eyes staring at you, monitoring your every move? Composer and guitarist Daniel Davies reflects on this familiar paranoia on his new EP, Spies. Across its five stirringly atmospher- ic tracks, the frequent John Carpenter collaborator evokes the tingle you get on the back of your neck when you sense you’re under surveillance - a feeling some psychologists have dubbed the “psychic staring effect.”

TRACK LISTING

1 The Bomber (5:11)
2 Out Of The Night (4:18)
3 Spies (3:14)
4 Beasts Of L.A. (4:53)
5 Ceremony (5:44)

Indigo Sparke brings her deeply personal lived experiences to her music, highlighting the spaces between the polarity of softness and grit. Pulling from her experiences of addiction, of healing, of queerness, of heartbreak, of joy, of connection, of the softness and of the grit alchemizing it all into tenderness through her music, she conjures up a myriad of feelings that is undeniably potent.

echo was co-produced by Sparke, Big Thief's Adrianne Lenker and Andrew Sarlo.

TRACK LISTING

1. Colourblind
2. Undone
3. Bad Dreams
4. Carnival
5. Dog Bark Echo
6. Golden Age
7. Wolf
8. Baby
9. Everything Everything

John Carpenter, the legendary director and composer behind Halloween, Escape From New York, They Live, Assault on Precinct 13 and many more announces his debut solo album ‘Lost Themes’ on Sacred Bones Records. 

John Carpenter has been responsible for much of the horror genre’s most striking soundtrack work in the fifteen movies he’s both directed and scored. The themes that drive them can be stripped to a few coldly repeating notes, take on the electrifying thunder of a rock concert, or submerge themselves into exotic, unholy miasmas. It’s work that instantly floods his fans’ musical memory with imagery of a menacing shape stalking a babysitter, a relentless wall of ghost-filled fog, lightning-fisted kung fufighters, or a mirror holding the gateway to hell. Lost Themes asks Carpenter’s acolytes to visualize their own nightmares.

“Lost Themes was all about having fun,” Carpenter says. “It can be both great and bad to score over images, which is what I’m used to. Here there were no pressures. No actors asking me what they’re supposed to do. No crew waiting. No cutting room to go to. No release pending. It’s just fun. And I couldn’t have a better set-up at my house, where I depended on (collaborators) Cody (Carpenter, of the band Ludrium) and Daniel (Davies, who scored I, Frankenstein) to bring me ideas as we began improvising. The plan was to make my music more complete and fuller, because we had unlimited tracks. I wasn’t dealing with just analogue anymore. It’s a brand new world. And there was nothing in any of our heads when we started other than to make it moody.”

As is Carpenter’s style, repetition is the key to the thundering power of these tracks, their energy swirling with shredding chords, soaring organs, unnerving pianos and captivating percussion. Singularly titled to inspire dread with such names as “Vortex,” “Dominion,” “Abyss,” and “Purgatory,” but all linked into a unified whole, Lost Themes has a mesmerizing power. Horror fans will be reminded of Carpenter’s past works, as well as ancestors like Mike Oldfeld’s Tubular Bells and the raging guitars and chiming percussion of Goblin’s Suspiria. “’Both classical music and rock and roll are part of my musical language, which is riff-driven,” Carpenter explains. “So if you listen carefully, I’m sure you can hear some echoes from my past. But I’m sure that’s true of any composer. You just bring your music along with you.”

TRACK LISTING

1. Vortex
2. Obsidian
3. Fallen
4. Domain
5. Mystery
6. Abyss
7. Wraith
8. Purgatory
9. Night

On Halloween 2014, the director and composer John Carpenter introduced the world to the next phase of his career with “Vortex,” the first single from Lost Themes, his first-ever solo record. In the months that followed, Lost Themes rightfully returned Carpenter to the forefront of the discussion of music and film’s crucial intersection. Carpenter’s foundational primacy and lasting influence on genre score work was both rediscovered and reaffirmed. So widespread was the acclaim for Lost Themes, that the composer was moved to embark on something he had never before entertained – playing his music live in front of an audience.

2016 will host the first ever John Carpenter tour and in true Carpenter spirit, a sequel to Lost Themes: Lost Themes II. The follow-up brings quite a few noticeable changes to the process, which result in an even more cohesive record. Lost Themes’ cowriters Cody Carpenter (John’s son) and Daniel Davies (John’s godson) both returned. Cody was recently also heard as a composer for Showtime’s Masters of Horror series (Cigarette Burns and Pro-Life), and NBC’s Zoo. Davies was a composer for NBC’s Zoo, as well as the motion picture Condemned.

All three brought in sketches and worked together in the same city, a luxury they weren’t afforded on the first Lost Themes. The result was a more focused effort, one that was completed on a compressed schedule — not unlike Carpenter’s classic, notoriously low-budget early films. The musical world of Lost Themes II is also a wider one than that of its predecessor. More electric and acoustic guitar help flesh out the songs, still driven by Carpenter’s trademark minimal synth.

Keep your eyes peeled for John and his co-writers to hit the road next year performing both lost and newly found themes, in addition to retrospective work from Mr. Carpenter’s multi-generational career. Long live the Horror Master.

STAFF COMMENTS

says: Master of Kosmische synth-workouts and general synth-based sountracking legend John Carpenter returns here with the second instalment of his surprising 'not a soundtrack' offering from last year. More twinkling synths, motorik pulses and cavern-soaked reverbed drums. Though soundtracks have always been Carpenters raison d'etre, this outstanding expansion on his lost themes selections just goes to show that Carpenter is indeed the king of the cosmic.

TRACK LISTING

1. Distant Dream (3:51)
2. White Pulse (4:21)
3. Persia Rising (3:40)
4.Angel’s Asylum (4:17)
5.Hofner Dawn (3:15)
6.Windy Death (3:40)
7.Dark Blues (4:16)
8.Virtual Survivor (3:58)
9.Bela Lugosi (3:23)
10. Last Sunrise (4:29)
11. Utopian Facade (3:48)
12.Real Xeno (4:30) (CD / Download Bonus Track)

The score for Only Lovers Left Alive - a collaboration between SQÜRL (Jim Jarmusch, Carter Logan and Shane Stoneback) and Dutch lutenist Jozef Van Wissem - serves as a reflection of the distinct textures of Detroit and Tangier, bridging ancient and modern sounds, entangled and timeless.

Avant-Baroque lute weaves through twenty-first century guitar grit, heavy back beats, Moroccan percussion, synth bass, field recordings, and numerous sonic effects to create a cinematic tapestry.

Guest vocalist Madeline Follin (Cults) appears on SQÜRL’s syrup soaked re- interpretation of the Wanda Jackson hit “Funnel of Love”. Zola Jesus’ commanding vocal soars through Van Wissem’s “In Templum Dei”. And Yasmine Hamdan’s intimate and evocative “Hal”, recorded on the set of the film and mixed by SQÜRL .

The film and soundtrack album were released worldwide in 2014, and quickly earned the group the Cannes Soundtrack Award from a consortium of film and music critics. In the years that have followed it has remained a favorite of critics and fans alike, who have continued to hunt down the limited vinyl copies in existence.

TRACK LISTING

1 Streets Of Detroit (0:37)
2 Funnel Of Love (3:41)
3 Sola Gratia (Pt. 1) (3:26)
4 The Taste Of Blood (5:50)
5 Diamond Star (1:15)
6 Please Feel Free To Piss In The Gard (4:21) 7 Spooky Action At A Distance (3:35)
8 Streets Of Tangier (1:37)
9 In Templum Dei (2:58)
10 Sola Gratia (Pt. 2) (5:10)
11 Our Hearts Condemn Us (4:36) 12 Hal (4:30)
13 Only Lovers Left Alive (3:32) 14 This Is Your Wilderness (3:52)

Alan Vega’s name is synonymous with unfettered, tireless creativity. Beginning in the late 1950s, when he was a fine art student at Brooklyn College, through his years playing in Suicide, and all the way up until his death in 2016, Vega was constantly creating. That process naturally led to a wealth of material that didn’t see the light of day immediately when it was recorded, which came to be known as the Vega Vault. Mutator is the first in a series of archival releases from the Vault that will come out on Sacred Bones Records.

Mutator was recorded alongside Vega’s longtime collaborator Liz Lamere at his NYC studio from 1995-1996, and it serves as a document of a particularly fertile time in his creative life. He had 11 full-length solo albums come out during the ’80s, ’90s and ’00s - plus numerous collaborations, and Suicide records A Way of Life and Why Be Blue. Mutator wasn’t shelved intentionally, but Vega’s back-to-thegrindstone M.O. meant that he had moved on to making his next record before this one was finished. Lamere and Vega’s friend and confidante Jared Artaud (The Vacant Lots) rediscovered the raw, unmixed recordings from the Mutator sessions in the Vault in 2019. Soon after, they mixed and produced them into the visionary album that was lurking within those tapes.

“Our primary purpose for going into the studio was to experiment with sound, not to ‘make records,’” Lamere recalls. “I was playing the machines with Alan manipulating sounds. I played riffs while Alan morphed the sounds being channeled through the machines.”

At the time of the Mutator sessions, Vega was massively inspired by what was happening in the streets of New York - not only the hip hop scenes that were exploding throughout the outer boroughs, but also the literal sounds of the streets, the traffic noise and industrial ambience of city living. That influence trickled into the sounds he and Lamere captured in those sessions. That sensibility, paired with Vega’s unmistakable voice and force of personality, is what made it the great album it is now. The final piece was the production job, completed by Lamere and Artaud 25 years after the songs were first captured.

- A never-before-heard full-length recorded by legendary NYC musician Alan Vega (Suicide) in the mid ’90s with his frequent collaborator Liz Lamere

- The tapes were uncovered by Lamere and Jared Artaud (The Vacant Lots), who mixed and produced them to create the record

- Mutator is the first release in the Alan Vega Vault series on Sacred Bones, collecting rare and unreleased archival recordings

TRACK LISTING

1. Trinity (1:16)
2. Fist (5:12)
3. Muscles (4:45)
4. Samurai (3:44)
5. Filthy (3:30)
6. Nike Soldier (4:18)
7. Psalm 68 (4:37)
8. Breathe (4:22)

Luca Yupanqui was not yet born when she recorded her debut album. The music on the aptly titled Sounds of the Unborn out April 2 on Sacred Bones, is the expression of life in its cosmic state — pre-mind, pre-speculation, pre-influence, and pre-human. It is the first album created by a person while they were still inside the womb, the expression of a soul that hasn’t yet seen the light of day nor taken a single breath of air. It is a message that comes from a different realm, a sublayer of our existence.

Sounds of the Unborn was made with biosonic MIDI technology, which translated Luca’s in utero movements into sound. With the help of her parents, Psychic Ills bassist Elizabeth Hart and Lee Scratch Perry collaborator Iván Diaz Mathé, Luca’s prenatal essence was captured in audio. They designed a ritual, a kind of joint meditation for the three of them, with the MIDI devices hooked to Elizabeth’s stomach, transcribing its vibrations into Iván’s synthesizers. They let the free-form meditations flow without much interference, just falling deeper into trance and feeling the unity. After five hour-long sessions, the shape of an album began to emerge.

Elizabeth and Iván then edited and mixed the results of the sessions, respecting the sounds as they were produced, trying to intervene as little as possible, allowing Luca’s message to exist in its raw form.

This cosmic soul summoning created new sounds, striking into uncharted territory for Elizabeth and Iván as musicians. A new language was being created, a new form of communication. It was a music without intellect or intentionality behind it, with no preconception or attempt to create any specific sound or melody. Every note on Sounds of the Unborn occurred naturally.

It is human nature to wonder what life is like inside another human being’s consciousness. How does it feel? What does it sound like? All these questions became stronger and more important to Elizabeth and Iván while they were waiting for Luca to come into the world. At a certain point the questions turned into, What would she say if she could speak? How would she react to the outer world? And ultimately, What kind of music would she play if she was able to? This album is an attempt to answer those questions.

Elizabeth and Iván mixed the album in 2020. Luca, now an infant, sat in the studio with them while they worked. Her awareness of what was happening was astounding. She would open her eyes wide and stare at her parents, seemingly recognizing her own sounds from the womb, knowing that they were revisiting those rituals that made them come together as one. Those mixing sessions were technically the first time Luca had heard her own music, but her reaction made it clear that that wasn’t really the case — she had already lived it.

TRACK LISTING

1. V5
2.V4.3 Pt.2
3.V2.1
4.V2.2
5.V3.2
6.V4.2
7.V4.1
8.V1
9.V3.1
10.V4.3 Pt.1

Dies Occidendum is a mythical voyage across fog-laden, scorched earth terrain from the original friar of dark hip hop, Dj Muggs the Black Goat. Known and revered as the sonic mastermind behind both Cypress Hill and his own Soul Assassins imprint, here Muggs sheds the MCs and presents his latest dark-soaked productions as an illuminated manuscript of sorts; a fully immersive, instrumental soundtrack to the mysterious Dies Occidendum. No one wields the Excalibur of sonic darkness quite like Muggs. Combining ingredients of psych rock, gypsy folk with modern elements of trap, forged together under layers of his signature sonic grime, Muggs has created yet another blueprint for the utmost sonic menace and macabre. The Renaissance is upon us. Long live King Muggs.

ABOUT DJ MUGGS:
One of the original architects of dark hip hop in the early ’90s, DJ Muggs helped craft a singular sound that blended darker sensibilities of psychedelic rock and hip hop in a unique way that influenced many in its wake. As the primary producer of legendary rap group Cypress Hill, Muggs’ productions and sonic sensibilities are unmistakable and deeply revered by the truest of hejkvgads. Muggs’ own MC round-robin imprint, Soul Assassins has been home to countless productions, laying sonic drop cloths for everyone from Dr. Dre, Ice Cube, Chuck D, GZA, Mobb Deep to MF Doom, Freddie Gibbs, Roc Marciano and Mach-Hommy.

TRACK LISTING

1 Incantation (2:15)
2 The Chosen One (3:03)
3 Nigrum Mortem (4:07)
4 Liber Null (3:41)
5 Alphabet Of Desire (2:12)
6 Subconscious (2:42)
7 Veni Vidi Amavi (1:48)
8 Anointed (2:23)
9 Anicca (2:57)
10 Transmogrification (5:16)

What is the utility of pain? Can it do anything but fester? In Ferneaux explores pain in motion, building audio-spatial chambers of experience and memory. Using an archive of field recordings from a decade of global travels, isolation gave Blanck Mass an opportunity to make connections in a moment when being together is impossible. The record is divided into two long-form journeys that gather the memories of being with now-distant others through the composition of a nostalgic travelogue. The journeys are haunted with the vestiges of voices, places, and sensations. These scenes alternate with the building up and releasing of great aural tension, intensities that emerge from the trauma of a personal grieving process which has perhaps embraced its rage moment.

An encounter with a prophetic figure on the streets of San Francisco presented the question of “how to handle the misery on the way to the blessing.” This is the quandary of the impasse we now all find ourselves in, trapped in our little caves, grappling with the unease of the self at rest – without movement, without the consumerist agenda of “new experiences.” The possibility of growth, always defined by our connections with others, held in limbo. Sartre said that “Hell is other people,” but perhaps this is the Inferno of the present: the space of sitting with the self.

A blessing is often thought of as a future reward, above and beyond the material plane. With In Ferneaux, Blanck Mass wrangles the immanent materials of the here-and-now to build a sense of transcendence. Here, the uncanny angelic hymn sits comfortably beside the dirge. The misery and blessing are one.

STAFF COMMENTS

says: If you know Blanck Mass, you know that his uncompromising mix of hypnotic synthy OPN business oft turns into an all-encompassing wall of tectonic noise and spine-tingling euphoric washes. Those of you who don't will find exactly that here, but constantly and perfectly progressing in both timbre and scope. It's intoxicating and unmissable stuff, Blanck Mass is never anything but.

TRACK LISTING

A1 Phase I (21:29)
B1 Phase II (19:33)

Much has changed in the musical life of renowned composer and director John Carpenter since 2016’s Lost Themes II. Following the release of that album, he went on his first-ever concert tour, performing material from the Lost Themes albums, as well as music from his classic film scores. He re-recorded many of those classic movie themes for 2017’s Anthology album, working alongside son Cody Carpenter and godson Daniel Davies. The following year, he was asked to executive produce and compose the music for the new Halloween movie directed by David Gordon Green, which promptly became the highest-grossing installment in the series. Now, he returns with his first album of non-soundtrack music in nearly five years, Lost Themes III: Alive After Death.

Underpinning Carpenter’s renaissance as a musician has been his collaboration with Cody Carpenter and Daniel Davies. They’ve composed and performed as a trio throughout this entire run, on studio albums, on soundtracks, and onstage. Here, the trio reaches a new level of creative mind meld. Richly rendered worlds are built in the interplay between Davies’s guitar and the dueling synthesizers played by the Carpenters.

“We begin with a theme, a bass line, a pad, something that sounds good and will lead us to the next layer,” John says of the trio’s process. “We then just keep adding on from there. We understand each other’s strengths and weaknesses, how to communicate without words, and the process is easier now than it was in the beginning. We’ve matured.”

Whereas the original Lost Themes album came as a pleasant surprise after years of relative silence from Carpenter, the third installment sees him in the midst of a resurgent moment as a cultural force. The 2018 Halloween score gave his music its biggest audience in decades, and the world he releases his new album into is one that has, at long last, given him the credit he deserves as a founding father of modern electronic music.

STAFF COMMENTS

says: There are very few forces more influential in the world of soundtrackery than John Carpenter, and it's no mean feat that his music outside of soundtracks is every bit as impressive. Featuring once again his son Cody and Daniel. Davies, Lost Themes III is every bit the pulsing, synthy wonder and helps further cement Carpenter's place in the annals of musical history.

TRACK LISTING

Alive After Death (4:05)
Weeping Ghost (3:33)
Dripping Blood (3:54)
Dead Eyes (3:26)
Vampire’s Touch (4:30)
Cemetery (4:11)
Skeleton (3:13)
Turning The Bones (3:33)
The Dead Walk (4:25)
Carpathian Darkness (5:36)

If you purchased a snake plant, asparagus fern, peace lily, or what have you from Mother Earth on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles (or bought a Simmons mattress from Sears) in 1976, you also took home Plantasia, an album recorded especially for plants. Subtitled “warm earth music for plants...and the people that love them,” it was full of bucolic, charming, stoner-friendly, decidedly unscientific tunes enacted on the new-fangled device called the Moog.

Before Brian Eno did it, MortGarson was making discreet music. Julliard-educated and active as a session player in the post-war era, Garson wrote lounge hits, scored the 1969 moon-landing and plush arrangements for Doris Day, and garlanded weeping countrypolitan strings around Glen Campbell’s “By the Time I Get to Phoenix.”

But as his daughter Day Darmet recalls: “When my dad found the synthesizer, he realized he didn’t want to do pop music anymore.” Garson encountered Robert Moog and his new device at the Audio Engineering Society’s West Coast conven-tion in 1967 and immediately began tinkering with the device.

“My mom had a lot of plants,” Darmet says. “She didn’t believe in organized religion, she believed the earth was the best thing in the whole world. Whatever created us was incredible.” And she also knew when her husband had a good song. Novel as it might seem, Plantasia is simply full of good tunes.

This release marks the first official re-issue of the long sought-after cult classic.Hearing Plantasia in the 21st century, it seems less an ode to our photosynthesiz-ing friends by Garson and more an homage to his wife, the one with the green thumb that made everything flower around him. “My dad would be totally pleased to know that people are really interested in this music that had no popularity at the time,” Darmet says of Plantasia’s new renaissance. “He would be fascinated by the fact that people are finally understanding and appreciating this part of his musical career that he got no admiration for back then.” Garson seems to be everywhere again, even if he’s not really noticed, just like a houseplant

TRACK LISTING

1. Plantasia (3:23)
2. Symphony For A Spider Plant (2:41)
3. Baby’s Tears Blues (3:03)
4. Ode To An African Violet (4:04)
5. Concerto For Philodendron And Pothos (3:09)
6. Rhapsody In Green (3:28)
7. Swingin’ Spathiphyllums (2:59)
8. You Don’t Have To Walk A Begonia (2:31)
9. A Mellow Mood For Maidenhair (2:17)
10. Music To Soothe The Savage Snake Plant (3:23)

Mort Garson’s road to cool cultural caché and the sublimity of Plantasia meant a decades’ long journey through an underworld of sophisticated, international, string-laced dreck (i.e., your great-grandparents’ record collection) to arrive at Music from Patch Cord Productions, this set of queasy-listening you now hold.

Music from Patch Cord Productions shows that Garson’s knack was to exist in both worlds, super-commercial and waaay out. He cut delirious minute-long blasts for commercials (as to whether or not they were actually ever aired remains unknown) and spacecraft-hovering études. Were there really account managers out there in the early ’70s that gave the greenlight to these commercial compositions which seemed to anticipate everyone from John Carpenter to Suicide? What were these campaigns actually for, Soylent Green? Regardless, Mort’s jingle work laid the groundwork for the future. As Robert Moog himself noted: “The jingles were important because they domesticated the sound.” Via Garson’s wizardry, the synthesizer transcended novelty to ubiquity and dominance.

Other curios and questions abound. How did Garson’s arrangement work for Arthur Prysock’s satiny body worship album This Is My Beloved transmogrify into the body-snatcher pulses of “This is My Beloved”? Are the two pieces even related? What is the IATA code for the airport of “Realizations of an Aeropolis”? What denomination is the “Cathedral of Pleasure”? If “Son of Blob” sounds like a hallucinatory melted ice cream truck theme, what on earth does Blob’s father sound like? Every sound wrangled out of that Moog by Garson pushes things further and further out.

Of course, these are all questions that may never get answers, as Garson wasn’t the most organized modern day composer, busy as he was conjuring strange new realms with his circuit boards and synths. He worked and wrote right up until his death in 2008, his daughter and Sacred Bones still going through all of the material left behind. He wouldn’t live to see it, but his renaissance was just around the corner, the seeds that had been scattered in record bins around the world suddenly coming to bear fruit. Take a bite!

TRACK LISTING

1. Is He Trying To Tell Us Something? (Instrumental) (3:27)
2. Rhapsody In Green (Alternate Take) (2:05)
3. Baroque No. 2 (2:14)
4. This Is My Beloved (3:05)
5. Music For Advertising #1 (1:02)
6. Music For Advertising #2 (1:03)
7. Music For Advertising #3 (1:06)
8. Killers Of The Wild (1:04)
9. Realizations Of An Aeropolis (2:07)
10. Music For Advertising #4 (1:05)
11. Music For Advertising #5 (0:33)
12. Z - Theme From “Music For Sensuous Lovers” Part I (Instrumental) (3:11)
13. The Blobs - Son Of Blob Theme (2:29)
14. Cathedral Of Pleasure (6:09)
15. Ode To An African Violet (Alternate Take) (3:57)
16. The Time Zone - Space Walker (2:47)
17. Dragonfly (3:20)
18. The Lords Of Percussion - Geisha Girl (4:00)
19. The Electric Blues Society - Our Day Will Come (2:36)

Black Mass is an album of supernatural electronics from synth pioneer Mort Garson, the mastermind behind the cult classic Mother Earth’s Plantasia. Originally released in 1971, it’s his only release under the Lucifer moniker, and it taps into a profound darkness that may surprise fans of his sunnier work. These songs are Garson’s synthesizer interpretations of occult and esoteric phenomena ranging from the Satanic black mass, to exorcism, to witchcraft, and beyond, and they’ve inspired artists from Coil to Oneohtrix Point Never. This deluxe remastered edition presents the album in full with all original liner notes.

ABOUT MORT GARSON: Morton S. “Mort” Garson was a Canadian-born composer, arranger, songwriter, and pioneer of electronic music. He is best known for his albums in the 1960s and 1970s that were among the first to feature Moog synthesizers. His bestknown album is Mother Earth’s Plantasia, a 1976 Moog album designed to be played “for plants and the people who love them.” Sacred Bones Records has undertaken the project of giving official, licensed reissues to key releases from Mort Garson’s catalog, with the intention of bringing these bold masterpieces to a 21st century audience.

• Supernatural and occult-themed electronic music from composer Mort Garson (Mother Earth’s Plantasia)
• Served as inspiration to contemporary artists from Coil to Oneohtrix Point Never
• Remastered from the original master tapes
• Pink vinyl limited to 3000 copies

TRACK LISTING

1. Solomon’s Ring (3:25)
2. The Ride Of Aida (Voodoo) (3:11)
3. Incubus (3:33)
4. Black Mass (3:43)
5. The Evil Eye (2:15)
6. Exorcism (3:48)
7. The Philosopher’s Stone (3:31)
8. Voices Of The Dead (The Medium) (2:08)
9. Witch Trial (3:04)
10. ESP (1:10)

Six years before the release of his landmark Mother Earth’s Plantasia LP, composer and arranger Mort Garson met experimental film director Skip Sherwood, who was interested in an electronic score for his new movie, Didn’t You Hear? While not much is known now about the exact nature of their collaboration, we have Garson’s magnificent score as a record of those heady, early days after his lifechanging discovery of the Moog synthesizer. Notable for being one of the earliest screen appearances by a young Gary Busey, Didn’t You Hear? also boasts one of the first-ever all-electronic movie scores. Though the score was first released in 1970, it sounds as adventurous and futuristic today as it must have then. Originally available only in the lobby of the theater at screenings of the movie in Seattle, the soundtrack LP went out of print shortly after the film’s release. It has been a sought-after record for collectors of Mort Garson and early electronic music ever since. Sacred Bones is honored to reissue Didn’t You Hear? as it was meant to be heard, taken from the original master tapes and given a pristine remaster by engineer Josh Bonati.

ABOUT MORT GARSON: Morton S. “Mort” Garson was a Canadian-born composer, arranger, songwriter, and pioneer of electronic music. He is best known for his albums in the 1960s and 1970s that were among the first to feature Moog synthesizers. His bestknown album is Mother Earth’s Plantasia, a 1976 Moog album designed to be played “for plants and the people who love them.” Sacred Bones Records has undertaken the project of giving official, licensed reissues to key releases from Mort Garson’s catalog, with the intention of bringing these bold masterpieces to a 21st century audience.

• Reissue of Mort Garson’s long-out-of-print soundtrack for the 1970 experimental film Didn’t You Hear?
• One of the first-ever all-electronic film scores
• Remastered from the original master tapes
• Silver vinyl limited to 2000 copies

TRACK LISTING

1. Didn’t You Hear? (2:49)
2. No Smoking (1:31)
3. Dream Sequence I (1:20)
4. Dream Sequence II (1:22)
5. Kevin’s Theme (1:18)
6. Sail! Sail! (2:39)
7. Kevin And Paige (5:12)
8. Bamboo City (2:17)
9. Walk To Grange Hall (1:48)
10. Virgil’s Theme (1:25)
11. Walk To The Other Side Of The Island (3:01)
12. Death Talk And Jeep Approach (2:24)
13. Jeep Ride (1:46)
14. Dead Tree (2:01)
15. Didn’t You Hear? (End Title) (1:45)

The pioneering electronic composer Mort Garson (“Plantasia”) takes on supernatural phenomena with lush synth grooves on “The Unexplained”, his only release under the name Ataraxia. Subtitled “Electronic Musical Impressions of the Occult”, the album explores tarot, astral projection, seances, and more with Garson’s signature Moog synthesizer serving as the listener’s tour guide to the paranormal. The exploratory, whimsical spirit of its creator is evident throughout the release, but it also takes its subject matter seriously, making it essential for anyone interested in musical conjurations of the occult. This remastered edition marks the first official reissue of the album since its initial 1975 release, and it includes all the original liner notes.

ABOUT MORT GARSON: Morton S. “Mort” Garson was a Canadian-born composer, arranger, songwriter, and pioneer of electronic music. He is best known for his albums in the 1960s and 1970s that were among the first to feature Moog synthesizers. His best known album is “Mother Earth’s Plantasia”, a 1976 Moog album designed to be played ‘for plants and the people who love them.’ Sacred Bones Records has undertaken the project of giving official, licensed reissues to key releases from Mort Garson’s catalog, with the intention of bringing these bold masterpieces to a 21st century audience.

TRACK LISTING

1. Tarot (4:22)
2. Sorcerer (3:56)
3. Deja Vu (3:22)
4. Astral Projection (5:14)
5. Seance (4:15)
6. I Ching (3:55)
7. Cabala (3:30)
8. The Unexplained (3:11)
9. Wind Dance (3:29)

In 1974, Jeremiah Sand and his nascent cult The Children Of The New Dawn decamp LA for the Shasta Mountain region and Redding, CA. They set up shop, begin printing leaflets, hold gatherings and start growing their ranks through recruitment. By mid 1974, Jeremiah becomes obsessed with recording “his masterpiece”...a musical message to the world, communicating a “Truth” that only he has been given spiritual access to. His lieutenant Brother Swann overhears that there is a small recording studio just North of the city. He arrives one day at the reception with a large gym bag full of cash and instructs the owner to cancel all sessions on the books. Tents and rough structures appear on the surrounding property as the Children make the studio and its grounds their new home.

A disgraced professor from the Electro Acoustic Music program at Evergreen state arrives with a full Buchla system he’s “liberated” from the university, Jeremiah is entranced by it and for a few weeks the only sounds coming from the studio are blasts of atonal, corroded noise underpinned by ominous chanting. The mood changes. The town begins to turn against the Children. A few people have gone missing. Some teenagers. A studio engineer. By the Spring of 1977, the entire session has broken down into hallucinogen and cocaine fueled chaos. Bad vibrations. One night in early March, after a particularly grueling mixing session, the producer and owner of the studio is startled awake by an extremely agitated looking Brother Swann. Swann is sweating and wild eyed, casually holding a gun, explaining to the producer that “plans have changed” and that Jeremiah has “heard a calling and a Great Summons”. They are leaving. All of them. That night. Swann directs the producer to put the existing reels in a lock box along with a short 16mm film, lyrics, album art and scribbled notes. Swann tells the producer Jeremiah will be back to finish his masterpiece. It all goes in the box and it’s not to be opened until the Children return. They never do. In 2018, wildfires rip through Redding, CA and burn it to the ground. Over a thousand homes are incinerated. One rough structure north of the city is partially saved. There’s a massive concrete basement filled with smoke and water damaged recording equipment and in the back...a lockbox.

TRACK LISTING

1. Lift It Down (5:07)
2. Message From The Mountain (6:22)
3. Love Is (4:14)
4. Now You Are Mine (3:21)
5. There Once Was A Man (3:02)
6. Golden Desert (4:26)
7. Golden Fervor (4:13)
8. Taste The Whip (5:50)

To celebrate the tenth anniversary of Moon Duo’s long-out-of-print debut LP Escape, Sacred Bones is proud to present a new deluxe version of the album. The new reissue will include the original album in its entirety, plus three additional rare tracks taken from Moon Duo’s wild early days. Reflecting on the album in March 2020, the band shared the following statement:

“We made this record in a rehearsal space in San Francisco in late 2009. It was kind of a classic band space, shared by a rangy assortment of musicians over months and years, behind one of several similar doors in a dark red hall. A windowless room lit by string lights and an odd assortment of lamps, the walls a palimpsest of posters and gig fliers. There was a grimy, burn-pocked rug, cluttered gear in various stages of use and abandonment, and the air seemed to hang in a permanent film of smoke residue and stale beer. We recorded to a 4-track tape machine over the course of a few nights - we’d just start the beats, hit ‘record’ and let fly. We had a vague sense of coalescence, or fomentation, like a glimpse of a thing in outline which you can’t yet see, but neither of us knew at the time that this was the record that would mark the beginning of our life as a touring band and would initiate our connections to so many (now long-time) friends, familiars and collaborators. Ten years feels like both a lifetime and the blink of an eye - measurable but impossible to quantify. These four tracks, and the others that join them here, are a snapshot of our earliest incarnation: flying blind, but high on the freedom of experimentation and filled with hope for things to come.”

TRACK LISTING

1. Motorcycle, I Love You (8:02)
2. In The Trees ( 7:25)
3. Stumbling 22nd St (6:58)
4. Escape (6:22)
5. A Little Way Different (6:35)
6. Catch As Catch Can (4:19)
7. Set It On Fire (4:19)

What if the antihero in your favorite film or book had no chance to repent, reconcile, or redeem himself ? There’s no victim to rescue. There’s no evil to thwart. There’s no tyranny to turnover. Instead of saving the day against his bet-ter judgment, he just walks a Sisyphean circle of existential malaise doomed to repeat yesterday’s vices without the promise of a better tomorrow. Rather than tell this story on the screen or on the page, Uniform tell it on their fourth full-length album, Shame. The trio – Michael Berdan (vocals), Ben Greenberg (guitar, production), and Mike Sharp (drums) – strain struggle through an industrialized mill of grating guitars, warped electronics, war-torn percussion, and demonically catchy vocalizations.“Thematically, the album is like a classic hard-boiled paperback novel without a case,” says Berdan. “It focuses on the static state of an antihero as he mulls over his life in the interim between major events, just existing in the world. At the time we were making the record, I was reading books by Raymond Chandler, James Ellroy, and Dashiell Hammet and strangely found myself identifying with the internal dialogues of characters like Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe.”The lead-up to this moment proved just as intriguing as any of those characters’ exploits. Born in 2013, Uniform bulldozed a path to the forefront of under-ground music.

TRACK LISTING

1. Delco (4:36)
2. The Shadow Of God’s Hand (3:54)
3. Life In Remission (4:26)
4. Shame (4:02)
5. All We’ve Ever Wanted (3:59)
6. Dispatches From The Gutter (1:54)
7. This Won’t End Well (3:41)
8. I Am The Cancer (7:51)

Legendary composer/director John Carpenter has returned with his first nonsoundtrack music since 2016’s Lost Themes II. Collaborating again with son Cody Carpenter and godson Daniel Davies, his bandmates and co-composers for the David Gordon Green-directed Halloween films, Carpenter is sharing the propulsive new single “Skeleton” and its B-side, the haunting “Unclean Spirit.”

The sessions for these songs saw the trio shifting their focus from scoring for the screen and engaging a totally different creative muscle. Instead of being guided by what was happening in the world of Halloween, they were free to work toward other ends.

“It was refreshing to be able to write music that didn’t have to fit to any sort of locked image,” John said. “We also had a specific focus and direction we wanted to follow when working on Halloween, both in terms of mindset and instruments, and being able to return to working without that narrow focus was refreshing. Although working on Halloween didn’t specifically influence any of these new compositions, there is always a honing of craft that must take place when working on a film like Halloween, and our improved skills definitely helped us in writing these songs.”

Working together to score a major Hollywood production only deepened the collaborative chemistry between the three composers. That comfort level paid dividends, as the songs developed largely in the room where they were recorded. “Like the majority of the songs that we write, both ‘Skeleton’ and ‘Unclean Spirit’ mainly started with an improvised riff, which was then expanded and built upon to create the full song,” John explained. “Like the previous Lost Themes album, we each handled duties of writing and recording, with all three of us contributing ideas and parts.”

STAFF COMMENTS

says: In the words of Youtube commenter Justin Martinez - "Now that we're all living in a John Carpenter film, we should at least buy the soundtrack."

TRACK LISTING

1. Skeleton (3:13)
2. Unclean Spirit (3:01)

“I think most of it takes place in dreams,” Caleb Landry Jones says of his debut solo album, The Mother Stone. “I’m talking more about dreams than I am about what’s happened in the physical realm. Or I’m talking about both, and you’re not sure what’s what.”

Caleb Landry Jones was born in Garland, Texas in 1989 and comes from a long line of fiddle players. Three, maybe four generations back, on his mother’s side. His grandfather wrote jingles for commercials, his mother was a singer-songwriter who taught piano lessons in the house, and his father was a contractor who did a lot of work for the Dallas music-equipment retailer Brook Mays and knew a guy if you needed a bass or a banjo. But Jones is not sure if you can hear any of this in his music and he does not play the fiddle.

Jones has been writing and recording music since age 16, around the same time he started acting professionally. Played in a band called Robert Jones for a minute, lost his guitar player to higher education, moved into his own place, and broke up with somebody, at which point the songs really started coming hard and fast.

“I started playing guitar and playing more keys,” he says, “and then started writing record after record after record after record, because I didn’t know what to do with myself. It was a good way of healing. And it felt like as soon as I started doing it, it felt like it needed to happen all the time.”

In the ensuing years he’d spend a lot of time carrying unrecorded songs around in his head like goldfish in a bag, waiting for a chance to record them in marathon sessions in his parents’ barn. “You gotta play the songs every day, or every two or three days, to keep ‘em,” he says. “Otherwise I forget them.” Sometimes the ideas fuse together, one chapter to the next; this is how songs grow into sevenplus-minute epics like the ones on The Mother Stone. His back catalog is around seven hundred songs deep— a whole discography of full albums, most of them unheard outside the barn, at least for now.

TRACK LISTING

1. Flag Day / The Mother Stone
2. You’re So Wonderfull
3. I Dig Your Dog
4. Katya
5. All I Am In You / The Big Worm
6. No Where’s Where Nothing’s Died
7. Licking The Days
8. For The Longest Time
9. The Hodge-Podge Porridge Poke
10. I Want To Love You
11. The Great I Am
12. Lullabbey
13. No Where’s Where Nothing’s Died (A Marvelous Pain) 
14. Thanks For Staying
15. Little Planet Pig

When S KryshNashikhDomov the debut album by MolchatDoma, was released in 2017, it announced a bold new voice in underground music. The album found a passionate audience on Bandcamp and other streaming services and was released on CD and cassette. Sacred Bones Records is proud to present the album on vinyl for the first time.

MolchatDoma (translated as “Houses Are Silent”), founded in 2017 in Minsk, Belarus, stands at the intersection of post-punk, new-wave and synth-pop. Dark yet danceable, and with a heavy dose of goth ethos, their music is reminiscent of the masters that predate them, but make no mistake: MolchatDoma creates a sound and meaning that is immediately recognizable as all their own.

The band is comprised of EgorShkutko, who sings the Russian lyrics in his deep monotone, Roman Komogortsev on guitar, synths, and drum machine, and Pavel Kozlov on bass and synths.

TRACK LISTING

1. DomaMolchat (2:57)
2. Kryshi (2:48)
3. LudiNadoeli (2:59)
4. MashinaRabotaet (3:09)
5. NeobychniyChelovek (3:31)
6. Pryatki (3:19)
7. Technologia (3:35)
8. Tishina (4:20)
9. Ya Ne Kommunist (3:13)

The second LP by Belarussian trio Molchat Doma, Etazhi, meaning “Floors”, was first released in 2018 on Berlin-based Detriti Records. It became a viral hit, garnering over one million views on YouTube and becoming a legitimate phenomenon on Bandcamp. The band may fly under the radar in their native Belarus, but they’ve reached huge audiences across Europe and beyond. Six separate vinyl pressings of the album have sold out in quick succession, and Sacred Bones Records is now thrilled to bring the record back in print for good.

MolchatDoma (translated as “Houses Are Silent”), founded in 2017 in Minsk, Belarus, stands at the intersection of post-punk, new-wave and synth-pop. Dark yet danceable, and with a heavy dose of goth ethos, their music is reminiscent of the masters that predate them, but make no mistake: MolchatDoma creates a sound and meaning that is immediately recognizable as all their own
.
The band is comprised of EgorShkutko, who sings the Russian lyrics in his deep monotone, Roman Komogortsev on guitar, synths, and drum machine, and Pavel Kozlov on bass and synth

TRACK LISTING

1. Na Dne (4:07)
2. Tancevat (3:23)
3. Filmy (4:17)
4. Volny (4:11)
5. Toska (3:07)
6. Prognoz (3:05)
7. Sudno (Boris Ryzhy) (2:21)
8. Kommersanty (3:47)
9. Kletka (4:44)

Hilary Woods’ Birthmarks has been a labor of intensity and intuition, written over the course of two years. Recorded whilst heavily pregnant between Galway and Oslo in the winter of 2019, Woods explores the oscillating and volatile processes of selfhood and becoming, hidden gestational growth, and the birthing of the Self, amidst continuous social and personal change.

Birthmarks is a record that hunts for ways in which to revisit and caress wounds left by the memory of their scars. In its mystery and attentiveness to the art of alchemy and the world of the unseen, it is a journey through textural fog and feral density that gives way to passages of voracious sonic exorcism and poetic healing. Its eight songs traverse planes of visceral physicality, stark tender space, and breathtaking introspective beauty.

Spurred on and crafted by the impulse to create a more corporeal sonic tendon for her songs to inhabit, Woods took her vision and home recordings to Norwegian experimental noise producer and filmmaker Lasse Marhaug. The collaboration proved rare and fruitful and lies at the heart of this record. Field recordings, analogue bass synthesizers, hushed vocals, and the breath are underpinned with heavy noise processing, fierce and wide cello, rich percussion, sable saxophone, and electronics.

Birthmarks is inspired and informed by ideas of inner transmutation in the face of anxiety, post-war Japanese and wet-plate photography, early music, the secret life of trees, wolves, drone, the drawings of Francis Bacon, the images of Francesca Woodman, the films of Chris Marker, the experiential collapse of community, and the power of the lone human voice. It is a deeply powerful and enigmatic record that ultimately transcends its disquiet roots. 

TRACK LISTING

1. Tongues Of Wild Boar
2. Orange Tree
3. Through The Dark, Love
4. Lay Bare
5. Mud And Stones
6. The Mouth
7. Cleansing Ritual
8. There Is No Moon

Whether scoring a film or making a solo album, Daniel Davies thinks cinematically. Images and story – on a movie screen, on a canvas, or flashing through his mind – inform the shape of his compositions and the sounds he uses to bring them to life. For Signals, his first solo record for Sacred Bones, the inspiration for his musical narration was a collaboration with visual artist Jesse Draxler, whose otherworldly mixed media works grace the cover and the booklet.

“I had an instant connection to Jesse’s art,” Davies explains. “One of the main concepts for this album was working with the feeling of uncertainty. Jesse’s art illustrates that perfectly with his disruptive shapes. At first, they are foreign to the landscapes they live in, but over time we become used to them, we adjust. The foreign objects force us to evolve, to accept and live with the uncertainty they create.”

Using Draxler’s images as his jumping off point, Davies created eight richly textured compositions that created a soundtrack for the unsettling world of the artwork. “Musically, I wanted to capture that same contrast — melodies evolving out of drones, haunting beds of tension with beautiful shimmering melodies laid above. What were once conflicting emotions became harmonious.”

As the songs move through the landscape, Davies calls on whatever instrumentation he needs to serve their journey. He utilizes the warbling synths and slicing guitar that have characterized his soundtrack work, but he’s also preternaturally at ease when he busts out a harpsichord and a vocal synth on lead single “Phantom Waltz.” On “Destructive Field,” he leaves space for his Halloween collaborator John Carpenter to lay down his signature sound. With the exception of that passage, all the music on the record is recorded by Davies himself.

While the results indeed feel cinematic, Davies is liberated by the absence of a film to score: “While scoring a movie, I serve the director’s vision and focus on telling a specific story. When working on an album, I’m free to create my own narrative and be more experimental.”

STAFF COMMENTS

says: It's a bit of a spooky affair this, with the Arrival-esque oddities of the cover art being perfectly matched to the swirling instrumentals and Carpenter-esque unease in the music itself. Part ambient, part soundtrack, part gothic waltz and ALL brilliant, this is a triumph in concept and execution and a superb listen for a cold winter night.

TRACK LISTING

1. Last Days
2. One Hundred Years
3. Origins
4. Destructive Field
5. Beyond Megalith Illumination
6. Possessor
7. Phantom Waltz
8. Visible

New York band The Men have always been genre-morphic and unpredictable, but on their eighth album Mercy they have truly done something new as a band. For the first time since forming, they have now created three straight records with the same lineup, and the result is a sound that feels developed and continuous despite running the gamut of mood, in true Men fashion. Having this lineup stability has allowed the band to deepen and finesse the sounds they were exploring on 2017’s Drift and produce tracks that have a unique and distinct voice.

Mercy was recorded live at Serious Business studio to 2” tape with Travis Harrison. The band did minimal overdubs, contributing to the urgent feel of the recording. The album is simply the sound of a band that has a deep and unjaded passion for songwriting and creation, working at the peak of their collaborative connection.

Mercy takes the listener on a cinematic journey throughout its seven tracks, beginning with the soothing but lonesome country rock opener “Cool Water.” This track, like many on the record, feels timeless, illustrating the band’s ability to write songs you are convinced you’ve heard before on the B-side of your favorite record from the ’70s. You are then pulled into its longest song, the 10-and-a-half minute psychedelic blues rock opus of “Wading in Dirty Water.” The band explore some new territory on Mercy, and they also revisit the Suicide-style sound they have been working on for a while through Drift and also with one of their side projects Dream Police, resulting in the highlight “Children All Over the World,” a song that could stand next to any classic rock hit but with The Men’s unique artistic savvy. It wouldn’t be a contemporary Men record without a total fuzzed-out stomper a la their Open Your Heart-era sound, and this record’s offering, “Breeze,” shows the band’s complete command of this urgent and pulverizing style. 

STAFF COMMENTS

says: As stylistically varied a record we've ever heard from The Men, Mercy skilfully toes the line between pastiched 80's soft-focus synth work and grooving psychedelia, dipping toes into a wealth of genres along the way including gothic rock, blues and even veering towards the dancefloor. A fascinating and engrossing collection.

TRACK LISTING

1. Cool Water
2. Wading In Dirty Water
3. Fallin’ Thru
4. Children All Over The World
5. Call The Dr.
6. Breeze
7. Mercy

When Chris Stewart set out to write and record his third album as Black Marble, he was newly living in Los Angeles, fresh off a move from New York. The environment brought much excitement and possibility, but the distance had proved too much for the car he brought along. With it out of commission indefinitely, he purchased a bus pass and planned his daily commute from his Echo Park apartment to his downtown studio, where he began to shape Bigger Than Life. The route wound all through the city, from the small local shops of Echo Park to the rising glass of the business district, to the desperation of Skid Row. The hurried energy of the environment provided a backdrop for the daily trip. When Stewart finally arrived at his studio, he’d look through his window at the mountains and the sky, seeing the beauty that makes L.A. unique — the same beauty his fellow commuters, some pushed to the edge of human endurance, had seen. That was the headspace he was in when he began to map out the syncopated drums and staccato arpeggiation of Bigger Than Life, an ode to his new condition and a shimmering synth-pop response to its cacophony.

“The album comes out of seeing and experiencing a lot of turmoil but wanting to create something positive out of it,” Stewart explains. “I wanted to take a less selfish approach on this record. Maybe I’m just getting older, but that approach starts to feel a little self-indulgent. So with this record, it’s less about how I see things and more about the way things just are. Seeing myself as a part of a lineage of people trying to do a little something instead of trying to create a platform for myself individually.”

As with every Black Marble album, Stewart recorded, produced, and played everything you hear on Bigger Than Life using entirely analog gear, though the process was new. This time around, he wrote everything on his MPC and sequenced it live to his synths — only using the computer to record, not to create. “I try new approaches every time, which helps me stay engaged but also its kind of a trick I play on the creative side of my brain,” Stewart says. “Keeping one side of my mind busy on organizational creativity I think frees up the other side where the inspirational creativity comes from.”

TRACK LISTING

1. Never Tell
2. One Eye Open
3. Daily Driver
4. Feels
5. The Usual
6. Grey Eyeliner
7. Bigger Than Life
8. Private Show
9. Shoulder
10. Hit Show
11. Call 

This soundtrack pays homage to the classic Halloween score that Carpenter composed and recorded in 1978, when he forever changed the course of horror cinema and synthesizer music with his low-budget masterpiece. Several new versions of the iconic main theme serve as the pulse of Green’s film, its familiar 5/4 refrain stabbing through the soundtrack like the Shape’s knife. The rest of the soundtrack is just as enthralling, incorporating everything from atmospheric synth whooshes to eerie piano-driven pieces to skittering electronic percussion. While the new score was made with a few more resources than Carpenter’s famously shoestring original, its musical spirit was preserved.

2018’s Halloween, directed by David Gordon Green, starring Jamie Lee Curtis, and with music by series creator John Carpenter (along with his son and godson, Cody Carpenter and Daniel Davies) was a critical and box-office smash. It grossed $159 million against a $10 million budget, becoming the most profitable Halloween movie since the 1978 original. The soundtrack album was a hit, too, debuting at #12 on the Billboard Albums chart and #2 on the vinyl chart, on its way to becoming one of the most successful movie soundtracks of the last decade. One year later, Sacred Bones Records is pleased to present an expanded edition of the soundtrack, including more than 28 additional minutes of music from the film and presenting a more complete, immersive listening experience.

The additional material included on the expanded edition adds at total of 24 cues to the album, spread across two more sides of vinyl on the deluxe double LP version. The LP also has all-new art and lavish packaging, including an optical-illusion lenticular sleeve that makes the flames around Michael Myers’s mask dance when you slide it off the record jacket. For diehard fans of the Halloween series, collectors of John Carpenter’s music, or anyone who wants to hear even more of the incredible score to this movie, this expanded edition is a must-buy.

TRACK LISTING

Intro
1. Aaron Meets Michael
2. Halloween Theme
3. Laurie’s Theme
4. Aaron And Dana Enter Laurie’s Compound
5. Laurie’s Past
6. Prison Montage
7. Laurie Breaks Down
8. Karen’s Flashback
9. Lumpy Explores Crash
10. Michael Kills
11. Hawkins Arrives At Crash Site
12. Dana’s In The Shower
13. The Story Of Judith’s Death
14. The Gas Station
15. Michael Kills Again
16. Gas Station Aftermath
17. The Shape Returns
18. The Boogeyman
19. The Shape Kills
20. Hawkins Called To Babysitter’s House
21. Laurie Sees The Shape
22. Babysitter Aftermath
23. Sartain Meets Laurie
24. Looking For Allyson
25. Wrought Iron Fence
26. The Shape Hunts Allyson
27. Talking To Cops
28. Allyson Discovered
29. Gun Closet
30. Halloween Theme (I’ve Got Eyes)
31. Sartain’s Gone Mad
32. Say Something
33. Through The Woods
34. Ray’s Goodbye
35. The Shape Attacks Laurie
36. The Shape Is Monumental
37. Searching For The Shape
38. Mannequin Panic
39. Death Drum
40. The Shape And Laurie Fight
41. The Grind
42. Trap The Shape
43. The Shape Burns
44. Halloween Triumphant

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

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

“In this post-industrial, post-enlightenment religion of ourselves, we have manifested a serpent of consumerism which now coils back upon us. It seduces us with our own bait as we betray the better instincts of our nature and the future of our own world. We throw ourselves out of our own garden. We poison ourselves to the edges of an endless sleep.

Animated Violence Mild was written throughout 2018, at Blanck Mass’ studio outside of Edinburgh. These eight tracks are the diary of a year of work steeped in honing craft, self-discovery, and grief - the latter of which reared its head at the final hurdle of producing this record and created a whole separate narrative: grief, both for what I have lost personally, but also in a global sense, for what we as a species have lost and handed over to our blood-sucking counterpart, consumerism, only to be ravaged by it. 

I believe that many of us have willfully allowed our survival instinct to become engulfed by the snake we birthed. Animated - brought to life by humankind. Violent - insurmountable and wild beyond our control. Mild - delicious.
This is perhaps the most concise body of work I have written to date. Having worked extensively throughout my musical life with dramatics, narrative, and ‘melody against all odds’, these tracks are the most direct and honest yet. The level of articulation in these tracks surpasses anything I have utilized before.”
- Benjamin John Power.

STAFF COMMENTS

says: Huge lurching arpeggios and cavernous percussion snaps glitch their way around a solid core of 16-bit reductions and skittering vocal shards. Drawing a flawless line between game soundtracks, rawkous EDM and the slowly building electronics of dancefloor trance or the incremental atmospheric accentuation of 70's prog. Indescribably mad, but thoroughly addictive.

TRACK LISTING

1. Intro
2. Death Drop
3. House Vs. House
4. Hush Money
5. Love Is A Parasite
6. Creature/West Fuqua
7. No Dice
8. Wings Of Hate

Devour marks the fourth full-length record from Margaret Chardiet’s project Pharmakon and her most intense output to date. The album was recorded by Ben Greenberg (Uniform) and is the first Pharmakon album recorded live in studio. The A and B sides were each recorded as continuous takes with vocals from start to finish, marking a totally new process for the artist that allows the ferocity and immediacy of her live performance to resonate throughout. Devour also explores new sonic territory, with denser electronics, groovier hooks, and moments of her most unhinged vocal deliveries to date.

TRACK LISTING

1. Homeostasis
2. Spit It Out
3. Self-Regulating System
4. Deprivation
5. Pristine Panic / Cheek By Jowl

The long-awaited fourth full-length by Föllakzoid isn’t merely a recalibration for the band. It is a multidimensional reconsideration of what the process of songwriting, performance, and creating a work of recorded music can be.

Föllakzoid grows via depuration, aiming with each record to fill longer spaces of time with fewer and fewer elements. The creative perspective of the band has always been about unlearning the narrative and musical knowledge that shape the physical and digital formats and conceptions available, both visually and musically in order to make a time-space metric structure that dissolves both the author and the narrative paradigms. “We found our sonic and metric identity even more in these songs than in our previous attempts,” guitarist/singer Domingæ GarciaHuidobro explains.

Unlike past Föllakzoid records, that were done in single takes with the full band, this record took three months to construct out of more than 60 separate stems – guitars, bass, drums, synthesizers, and vocals, all recorded in isolation. Producer Atom TM, who was not present for recording, was then asked to re-organize the four sequences of stems without any length, structural restrictions or guidelines. Those sequences ultimately became the four long tracks that appear on I.

The result of this was a set of songs where neither the band’s, nor the producer’s, structural vision primarily shaped the metric or tonal space shifts, but where both were still subliminally present in each of the parts that form the structure and the frequency modulations that guide them.

“We invite you to join us in sharing the experience of being led by this nonrational, sonic artform and its energy. It is also an invitation to connect once again with your inner master and his intuition, erasing the systematic rationalization that usually follows creative forces when perceived, to guide you on this holographic simultaneous simulation where reality is rooted in,” Domingae added.

STAFF COMMENTS

says: While I've moderately enjoyed everything this Chilean prog-psyche band have conjured up in the past, it's this, their Basic Channel-indebted, drone-techno opus that's really captured my imagination. I swear you could drop a couple of these monstrous workouts in the main hanger at Sonar, while the growling machine whirrs could soundtrack a million next-day apocalypses in poorly lit studio flats as the inhabitants melt into the walls.

says: In a perfect storm of four long tracks and dark, brooding front cover, Föllakzoid have once again piqued my interest, and it's safe to say the music itself doesn't disappoint. Brooding droney instrumentals, cosmic percussion and industrial synths grow into a perfectly measured and brilliantly executed whole. Long live Föllakzoid.

TRACK LISTING

1. I
2. II
3. III
4. IIII 

Philosophy of Beyond, the second volume in Sound Supervisor Dean Hurley’s Anthology Resource series, continues Hurley’s experimental soundscape work into more ethereal and celestial territory. 12 tracks weave together a rich sonic tapestry built in part from comb-filtering experiments, tape loops, and sampled field excursions into unique acoustical environments. A bulk of the LP is assembled from Hurley’s sonic contributions to the recent feature film Perfect (2018, director Eddie Alcazar) as well as material made in residency for Art Gallery of New South Wales’ event Masters of Modern Sound...all of which are threaded together into a singular, cohesive dissertation on the afterlife.

Outlining a landscape beyond physical reality, the record serves as a soundtrack to the mysterious and immortal voyage of the soul into depths beyond the known and back again. What lies beyond physical reality? Beyond intellect and the system of the five senses? What do accounts of near death experiences, alien encounters, psychedelic drugs, astral projection, even strokes all have to do with this and why do each seem to share a core architecture of description?

A long time David Lynch collaborator, Hurley operated and managed Lynch’s Asymmetrical Studio from 2005-2018 where he worked closely with Lynch on the sound and music for his feature films, commercial work and albums; most recently providing material for the third season of Twin Peaks (Showtime). Hurley inaugurated the Anthology Resource series with a compilation of his licensed material from the show in 2017.

What is Anthology Resource? Anthology Resource is an ongoing compendium curated both from and for film and television in the library / production music tradition. A flagship source for outrésonic material, it was conceived to service the unique gap that straddles atmospheric score and sound design. Each release organizes thematic audio material fully licensable, non-exclusive and designed for motion picture based work and listeners alike.

TRACK LISTING

1. Edge Of The Known
2. The Curved Arrow Of Time
3. Dissension
4. Low Harmonic Fanfare / Growth
5. Exotic Matter
6. Far Boundaries
7. Splendor
8. Pastness
9. Echoes Of Known
10. In Knowing
11. Somewhere In Time
12. Birth

In the mid-1970s, a force of nature swept across the continental United States, cutting across all strata of race and class, rooting in our minds, our homes, our culture. It wasn’t The Exorcist, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, or even bell-bottoms, but instead a book called The Secret Life of Plants. The work of occultist/former OSS agent Peter Tompkins and former CIA agent/dowsing enthusiast Christopher Bird, the books shot up the bestseller charts and spread like kudzu across the landscape, becoming a phenomenon. Seemingly overnight, the indoor plant business was in full bloom and photosynthetic eukaryotes of every genus were hanging off walls, lording over bookshelves, and basking on sunny window ledges. The science behind Secret Life was specious: plants can hear our prayers, they’re lie detectors, they’re telepathic, able to predict natural disasters and receive signals from distant galaxies. But that didn’t stop millions from buying and nurturing their new plants.

Perhaps the craziest claim of the book was that plants also dug music. And whether you purchased a snake plant, asparagus fern, peace lily, or what have you from Mother Earth on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles (or bought a Simmons mattress from Sears), you also took home Plantasia, an album recorded especially for them. Subtitled “warm earth music for plants…and the people that love them,” it was full of bucolic, charming, stoner-friendly, decidedly unscientific tunes enacted on the new-fangled device called the Moog. Plants date back from the dawn of time, but apparently they loved the Moog, never mind that the synthesizer had been on the market for just a few years. Most of all, the plants loved the ditties made by composer Mort Garson.

Few characters in early electronic music can be both fearless pioneers and cheesy trend-chasers, but Garson embraced both extremes, and has been unheralded as a result. When one writer rhetorically asked: “How was Garson’s music so ubiquitous while the man remained so under the radar?” the answer was simple. Well before Brian Eno did it, Garson was making discreet music, both the man and his music as inconspicuous as a Chlorophytum comosum. Julliard-educated and active as a session player in the post-war era, Garson wrote lounge hits, scored plush arrangements for Doris Day, and garlanded weeping countrypolitan strings around Glen Campbell’s “By the Time I Get to Phoenix.” He could render the Beatles and Simon & Garfunkel alike into easy listening and also dreamed up his own ditties. “An idear” as Garson himself would drawl it out. “I live with it, I walk it, I sing it.”

But as his daughter Day Darmet recalls: “When my dad found the synthesizer, he realized he didn’t want to do pop music anymore.” Garson encountered Robert Moog and his new device at the Audio Engineering Society’s West Coast convention in 1967 and immediately began tinkering with the device. With the Moog, those idears could be transformed. “He constantly had a song he was humming,” Darmet says. “At the table he was constantly tapping.” Which is to say that Mort pulled his melodies out of thin air, just like any household plant would.

The Plantae kingdom grew to its height by 1976, from DC Comics’ mossy superhero Swamp Thing to Stevie Wonder’s own herbal meditation, Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants. Nefarious manifestations of human-plant interaction also abounded, be it the grotesque pods in Invasion of the Body Snatchers or the pothead paranoia of the US Government spraying Mexican marijuana fields with the herbicide paraquat (which led to the rise in homegrown pot by the 1980s). And then there’s the warm, leafy embrace of Plantasia itself.

“My mom had a lot of plants,” Darmet says. “She didn’t believe in organized religion, she believed the earth was the best thing in the whole world. Whatever created us was incredible.” And she also knew when her husband had a good song, shouting from another room when she heard him humming a good idear. Novel as it might seem, Plantasia is simply full of good tunes.

Garson may have given the album away to new plant and bed owners, but a decade later a new generation could hear his music in another surreptitious way. Millions of kids bought The Legend of Zelda for their Nintendo Entertainment System back in 1986 and one distinct 8-bit tune bears more than a passing resemblance to album highlight “Concerto for Philodendron and Pothos.” Garson was never properly credited for it, but he nevertheless subliminally slipped into a new generations’ head, helping kids and plants alike grow.

Hearing Plantasia in the 21st century, it seems less an ode to our photosynthesizing friends by Garson and more an homage to his wife, the one with the green thumb that made everything flower around him. “My dad would be totally pleased to know that people are really interested in this music that had no popularity at the time,” Darmet says of Plantasia’s new renaissance. “He would be fascinated by the fact that people are finally understanding and appreciating this part of his musical career that he got no admiration for back then.” Garson seems to be everywhere again, even if he’s not really noticed, just like a houseplant.

STAFF COMMENTS

says: Perfect for playing to plants, pasta and unborn children (Barry reckons you can play it to your cat too), this early electronic masterpiece is amongst the finest Moog records ever recorded. Shut your eyes and you’ll find yourself brushing through the verdant flora of a distant planet, glittering arps and delicate melodies accompanying your every move. Originally given away with any houseplant purchase at LA’s Mother Earth, this unique LP has since become a holy grail for open-minded audiophiles, and we’re eternally indebted to Sacred Bones for such a gorgeous reissue.

TRACK LISTING

(A)
1. Plantasia
2. Symphony For A Spider Plant
3. Baby’s Tears Blues
4. Ode To An African Violet
5. Concerto For Philodendron And Pothos

(B)
1. Rhapsody In Green
2. Swingin' Spathiphyllums
3. You Don't Have To Walk A Begonia
4. A Mellow Mood For Maidenhair 

Pirouetting on decadence, meeting eyes with a dizzy sensation, falling and flying at the same time—Lust for Youth have continually held poise through the most vitalizing of times. Their new album, a self-titled collection of eight songs, is surefooted where they had earlier feared to tread, and light-headed for a new set of reasons. The album is driven by a dance-pop agenda, hustling its way through upbeat peaks that level out into reflective ballads. While still taking clear cues from a crop of austere synth-pop, Lust for Youth sound brighter than they ever have before, taking tips from some of the flirtiest Eurobeat to aid their new direction.

On their previous album, Compassion, Lust for Youth examined euphoria and contemporary life with a wry wit. Where facetiousness masqueraded as commitment, compliments and fawning clearly yearned for a true connection. Lust for Youth sees Hannes Norrvide and Malthe Fischer taking some familiar strides, though to another place. The disaffected balearia is this time rendered into brighter pop compositions that bustle with intricate production. No longer galvanizing us with hooks, but with a songcraft unhindered by anxiety, the album presents a cohesion not seen in the project until now. Lyrically, the apprehension still hangs like tinsel. Often garish and celebratory, the droll mischief is this time more pointed, more personal, and far more self-aware. A thread of reflections upon the state of the world is artfully wound throughout the album, casting a quiet force upon the detachment of Norrvide’s vocals.

Lust for Youth have been one of love’s most honest confrères, detailing the pangs of what is all too often a sullen process. On this occasion, they look up. The pull of the world is different for us all, but it pulls us all.

STAFF COMMENTS

says: Twinkling keys and huge, echoing kick drums form a throbbing backdrop to the 80's vox and dreamy atmospheric synth swells littered all over Lust For Youth's self titled masterpiece. Huge arps and chest-thumping basses work their way around a brilliantly written and hugely reminiscent melodic counterpoint. Lovely stuff.

TRACK LISTING

1. New Balance Point
2. Insignificant
3. Venus De Milo
4. Great Concerns
5. Fifth Terrace
6. Adrift
7. Imola
8. By No Means

With half the band having left their native Texas for New York, Readjusting the Locks is the first Institute album written across the country. Despite the distance it sounds every bit as cohesive as if they were all still hanging out every night in the same Austin dives. The newly NYC-based Moses Brown and Arak Avakian flew to Houston in October 2018, where they joined Barry Elkanick and Adam Cahoon to demo the entirety of the new album in a single day. In December, the band got back together in Brooklyn to record with their longtime producer Ben Greenberg (Uniform).

Where the previous Institute albums often wandered into the experimental, Readjusting the Locks strives to be economical, its 13 tracks clocking in at a tight 29 minutes. The band has seamlessly incorporated more ’77 rock n’ roll into their sound, some songs feeling like they could’ve been a Stiff Records single. This sound is emphasized by Greenberg’s expert production — crisp but still blown out and dirty. Lyrically, Readjusting the Locks moves away from the traditionally personal words of frontman Moses Brown. Rather than attacking the internal workings of his brain or its socialization, as on previous records, this album attempts to address the societal atmosphere in which his agita exists.

Blaming Neoliberalism and the irresponsible notions of utopia fostered under it, Brown argues that in recent decades the Western world’s assumption that humanity would continue to prosper into the future has, on the contrary, created a disastrous political vacuum. This has allowed banks, corporations, and their politicians to aimlessly advance the Neoliberal agenda into an inconceivably dangerous place. He argues that we are deadlocked in a permanent existential crisis, stuck in an unhumanitarian and environmentally destructive system so all-consuming that we will not find a clear alternative. Without a true plan for a sustainable future those in power will continue to offer humanity new policies, technologies, and politicians that promise change but are only capable of “readjusting the locks” on our incomprehensible existential predicament.

TRACK LISTING

1. M.P.S. (2:15)
2. Mon Cherie (1:53)
3. Let Me Be (2:02)
4. Indoctrination Set (1:45)
5. Roll Music (2:30)
6. Can’t See Nothin’ (1:14)
7. Shangri-La (2:56)
8. St John’s Wort (1:23)
9. Dazzle Paint (2:36)
10. Anxiety (1:53)
11. Utopia Sound (1:26)
12. Fooled Again (2:38)
13. Deadlock (4:28)

Experimental lute player Jozef Van Wissem and acclaimed film director and musician Jim Jarmusch have a working relationship that dates back to 2006, when they ran into each other on the street in New York City and quickly struck up a friendship. Van Wissem contributed to the soundtrack for Jarmusch’s 2013 movie Only Lovers Left Alive, and the two have collaborated on three previous studio albums — Apokatastasis, Concerning the Entrance Into Eternity, and The Mystery of Heaven. An Attempt to Draw Aside the Veil is their second release as a duo for Sacred Bones Records, following The Mystery of Heaven, and its narrative picks up where that album left off.

Like The Mystery of Heaven, An Attempt to Draw Aside the Veil delves into the theology of William Blake and Emanuel Swedenborg, this time also exploring the work of Russian occultist and philosopher Helena Blavatsky. The album is mostly instrumental, so the dialogue between the esoteric thinkers who inspired it and Van Wissem and Jarmusch is expressed primarily in the song titles — fittingly arcane phrases like “Concerning the White Horse,” “The Two Paths,” “When the Sun Rises Do You Not See A Round Disc of Fire.”

Musically, the album finds much of its power in minimalism. Van Wissem’s lute traces the outlines of subdued electronics and ominous guitar drones laid down by Jarmusch. It’s a subtle album, and repeat listens reveal vast depths in its dark corners. Above all, it’s an album that sees two formidable collaborators complement each other brilliantly.

“An Attempt To Draw Aside The Veil is another adventure with Jozef into the realm of vibrating strings and the dreamlike musical textures of darkness and light,” Jarmusch said of the album. “It was a real pleasure to collaborate with Jozef once again.”

TRACK LISTING

1. Concerning The White Horse
2. Dark Matter
3. The Unclouded Day 
4. The Two Paths 
5. Lost Continent
6. Final Initiation
7. When The Sun Rises Do You Not See A Round Disc Of Fire

NYC’s The Men have made a name for themselves as wayfaring musicians, constantly evolving and eluding their listeners. Before they were genre-hopping through country, post-punk, noise rock, and more, they were applying that experimental nature within the more confined space of punk. Within that genre they were wildly adventurous, playing noise shows, hardcore shows, rock shows, and switching up the instrumentation as they saw fit, while always operating within a general punk ethos. Their first demo was a hand-dubbed and spray-painted run of 32 copies, half of which worked, and their first shows were at New York dives like Tommy’s Tavern, Matchless, and Don Pedro (all of which have been shut down).

That hand-dubbed demo kicked off a furious run of creative output from 2008 to 2011, much of which is now collected on the new compilation, Hated. The songs on Hated are pulled from a variety of sources — the debut demo tape, a split with Nomos, a 7", a 12" EP, and a slew of unreleased demos, outtakes, and live recordings. These songs show the huge range and potential of a band still in its infancy, when they were just beginning to blaze the path they’re still on to this day.

The core value of the original incarnation of The Men was work ethic. The band became a lifestyle for original members Chris Hansell, Mark Perro, and Nick Chiericozzi, with Hansell even living off unemployment checks to dedicate his time to the project. The three of them would jam and obsess over music together over all else.

For those who were at those early NYC shows, Hated will be a welcome reminder of a glorious time in the underground. For those who weren’t, it’s a chance to experience The Men as the locals did, and to get a glimpse of a Brooklyn DIY scene that doesn’t really exist anymore, at least not in the same way. And for diehard fans of the band, it’s a reminder of how much they’ve evolved, and how much more evolution they still have to go.

TRACK LISTING

1. Twist The Knife
2. Hated
3. Free Sitar
4. Gates Of Steel
5. Ailment
6. Digital Age
7. Control Loop
8. Think (7" Version)
9. Impish
10. Walking Out On Love
11. Saucy
12. Somebody’s Watching Me
13. Love Revolution
14. Captain Ahab
15. Cowboy Song
16. California
17. Wasted

By the time Twin Peaks’ second season had aired and Fire Walk With Me had just begun principle production, Thought Gang had been born. The esoteric jazz side-project of David Lynch and Angelo Badalamenti evolved from the seeds of Twin Peaks’ trademark slow cool jazz and blossomed into more experimental pastures: horizonless vistas of acid-soaked free-jazz, laced with spoken word narratives and sprawling noisescapes. Fire Walk With Me’s soundtrack would ultimately showcase two preliminary tracks (“A Real Indication” and “The Black Dog Runs at Night”) from a full-length album that wouldn’t see release for two-and-ahalf decades. Beginning in May 1992 and continuing throughout 1993, the bulk of the remaining material for the album was recorded in pieces, and dove-tailed into a string of contracted sessions for other Lynch-Badalamenti projects.

In the years following, fragments and working versions of Thought Gang material would make appearances in everything from a Lynch-helmed Adidas commercial to scenes in Hotel Room, Mulholland Dr., Inland Empire, deleted scenes from Fire Walk With Me, and most expansively utilized in Showtime’s third season of Twin Peaks. “Frank 2000” and “Summer Night Noise,” as well as an alternate instrumental mix of “Logic and Common Sense,” would score scenes from season three and aid in defining the show’s distinctly experimental, noisetilted soundtrack.

“It’s sort of like jet-fueled jazz in a weird way…but it’s all based on stories,” says Lynch. “It’s Modern Music.”

Those two words seem to efficiently capture both Thought Gang’s essence and distinctively genre-less genre. Quite often music that finds release beyond its decade of creation experiences a bit of an aural patina resulting from the process of marinating in the ether of time. Perplexingly, Thought Gang retains a contemporary quality difficult to quantify. Fittingly, the resulting album somehow still sounds “modern” and will continue to remain “modern,” decades upon decades after is creation.

TRACK LISTING

1. Stalin Revisited
2. Logic And Common Sense
3. One Dog Bark
4. Woodcutters From Fiery Ships
5. A Real Indication
6. Jack Paints It Red
7. A Meaningless Conversation
8. Frank 2000 Prelude
9. Multi-Tempo Wind Boogie
10. The Black Dog Runs At Night
11. Frank 2000
12. Summer Night Noise

When the new Halloween movie hits theaters in October 2018, it will have the distinction of being the first film in the series with creator John Carpenter’s direct involvement since 1982’s Halloween III: Season of the Witch. Carpenter serves on the new David Gordon Green-directed installment as an executive producer, a creative consultant, and, thrillingly, as a soundtrack composer, alongside his collaborators from his three recent solo albums, Cody Carpenter and Daniel Davies.

The new soundtrack pays homage to the classic Halloween score that Carpenter composed and recorded in 1978, when he forever changed the course of horror cinema and synthesizer music with his low-budget masterpiece. Several new versions of the iconic main theme serve as the pulse of Green’s film, its familiar 5/4 refrain stabbing through the soundtrack like the Shape’s knife. The rest of the soundtrack is just as enthralling, incorporating everything from atmospheric synth whooshes to eerie piano-driven pieces to skittering electronic percussion. While the new score was made with a few more resources than Carpenter’s famously shoestring original, its musical spirit was preserved.

“We wanted to honor the original Halloweensoundtrack in terms of the sounds we used,” Davies explained. “We used a lot of the Dave Smith OB-6, bowed guitar, Roland Juno, Korg, Roli, Moog, Roland System 1, Roland System 8, different guitar pedals, mellotron, and piano.”

Unlike the Lost Themes albums, where the composers wrote the soundtracks for imaginary movies, Halloween saw the Carpenters and Davies collaborating on music set to images for the first time. Though it marked a significant change from their previous creative process, the trio thrived under the constraints and tight deadlines that film scoring work demands.

“Being limited by the length of time in scoring the sequence, we focused on the director’s tempo, timing, and vision,” Davies said. “He would tell us what he had in mind, how long the cue should be, what emotion he wanted, and we would take it from there. It’s only the three of us, there is no elaborate system. We wrote, performed, and orchestrated everything.”

For John Carpenter, who reunited on the new film with original Halloween star Jamie Lee Curtis, composing the score felt like a homecoming. Not only had he not worked on a Halloween movie in 35 years, he hadn’t composed a soundtrack since his 2001 sci-fi thriller Ghosts of Mars.

“It was great,” Carpenter said of the experience. “It was transforming. It was not a movie I directed, so I had a lot of freedom in creating the score and getting into the director's head. I was proud to serve David Gordon Green’s vision.”

For Cody Carpenter, John’s son, and Davies, his godson, it was surreal to work on something that means so much to generations of fans, and that they grew up around.

“It was an honor for us to be involved, and we are really happy to be a part of something that so many people are anticipating and excited about,” Davies said. “Working together with both the director of the new Halloween and the creator of the original Halloween was really a fantastic experience.”

TRACK LISTING

1. "Halloween Theme" 2:21
2. "Halloween 1963" 3:11
3. "The Evil Is Gone!" 4:08
4. "Halloween 1978" 2:50
5. "The Boogeyman Is Coming" 0:40
6. "The Shape" 1:43
7. "The Hedge" 1:35
8. "He Came Home" 2:40
9. "Trick Or Treat" 0:39
10. "The Haunted House" 1:43
11. "The Devil's Eyes" 1:39
12. "The Boogeyman Is Outside" 1:27
13. "Damn You For Letting Him Go!" 1:34
14. "Empty Street" 0:33
15. "See Anything You Like?" 2:22
16. "Lock The Door" 2:53
17. "He's Here?" 0:55
18. "Light's Out" 2:49
19. "Cut It Out" 1:19
20. "Tombstone" 1:19
21. "The Shape Stalks Laurie" 1:35
22. "Turn Around" 0:33
23. "Unlock The Door" 2:53
24. "The Hanger" 3:04
25. "Call The Police" 0:28
26. "Last Assault" 1:34
27. "Was That The Boogeyman?" 0:32
28. "End Credits/Halloween Theme (Reprise)" 3:36

Exploded View, the international music project of Annika Henderson, Hugo Quezada, and Martin Thulin has returned and taken flight with their second full-length, Obey. The album was recorded at Hugo’s and Martin’s studios in Mexico City with Annika visiting from Berlin. Leaving behind their raw, live recording process, and embracing overdubs and multi-instrumentalism, the band has crafted their most ambitious work to date. The four-piece that recorded the band’s self-titled debut album and Summer Came Early EP became three to create a more concise collection of songs. Their motivation for creating together remains purely passionate and the improvisational spark the band is known for has morphed into the emotional flames of being close friends with a deep desire to make music with each other.

When asked about the title of the record, singer Annika said “this is in reference to so many things. We live in a society where we must obey or risk punishment. This can be social punishment, legal punishment, emotional punishment - if you dare to step outside, you will reap the reward. We live in a time when we are selfcertifying a lot. Whether it’s how we present ourselves on social media or our diet or our job - we obey the social norms. Our fears are used against us by advertisers. Our fears of growing old or being excluded - we must conform or pay the high price - buy this and you will be accepted. We must obey.” She adds musingly at the end, “It’s also funny because in the band we often feel like we are all compromising, so we must all obey each other’s wishes to some extent too.”

Striking the balance between precise and wild, between unshackled and grounded, grooving and unhinged, has always been Exploded View’s specialty. They have a special knack for making the esoteric feel accessible and crafting pop music out of seemingly raw consciousness. This unique ability to make beautiful music that feels written beyond the veil is at the heart of what makes the band so captivating and powerful, and it’s on full display all over Obey.

STAFF COMMENTS

says: Woozy, languid psychedelic atmospheres wrap around a solid foundation of reticent percussion and pulsing bass drones. Elsewhere we get more directed instrumental lines but imbued with the syncopated lag seen elsewhere. A stripped-back but perfectly formed experience, rich and multi-layered but beautifully concise at the same time.

TRACK LISTING

1. Lullaby (2:13)
2. Open Road (4:19)
3. Dark Stains (3:25)
4. Gone Tomorrow (5:03)
5. Obey (5:30)
6. Sleepers (3:49)
7. Letting Go Of Childhood Dreams (2:42)
8. Raven Raven (3:33)
9. Come On Honey (2:52)
10. Rant (4:46)

It was 10 years ago, in a house on the outskirts of Santiago, Chile, that Ives Sepúlveda Minho and Manuel Parra started playing music together, and The Holydrug Couple was effectively born. A decade later, they’ve made ‘Hyper Super Mega’, an album that represents the culmination of everything they’ve learned in their years as a band.

Following the release and surrounding tours of their second album, 2015’s ‘Moonlust’ (Sacred Bones), the duo found themselves back at home, feeling directionless and listless. “The over-riding feeling was one of exhaustion,” Sepúlveda recalls, “exhaustion of the planet and of culture, the overuse of references and information that you see everywhere, in fashion, literature, tourism, music, technology and so on.”

So, the duo immersed themselves in these feelings and started to build the foundations of their new record. Amidst eleven tracks of perfectly-formed, heady psych-pop, ‘Hyper Super Mega’ speaks of immediacy, internet and social media, consumption, love and a comfortable despair at the state of the planet. It tells of a world over-connected through cell phones and information, whilst hinting at the place of occult language and imagery in an attempt to convene different and unknown places, or places that are open to interpretation.

Sonically, if ‘Hyper Super Mega’ feels, in places, like a classic pop record, that’s because Sepúlveda and Parra spent much of the recording process thinking, too, about the classic pop records of the ’60s and ’70s. Masterpieces by bands like The Beatles, The Beach Boys, and Fleetwood Mac were all reference points, not always explicitly in sound, but certainly in spirit. The duo approached the mythos of the “classic album” from their own inimitable perspective, hoping to make a record that felt authentically like The Holydrug Couple that might fit into the same canon.

STAFF COMMENTS

says: Longing Indie anthems bolstered with swooning, classic rock solos and huge, soaring synthlines. Cosmic and dreamy but intermittently propulsive, The Holydrug Couple have hit the perfect combination of melancholic, wandering instrumentals and pointed melodicism. Ace.

TRACK LISTING

1. Hyper Super Mega (3:58)
2. Waterfalls (4:20)
3. Forever End (4:00)
4. Ikebana Telephone Line (4:14)
5. Lucifer’s Coat (2:11)
6. I’ll Only Say This (5:01)
7. Easy (4:14)
8. Chevalier (2:53)
9. Hotel Cache (5:13)
10. Western Shade (1:54)
11. Mercury Lake (3:49)

Sacred Bones Records is proud to present the new album, Magus, Thou’s first full-length since 2014’s Heathen. In the months leading into the new album, Thou will be releasing three drastically different EPs: The House Primordial on Raw Sugar, Inconsolable on Community Records, and Rhea Sylvia on Deathwish, Inc. Each record will focus on a particular sound—noisy drone, quiet acoustic, and melodic grunge—all of which is incorporated into the new LP, subsumed in the band’s more standard doom metal.

While sonically, Magus may be a continuation of Heathen, thematically it stands as a stark rebuttal, a journey beyond the principles of pleasure and pain. It is more the culmination of these distinct EPs, which all orbit some internal black hole. FFO alienation, absurdity, boredom, futility, decay, the tyranny of history, the vulgarities of change, awareness as agony, reason as disease.

TRACK LISTING

1. Inward (10:09)
2. My Brother Caliban (1:04)
3. Transcending Dualities (8:53)
4. The Changeling Prince (6:29)
5. Sovereign Self (10:15)
6. Divine Will (1:35)
7. In The Kingdom Of Meaning (9:33) Greater
8. Invocation Of Disgust (5:59)
9. Elimination Rhetoric (7:54)
10. The Law Which Compels (2:59)
11. Supremacy (10:54)

Three Demos is a very unique release, featuring the very first demo recordings for songs from Julee Cruise’s initial lp with David Lynch and Angelo Badalamenti, Floating Into the Night.

In 1985, Lynch’s obsession with This Mortal Coil’s “Song to the Siren” was at a fever pitch. Wanting to feature the song in Blue Velvet, the rights to the Tim Buckley cover proved problematic and prohibitively expensive. Lynch had famously just began working with Angelo Badalamenti, who had been suggested by producer Fred Caruso to coach Isabella Rossellini with singing “Blue Velvet” for the film. Faced with the “Song to the Siren” dilemma, Caruso again suggested his friend Badalamenti as a possible solution, encouraging Lynch himself to pen lyrics in order to come up with an original alternative for the film. “David reluctantly agreed to write a lyric, but he thought writing a new song was absolutely preposterous because ‘Song to the Siren’ was his favorite song of all time,” Badalamenti says. The result – “Mysteries of Love,” sung by Cruise – ended up forging a rich blueprint for not just one song, but two full-length albums.

Two years after Blue Velvet was released, the notion of a full album of material took shape and three crucial demos were recorded to gain the confidence and financial support of a label. Early versions of “Floating,” “Falling,” and “The World Spins” were all roughed out in economic elegance, rendering distinctive snapshots of what could be if the formula of “Mysteries of Love” was spun into a larger body of work. They’re fascinating glimpses into the genesis of what became Floating Into the Night and the minimal key ingredients that made the material alchemize. An early version of the album opener “Floating” originally began with a stunning spoken-word intro later dropped entirely from the album version. A revelation in its overarching simplicity, the three-song collection is devoid of the lp’s additional arrangement flourishes, and yet still manages to present the same emotional depth charge with only voice, synthesizer, and lyric.

TRACK LISTING

1. Floating (Demo) (6:12)
2. Falling (Demo) (6:01)
3. The World Spins (Demo) (7:43)

Following the release of critically acclaimed LP Wake in Fright, which had two songs featured in the new season of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, it was time for Uniform vocalist Michael Berdan and instrumentalist Ben Greenberg to return to the studio. The duo decided to up the ante and add a third member to help perfect their vicious post-industrial dystopian cyber-punk. After some deliberation, Greenberg called upon drummer Greg Fox (Liturgy, Zs) to help round out the sound they were looking for. Using a mix of triggered samples and real drums along with layered synths and good old electric guitar, the trio arrived at what would become The Long Walk after only a few short days in the studio.

From the opening whirr of the title track, it’s clear that the band is onto something special. Recorded in Strange Weather studios in the first part of 2018, The Long Walk is eight new tracks by the duo of Greenberg and Berdan, incorporating Fox’s skills behind the drum kit to add an entirely new dimension to the signature Uniform sound. Ditching sequenced tracks, Greenberg opted for single takes to highlight the Frankenstein-like guitar-bass-synth hybrid that oozes throughout the recording. Meanwhile, crushing guitar thunder is punched up by Fox’s masterful drumming while Berdan’s cries from the nether feel more desperate and morose than ever. This is Uniform at its most bleak, emotional, and powerful.

Lyrically, The Long Walk deals with paradoxes in spirituality and organized religion. Berdan went to Catholic school for most of his primary education. Fear of Biblical hell and damnation felt tangible. As Berdan grew and matured emotionally, he began to reject Catholicism bit by bit. In the recent past, Berdan found himself slowly reconnecting with his background, observing how the faith that he found so repressive served as a great source of comfort and strength for so many. Yet therein lay the contradiction that drove him from religion in the first place — many of the human traditions of the church also dealt in repression, intolerance, and bigotry. Could one observe the rituals and practice of a faith while acknowledging and rejecting its ugliest elements?

TRACK LISTING

1. The Walk (5:31)
2. Inhuman Condition (4:16)
3. Found (3:51)
4. Transubstantiation (4:36)
5. Alone In The Dark (3:47)
6. Headless Eyes (3:58)
7. Anointing Of The Sick (4:47)
8. Peaceable Kingdom (6:49)

Hard to Please is the debut Sacred Bones 7" release by Bay Area artist Chystia Cabral, aka SPELLLING. She released her first full length Pantheon of Me in September 2017, and it was self-written, performed, and produced in her apartment in Berkeley, California. She began experimenting with music production in 2015 in effort to carry on the creative legacy of a lost loved one. Drawing heavily from messages in her dreams, her sound spirals through clarity and obscurity searching through landscapes of psychic space. The result is a divine soul music, soft in its restraint but heavy with passion. SPELLLING’s powerful vocal range dances over compositions that vary from rhythmic and ethereal to crunchy and hypnotic, while all remaining singularly cohesive to her distinct and enveloping sound. Pantheon of Me was Bandcamp’s #4 record of the year in 2017 and they raved of that sound: “Cabral has it, from her careful sense of composition to her charismatic presence to her ability to communicate with her music straight through to the listener’s heart.”

Her newest tracks “Hard to Please” and “My Other Voice” (a cover of Sparks’ 1979 symphonic disco track) pair together to reflect on bittersweet passions of an obsessive romance. “Hard to Please” swells through the excitement and pain of yearning to please an unsatisfiable lover, with “eyes of winter” but a promising “heart of spring.” The track presents as dance music but journeys through a swirling climax to something more spiritual. “My Other Voice” channels a more sinister state of romantic high, commanding obedience from this aloof lover, “you’re so independent but that’s going to change real soon, with my other voice I can destroy this room.” The sinister tone is juxtaposed with the elated music, that grooves celestially along, entrancing the listener and destroying the proverbial room with the power of SPELLLING’s voice, which elevates this cover beyond an homage and to a unique vision entirely its own.

TRACK LISTING

1. Hard To Please
2. My Other Voice

Zola Jesus’ Okovi: Additions lp offers a new angle on her 2017 album, Okovi. The collection pairs four previously unreleased songs from the Okovi sessions with four remixes by a diverse cast of artists.

Johnny Jewel turns “Ash to Bone” into a late-night cinematic torch song, Tri Angle Records composer Katie Gately’s “Siphon” is a dark choir of warping angels, black metal band Wolves in the Throne Room’s take on “Exhumed” makes the pounding industrial anthem even denser and heavier, and Toronto producer Joanne Pollock (formerly one half of Poemss with Venetian Snares’ Aaron Funk) makes “Soak” feel like an aching classical standard— until it starts warping in on itself and goes somewhere else entirely.

The songs on Additions traverse a vast amount of sonic ground, but taken together, they cohere remarkably well as an album, all while serving to enrich the experience of Okovi.

“These four new songs were intended to be on Okovi,” Nika Roza Danilova explains. “Each of them represents a snapshot of my journey in making the record, and are just as precious to me as the songs that made it onto the final track listing. The remixes are beloved in their own way, as most were born from organic circumstances, and have drawn the original songs into completely new atmospheres.”

TRACK LISTING

1. Vacant (3:36)
2. Bound (3:06)
3. Pilot Light (2:28)
4. Bitten Wool (3:15)
5. Ash To Bone (Johnny Jewel Remix) (3:17)
6. Siphon (Katie Gately Remix) (3:24)
7. Exhumed (Randall Dunn And Aaron Weaver [Wolves In The Throne Room] Remix) (4:00)
8. Soak (Joanne Pollock Remix) (4:10)

Drift is the seventh full-length by NYC rock polymaths The Men. The band’s last album, the self-released Devil Music, was the sound of a band who had been through hell hitting reset and looking to their roots to rediscover themselves. On Drift, The Men return to their longtime label Sacred Bones Records and explore the openness that Devil Music helped them find.

The immediately evident result of that exploration is the experimental quality of much of the material on Drift. Songwriters Mark Perro and Nick Chiericozzi chase their muses down a few dozen thrilling rabbit-holes over the course of the album’s nine tracks. The songs on Drift veer in a number of directions, but notably, almost none of them feature a prominent electric guitar. The lone exception, “Killed Someone,” is a rowdy riff-rocker, worthy of the finest moments of the band’s now-classic Leave Home and Open Your Heart albums. The rest of the album drives down stranger highways. “Secret Light” is an improvisation based on an old piano riff of Perro’s. “Maybe I’m Crazy” is a synth-driven dancefloor stomper for long after last call. “Rose on Top of the World” and “When I Held You in My Arms” are paisley-hued, psyched-out jams with big, beating hearts.

The album was recorded to 2" tape with Travis Harrison (Guided by Voices) at Serious Business Studios in Brooklyn. A whole pile of instruments was involved — synths, strings, sax, steel, harmonica, tape loops, on top of the usual guitar, bass, and drums. Unlike recent releases from The Men, there aren’t many overdubs on Drift — a reflection of the personalities of its makers becoming less frantic, Chiericozzi suggests. In fact, the band removed a lot of the additional parts they tried adding early on, giving the final product a bit of a ghostly feel. The songs on Drift took giant leaps and trips from their beginnings only to find the band returning to the first spark of creation.

TRACK LISTING

1. Maybe I’m Crazy (4:11)
2. When I Held You In My Arms (4:59)
3. Secret Light (4:16)
4. Rose On Top Of The World (4:28)
5. So High (3:26)
6. Killed Someone (2:30)
7. Sleep (2:45)
8. Final Prayer (5:46)
9. Come To Me (2:45)

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

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

For over a decade, Nika Roza Danilova has been recording music as Zola Jesus. She’s been on Sacred Bones Records for most of that time, and Okovi marks her reunion with the label.

Fittingly, the 11 electronics-driven songs on Okovi share musical DNA with her early work on Sacred Bones. The music was written in pure catharsis, and as a result, the sonics are heavy, dark, and exploratory. In addition to the contributions of Danilova’s longtime live bandmate Alex DeGroot, producer/musician WIFE, cellist/noise-maker Shannon Kennedy from Pedestrian Deposit, and percussionist Ted Byrnes all helped build Okovi’s textural universe.

With Okovi, Zola Jesus has crafted a profound meditation on loss and reconciliation that stands tall alongside the major works of its genre. The album peaks of tragedy with great wisdom and clarity. Its songs plumb dark depths, but they reflect light as well.

ARTIST STATEMENT:

Last year, I moved back to the woods in Wisconsin where I was raised. I built a little house just steps away from where my dilapidated childhood tree fort is slowly recombining into earth. Okovi was fed by this return to roots and several very personal traumas.

While writing Okovi, I endured people very close to me trying to die, and others trying desperately not to. Meanwhile, I was fighting through a haze so thick I wasn’t sure I’d find my way to the other side. Death, in all of its masks, has been encircling everyone I love, and with it the questions of legacy, worth, and will.

Okovi is a Slavic word for shackles. We’re all shackled to something—to life, to death, to bodies, to minds, to illness, to people, to birthright, to duty. Each of us born with a unique debt, and we have until we die to pay it back. Without this cost, what gives us the right to live? And moreover, what gives us the right to die? Are we really even free to choose?

This album is a deeply personal snapshot of loss, reconciliation, and a sympathy for the chains that keep us all grounded to the unforgiving laws of nature. To bring it to life, I decided to enlist the help of Alex DeGroot, who has been the only constant in my live band and helped mix the Stridulum EP back in 2010. It will be released on Sacred Bones, the closest group of people I’ll ever have to blood-bound family.

TRACK LISTING

1. Doma
2. Exhumed
3. Soak
4. Ash To Bone
5. Witness
6. Siphon
7. Veka
8. Wiseblood
9. NMO
10. Remains
11. Half Life

“Seven yers ago, it was winter break at university in Madison, Wisconsin. There was a snowstorm that covered the city with a still white haze. Not a single person in the streets. I was sitting on my bed with a cheap keyboard and a computer, screaming into the void. I barely remember writing the songs. It was a chaotic point in my life. I had no time to think about process or intent. It was a purge. I do remember taking a break from recording, bundling up, and walking through the barren streets while listening to the demos I’d made. The world, at once, felt clear. After writing and producing what would become the Stridulum EP, I contacted a new friend, Alex DeGroot, to come over and record my vocals. He was studying audio engineering and had more knowledge and gear than I could dream of. He helped mix Stridulum, too, because all I had was a pair of headphones. (Since then, Alex has stuck by me, as a live bandmate, technical director, co-producer, mixer, and engineer.) These songs were a huge leap of faith back then. It was my first time singing without layers of distortion, echo, and reverb. It was the first time I peeled back the layers to find out what was at the core. I’m still on that path today, seeing how far I can push myself into unknown places, whether through clarification or destruction. It’s like Stridulum’s still here with me, underneath it all. Still, it’s surreal to think that this record, made by a 19-year-old girl sitting on a bed in a freezing old house in Madison, would make its way into strangers’ ears seven years later.”

-Nika Roza Danilova, June 2017

Collects the early Zola Jesus EPs Stridulum and Valusia in a single volume for the first time.

TRACK LISTING

1. Night (3:37)
2. Trust Me (2:01)
3. I Can’t Stand (4:10)
4. Stridulum (4:22)
5. Run Me Out (3:19)
6. Manifest Destiny (3:16)
7. Poor Animal (4:27)
8. Tower (3:58)

“Contradictions embraced: Although SQÜRL’s music is anti-mathematic, SQÜRL loves mathematics. We love the Fibonacci numbers. And magic numbers. Perfect numbers. Bell numbers. Catalan numbers. 260 is none of these. It isn’t a perfect number, and not factional of any number. It’s not even a regular number. 260, though, is the number of days in all Mesoamerican calendars. The Mayan calendar. The Tolkien calendar. 260 is also the number of days of human gestation. (Orangutans also). 260 also has an elliptical connection to the dark rift; a series of molecular dust clouds located between our solar system and the Sagittarius Arm of the Milky Way. And although not a magic number, 260 is the magic constant of the magic square investigated by Benjamin Franklin, and part of the solution to a famous chess problem; the n-queens problem for n=8. 260 is also the country code for Zambia. And the US area code for Fort Wayne, Indiana. Therefore, SQÜRL has labeled this recording EP #260.” -Jim Jarmusch, March 1, 2017

SQÜRL is: Jim Jarmusch, Carter Logan and Shane Stoneback.

An enthusiastically marginal rock band from New York City who like big drums & distorted guitars, cassette recorders, loops, feedback, sad country songs, molten stoner core, chopped & screwed hip-hop, and imaginary movie scores.

SQÜRL began in 2009 when Jim Jarmusch and Carter Logan teamed with producer Shane Stoneback to record some original music for the film The Limits of Control. Echoing the varied Spanish landscapes captured in the film, the three emerged with a set of slow-motion psychedelic rock instrumentals (releasing them as Bad Rabbit). Following these scoring sessions Jim, Shane, and Carter continued to record new originals while also exploring the back-alleys of American country, noise, and psychedelia. SQÜRL released a series of 3 EPs, recorded over a 3 year period by Shane at Treefort Recording in Brooklyn, NY. Jarmusch and Logan’s collaboration continued as a duo with SQÜRL’s acclaimed score for Paterson, and a trio with Stoneback for EP #260

TRACK LISTING

1. Solstice (6:03)
2. The Dark Rift (4:35)
3. Equinox (5:09)
4. Gates Of Ishtar (Equinox Remix By Anton Newcombe) (9:30)
5. The Dark Rift (Föllakzoid Remix) (8:32)

Since their first demo in 2013, the Austin expats in Institute have edged their raw anarcho punk blitz into something much more expansive and nuanced. 2014’s Salt EP marked the beginning of the band’s working relationship with Sacred Bones, and it explored longer, more experimental song forms. Catharsis, the band’s debut full-length, was another huge push forward, with a slightly cleaner production and some Krautrock influence creeping in around the edges. Subordination sees them push themselves further out of genre, incorporating hard rock and glam and writing some of the most diverse material of their career.

Subordination was written in the days leading up to Institute’s first European tour, where they then had a chance to sculpt the songs live before recording them in summer of 2016. The song writing and recording process sought to close the gap between the band’s records and shows, to make an album as representative of their live set as possible. It was the most collaborative Institute writing session to date, with all four band members contributing (gtr -Arak Avakian, drums - Barry Elkanick, bass- Adam Cahoon & vox - Moses Brown). They worked again with producer Ben Greenberg (Uniform) and fully captured the intensity that has made them one of the best live punk bands touring today.

Frontman Moses Brown’s lyrics remain deeply personal, but rather than diving into introspection and plucking out intimate details about his life, he attempts to dismantle systems of patriarchal thought and power. Brown investigates national insecurities and American socialization failures through the lens of his personal experiences in both public school and art schools.

The songs on Subordination address the lonely sham of playing by the rules, the search for money and power, the annihilation of a true personality, and the stan¬dards of normalcy that from childhood conditions us to feel abject.

TRACK LISTING

1. Exhibitionism (2:35)
2. Only Child (3:29)
3. Prissy Things (1:54)
4. All This Pride (2:39)
5. Oil Money (3:04)
6. Human Law (4:34)
7. Too Dumb (1:51)
8. Good Ol’ Boys (2:50)
9. Powerstation (3:23)

Meaning all things magick and supernatural, the root of the word occult is that which is hidden, concealed, beyond the limits of our minds. If this is occult, then the Occult Architecture of Moon Duo’s fourth album - a psychedelic opus in two separate volumes released in 2017 is an intricately woven hymn to the invisible structures found in the cycle of seasons and the journey of day into night, dark into light.

Offering a cosmic glimpse into the hidden patterning embedded in everything, Occult Architecture reflects the harmonious duality of these light and dark energies through the Chinese theory of Yin and Yang.

Following the Yin (feminine, darkness, night, earth) represented on Occult Architecture Vol. 1, Vol. 2 presents the Yang. Yang means “the bright side of the hill” and is associated with the male, sun, light and the spirit of heaven, and as such Vol. 2 explores the light and airy elements of Moon Duo’s complex psyche.

“In production we referred to Vol. 1 as the fuzz dungeon, and Vol. 2 as the crystal palace,” guitarist Ripley Johnson explains. “The darkness of Vol. 1 gave birth to the light of Vol. 2. We had to have both elements in order to complete the cycle. We’re releasing them separately to allow them their own space, and to ensure clarity of vision. To that end we also mixed Vol. 2 separately, in the height of Portland summer, focusing on its sonic qualities of lightness, air, and sun. Listeners can ultimately use the two volumes individually or together, depending on circumstance or the desired effect.”

Vol. 2 was mixed in Portland by the band’s longtime collaborator Jonas Verwijnen

STAFF COMMENTS

says: If you haven't heard of Moon Duo already, where have you been? This is the second (and equally excellent) album they have put out in 3 months! Driven psychedelic haze, hypnotic distortion and ethereal vocals, pushed together into a perfect combination of melody and drive. How do they keep doing it?

TRACK LISTING

1. New Dawn (6:07)
2. Mirror’s Edge (7:02)
3. Sevens (6:48)
4. Lost In Light (8:39)
5. The Crystal World (10:10)

Wake in Fright, the second full-length by the New York City duo Uniform, is a harrowing exploration of self-medication, painted in the colors of war. Following the Ghosthouse 12", whose A-side Pitchfork called “their most relentless track yet,” vocalist Michael Berdan and guitarist/producer Ben Greenberg return with a new batch of even more punishing songs that incorporate elements of industrial music, thrash metal, harsh noise, and power electronics.

“This record is primarily about psychic transition,” Berdan explained. “The distress that these songs attempt to illustrate comes from a place of stagnation and monotony. This is what happens when old ways of thinking become exhausted and old ways of coping prove ineffective. Something must change or it will break.”

The characters Berdan brings to life in his lyrics quit using but have ruinous relapses (“Habit”) or struggle as their resolve crumbles (“Bootlicker”); they use alcohol to ease their insomnia but and are helpless when they get sober and stop sleeping again (“Night of Fear”); they’re existential misanthropes trapped in dead-end lives (“The Lost”).

Greenberg sets these stories to menacing guitar and samples of literal sounds of war — the kick drums are bombs going off, the snares are gunshots. He drew the record’s immense sample library from action movies, Foley sound packs, field recordings, and more, and the result is devastating. The guitar is also as crucial as ever, and now as indebted Slayeras it is to Big Black. Greenberg conjures up massive riffs and shredding solos, pushing the band deeper into the metal world whose borderlands they’ve long stalked.

“We are surrounded by war and the whole world is burning and it doesn’t seem like there are any appropriate reactions or responses left anymore,” Greenberg elaborated. “This music is our response to and our reflection of the overwhelming violence, chaos, hate, and destruction that confronts us and everyone else in the world every day of our lives. When we play, I don’t feel powerless anymore. I hope this record can help others transcend their anger and frustration.”

STAFF COMMENTS

says: A visceral and brutal assault of double kick drums, pummelling grindcore guitars and low-fi gritty production aesthetic make this a force to be reckoned with. Electronic backboned brutalist sound sculptures for the enraged.

TRACK LISTING

1. Tabloid (3:15)
2. Habit (4:31)
3. The Lost (4:50)
4. The Light At The End (Cause) (4:37)
5. The Killing Of America (4:04)
6. Bootlicker (5:03)
7. Night Of Fear (5:02)
8. The Light At The End (Effect) (5:53)

Uniform formed in New York City in 2013 when old friends Ben Greenberg (ex-The Men, Hubble, and the producer/engineer responsible for much of the Sacred Bones catalog) and Michael Berdan (ex-Drunkdriver, York Factory Complaint) reconnected and realized that they had evolved to a similar place musically. Wanting as intimate an experience as possible, they decided to keep the project a two-man show, eschewing a live rhythm section for programmed drums and low-end synths, augmented with Greenberg playing guitar and Berdan handling vocals. The collaboration quickly yielded a raw 12", followed by a full-length, Perfect World. The Ghosthouse12", is the first Uniform release on Sacred Bones Records, and it will be followed by a full-length in early 2017.

Ghosthouse shares a basic configuration with the previous Uniform releases, but the tools have evolved far beyond their initial drum machine and bass synth setup. These songs have grown from a broader palette of sounds — shots, explosions, implosions, impacts, ricochets, collapse; the sounds of conflict, war, and destruction that we witness every day. The result is the most sonically confrontational Uniform material to date, and Berdan’s lyrics, largely inspired by his lifelong battle with insomnia and depression, match them for relentlessness.

The three songs on Ghosthouseshow the incisiveness that Greenberg and Berdan now have at their command. The title track addresses the feeling of lying awake at night and wondering if it’s still possible to make peace with an estranged friend after their death. “Waiting Period,” a riff on the Hubert Selby Jr. novel of the same name, is the internal dialogue of a man waiting for his handgun application to clear so he can kill himself. The “Symptom of the Universe” cover pays mostly faithful homage to Black Sabbath, but trades the original’s “summer skies of love” for something far bleaker. These tracks reveal the incredible range that’s possible within the Uniform musical template, and they provide a fascinating glimpse of what’s to come.

TRACK LISTING

1. Ghosthouse (7:25)
2. Waiting Period (5:47)
3. Symptom Of The Universe (5:44)

Marching Church, the onetime solo project and now bona fide big band formed by singer Elias Bender Rønnenfelt, has followed its leader’s muse everywhere from their early days of 4-track lo-fi tapes, to Sam Cooke-tinged soul on This World is Not Enough, to outré free jazz on their most recent Coming Down 12".

For Telling It Like It Is, Rønnenfelt and his bandmates have foregone much of their past proclivity for wild stylistic swings in favor of thematically unified, complicated, but fundamentally cohesive song arrangements; the studio itself at times acting as an auxiliary band member. The result is the most focused vision of Marching Church yet, but one that has lost none of its swagger, and none of its power to enthrall.“We have here one world united under the sparks of one enormous disco ball hanging over us like the moon,” Rønnenfelt elaborates. “In one fleeting moment in the light of its mirrored surface we see human endurance, in the next we see doom.” The light and shade he finds in this worldview permeate the songs on Telling It Like It Is. Rønnenfelt describes the new work “an album which raises multiple flags,” and “the sound of individualism stuck in the center of the modern world, swimming with and against the current.”

The band in 2016 comprises Rønnenfelt and his frequent collaborator and Iceage bandmate Johan S. Weith (on electric viola and guitar here), Lower‘s rhythm section of Kristian Emdal and Anton Rothstein, trumpet player Jakob Emil Lamdahl, and Hand of Dust’s Bo Høyer Hansen. Augmenting these sessions are Maaike Van der Linde and Thora Sveinsdottir of the Stargaze Orchestraon flute and strings, and Sonja La Bianca of Choir of Young Believers on saxophone. The obvious chemistry among these players makes this the most cultivated Marching Church album to date, unveiling the full spectrum of capabilities and musical dexterity of each player. Telling It Like It Is taps into a debauched lunacy that teeters equally on the verge of exhaustion, and the charged sensuality rooted in our loins that keep us going.

TRACK LISTING

1.Let It Come Down (3:18)
2.Up For Days (4:10)
3.Heart Of Life (3:44)
4.Inner City Pigeon (5:04)
5.Lion’s Den (4:46)
6.Florida Breeze (5:26) (CD Only)
7.2016 (4:02)
8.Achilles’ Heel (4:41)
9.Information (4:35)
19.Calenture (5:39)

After recently signing to Sacred Bones Records, new four-piece Exploded View, fronted by German/Bristol political- journalist-turned-musician/singer Anika, announce news of their debut self-titled album.

While lead single ‘No More Parties in The Attic’ is laden with an enticing no-wave, post-punk sound, layered with distorted guitars and ominous drones– ‘Orlando' chimes in with echoing vintage synths, courtesy of Hugo Quezada that clash with a chilly electro backbeat and an anthemic soulful bass line setting the tone. With her disarming quietude nursery rhyme like vocal delivery, Anika remarks on the creation process: “Well, that day I was speechless and empty; a reflection of the times. I became a vessel for the past; the only way to deal with or help understand the present. Enlightenment came with the help of some strong leading ladies; A certain author, a certain film and a certain actress. Go figure.”

Anika released her self-titled debut album in collaboration with Geoff Barrow’s Invada imprint and Stones Throw to critical acclaim in 2010. This new project was created during the rehearsal sessions for Anika's Mexican live debut back in March 2014. An unexpected partnership formed between Annika and local producers, Martin Thulin (Crocodiles producer) synth-head Hugo Quezada (Robota) and Riotboy sweetheart Hector Melgarejo (Jessy Bulbo / Nos llamamos) to form Exploded View. The four musicians discovered a new sound, several steps removed from the krautrock-isms of Henderson’s previous work during their rehearsals and live performances in Mexico City. The straight to tape sessions that followed in the San Rafael neighborhood, ventured somewhere new; a lighter place, unguarded, veering from any script. Improvisation was the guiding principle and the source of the band’s inspiration. The studio itself was outfitted so that every sound produced in the room would be recorded. A Tascam 388 8-track captured everything – fully live, fully improvised, first-takes only. Produced by Thulin and Quezada and mastered by Josh Bonati in NYC.

For fans of Can, dub, and political revolution.

STAFF COMMENTS

says: Berlin's Exploded View formed around Annika Henderson (aka Anika), better known, up to this point, for the sparse, troubled beauty of her solo work. The exploded view in this case is formed by what was initially intended to be Anika's backing band, but is now the entity in its own right. This is a disturbed dream, a fitful night of drones, Kraut dub and fractured melodies over which Anika's low tones brood and rant on subjects as diverse as capitalism, the illusion of existence and Robert De Niro. A dark joy.

TRACK LISTING

1.Lost Illusions
2.One Too Many
3.Orlando
4.Call On The Gods
5.Disco Glove
6.Stand Your Ground
7.No More Parties In The Attic
8.Lark Descending
9.Gimme Something
10.Beige
11. Killjoy

Both formats include an exclusive free Sacred Bones label sampler bonus disc CD.

Don’t sleep. Don’t retreat. Stay awhile. Let’s spend the night together. Cheena testify to a long history of New York nights, trading insults and borrowing beer at rooftop parties that began years ago. There’s plenty of New York in this band – Lou Reed’s better glam punches found a jawline or two among them, the heavy handed playing of the Dolls, and that particular manner of NY glam you can hear in Kiss– that’s all in Cheena.

Spend The Night With...is a soundtrack to nights where revelry and lust are never isolated from poor decisions and vanity, where the grave sincerity of a bathroom confession explodes into cruelty and hysteria. Nights on busy streets or crowded subway cars coloured with elegant ambition and constrained by the practicality of street smarts. While we say this is NY music, we must also say this is American music. One could imagine a timeless jukebox of American RNR history from hard glam to cocaine / codeine country has blasted into the imbibed ears of our Cheens for many nights on end. Thus we hear songs for and of the night, songs pieced together out of iPhone recordings of 5am guitar histrionics and lyrics scraped out of speed fried text exchanges. There is a long history of bands as disparate as the Byrds, Gun Club, and the Flesh Eaters which had to reconcile RNR with country and blues roots; a tradition of truly AMERICAN music that feeds on itself. This is where I would isolate the sound of Cheena.

America eating itself. Every generation gets the Cheena it deserves because we still live in cities and we still need RNR to live. We still need guitars to be gripped by gods. We still need bards to write odes to heroic crime and ignoble, destitute hedonistic excess, we still need music to drink to that also contains the darkness and disease of hangovers so we aren’t too far away from what is raw and what is real. With love and admiration, I kiss your hand from Melbourne to the Sacred Bones offices and the 538 roof. – DX (Total Control, UV Race, Distort).

TRACK LISTING

1. Cry For Help
2. Fever
3. Car
4. Jane
5. Electric Snoopy Gang
6. Stupor
7. Tarzan
8. 7 Nights
9. Liberated Animal
10. Lost My Way
11. M.E. (Bonus Track)

‘Like Shadows Dancing In The Dark’- Label Sampler Bonus Disc
Tracklist
1. Jenny Hval – Female Vampire (from Blood Bitch)
2. Exploded View – Orlando (from Exploded View)
3. Lust For Youth – Display (from Compassion)
4. Blanck Mass – Atrophies (from Dumb Flesh)
5. Wymond Miles – Divided In Two (from Call By Night)
6. Psychic Ills – I Don’t Mind (feat. Hope Sandoval) (from Inner Journey Out)
7. Institute – Perpetual Ebb (from Catharsis)
8. Cheena – Car (from Spend The Night With…)
9. Destruction Unit – Salvation (from Negative Feedback Resistor)
10. Marching Church – Living In Doubt (from This World Is Not Enough)
11. Flowers For Agatha – The Freedom Curse (from KBDR Vol.2)
12. Pop.1280 – USS ISS (from Paradise)
13. Almost Holy OST (Atticus Ross & Bobby Krilic) – Wild Moose
14. John Carpenter – Utopian Façade (from Lost Themes II)

Wymond Miles was raised in the working-class small towns of the American West. On Call by Night, the singer’s latest widescreen opus, Miles masterfully evokes that lost landscape, all while grappling with issues of fatherhood, privacy, PTSD, violence, and dissipated romance. The album adds a critical new chapter to the Fresh & Onlys guitarist’s story as an artist, and reasserts him as a major voice in contemporary songwriting. Call by Night sees Miles building a noticeably bigger sound than on his previous solo records, while simultaneously standing as his most intimate work.

It’s a record explicitly written for the fidelity of the vinyl format, with louder songs beginning each album side and quieter songs at the interior. His attention to sequencing paid off; the album flows like a piece of classic cinema, and sounds like it’s splashed across a drive-in screen in 70mm. Recorded using vintage gear by Phil Manley (The Fucking Champs, Trans Am) at El Studio in San Francisco and Miles’ Garden Chamber home studio, the record is a treasure of tube-amp warmth, and a landmark in the songwriter’s catalog. Miles wrote most of Call by Night on piano, and while the wall-of-sound guitar and cinematic synth playing that helped define his earlier efforts is still present, the beating heart of the songs is left more open thanks to his new method.

Where previous full-lengths were cloaked in distinct aesthetic choices, this record exists outside of any stylistic restraints. “Divided in Two,” the lead single, considers dignity, class, honor, and father-son relationships through the devastating lens of PTSD, all set to a sardonic flag-waving waltz, with martial percussive bomb blasts. The title track explores the enduring aesthetic of British psych-folk. Other songs dip into the traditions of gospel music, sea shanties, and even big-box power ballads, using antique instruments and Miles’ unique perspective on the modern world to forge a new collection of entries for the American songbook. Miles has said the songs on Call by Night mark his “more definitive commitment to seek, listen, and give voice to an enduring muse.” If that’s true, then the muse has obviously been singing to him loud and clear.

New solo record by the guitarist of The Fresh & Onlys

TRACK LISTING

1.Summer Rains (4:44)
2.Protection (2:14)
3.Solomon’s Song (3:05)
4.Call By Night (2:37)
5.Bride Of The Lamb (2:17)
6.Divided In Two (4:01)
7.Rear View Mirror (3:16)
8.Stand Before Me (4:27)
9.Devil’s Blue Eyes (4:12)

‘Like Shadows Dancing In The Dark’- Label Sampler Bonus Disc
Tracklist
1. Jenny Hval – Female Vampire (from Blood Bitch)
2. Exploded View – Orlando (from Exploded View)
3. Lust For Youth – Display (from Compassion)
4. Blanck Mass – Atrophies (from Dumb Flesh)
5. Wymond Miles – Divided In Two (from Call By Night)
6. Psychic Ills – I Don’t Mind (feat. Hope Sandoval) (from Inner Journey Out)
7. Institute – Perpetual Ebb (from Catharsis)
8. Cheena – Car (from Spend The Night With…)
9. Destruction Unit – Salvation (from Negative Feedback Resistor)
10. Marching Church – Living In Doubt (from This World Is Not Enough)
11. Flowers For Agatha – The Freedom Curse (from KBDR Vol.2)
12. Pop.1280 – USS ISS (from Paradise)
13. Almost Holy OST (Atticus Ross & Bobby Krilic) – Wild Moose
14. John Carpenter – Utopian Façade (from Lost Themes II)

Movement and gesture is natural. The flâneur has an iPhone, and their heart is embroidered into a microfiber sleeve in gold.

Lust for Youth are a three-piece from Copenhagen. 2014’s acclaimed album, International, took the melancholic insomnia of their former releases out into the street and away from the domestic frustrations of a life in headphones. Suddenly, surrounded by bodies, and with a staccato heart, Balearic infatuations and capricious nights in crowded clubs set the mood for Norrvide’s pining sighs. International marked Lust For Youth’s new-found decadence with fully resolved charm and enhanced self-deprecation. This was swiftly channeled into their recent hit, “Better Looking Brother.” Compassion’s first single was streamed over 50k times in its first month, capping off a highly successful 2015 of worldwide tours and critical social media updates.

Compassion restates beauty for a time of crisis and clickbait. Judgement, design, form, and opinion: to what end will we refine our world if we can’t also make an anthem of our lives? This is the tender conspiracy: I’m on twitter; I have an anthem. Do we have an anthem? We have lust. Let’s meet IRL.

Lust for Youth are affectionately vicious, and vulnerably sharp. They are the anticipation of the comedown as you come up on the best you’ve ever been offered from a bathroom stall. This is the spectrum: a low you know, and a dizzy new height.

Hearts blind lights and finance desire. Is it the fate of the cunning to look good, or is it just cunning to look this good? Compassion is dexterity: we all look this good. An impulse is an appetite, and you’re entitled to everything. Multitask collapse and revolution because you’re a beautiful mess.

Compassion is deliverance.
Anticipate compassion. —Patrick Quick

TRACK LISTING

1. Stardom (3:45)
2.Limerence (3:34)
3. Easy Window (3:20)
4. Sudden Ambitions (4:19)
5. Better Looking Brother (7:29)
6. Display (4:20)
7. Tokyo (3:40)
8. In Return (4:42)

Human culture has reached its terminus. The corporate and political machinery that seeks to subjugate our bodies and control our minds has utterly defeated us, and we didn’t put up a fight. We willingly participate in the constant surveillance that has stripped us of any semblance of privacy. It is this world that Pop.1280 inhabits, and unto this world that they offer Paradise, their third full-length album. Paradise is an act of defiance against the engineers of these end times, yes — but it’s also an unforgiving look into the mirror; it’s the paradise we created for ourselves.

While Paradise is indeed concerned about the ills that technology has wrought in the modern world, it’s also a record fraught with existential ennui. A fear permeates the record that the world will never get any better; that we as humans have made our bed and now must lie in it. The combined weight of those external and internal forces lay the foundation for the album, and they give it its power. Paradise builds on 2013’s Imps of Perversion LP and 2015’s Penetrate 7" by venturing further outside of traditional notions of punk, and diving even deeper into outer sounds. Synthesizers, mechanized drum machines, and samplers play as critical a role on the record as the more familiar squall of Ivan Drip’s buzzsaw guitar and Chris Bug’s vocals. Any noise a band member could make that helped contribute to the record’s atmosphere of unease was welcome; synth player Allegra Sauvage adds cello to two songs, and drummer/producer Andy Chugg plays trumpet on the title track.

The sessions for Paradise were held at the Population Control Center, and the result is the most collaborative Pop. 1280 release to date. Despite its misgivings about technology, Paradise was made possible by the confluence of humans and their machines, at times struggling for control, but ultimately working together to create this vital, vicious piece of art. If the bitter irony makes you smile, hold that pose — the camera lens is watching.

TRACK LISTING

1.Pyramids On Mars (5:24)
2.Phantom Freighter (3:38)
3.In Silico (7:13)
4.Chromidia (2:52)
5.USS ISS (3:26)
6. Paradise (3:37)
7.Rain Song (4:45)
8.The Last Undertaker (4:02)
9. Kingdom Come (4:32)

Since 2010, Elias Bender Rønnenfelt (Iceage, Vår) has used the Marching Church moniker to a variety of musical ends, both live and recorded. However, the project as it exists on This World Is Not Enough wasn’t born until November 2013. With a live performance looming and no real idea what the set would be, Rønnenfelt found a new vision for the band while daydreaming at a gig at the venue where Marching Church was set to perform. “What I pictured was me in a comfortable armchair, adorned in a golden robe, leading a band while a girl kept pouring me champagne when I required it,” Rønnenfelt explained. “This raised the question, ‘What sort of music would go along with this picture?’”

Rønnenfelt discovered the answer to that question with a lineup rounded out by Kristian Emdal and Anton Rothstein of Lower, Cæcilie Trier (Choir of Young Believers), Bo H. Hansen (Hand of Dust, Sexdrome) and Frederikke Hoffmeier (Puce Mary). Under Rønnenfelt’s leadership, the group composed some music, rehearsed twice, and played their show. It was decided that night that this incarnation of Marching Church would make a record.

This World Is Not Enough was influenced at first by obscure works like David Maranha’s experimental drone-rock saga Antarctica, and eventually by soul bandleaders like James Brown and Sam Cooke. “The whole month of writing and rehearsing and the one week we had in the studio was truly an explosion of ideas,” Rønnenfelt said. “Improvisation, something I have never worked with before, was crucial in the making of this album, considering the loose nature of the writing on some of these songs. The album works because of the band’s incredible ability of breathing life into these, at times, very simple ideas and experiments.” The eight tracks that made the final cut are, in Rønnenfelt’s words, “songs of nocturnal longing, preposterous self-obsession and cockeyed etiquette,” and they are an exemplary statement of the songwriter’s extraordinary growth since the birth of Iceage.

TRACK LISTING

1. Living In Doubt
2. King Of Song
3. Hungry For Love
4. Your Father’s Eyes
5. Calling Out A Name
6. Every Child (Portrait Of Wellman Braud)
7. Up A Hill
8. Dark End Of The Street

Sacred Bones Records is proud to present International, The third full length LP from Copenhagen's Lust For Youth. To put it bluntly, International is unrecognizable as a Lust For Youth record on first listen. Hannes Norrvide’s previous solo albums under the Lust for Youth moniker have been described as “dark, cold, atonal, tormented, lonely, and lower than lo-fi.” The approach on International has shifted dramatically. Writing as a three-piece now, with longtime live collaborator Loke Rahbek and new band member Malthe Fisher, who produces and plays guitar, LFY have entered a completely new territory. The result is stunning. International is a buoyant synth masterpiece in the vein of early Depeche Mode, Pet Shop Boys and New Order. Norrvide’s work has always had pop sensibilities buried deep in the reverb, but the hooks are front and center on International, and there is nothing lo-fi about it.

That is not to say the record is without substance. There are still some deeply introspective moments as well, notably the instrumental passages “Ultras” and “Basorexia,” which evoke the morning-after loneliness that a lot of earlier Lust For Youth work has explored. According to Rahbek, “the record sort of happened by chance. Hannes and I had talked about recording some stuff together for the fun of it, and Malthe offered to help us record. Initially, we were just going to do a song or two, but within a few weeks it was obvious that it was a combination that worked. The period was strange, terrible things happened in everyone’s life outside of the studio, so as a result many hours were spent in the studio, like a safe zone.”

“As the title indicates,” Rahbek adds, “the record deals with the rootless, sometimes almost inhuman, nature of traveling and touring. Hotel rooms and strangers’ beds, drugs and clubs, and the impossibility of living a regular life.” It may be an irregular life, but nothing could suit them better. International is Norrvide’s magnum opus, and with Fisher’s production and Rahbek’s co-writing skills, the potential this band has always shown has been fully realized. The album features additional production by Elias Bender Rønnenfelt of Iceage as well as Adrian Toubro of Lower

TRACK LISTING

1. Epoetin Alfa (3:32)
2. Illume (2:39)
3. Ultras (1:27)
4. New Boys (3:32)
5. Lungomare (5:03)
6. Armida (4:50)
7. After Touch (4:00)
8. Basorexia (2:01)
9 Running (3:52)
10 International (3:49)

THIS IS A RECORD STORE DAY 2014 EXCLUSIVE, LIMITED TO ONE PER PERSON.

In early 2007, David Lynch was the subject of a retrospective art exhibition at Paris' Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain. Evocatively titled The Air is on Fire, it was notable for being the first major comprehensive exhibition of the avant-garde director's paintings, photographs and drawings. It wasn't strictly a visual affair; throughout the entire gallery's two floors and four rooms, a pervasive, interactive soundscape escorted viewers through the work. That soundscape, which shares the name of the exhibition, was composed by Lynch and his collaborator, Dean Hurley, and it's being issued for the first time on vinyl by Sacred Bones Records as a special Record Store Day release.