For ten years Spike Fuck has existed more as a messy myth than an artist; sporadic works forever poised on the precipice of triumph, rumours of death or insanity and so on. Spike’s mission is to distill the sacred and profane, balancing the melancholy and humour of life; “to be alive is to be traumatised.” Luckily, the devotion to his music persevered, somewhat bolstered by his inconsistency and inaccessibility. This inexplicable goodwill towards his artistry is perhaps partly due to Spike’s timeless, pained and confessional lyricism, though more pointedly, the fragility of a life mired in addiction. His being or works does not question the virtue of life, but simply addresses the numb, pragmatic and far more immediate matter of surviving another day, an almost ineffable sentiment only justified by his distinct, poetic audaciousness. Free from his arresting thoughts, 'Evidence', the long anticipated debut album, is a brazen proof of life statement. Convicted by the outlandish idea of evidencing a ‘you had to be there’ mentality, the record honours the presence in body, a record to be felt, never to be rationalized.

The material on 'Evidence' touches on elements of new wave, glam, soul and doo-wop, citing Pere Ubu, New York Dolls, The Temptations and Bettye Swan as key influences. Melodically it emits the energy of a down-and-out CBGBs band who cashes in by recording a lucrative Christmas album. Spike frequently uses sonic and lyrical juxtapositions to perform comic twists of sincerity, a reflection of society's obsession with ‘getting a rise’. On 'Bored to Death', a scuzzy, laidback and soulful tune, paired with morbid ragebait lyrics that payoff as a stand up joke “when I look up at the sun it makes me so happy cause I know one day it’s gonna kill me, and it’ll kill you too!” Lead single 'All By Myself' carries on in this fashion; with feelgood, family-friendly punk doo-wop production, Spike is misleading on if his joy comes from the pride in solitude, or from lone- liness and a ‘give me everything’ mentality in the act of shooting heroin. The vocal performances oscillate between being blasé, vulnerable and manic; 'Sweet Release' meets power-ballad criteria solely due to Spike’s deteriorating cries into the void, the jittery delivery on 'Getting Sober' embodies religious fanaticism while sounding like a pop song written by Suicide for a David Lynch film.

'Evidence' is an album that lives outside the limits of discourse; its purpose is eponymous and self-evident. It is what it is, and is subject to interpretation. There is no point in interrogating attachments, virtue or value. The only rightful way to live is to be.

TRACK LISTING

1. CAN'T GET IT UP 
2. HAD YOUR WAY 
3. SWEET RELEASE 
4. BORED TO DEATH
5. ALL BY MYSELF 
6. GETTING SOBER
7. BLUELIGHT
8. HATE ME

An abandoned cathedral. A gruesome murder. A powerful supernatural entity living in the catacombs. It all comes to a head in downtown Los Angeles. What will happen and who will live to tell the tale? Such is the storyline of 'Cathedral', the thrilling new album and terrifying graphic novel from director and musician John Carpenter, based on a dream Carpenter had in 2024. 'Cathedral' has all the drama, dark atmosphere, and frenetic pacing of a classic heavy metal record. Especially designed as the soundtrack to the graphic novel, each track corresponds to a specific section of the book.

The liner notes included with the album packaging feature prompts for each track, creating a fully interactive experience. Combined with the graphic novel, it’s the closest thing to a new John Carpenter film in years. The music on 'Cathedral' retains all the eerie atmosphere and sinister propulsion of the epochal scores Carpenter created for his films Halloween, The Fog, and Assault on Precinct 13, but this is a much heavier, riff-driven enterprise.

Carpenter is a firm believer that music plays a major role in what really makes something scary. That’s first and foremost,” the director says. “It’s all about making the music work.” “This is somewhat different sounding stuff that we’ve done, but it’s done with the same desire in mind,” he adds. “In other words, put this thing on and imagine you’re watching a movie. That’s what we want you to do.” Daniel Davies’ soaring, snaky guitars take center stage on opener 'Primeval', 'Elevator', and the metal masterpiece 'Lord of the Underground' while John Carpenter and Cody Carpenter’s synths take the lead on the ominous 'Desolation in the Underworld', the plaintive 'Death of the Mapmaker', and even converge with strings on 'Abandoned Cathedral'.

Whereas the 'Lost Themes' albums were written as scores to movies of the mind, 'Cathedral' scores the first original graphic novel written by Carpenter, his wife and long-time creative partner, producer and editor Sandy King, and writer Sean Sobczak, published by Storm King Comics. 

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: A thrashing, metallic soundtrack to a comic book of Carpenter's own making, Cathedral is as intense as anything Carpenter's done, with pummelling percussion and distorted guitars taking centre-stage and ending up soundtracking what I assume is an equally dark and foreboding, Carpenteresque tale.

TRACK LISTING

1. Primeval 
2. Identity 
3. Inside Out 
4. Abandoned Cathedral 
5. Elevator 
6. Elevator Two 
7. Desolation in the Underworld
8. The Mapmaker
9. The Ferryman
10. Lord of the Underground 
11. Death of the Mapmaker 
12. Back to Ruins 
13. Revenge 
14. Resolution 

Bonus 7":
1. Lord of the Underground (Live at The Belasco Theater) 
2. Last Rites (Live at The Belasco Theater) 

The origin of Chrystabell and David Lynch’s album Cellophane Memories comes from a vision that David experienced during a nighttime walk through a forest of tall trees, over the tops of which he saw a bright light. As he recalls it, the light became the lilt of Chrystabell’s voice and revealed a secret to him. It is from these mysterious convergen- ces of light and sound, day and night, starry sky and black forest that Chrystabell and David’s collaboration has continued to blossom.

For Cellophane Memories, the two have traveled through different portals. Fittingly, many of the songs are set in fairytale forests, mountain peaks, swimming holes, crepus- cular highways and darkened bedrooms. These are the abodes of both loneliness and romance, the sorts of sublime landscapes where people often travel alone in search of a wayward lover. But they are also shapeless atmospheres—of color, weather and breath: blue and white skies, red roses, darkening thunderheads, swirling winds and summer perfumes, which quickly immerse the traveler in the supernatural sensations of other worlds.

Time is a mercurial creature in Chrystabell and David’s songs. The characters are little more than oblique sketches of time’s quotidian melodramas: people arrive and depart as strangers, strangers fall into despair and love, lovers part at the crossroads and re- unite in a dream. In this quantum matinee of everyday life, each character is both a star and a background extra. Elisions in time reappear over and over within Chrystabell’s vocals, which emerge and dissolve and loop back in layers of harmony and history. They are mantled by David’s, and late composer Angelo Badalamenti’s, orchestra of waldeinsamkeit-inspired strings, oneiric guitar glissandi and clouds of reverb, whose melodies are like the sensation of time pausing for a first kiss.

As with much of Chrystabell and David’s work from the past, Cellophane Memories re- turns us to a central question: what is a mystery? Alas, the riddle remains unanswered. But all mystery contains slivers of those conceits and feelings described above: the departing and the coming-back, the landscape, atmosphere and breath, the topsy turvy mechanisms of time, memories of the bygone, a distant light radiating from darkness, music within silence, love.

TRACK LISTING

1. She Knew (3:12)
2. The Sky Falls (3:50)
3. You Know The Rest (3: 25)
4. So Much Love (3:51)
5. Two Lovers Kiss (3:18)
6. The Answers to The Questions (5:50) 7. With Small Animals (3:19)
8. Reflections in a Blade (4:06)
9. Dance of Light (4:08)
10. Sublime Eternal Love (2:52)

'Morning Star' finds Këkht Aräkh arriving at a truer, more refined version of himself. Recorded between Berlin and Stockholm, the album emerges from a period of intense personal and artistic growth, blending aggressive black metal passages with immersive, textured soundscapes that feel both intimate and vast. Since his origins in Mykolaiv, Ukraine, Dmitry (a.k.a. Crying Orc), the sole mastermind behind the project, has sought a distinctive path within black metal. This vision unfolded through his debut 'Through the Branches to Eternity' EP (2018) and the albums 'Night & Love' (2018) and 'Pale Swordsman' (2021), establishing a signature tension between ferocious, visceral black metal and delicate, introspective ballads. On 'Morning Star', this dynamic reaches new depth.

Created at a point of artistic clarity, the album explores a rawer, more personal emotional palette, shaped by stress, anxiety, and long stretches of writer’s block, giving it rare immediacy and vulnerability.

Dmitry recorded nearly all instruments himself, with drums by Jonathan (Spira Me, Vanskapth, Olycka). Bladee contributed vocals and co-wrote lyrics on 'Eternal Martyr', an unexpected collaboration that reveals intuitive chemistry. VS--55 and Varg2™ add abstract sampling and subtle textural design, giving 'Morning Star' its distinctive grain and analog warmth, while James Ginzburg (Emptyset, Osmium) handled final mastering, enhancing dynamic depth and atmospheric richness. Several tracks revisit earlier material with fresh perspectives. 'Wänderer' and 'Drömsång' are partially rerecorded or fully reimagined. Intense, driving passages collide with sparse, contemplative interludes, producing a landscape both visceral and haunting. Themes of isolation and wandering surface in 'Wänderer', dreamlike melancholy in 'Drömsång', existential struggle in 'Angest', and reflections on time and transformation in 'Three Winters Away' With 'Morning Star', Këkht Aräkh synthesizes past explorations with new collaborative energy, producing a record that honors 90s black metal tradition while embracing lo-fi warmth, melancholic melodies, sonic experimentation, and emotional candor. The result is a deeply personal statement an album that is both an arrival and a continuation of his artistic journey. 

TRACK LISTING

1. Wänderer
2. Castle 
3. Lament
4. Genom Sorgen (ft. VS--55)
5. Angest
6. Mörker över Mörker
7. Three Winters Away
8. Drömsång
9. Raven King
10. Vigil
11. Eternal Martyr (ft. Bladee)
12. Trollsång (ft. Spöke)
13. Land Av Evig Natt L 
14. Land Av Evig Natt Ll
15. Gates 
16. Morning Star 
17. Outro (ft. Varg2™)

'Hard Hearted Woman' is Ora Cogan’s debut on Sacred Bones, blending haunted folk, psych rock, and shadowy country into an intimate, cathartic sound. Written in Nanaimo, B.C., and recorded with collaborators from country and experimental scenes, the album reflects resilience and tenderness amid a hardening world. Inspired by nature, community, and late-night reflections, it explores themes of survival, mystery, and connection. Tracks like 'Honey', 'The Smoke', and 'Division' address social issues and emotional depth, creating a shimmering, jewel-toned work devoted to staying open and human in fractured times.

TRACK LISTING

1. Honey
2. The Smoke
3. Division
4. Bury Me
5. Limits
6. Love You Better
7. River Rise
8. Believe In The Devil
9. Outgrowing
10. Too Late

Celebrating ten years of The Holydrug Couple’s ethereal album Moonlust, Sacred Bones Records is thrilled to present a Special Art Edition vinyl featuring brand new holographic rainbow-laminated artwork. Originally released in 2015, Moonlust marked a bold evolution for the Chileanduo. The album holds a sense of yearning and transparency, delving into a spacey, psychedelic dream-pop realm, engulfed in romantic synth leads,pop-infused distant vocals, and hallucinogenic soundscapes. The Holydrug Couple are known for creating a palette of their own reality, birthing one of the most revolutionary psychedelic albums of the past decade. With songs like “If I Could Find You (Eternity),” taking you on a tender adventure through space, gliding on Ives Sepúlveda’s vocals and kaleidoscopicsynths, and “Atlantic Postcard” imbued with vividly arpeggiated ambienttones, Moonlust is a must-have album for all psychedelic rock lovers.

TRACK LISTING

1. Atlantic Postcard
2. Dreamy
3. Light Or Night
4. French Movie Theme
5. If I Could Find You (Eternity)
6. I Don’t Feel Like It
7. Concorde
8. Baby I’m Going Away
9. Generique Noir
10. Submarine Gold
11. U Don’t Wake Up
12. Remember Well

Jim Jarmusch and Anika first crossed paths at the Sacred Bones 15th Anniversary celebration in 2022, where both Anika and SQÜRL performed. Jim was immediately struck by Anika’s performance, while Anika admired Jim as a mentor who had stayed true to his unique vision throughout his career. This mutual respect led to a creative collaboration, which culminated in the haunting soundtrack for Jarmusch’s film 'Father Mother Sister Brother'.

Jim first invited Anika to record a cover of Jackson Browne’s 'These Days', inspired by Nico’s iconic version. This fully arranged track, prepared by Anika and featuring the Kaleidoskop string quartet, was recorded in Berlin and appears as a bonus track on the album as 'These Days (Berlin Version)'. Jim later mixed a more minimal version of the song, adding several electric guitar tracks. While in Berlin, Jim revealed to Anika that the only preexisting track in the film would be Dusty Springfield’s 'Spooky'. Anika, who had performed a live version, suggested they cover it. The stripped-back version they created featuring just vocals, upright bass, finger snaps, and a distorted organ riff was chosen to open the film’s credits.

Beyond these covers, much of the film’s score was born out of improvisation. Jim and Anika spent hours improvising together, leading to a second round of recordings in Berlin, where Anika played Wurlitzer and electric guitar and Jim contributed affected electric guitars. Upon returning to New York, Jim shaped these recordings into the short, evocative instrumental pieces that became the film’s score. The very final touches were completed during a residency Jim and Anika spent together in Paris via the Pompidou Center.

The music for 'Father Mother Sister Brother' is an experimental, collaborative soundscape, not meant to center around or define a single character. Instead, it’s atmospheric, like the air invisibly surrounding the characters. 

TRACK LISTING

1. Spooky
2. Disorder
3. Skaters (Short Version)
4. The Lake 1
5. The Lake 2 
6. The World In Reverse
7. Afterwards
8. Order 
9. Twins 
10. Skaters 
11. Return
12. Emptiness 
13. These Days 
14. Jetlag 
15. Paris Bleu
16. These Days (Berlin Version)

For almost everyone, the entry point for discovering the music of Q Lazzarus came via “Goodbye Horses.” The song first appeared in 1988, via Jonathan Demme’s Married to the Mob, but it would not become fully lodged into popular consciousness until it infamously materialized again in Demme’sThe Silence of the Lambs in 1991.“Goodbye Horses” felt like a self-contained universe – dreamlike and wholly unusual, an instant classic that left listeners captivated and curious about the mysterious voice behind it. That voice belonged to Diane Luckey, a uniquely talented artist whose music was ahead of its time and who would ultimately remain largely unrecognized in her lifetime. In conjunction with the release of Aridjis Fuentes’ documentary film Goodbye Horses: The Many Lives of Q Lazzarus, Sacred Bonesis releasing a collection of songs that span the entirety of Q’s career, showcasing the different eras of her work and the full breadth of her personality.

The first collection of music to be given the blessing of Q’s remaining family, Goodbye Horses has the distinction of being her first and only full-length release. Recorded between 1985 and 1995, this trove of previously unreleased music reflects some of the most interesting facets of pop music from the past four decades in away that feels both savvy and wildly eclectic. The titular “Goodbye Horses” remains a singular piece of spooky new wave perfection and one might imagine an entire Q Lazzarus album coiled around this aesthetic, but much like singers such as Alison Moyet, Annie Lennox, or Lisa Gerrard, Q’s chameleonic voice could lend itself perfectly to a variety of styles and settings. Her cover of Talking Heads’ “Heaven” transforms the song into a full-throated power ballad complete with tinkly piano flourishes, while her take on Gershwin’s “Summertime” sounds like the kind of dubby club redux that could have been a perfect companion to anything from Nightclubbing-era Grace Jones.

Tracks like “My Mistake” and “Hellfire” flirt with house music and showcase just how brassy and belty Q’s voice could be when shere ally let loose, while “Don’t Let Go” sounds like the kind of bombastic radio single Cher might have released several decades ago. Elsewhere, songs like “Bang Bang” and “I See Your Eyes” espouse the kind of guitar-driven alt-rock sensibilities that, in a parallel universe, could have made them staples on 120 Minutes.

TRACK LISTING

LP TRACKLIST:
1. Goodbye Horses (single Edit)
2. Heaven
3. I See Your Eyes
4. A Fools Life
5. Summertime
6. My Mistake
7. Hellfire
8. Don’t Let Go
9. Bang Bang
10. Goodbye Horses (New Wave Version)

CD TRACKLIST:
1. Flesh For Sale
2. I Don’t Want To Love You Anymore
3. The Candle Goes Away
4. Fathers, Mothers, And Children
5. Dying In The Street
6. Love Lust
7. Home
8. Momma Never Said
9. The Time Is Right (Dare)
10. Only You Can Light The Candle
11. Love Dance
12. Take The Time
13. Be Mine
14. It Don’t Mean Nothing

Night Criú is Hilary Woods’ fourth full-length album - an ode to the mysterious, the outsiders, those who are freely dancing through the night. This record is ethereal, entrancing listeners with full orchestral instrumentation; Hilary’s magnificent vocals, surrounded by a choir of children, sway in between string and woodwind instruments, calling upon the listener to join her in the mist. Each track peels back a subconscious layer, hinting at nostalgic memories and emotions, enthralling you one harmonious song at a time.

Hilary Woods’ new album is produced in collaboration with Dean Hurley. Her previous work has seen international praise and support - from features and reviews from The Wire, Crack Magazine, DIY Mag, Narc, The Line of Best Fit, and Brooklyn Vegan.

John Carpenter’s soundtracks for the most recent Halloween trilogy, made alongside his frequent collaborators Cody Carpenter and Daniel Davies, marked the legendary director and composer’s return to film scoring after nearly two decades away. 2018’s Halloween, 2021’s Halloween Kills, and 2022’s Halloween Ends were all directed by David Gordon Green, who engaged Carpenter early in the pre-production process, ultimately enlisting him as both an executive producer and soundtrack composer for the trilogy. Now, for the first time, a deluxe, 2xLP expanded edition of the Halloween End score is being made available by Carpenter’s longtime label, Sacred Bones Records.

TRACK LISTING

1. Where Is Jeremy?
2. Halloween Ends (Main Title)
3. Laurie’s Theme Ends
4. The Cave
5. Tire Slash
6. Cool Kid
7. Drags To The Cave
8. Evil Eyes
9. Transformation
10. Because Of You
11. Walk With Me
12. Requiem For Jeremy
13. In The Restaurant
14. Bridge Fight
15. Kill The Cop
16. Corey And Allyson
17. Side Of The Road
18. Corey And Michael
19. Slap
20. Corey’s Requiem
21. Take The Mask
22. The Junk Yard
23. Where Are You?
24. Suicide
25. What Did You Do?
26. Bye Bye Corey
27. The Fight
28. Before Her Eyes
29. The Procession
30. Cherry Blossoms
31. Halloween Ends

John Carpenter’s soundtracks for the most recent Halloween trilogy, made alongside his frequent collaborators Cody Carpenter and Daniel Davies, marked the legendary director and composer’s return to film scoring after nearly two decades away. 2018’s Halloween, 2021’s Halloween Kills, and 2022’s Halloween Ends were all directed by David Gordon Green, who engaged Carpenter early in the pre-production process, ultimately enlisting him as both an executive producer and soundtrack composer for the trilogy. Now, for the first time, a deluxe, 2xLP expanded edition of the Halloween Kills score is being made available by Carpenter’s longtime label, Sacred Bones Records.

TRACK LISTING

1. Logos Kill
2. Hawkins Discovered
3. Flashback
4. Spit
5. Hey Kid
6. The Myer’s House
7. Cops Explore
8. Irst Attack
9. Stand Off
10. Halloween Kills (Main Title)
11. Let It Burn
12. He Appears
13. From The Fire
14. Strodes At The Hospital
15. Cruel Intentions
16. Phone Call
17. Massacre
18. Someone’s In The Car
19. Halloween Trick
20. Back At The Hospital
21. Goodbye Michael
22. Gather The Mob
23. Rampage
24. Frank
25. Search
26. Frank And Laurie
27. Evil Dies Tonight
28. The System Failed
29. Blood On The Door
30. Disturbed Man
31. Violent Return
32. Hallway Madness
33. It Needs To Die
34. Look At Me
35. Reflection
36. Hunting A Killer

John Carpenter’s soundtracks for the most recent Halloween trilogy, made alongside his frequent collaborators Cody Carpenter and Daniel Davies, marked the legendary director and composer’s return to film scoring after nearly two decades away. 2018’s Halloween, 2021’s Halloween Kills, and 2022’s Halloween Ends were all directed by David Gordon Green, who engaged Carpenter early in the pre-production process, ultimately enlisting him as both an executive producer and soundtrack composer for the trilogy. Now, for the first time, a deluxe, 2xLP expanded edition of the Halloween score is being made available by Carpenter’s longtime label, Sacred Bones Records.

TRACK LISTING

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

John Carpenter’s soundtracks for the most recent Halloween trilogy, made alongside his frequent collaborators Cody Carpenter and Daniel Davies, marked the legendary director and composer’s return to film scoring after nearly two decades away. 2018’s Halloween, 2021’s Halloween Kills, and 2022’s Halloween Ends were all directed by David Gordon Green, who engaged Carpenter early in the pre-production process, ultimately enlisting him as both an executive producer and soundtrack composer for the trilogy. Now, for the first time, expanded editions of all three scores are being made available in a deluxe box set by Carpenter’s longtime label, Sacred Bones Records.

TRACK LISTING

Halloween Ends Tracklist:
1. Where Is Jeremy?
2. Halloween Ends (Main Title)
3. Laurie’s Theme Ends
4. The Cave
5. Tire Slash
6. Cool Kid
7. Drags To The Cave
8. Evil Eyes
9. Transformation
10. Because Of You
11. Walk With Me
12. Requiem For Jeremy
13. In The Restaurant
14. Bridge Fight
15. Kill The Cop
16. Corey And Allyson 
17. Side Of The Road 
18. Corey And Michael
19. Slap
20. Corey’s Requiem
21. Take The Mask 
22. The Junk Yard
23. Where Are You?
24. Suicide 
25. What Did You Do? 
26. Bye Bye Corey
27. The Fight
28. Before Her Eyes
29. The Procession
30. Cherry Blossoms
31. Halloween Ends

Halloween Kills Tracklist:
1. Logos Kill
2. Hawkins Discovered
3. Flashback
4. Spit
5. Hey Kid
6. The Myer’s House
7. Cops Explore
8. Irst Attack
9. Stand Off
10. Halloween Kills (Main Title)
11. Let It Burn
12. He Appears
13. From The Fire
14. Strodes At The Hospital
15. Cruel Intentions
16. Phone Call
17. Massacre
18. Someone’s In The Car
19. Halloween Trick
20. Back At The Hospital
21. Goodbye Michael
22. Gather The Mob
23. Rampage
24. Frank
25. Search
26. Frank And Laurie
27. Evil Dies Tonight
28. The System Failed
29. Blood On The Door
30. Disturbed Man
31. Violent Return
32. Hallway Madness
33. It Needs To Die
34. Look At Me
35. Reflection
36. Hunting A Killer
37. Righteous Intention
38. Morbid Discovery
39. Unkillable
40. Payback
41. Michael’s Legend
42. Back To His Sister’s Room
43. Final Kill
44. Michael Answers
45. Halloween Kills (End Titles)

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

Lathe of Heaven return with their second full-length album Aurora, a bold expansion of their sonic and thematic palette that unfolds like a series of vivid, emotional vignettes.

Aurora is an iteration of Lathe of Heaven’s sound previously unexplored, one that offers a delicate balance of their punk roots with captivating new-wave and 80s post-punk aesthetics, incorporating influences from mid 80s British and Finnish post-punk, combined with subtle nuances from 90s and contemporary under-ground pop. Recorded with Ben Greenberg at Circular Ruin and mastered by Brad Boatright, the album sonically is inspired by The Cure’s melodic rock, Musta Paraati’s gothic post-punk synth and intense drumming, and A Flock of Seagulls’ art pop vocals and guitar riffs. Lyrically, Aurora doesn’t shy away from heavy themes. Envisioned as a collection of sci-fi short stories, it is deeply influenced and lyrically driven by themes of anti-colonialism, diversity, and equality.

These stories are inspired by Ursula K. le Guin, Octavia Butler, Greg Egan, and Peter Watts’ novels, leading listeners to mythical, bold, and somewhat unnerving realities. The title track, “Aurora,” is set in a dystopian future where Earth is long abandoned due to nuclear fallout - it ex-plores themes of loss, love, and devotion. “Oblivion” delves into the phenomenon of semantic satiation - say a word enough times and it begins to lose its meaning.

“Exodus” reimagines Theseus’ Ship Paradox, narrating the experience of transferring consciousness into a new, perfect body. Elsewhere, “Portrait of a Scorched Earth” stands as a direct act of resistance. One of the most emotionally raw songs on the album, it breaks from the band’s usual lyrical abstraction as an unflinching reckoning with the horrors of modern warfare and displacement, rooted in the lived tragedy of Gaza.

Lathe of Heaven hope Aurora elicits a vast spectrum of emotions, and inspires deeper reflection on the state of our reality and humanity. It is literary without being pretentious, political without preaching, and emotional without flinching. Every song holds a piece of a shattered mirror and what emerges is a prismatic, wounded beauty, staring back with a thousand faces. Set to be released August 29th, 2025, Aurora stakes its claim; “tremble without fear into dreamless oblivion.” You are invited. 

TRACK LISTING

Exodus (3:29)
Aurora (5:07)
Portrait Of A Scorched-Earth (3:23)
Just Beyond The Reach Of Light (4:04)
Oblivion (4:37)
Kaleidoscope (4:19)
Matrix Of Control (3:21)
Catatonia (3:22)
Infinity’s Kiss (3:15)
Automation Bias (3:12)
Rorschach (3:30) 

Some bands find their groove and stick to it; others reinvent themselves constantly. Sextile belongs to the latter camp, embracing the thrill of an ever-changing roadmap. The LA duo of Melissa Scaduto and Brady Keehncraft music with a lust for life, drawing inspiration from no wave to hardstyle. Their latest album, 'yes, please.' pushes their sound into bold new territory, fusing anarchic electro fire with raw personal recollections—and enough beefed-up bass to bust a speaker or two.

'yes, please.' is an album of contrasts: a vulnerable record that bares its soul as much as it revels in excess, showing just how far you can push your sound when you shake off your inhibitions. Together, the pair betray a confidence that never wavers, making a bold splash on the speedy intro with a rave siren cut from a ‘00s New York house party or sweaty Brooklyn warehouse. By the same token, the spirit of electroclash stalks the building, flashing its ID on the cowbell-peppered thunder-bolts of 'Freak Eyes' and 'Rearrange', and turning in a scuzzy dancefloor bomb with 'Women Respond to Bass'. High on endorphins, 'Push Ups'—which features vocals from Jehnny Beth—is pure muscle music, fortified by hoover bass and fleshed out by synths that hammer as hard as lumps of hail on a glass roof. But behind the slogans, sass, and monster dance energy lies an intimacy that can only be found from opening up about painful, life-altering events. 'Hospital' and 'Soggy Newports' reflect harrowing experiences in a New York state-run facility after a near-fatal accident. 'Resist' tackles abortion rights, while 'Penny Rose' explores US education, AI, and future generations. Scaduto’s elastic vocals shine throughout, from the razor-sharp synths of 'S is For' to the trance-pop heights of 'Kids', featuring Izzy Glaudini from Automatic

'yes, please.' is an action-packed dance record stuffed with wild, heady roof-raisers but is in the same breath a testament to living, and never looking back. In opening themselves up to a new “freeing” way of making music, Sextile have whipped up their most creative offering to date. Then again, you just know they still have so much more to give

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Scathing, visceral dance music that's both full of momentum and jewelled with bursts of off-piste experimental weirdness. Bold, brilliant rave madness from the musically elastic Sextile.

TRACK LISTING

1. Intro
2. Women Respond To Bass
3. Freak Eyes
4. Penny Rose
5. Push Ups
6. Kids
7. 99 Bongos
8. S Is For
9. Rearrange
10. Resist
11. Kiss
12. Hospital
13. Soggy Newports

Anika channels her frustration, anger, and confusion with the world into her third album, 'Abyss'. Recorded live to tape at Berlin’s legendary Hansa Studios, the album captures raw energy with minimal overdubs, resulting in a visceral and urgent 10-track journey fueled by intense emotions. The recording process, done in just a few days with a live band, emphasises immediacy, offering a sound that’s both physical and direct.

'Abyss' reflects Anika’s desire to create a space where people can unite and feel free to express themselves amidst the chaos of the world. With influences ranging from 90s grunge and Courtney Love to Patti Smith and Genesis P-Orridge, the album is driven by a rebellious spirit. Tracks like 'One Way Ticket' critique the rise of fascism, while 'Hearsay' takes on the divisiveness of fake news, revealing Anika’s determination to confront the complexities of our current moment. The album’s raw, emotional power is matched by its physicality. Anika’s goal is to take listeners out of their heads and back into their bodies, offering a release through the music and live performances. This is a space to reclaim the connection between mind and body—something she feels is increasingly lost in world. Her desire to create that energy on stage is reflected in 'Abyss’ dense, pounding rhythms, which build on the energy of 90s alt-rock.

'Abyss' also delves into the intense tensions between the left and right in contemporary society, exploring the complexities of human imperfection and healthy debate. From the thrashing intensity of 'Oxygen' to the melancholic 'Buttercups', the album refuses to shy away from uncomfortable truths. Anika boldly con-fronts her own raw emotions, as exemplified in the candid lyrics of 'Walk Away', where she reflects on discontent with herself and the world.

With 'Abyss', Anika invites listeners into a space for release, rebellion, and honesty, creating an album that speaks to the turmoil of our times while offering an emotional outlet. As she puts it, “This is a space for you.”

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Swimming in the sort of minimal, gnarly electronics we'd expect from Chris Carter or Throbbing Gristle and topped with vocals that are perfectly pitched but very relaxed in a performance sense. Grungy and intense, but with a sense of playfulness and melodic brightness.

TRACK LISTING

1. Hearsay
2. Honey
3. Abyss
4. Oxygen
5. Walk Away
6. Into The Fire
7. Out Of The Shadows
8. One Way Ticket
9. Last Song
10. Buttercups

On Chrystia Cabral’s fourth album as SPELLLING, the Bay Area artist transforms her acclaimed avant-pop project into a mirror. Cabral’s lyrics for 'Portrait of My Heart' tackle love, intimacy, anxiety, and alienation, trading the allegorical approach of much of her previous work for something pointed into her human heart. The album’s thematic forthrightness is echoed in its arrangements, making it the sharpest, most direct SPELLLING album to date. From the dark minimalism of her earliest music to the lavishly orchestrated prog-pop of 2021’s 'The Turning Wheel' to this newly energetic expression of her creative spirit, Cabral has proved again and again that SPELLLING can be whatever she needs it to be.

The title track, with its propulsive drum groove and anthemic chorus of “I don’t belong here,” is the most potent embodiment of the album’s turn toward emotional directness. Once the main melody emerged, Cabral used the song as a tool to process her anxiety as a performer and opted for a tighter, more rock-oriented composition. This transformation mirrors the album’s broader shift toward energy and immediacy, driven by the core band of Wyatt Overson (guitar), Patrick Shel-ley (drums), and Giulio Xavier Cetto (bass), whose collaboration uncovers new contours of the SPELLLING sound. Cabral still writes and demos in isolation, but presenting the songs for 'Portrait of My Heart' to her bandmates helped her discover their eventual lively, organic forms. So did working with a trio of producers — 'The Turning Wheel' mixing engineer Drew Vandenberg, SZA collaborator Rob Bisel, and Yves Tumor producer Psymun.

Key guest contributions further shape the album. Chaz Bear (Toro y Moi) delivers SPELLLING’s first duet on 'Mount Analogue', Turnstile guitarist Pat McCrory turns Cabral’s original piano demo for 'Alibi' into the crunchy, riffy version that appears on the record, while Zulu’s Braxton Marcellous gives 'Drain' its sludgy heft. These parts aren’t just incorporated seamlessly into the album; they feel like an integral part of its universe. Ultimately, though, 'Portrait of My Heart' is nobody’s record but Cabral’s. She fearlessly draws the curtain back on parts of herself that she’s never included in SPELLLING before - her feelings of being an outsider, her overly guarded nature, the way she can throw herself recklessly into intimate relationships and then cool on them just as quickly. “It’s very much an open diary of all those sensations,” she says.

TRACK LISTING

1. Portrait Of My Heart
2. Keep It Alive
3. Alibi
4. Waterfall
5. Destiny Arrives
6. Ammunition
7. Mount Analogue
8. Drain
9. Satisfaction
10. Love Ray Eyes
11. Sometimes

In June 2023, Lust For Youth and Croatian Amor shared the stage at the iconic Sydney Opera House during the Vivid Live Festival. This encounter reignited their creative partnership, laying the foundation for their collaborative new album 'All Worlds'. Drawing inspiration from the 'Golden Record' sent into space as humanity’s message to the unknown, 'All Worlds' mirrors this longing for connection and understanding. Each track captures a fragment of emotion, culture, or memory, offering a kaleidoscopic view of the human experience. The album’s title reflects the idea of collecting fragments from disparate places, feelings, and stories. Each song unveils a unique “world,” contributing to overarching themes of exploration and introspection. These “worlds” represent the inner landscapes we carry, shaping our identities. The title also gestures toward connection — as if these worlds float through space, waiting to be discovered and understood. Ultimately, 'All Worlds' embodies the quest for belonging and meaning.

Through a sonic journey of isolation, resilience, and wonder, introspective lyrics intertwine with lush, evocative soundscapes. Retaining the dreamy atmospheres characteristic of both Lust For Youth and Croatian Amor, the album’s reverb-drenched production lends it an ethereal, nostalgic quality. While themes of melancholy and longing are central, energetic beats and uplifting arrangements introduce a bittersweet harmony that oscillates between vulnerability and euphoria.

The album marks a shift in tone, moving away from Lust For Youth’s synth-driven post-punk roots. Instead, All Worlds embraces a dance-oriented aesthetic, weaving pulsating rhythms and techno-inspired motifs with layered vocal samples. The result is a textured soundscape—an exploration of emotional fragility through shimmering production and introspective melodies. Celebrating twelve years since their 2013 ambient-industrial album 'Pomegranate', 'All Worlds' reflects the evolution of Lust For Youth and Croatian Amor. This album serves as both a response to their earlier work and a progression informed by a decade of growth and change. It deepens their exploration of sound and meaning, speaking directly to the present moment.

Like the 'Golden Record' adrift in space, 'All Worlds' is a collection of moments waiting to connect with those who choose to listen. 

TRACK LISTING

1. Friendzone
2. Passerine
3. Dummy
4. Akkadian
5. Lights In The Center
6. Kokiri
7. Nowhere
8. Fleece
9. Velella Velella Wind Sailors
10. Still Here

American Standard begins with a shock. Vocalist Michael Berdan stands alone, screaming, “A part of me, but it can’t be me. Oh God, it can’t.” It all starts with an admission. Beneath the harrowing screams, there’s the pain of bulimia nervosa. There’s the pain of a sickness that is as physical as it is psychological. This is a kind of emergence.

With every movement of American Standard, Uniform peels off a new layer and tells the story inside of the one that came before it. The lyrics sink down into the core of the innermost self, the small human being crushed in the grip of sickness. To help peel away this narrative of eating disorders, self-hatred, delusion, mania, and ultimate discovery, Berdan sought assistance from a towering pair of outsider literary figures. Alongside B.R. Yeager (author of the modern cult-classic Negative Space) and Maggie Siebert (the mind behind the contemporary body horror masterpiece Bonding), the three writers eviscerate the personal material to present a portrait of mental and physical illness as vividly terrifying as anything in the present-day canon. The result is an acute articulation of a state beyond simple agony, capturing the thrilling transcendence and deliverance that sickness can bring in the process.

American Standard is surely Uniform’s most thematically accomplished and musically self assured album to date. Sections spiral and explode. Motifs drift off into obscurity before reasserting themselves with new power. Genres collide and burst open, forming something idiosyncratic and new. There’s a grandeur, due in part to the addition of Interpol bassist Brad Truax alongside the percussive push and pull of returning drummer Michael Sharp and longtime touring drummer Michael Bloom, marking his Uniform recorded debut here. However, this magnificence is most clearly attributable to the scale and power of guitarist and founder Ben Greenberg’s arrangements, matching ever elegantly to the intense lyrical subject matter.

Without a shred of doubt, American Standard is a work of art, agonizing in its honesty and relentless in its pursuit of sonic transcendence. It is hideous. It is beautiful. It is necessary.

TRACK LISTING

1. American Standard
2. This Is Not A Prayer
3. Clemency
4. Permanent Embrace

The origin of Chrystabell and David Lynch’s album Cellophane Memories comes from a vision that David experienced during a nighttime walk through a forest of tall trees, over the tops of which he saw a bright light. As he recalls it, the light became the lilt of Chrystabell’s voice and revealed a secret to him. It is from these mysterious convergences of light and sound, day and night, starry sky and black forest that Chrystabell and David’s collaboration has continued to blossom.

For 'Cellophane Memories', the two have traveled through different portals. Fittingly, many of the songs are set in fairytale forests, mountain peaks, swimming holes, crepuscular highways and darkened bedrooms. These are the abodes of both loneliness and romance, the sorts of sublime landscapes where people often travel alone in search of a wayward lover. But they are also shapeless atmospheres—of color, weather and breath: blue and white skies, red roses, darkening thunderheads, swirling winds and summer perfumes, which quickly immerse the traveler in the supernatural sensations of other worlds.

Time is a mercurial creature in Chrystabell and David’s songs. The characters are little more than oblique sketches of time’s quotidian melodramas: people arrive and depart as strangers, strangers fall into despair and love, lovers part at the crossroads and reunite in a dream. In this quantum matinee of everyday life, each character is both a star and a background extra. Elisions in time reappear over and over within Chrystabell’s vocals, which emerge and dissolve and loop back in layers of harmony and history. They are mantled by David’s, and late composer Angelo Badalamenti’s, orchestra of waldeinsamkeit-inspired strings, oneiric guitar glissandi and clouds of reverb, whose melodies are like the sensation of time pausing for a first kiss.

As with much of Chrystabell and David’s work from the past, 'Cellophane Memories' returns us to a central question: what is a mystery? Alas, the riddle remains unanswered. But all mystery contains slivers of those conceits and feelings described above: the departing and the coming-back, the landscape, atmosphere and breath, the topsy turvy mechanisms of time, memories of the bygone, a distant light radiating from darkness, music within silence, love.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Hanting, otherworld melodies and overlapping lysergic vocals, droning neo-folk and gothic washes of waving delay. It's an otherworldly, transformative experience and perfectly dips in and out of a wealth of sound worlds. Beautifully rich, and wonderfully weird.

TRACK LISTING

1. She Knew
2. The Sky Falls
3. You Know The Rest
4. So Much Love
5. Two Lovers Kiss
6. The Answers To The Questions
7. With Small Animals
8. Reflections In A Blade
9. Dance Of Light
10. Sublime Eternal Love

In the last decade, Daniel Davies has become a lauded composer of atmospheric, synth-heavy instrumental music—for film and TV scores, alongside John Carpenter on the director’s Lost Themes albums, and on solo releases like Signals and Spies. But in his previous musical life, Davies was a rocker, touring all over the world with heavy bands like Year Long Disaster and Karma to Burn. After setting rock music aside to focus on his soundtrack and instrumental work, the multi-instrumentalist has found himself falling back in love with loud guitars over the past couple of years.

Ghost of the Heart, the first full-length alt-rock album Davies has ever released under his own name, captures the excitement of that rediscovered love. After a decade of making music that either had to match a filmed image or create a mental one, he sounds liberated by the concrete, reliable logic of verse/chorus/ verse. The songs on Ghost of the Heart don’t fit neatly into any one subgenre: they’re moody, heavy, and a little proggy, but with a strong pop sensibility and lots of melody. The album divulges Davies’ affinity for hooky, forward-thinking bands like Radiohead and Blur, but more than anything, Ghost of the Heart feels natural, like he’s tapping back into something fundamental about himself as a musician. “My first love is writing rock songs,” Davies says. “It just felt like the right time to get back to it.”

Ghost of the Heart is a special album for Davies. It sees him returning to his origins in rock music, but it also couldn’t have been made without the lessons of his time in the film world. In the truest sense, it’s a career-defining work, one that showcases everything he’s learned in his decades as a musician. It reveals a door that, now opened, can take Davies anywhere he wants to go.

TRACK LISTING

1. I Know Why
2. Presence On The Hill
3. In To You
4. It Takes A Lot
5. Ghost Of The Heart
6. Still The Servant
7. Big Crush
8. Wait
9. Those Eyes 

Clean Hands Go Foul (2009) generously offers more of everything: voluminous drones, clashing dissonance, mysterious subharmonic swells, escalating terror, and environments drenched in heavy anticipatory dread. The final hour of the band’s first decade sees Khanate, as always, making “music that, even in the realm of extreme music, is dark and distorted” (Pitchfork). Clean Hands Go Foul would be followed by the ultimate minimalism, as the Khanate entity sat shrouded in silence until the release of 2023’s To Be Cruel.

TRACK LISTING

1. Wings From Spine
2. In That Corner
3. Clean My Heart
4. Every God Damn Thing 

Largely recognized as their breakthrough album, Khanate was confident enough by the two-song, forty-minute Capture & Release (2005) to peel back its layers of thick mossy droneand reveal the minimalist underpinnings, a change either interpreted as maturity or an implied threat. “It’s a grim, avant-garde exercise in tension and paranoia. Dense, leaden drones fill up the spaces between O’Malley’s sparse, deeply sustained guitar chords. Vocalist Alan Dubin’s anguished vocals seem to convey the tortures of the damned as if there were not a shred of hope left for existence in this world. Capture & Release is not dissimilar to black metal in how it so violently conveys such a bleak and ultra-nihilistic world outlook. But while the standard tempo on a black metal album typically strays into the triple digits in terms of beats per minute, Khanate’s plodding pace keeps the BPM soundly within the singledigit range.” (Tiny Mix Tapes).

TRACK LISTING

A1. Capture
B1. Release 

Jim Jarmusch and Carter Logan (founding members of SQÜRL) return with a sonic exploration of the cinematic works of Dadaist pioneer Man Ray, a captivating project that melds music and film.

Over the past eight years, SQÜRL have been enchanting audiences with their live scores to Man Ray’s short films across sold-out shows in prestigious venues like the Centre Pompidou in Paris, Queen Elizabeth Hall in London, and the Art Institute of Chicago. The culmination of their endeavor took place in the spring of 2023, on the 100th anniversary of Man Ray’s inaugural foray into filmmaking, when the newly restored Return to Reason premiered at the Cannes Film Festival.

Produced by Womanray (Marieke Tricoire) and Cinenovo (Julie Viez), Return to Reason unfolds as an anthology featuring four silent short films by Man Ray – Étoile de mer (1928), Emakbakia (1926), Le Retour á la Raison (1923), and Les Mysteres du Château de Dé. (1929) — each paired with an original score by SQÜRL.

Jarmusch and Logan, two multi-disciplinary artists known for their experimentalprowess, approached these scores as a way to create an ecstatic state, a space betweenconsciousness and unconsciousness, reality, and the surreal. The resulting album,Music for Man Ray, born out of a live recording at the Centre Pompidou in Paris inFebruary of 2023, features distorted guitars, hypnotic feedback, loops and affectedsynthesizers. In the words of Logan, “It’s a journey we want to take the audience on,illuminating themes throughout these films. They are discrete, but there are alsorecurring echoes throughout the whole program.” Jim Jarmusch adds, “We feel veryproud to be Man Ray’s backup band.”

Now both the film Return to Reason and the resulting music in the form of Musicfor Man Ray are seeing the light of day - both stand as a testament to the creativesynergy between Man Ray’s groundbreaking cinema and the innovative musicalinterpretation by SQÜRL.

TRACK LISTING

1. Starfish
2. Leave Me Alone
3. The Return
4. Castle Of Dice

Caleb Landry Jones, the enigmatic and multi-talented artist, is set to release his highly anticipated fourth album, Hey Gary, Hey Dawn, on the esteemed Sacred Bones label.

Renowned as a multi-instrumentalist crafting intricate cinematic works that hover on the fringes of prog, Jones breaks new ground with a deliberate focus on live performance for his latest record. Jones has in fact intentionally designed Hey Gary, Hey Dawn with the live stage in mind, a previously missing element in his musical career.

Assembling a formidable band, he sets the stage for an enthralling experience, kickstarting a month-long residency in Austin, Texas, this February, culminating in a standout performance at SXSW. The residency serves as a precursor to a series of planned US and international tours, promising to bring the album’s electrifying energy to audiences worldwide.

The music is Jones’s heaviest to date, and though often reticent about direct influences and resistant to categorizations, he weaves a sonic tapestry that hints at punk and grunge elements within his signature kaleidoscopic symphonies. “It’s not for me to say what it is. I’m only here to give it up,” he asserts, emphasizing the individual listening experience. But even though these songs are his most succinct, they are anything but simple. Over 20 talented musicians, including a quartet, contributed to the album, adding layers of depth and complexity to this dynamic collection of songs that seamlessly traverse a multitude of genres.

Since his last album Gadzooks Vol. 2 Jones has been steadfast in making visual art, some of which graces the album art for Hey Gary, Hey Dawn. Simultaneously, he has continued to captivate audiences on the big screen, starring in Luc Besson’s acclaimed film Dogman and preparing for multiple roles in 2024.

Hey Gary, Hey Dawn is a testament to Caleb Landry Jones’s artistic evolution, demonstrating his ability to push boundaries while maintaining a distinct and indescribable quality. With a blend of intensity, vulnerability, and musical virtuosity, Jones invites listeners to embark on a journey that transcends traditional genres, promising an immersive experience that resonates long after the final note.

TRACK LISTING

1. Hey Dawn
2. Too Sharp To Be My Carrot
3. The Moonkey Light Hey Dawn
4. Spot A Fly
5. Corn Mine
6. Your Favorite Song
7. Hey Gary
8. The Bonzo Bargain
9. Masandoia
10. He Sued His Wife
11. Useless
12. The Pageant Thieves

After Xmal Deutschland’s success with four albums on cult labels such as 4AD, Huwe abandoned music to pursue her visual art career. But leaving her legacy in the past was not so easy.

During the pandemic Huwe reconsidered her decades-long hiatus from music. With a push by her longtime friend Mona Mur - a singer, songwriter and film music composer (as well as the frontwoman of early-80s project Mona Mur & Die Mieter) - Huwe decided to join Mur in Berlin. Together with Manuela Rickers, guitarist and collaborator in Xmal Deutschland, they tossed around music and poetic ideas that would eventually become the album Codes.

Initially inspired by the diary entries of Moshe Shnitzki, who, at the age of 17, left his home in 1942 to live in the cavernous White Russian forests as a partisan, Codes is about the human experience and what extremes can do to an individual. “The result is a poetic, musical cosmos that encompasses the following themes: forest, fear, pain, loss, violence, and loneliness but also beauty, longing, hope and the will to survive,” Huwe explains. These thematic extremities cause an erraticism to Codes - a passing thunderstorm, a cyclonic burst of nature’s force - but one that exudes anticipation amidst the chill.

With elegant production by Mur and Huwe and mixing and mastering by Jon Caffery (Joy Division, Gary Numan, Einstürzende Neu-bauten) epic builds crash and disseminate, the sleek synthesized drones of sound even feel claustrophobic at times.

Xmal Deutschland, now marked as forerunners of the post-punk movement, were never complacent but consistently ravenous in their attack throughout the 1980s. Huwe’s return is no different. Unexpected but long overdue, Codes is that missing page from post-punk’s history books, the freshly splayed paint across the decades-old canvas - it is the productof the tireless will to survive on her own terms.

TRACK LISTING

1. Skuggornas
2. Rebenschwarz
3. Pariah
4. Exit
5. O Wald
6. Zwischenwelt
7. Sleep With One Eye Open
8. Living In The Forest
9. Hideaway

“Gothics” - a time before the word goth had even taken shape - believed in the do-it-yourself punk ethos that anyone could pick up an instrument. Gray clouds were starting to form and in the unlikely city of Hamburg, a brazen and haunting gang of five women formed Xmal Deutschland. As any true punk would, Xmal Deutschland’s members Caro May, Rita Simon, Manuela Rickers, Fiona Sangster and Anja Huwe, started the band despite any previous musical experience.

The “Schwarze Welt” seven-inch was released on the local punk label, ZickZack, in 1981 and introduced the band as an unsettling swarm of intensity. There’s an urgency in its repetitive dirge, a swirling mania that persists on the b-side with “Die Wolken” and “Großstadtindianer” whose crude synthesizer noises escalate in tension. Most of all, Huwe’s uniquely venomous German vocals quickly became embedded in the unbridled and burgeoning scene of glamorous gloom.

Punk’s independence from the stiff grip of tradition allowed the band to find solace in anti-establishment art and music, far from the conventions of the past. With their peacocked hair and thick kohl-lined eyes, Xmal Deutschland’s music retained both a restlessness and delicacy, transcending any confines of the “Neue Deutsche Welle” movement (much like their colleagues and friends DAF and Einstürzende Neubauten) with the release of the “Incubus Succubus” single in 1982. It instantly became a post-punk classic. The guitar’s buzz ransacks through the melody as the ghoulish primitiveness of Huwe’s voice teases that maybe, just maybe, she is the nightmarish creature of which to be aware. The b-sides, “Zu Jung Zu Alt” and “BlutIst Liebe,” keep strict militaristic dance beats as they teem in agitation.

That same year, the band performed in London as support for the Cocteau Twins; it was the platform they needed to ricochet into the arms of the ripped fishnet masses. Early Singles (1981-1982), is a map of the foundational movements of Xmal Deutschland, just seconds before takeoff. Bonus tracks on the compilation, “Kaellbermarsch” and a gritty live version of “Allein,” further accentuate their fusion of toughness with the quixotic decadence of atmospheric synthesizers. The band’s pursuit of something greater is palpable with this release, a reflection of a time that introduced accessibility to new means of making music following the onset of punk.

TRACK LISTING

1. Schwarze Welt
2. Die Wolken
3. Großstadtindianer
4. Kälbermarsch (from The Compilation “Lieber Zuviel AlsZuwenig”)
5. Incubus Succubus
6. Zu Jung Zu Alt
7. BlutIst Liebe
8. Allein (from The Compilation “Nosferatu Festival”) 

Blessings of the Highest Order compiles all of Thou’s Nirvana covers, originally recorded and released piecemeal on various EPs, splits, and tributes from 2009 – 2018. The songs feature guest appearances from Emily McWilliams (Silver Godling), Melissa Guion (MJ Guider), Rebecca Levy (Turboslut), Isidore Grisoli (High), and Jennifer Murphy (that one Thou tote). The record features artwork by New Orleans’ underground, BDSM, xerox freakaleek “Trashboy.”

TRACK LISTING

1. Blew
2. School
3. Stain
4. In Bloom
5. Territorial Pissings
6. Scentless Apprentice
7. Aneurysm
8. Floyd The Barber
9. Sifting
10. Milk It
11. I Hate Myself And I Want To Die
12. Dive
13. Even In His Youth
14. Endless, Nameless
15. Something In The Way
16. Where Did You Sleep Last Night? 

Acts of Light is a fugue comprised of nine slow hypnotic dirges. Vulnerability, majesty, and candour elicited with drone, double bass, field recordings and sacred choral chant compose its private ritual. Born out of excavations and explorations in feeling, intuition and physicality through sound which culminated in her 2021 EP Feral Hymns, Acts of Light is a disquiet personal offering to wilderness, loss, absence, mystery and love supreme.

Its resonant, rich and weighted lament is both subterranean and chasmal whilst simultaneously detailed and tender, awakening hidden forms that emerge from the shadows with each listen. Textural dust and speckled light move slowly and expansively here through a deeply sonic and sensory rite of passage where Woods’ moving compositions confide in us feeling to be received with the entire body.

Recorded and mixed over a span of two years along the west coast of Ireland and in various other locations, including the Pro cathedral in Dublin where Woods recorded the choristers of the Palestrina Choir and Galway where she recorded the voices of Galway City Chamber Choir, string samples were recorded by Jo Berger Myhrein Oslo, whilst field recordings were recorded nomadically thro ughout her time spent travelling through the north and south of Spain

TRACK LISTING

1. Burial Rites
2. Wife Mother Lover Crow
3. Where The Bough Has Broken
4. Acts Of Light
5. Ochre
6. Awakening
7. Blood Orange
8. The Foot Of Love
9. Vigil 

In the early 1990s, a team of linguists, engineers, anthropologists, and archaeologists were tasked with constructing a type of communication that could transcend time. How might we converse with future civilizations when language may evolve or dissolve entirely? The result yielded the design of spike fields; a strange construction of granite thorns bursting from the earth to alert its viewers to the deadly uninhabitability of nuclear waste disposal sites. For Maria BC (they/them), this state of temporal focus molds the wanderings on their second full length album Spike Field. How do we connect with the weathered shadow of our experience, while envisioning the self a few steps ahead of us? While their debut album Hyaline (2022, Father/Daughter) explored grief and anxiety through a series of character-led accounts, Spike Field recognizes that the past will continue to lurk below the surface until we decide to break through the soil.

Spike Field was recorded in the home of a family friend. The home featured an out-of-tune baby Steinway piano, complete with squeaky hammers and strange, sporadic sounds. The piano is sprinkled throughout the album, and features extensively on opener “Amber,” showcasing Maria BC’s looser, more extensive arrangements. The song flickers with electronic wonder, like a wave seeking out its station, before crashing into the angelic choral introduction of “Watcher”. Strings, plucked guitar and buzzing swells accompany their classically-trained mezzo- soprano voice on “Return to Sender,” a song that focuses on the frustrations and turmoil of being unable to reach a loved one––both physically and emotion-ally.

Spike Field reminds us that despite our best efforts to bury certain aspects of ourselves, they will always lurk beneath the surface. Instead of ignoring the seeds striving to break through, we can point to these places with a curious grace, concocting a language that transcends words to converse with our previous selves. Maria BC pieces together juxtaposing sonic landscapes and oscillating vocals to represent the thread of miscommunication, or the failure of words, that weaves throughout the album, transforming it into a distinct and ever-evolving sonic tongue. If we listen, we might find something new within ourselves

RiYL: Grouper, Big Thief, Marissa Nadler, Cat Power, Juliana Barwick, Mount Eerie, Espers, Diane Cluck, Six Organs, Steven R Smith, Linda Perhacs

TRACK LISTING

1 Amber (3:54)
2 Watcher (3:04)
3 [ A Backlit Door ] (0:52)
4 Haruspex (5:19)
5 Return To Sender (3:21)
6 Tire Iron (3:49)
7 Daydrinker (3:58)
8 Tied (ft. Issei Herr) (4:16)
9 Still (5:13)
10 Lacuna (4:16)
11 Mercury (4:08)
12 Spike Field (6:27) 

By now everyone should know John Carpenter is not only a celebrated filmmaker but also a musical maestro whose soundtracks have become synonymous with the genres of horror, suspense, and science fiction. His innate talent for composition and his deep understanding of how music can elevate storytelling have left an indelible mark on the world of cinema, and a haunting presence in people’s record collections.

Anthology II continues the celebration of his compositional genius via an excellently sequenced collection of some of his most iconic pieces of music from his extensive filmography, all newly recorded with his musical collaborators Daniel Davies and Cody Carpenter.

The compilation opens with “Chariots of Pumpkins” from Halloween III that perfectly captures the eerie essence of the cult classic film with its pulsating synths and haunting melodies. The listener is engulfed by a sense of unease and anticipation, before being thrust into “69th St. Bridge” from Escape From New York, a dynamic track that encapsulates the futuristic and gritty nature of the film via the use of throbbing bass lines, driving rhythms, and electronic textures. The record has also an isolating tone as it skulks through ambient leaning tracks such as “Fuchs” and “To Mac’s Shack” from The Thing, and “Walk to the Lighthouse” from The Fog, all of which display a slower tempo, foreboding undertones and an ethereal atmosphere that feels like a distant whisper. All of which has been cautiously laid in preparation to the grand finale. The iconic and instantly recognizable ”Laurie’s Theme” from the original Halloween. Its simple yet menacing piano melody which has become synonymous with the horror genre, concludes the album by striking fear into the hearts of listeners.

These tracks represent just a fraction of John Carpenter’s impressive musical repertoire. With each haunting note and pulsating beat, his soundtracks continue to resonate with audiences, forever etching his name in the annals offilm music history.

TRACK LISTING

1. Chariots Of Pumpkins (Halloween III)
2. 69th St. Bridge (Escape From New York)
3. The Alley (War) (Big Trouble In Little China)
4. Wake Up (They Live)
5. Julie’s Dead (Assault On Precinct 13)
6. The Shape Enters Laurie’s Room (Halloween II)
7. Season Of The Witch (Halloween III)
8. Love At A Distance (Prince Of Darkness)
9. The Shape Stalks Again (Halloween II)
10. Burn It (The Thing)
11. Fuchs (The Thing)
12. To Mac’s Shack (The Thing)
13. Walk To The Lighthouse (The Fog)
14. Laurie’s Theme (Halloween)

Psychedelic warriors Föllakzoid began in Santiago, Chile from what they described as the result of “a product of a trance experience between friends, sort of a soul abduction in which they’ve been living since 2008.” They believe that there is some sort of gravitational force that makes South America able to dialogue directly with other places, times, and dimensions.

II is an album comprised of five songs and some of the finest kraut-rock, a record that is ready to take you on a serpentine journey through their mystical Chilean land.

This masterpiece originally released in 2013 is now getting a long awaited repress after being sold out for quite some time, and in an irresistible gold colour. 

TRACK LISTING

1. 9
2. Rio
3. Trees
4. 99
5. Pulsar 

Föllakzoid grows via depuration, aiming with each record to fill longer spaces of time with fewer and fewer elements. And like the best techno, kraut, and psychedelia have proven throughout time, sometimes the most minimal framework is the strongest container for transcendence. Which is what Föllakzoid have achieved with V, an immersive opus that takes the listener on seductive journey straight to the dance floor.

The creative perspective of the band has always been about unlearning the narrative, musical and visual paradigms that shape physical and digital conceptions, in an effort to make a time-space metric structure that dissolves both the author and the narrative. As the creative project of queer and trans artist Domingæ, the band has had a unique experience navigating the psychedelic rock scene.

Unlike past Föllakzoid records, that were done in single takes with the full band, their latest record V took a month to construct out of more than 70 separate stems. Guitars, bass, drums, synthesizers, and vocals, were all recorded in isolation and producer Atom™, who was not present for recording, was then asked to re-organize the four sequences of stems without any length, structural restrictions or guidelines.

The inherent possibilities were endless yet bound together by the inner logic of the game itself and by the spirits of the players. V is the exercise of telling an elaborate story about nothing, with the smallest number of words necessary. The story is one of the electricity and code which we inhabit - or which may inhabit us, and can be imagined through heart-pounding bass, skittering beats, head swirling melodies, and an ominous allure that feels at times like genuine hypnosis.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: We're massive fans of Follakzoid here at Piccadilly, and 'V' takes the formula so deftly established over their previous four LP's (grinding drone, huge stoner chug and psychedelic fog) and builds upon it substantially. Walls of noise and dynamic fuzz give way to scattered percussive shards and crystalline electronic textures. Mindblowing.

TRACK LISTING

1. I
2. II
3. III
4. IIII 

Spellling, the moniker of the Bay Area experimental pop mastermind Chrystia Cabral, returns with Spellling & the Mystery School, a collection of richly envisioned new versions of songs from throughout her critically-acclaimed discography, out August 25 via Sacred Bones. Recorded with her touring band (est. 2021), these reimagined studio tracks follow Cabral's spellbinding career — from her 2017 breakthrough debut Pantheon Of Me, to 2018's multidimensional synth-based project Mazy Fly, and her expansive third album, 2021's The Turning Wheel, breathing new life into the extravagant orchestrations she's written and produced entirely herself.

"With this album, I wanted to capture the ways that these songs have morphed; Cabral says of Spellling er the Mystery School. "They're like my children all grown up in a different stage of their lives, and I wanted to celebrate that:'

Throughout Spellling & the Mystery School, Cabral's hypnotizing voice is enveloped in a newly fleshed-out sonic universe of dreamy strings (Del Sol Quartet and Divya Farias), haunting piano (Jaren Feeley), driving trip-hop percussion (Patrick Shelley) and bass (Giulio Xavier Cetto), shredding electric guitar (Wyatt Overson), and drama-intensifying background vocals (Toya Wil-lock and Dharma Moon-Hunter).

Overall, the album encapsulates the transportative Spellling live experience through which Cabral, with her idiosyncratic stage presence, conjures up a spiritual sense of communion and vulnerability among her audience. "I want people to feel like there's alchemy happening and to be aware of the magical parts of sound," she explains. "Like, this really did come out of thin air:'

Cabral plans to bring her otherworldly live set through a special performance with Atlas Obscura this summer, held at Children's Fairyland, a historical children's amusement park in Oakland that her own mother used to frequent as a child. There, she will unravel her mythical songs that inter-rogate ideas of self-concept and political history, aided by the backdrop that will no doubt bring out her music's other dimensions of playfulness, innocence, curiosity, and joy.

TRACK LISTING

1. Walk Up To Your House
2. Under The Sun
3. They Start The Dance
4. Cherry
5. Haunted Water
6. Hard To Please (Reprise)
7. Phantom Farewell
8. Boys At School
9. Always
10. Revolution
11. Sweet Talk

The highly influential Khanate return with their first album in 14 years, developing their singular and signature precise, temporal abstract doom beyond all thresholds. Khanate are Stephen O’Malley (Sunn O))), KTL), James Plot- kin (OLD, Scorn, Phantomsmasher), Alan Dubin (OLD, Gnaw) and Tim Wyskida (Blind Idiot God).

Unflinching and brutal, the seeds for To Be Cruel were planted in October 2017 when Tim and Stephen spent a week in the English countryside at Orgone Studio with Jamie Gomez Arrellano. James began working these sessions into overall suites of music, a process the band has classically used on all of their prior albums. By spring 2018 initial song arrangements were proposed and over the latter half of the year bass, synth and vocal tracks were added. 2019 saw the completion of writing and recording at which point it was passed to Randall Dunn to mix, alongside the band, in 2020.

The three songs that comprise To Be Cruel are complex, powerful and multi- dimensional. The music is all-enveloping; dry, alive, rich, and blistering. Concurrent with the release of To Be Cruel, Sacred Bones will digitally reissue Khanate’s four prior full lengths - Khanate (2001), Things Viral (2003), Capture & Release (2005), Clean Hands Go Foul (2009) - with a physical reissue campaign to follow.

TRACK LISTING

1 Like A Poisoned Dog
2 It Wants To Fly
3 To Be Cruel

‘Silver Haze’ was produced by Randall Dunn, who has also worked with the likes of Sunn O))), Boris, Earth, Zola Jesus, and Marissa Nadler, all of whom are artists that SQÜRL cite as inspirations. The album enlists Charlotte Gainsbourg, Anika, and Mark Ribot as collaborators, resulting in a communal offering that shares an energetic lineage with the New York School of Poets.

‘Silver Haze’ expands on SQÜRL’s passion for creating rich textural sounds, finessed by a keen ear for production. The band is known for playing with everything from analogue synths to broken radios and pulling inspiration from painters, writers, and birds on the street. ‘Silver Haze’ is a poetic journey of spoken words, dynamic instrumentals, drone riffs and distorted effects, one that features tubular bells and a cello in addition to their signature stacks of delay, encircling the listener in a warm oscillation both delicate and devastating.

TRACK LISTING

1. Berlin '87
2. The End Of The World
3. Garden Of Glass Flowers Feat. Marc Ribot
4. She Don't Wanna Talk About It Feat. Anika
5. Il Deserto Rosso Feat. Marc Ribot
6. John Ashbery Takes A Walk Feat. Charlotte Gainsbourg
7. Queen Elizabeth
8. Silver Haze 

Over the last half decade, the music collective Constant Smiles has produced a prolific output of acclaimed music, culminating in their latest record Kenneth Anger, masterfully brought to life by engineer Jonathan Schenke (Parquet Courts, Liars, Dougie Pool). The group is known most recently for their much-praised debut album for Sacred Bones records, Paragons, an emotionally resonant offering of indie folk masterpieces that all confront the internal ways we process our struggles with intimacies, addiction and humanity - produced by Ben Greenberg.

Constant Smiles’ primary singer/songwriter Ben Jones uses the creative process as a tool for working through a deeply transformative period in his life. The band’s indie folk music lays bare this internal process, but on Kenneth Anger, the music shifts to synth pop and looks externally, examining creativity, community, ritual, and their place in the healing process. Ritual takes a primary role in the eponymous Kenneth Anger. Not only is auteur Kenneth Anger himself known for his sensorial depictions of ritual, Jones often used the films as a silent visual backdrop during his songwriting sessions, a ritual that grounded the creation of the album. And while the director's use of saturated color inspired the warm ‘80s synth style production, the director's trailblazing spirit of authenticity also pushed Jones through his most vulnerable expression to date.

Kenneth Anger is a collage of inspirations all funneled through the depths of reckoning into a distinctly unique synth pop tableau. Album opener "Finding Ways" uses a spiraling bass line, shimmering guitars and soft repetitive mantra-style vocals to bring the listener under the album's spell. It leads into stand-out track "In My Heart", where haunting background vocals by guitarist Lena Fjortoft and the propulsive drums of Ryan Jewell help to craft an anthem you haven't heard until you have heard it with the volume up and the wind in your hair. The album's most overtly pop song "Gold Like Water" was written about the intense feelings of panic attacks, spirals and spin outs, but also about feeling grateful for the people in your life who can help pull you out. The soothing double vocal performance by Jones and Taia and the rich cello accompaniment by Nicky Wetherall, become their own medicine.

This illustrates one of the foundational accomplishments of the album: while the narrative undertones of the songs deal with fear and isolation and anxiety, the songs themselves were created through the healing process of ritual, and enriched with collaboration, community and trust. The resulting music produces a balm that can genuinely recalibrate the nervous system. The listener journeys through the depths of every track while being lifted and guided by the music’s transformative hypnotic power. Just as a Kenneth Anger film explores the underbelly of the unconscious through proto-ASMR visuals, Kenneth Anger the album conjures the underworld into a series of synth pop classics.

TRACK LISTING

A1. Finding Ways
A2. In My Heart
A3. Gold Like Water
A4. Here And Gone
A5. I Hope You Are Well
A6. Emma #7
B1. I’m On Your Side
B2. Loaded Anger
B3. Wandering Hours
B4. Off Again 

After 45 years, the most acclaimed, revered horror franchise in film history reaches its epic, terrifying conclusion as Laurie Strode faces off for the last time against the embodiment of evil, Michael Myers, in a final confrontation unlike any captured on-screen before, one where only one of them will survive.

When the franchise relaunched in 2018, Halloweenshattered box office records, becoming the franchise’s highest-grossing chapter and set a new record for the biggest opening weekend for a horror film starring a woman. In 2021, Halloween Killsearned the biggest opening weekend for any horror film in the pandemic era and simultaneously set a new record for a non-live event premiere streaming on Peacock.

As Halloween Endsmarks the last chapter of the David Gordon Green trilogy, so it ushers the essential return of original director and composer John Carpenter to score the iconically hair-raising soundtrack alongside Cody Carpenter and Daniel Davies. Together they once again bring the celebrated music score to the horror movie series, one of the most distinctive aspects of the franchise to date

Similarly to the last two soundtracks, Halloween Endswas recorded in its entirety at John Carpenter’s home studio and Daniel’s studio. “The three of us compose,perform, and record all the music, and everything is mixed by Daniel together with John Spiker” says John Carpenter.

The unmistakable mix of software synths, vintage analogue equipment, and live instrumentation is utilized once again to provide the signature sound of Halloween. However, rumors have it that Halloween Ends is going to be somewhat different from the previous two films in the trilogy. With that comes an expanded soundtrack, one that matches the tone of a tangible rise in stakes and conveys the climatic feel of the film. The soundtrack of the third installment broadens old themes whilst creating new ones in an effort to bring renewed life to one of the most epic horror scores ever written. Carpenter elaborates, “The main themes have all been passed down from the original Halloween. We have refined them and created new themes for new characters.

”The soundtrack was tracked scene by scene but the album itself plays like a standalone piece of music. The general atmosphereis one of dread yet the record includes some groove laden moments reminiscent of Escape From New York or some of Carpenter’s other more dance-able scores. Exquisite and delicate ambient pieces weave their way between some of the score’s more arresting moments and yet maintain a subtle pop sensibility. The overall achievement showcases three master musicians, one of whom invented the entire horror-synth genre, crafting an evocative, playful and deeply listenable score that honors a legacy and expands on the decades of work that have been leading to this triumphant climax.

Carpenter is known for directing the original 1978 Halloween, as well as other horror classics like The Thing, The Fog, Escape From New York, Christine, Big Trouble in Little China, andThey Live. However John Carpenter is not only a cult movie-maker, he’s also a pioneering electronic composer. Halloween Endsis the soundtrack of the final battle against evil. Watch your back this Halloween, Michael may be near you.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: One of the most legendary soundtrack writers and directors of all time, in his newest guise with both Cody (his son) and Daniel Davies bring us the third and final bout of dystopian synths and tense atmospheric drone. A blistering, and perfectly fitting instrumental tour de force.

TRACK LISTING

1 Where Is Jeremy?
2 Halloween Ends (Main Title)
3 Laurie’s Theme Ends
4 The Cave
5 Cool Kid
6 Drags To The Cave
7 Evil Eyes
8 Transformation
9 Because Of You
10 Requiem For Jeremy
11 Kill The Cop
12 Corey And Michael
13 Corey’s Requiem
14 The Junk Yard
15 Where Are You?
16 Bye Bye Corey
17 The Fight
18 Before Her Eyes
19 The Procession
20 Cherry Blossoms
21 Halloween Ends

We have curated an LP of original Ya Ho Wa 13 and Father Yod and the Spirit of ’76 (the musical projects of the Brotherhood of the Source) music from their rich and prolific recording history. For those not familiar, Ya Ho Wa 13, formed in 1973, are regarded as one of the most extreme, groundbreaking and influential psychedelic rock bands in history. The band released nine super rare LPs (and are rumored to have recorded 60 LPs worth) full of deep spiritual wisdom, tribal drums and distorted guitars, some of which were completely unrehearsed jam sessions, others which contained more conventional rock songs. Most were recorded after hours of meditation at 3:00- 6:00 a.m. in a soundproofed garage that served as the musicians’ studio at the family’s communal residence. All of the records with Father Yod’s participation were completely improvised, with no rehearsals or overdubs and feature him on lead vocals and percussion, via a kettle drum. Most of their original music was pressed in small runs and are highly sought after collector’s items. We are super excited to have listened through hours and hours of this transformative music to bring you what we think is an absolutely essential compilation of some of their best songs.

TRACK LISTING

1. Ya Ho Wa 13 - Ho (Penetration, An Aquarian Symphony)
2. Father Yod And The Spirit Of ’76 - A Lady (1973 Recordings)
3. Father Yod And The Spirit Of ’76 - Every Morning (All Or Nothing At All)
4. Ya Ho Wa 13 - Oh Ya Ho Wa (Savage Sons Of Ya Ho Wa)
5. Father Yod And The Spirit Of ’76 - The Great Woe (1973 Recordings)
6. Father Yod And The Spirit Of ’76 - Different Dreams (All Or Nothing At All)
7. Ya Ho Wa 13 - I’m Gonna Take You Home (Excerpt) (I’m Gonna Take You Home)
8. Ya Ho Wa 13 - Ya Ho Wha (Penetration, An Aquarian Symphony)

Don't let the prestigious acting career fool you, Caleb Landry Jones is a bonafide musical maverick. And on his forthcoming release Gadzooks Vol. 2 he places himself in a lineage of outsider artists, many with only a thin thread tethering them to this reality, who are capable of reaching into the cosmic realms of imagination and bringing back a musical masterpiece. And while most artists don't save some of the best music of their career for an album with Vol. 2 in the title, Jones is an artist for whom chronology is a slippery substance.

The album was recorded with Nic Jodoin in the famed Valentine Recording Studios simultaneous with the mixing of his debut album The Mother Stone. The team invited a slew of heavy hitting musicians to the studio to contribute to the magic. The resulting album sounds a bit like pink elephants in cowboy hats making asmr... at least for the first 20 seconds before it seamlessly changes entirely.

One of Jones's greatest musical gifts is his ability to cover a vast energetic and sonic landscape, with a wide array of instrumentation and vocal stylings over a wholly unique song structure, in a way that feels cohesive and euphoric. And while all his records have an ecstatic quality Gadzooks Vol 2. is perhaps his most soothing and sublime collection to date. Each song has at least a dozen ear worming hooks, all so satisfying you feel a deep longing as they fade until you realize they are being woven into yet another groove-laden, toe-tapping peak. A continual mic drop on an orgasmic wonder wheel.

And given the chameleonic quality to the music we asked Caleb Landry Jones to introduce you to the album himself so here are some of his thoughts: "I'm aware of only half the picture. It comes down upon me like a heavy rain. The psycho Deli is out of mustard and all the Porn Stars won’t leave their homes. I’m out only to get myself, but don’t get in the way. The bugs which throw themselves at windows rarely get their say. "

TRACK LISTING

1. Croc Killers 2
2. Little Lion Blues
3. Touchdown Yolk
4. The Shanty Shine
5. Georgie Borge (The Termite)
6. Jeepers
7. Anyone But You
8. Slink On Fido
9. The Puppet Rush
10. Croc Killers 1

The horror master John Carpenter is back with his Halloween franchise collaborators Daniel Davies and Cody Carpenter for their infectious new soundtrack to the 2022 adaptation of Stephen King’s Firestarter. This marks the first official soundtrack that the team has composed together outside of the Halloween franchise and their inspiration and evolution as a creative team is on full display.

The film is a new take on the thriller examining a girl with extraordinary pyrokinetic powers and her fight to protect her family and herself from sinister forces that seek to capture and control her. The film releases theatrically on May 13th, 2022 and stars Zac Efron, Sydney Lemmon, Ryan Kiera, is directed by Keith Thomas (The Vigil) and created by the producers of The Invisible Man. The story has become a classic and the intense nature of the film creates a canvas for a dynamic soundtrack.

The Firestarter soundtrack utilizes some of the best elements of Carpenter’s famous musical repertoire and charts exciting new territory. The tracks range from fist pumping sci-fi anthems to slow reverb drenched piano ballads and each utilizes a variety of sonic applications. Skulking beats, skittering synths, crushing guitars and an ever-lurking echo come together to create an album that is atmospheric and also deeply melodic, cohesive and eclectic. These three musicians are all working in the peak of their individual and collaborative creativity and this soundtrack further solidifies them as masters of the craft.

TRACK LISTING

1. Mother’s Love
2. Lot 6 (Main Titles)
3. Are You Scared Of Me?
4. Dodge Ball Heats Up
5. Corporate Menace
6. Burned Hands
7. Rainbird Fights Vicky
8. Bless Mommy
9. Flashback Kills
10. Police Arrive
11. Sniper Attack
12. Charlie Alone
13. Charlie’s Powers
14. I’ll Find You
15. Charlie’s Rampage
16. Rampage Ends
17. Firestarter (End Titles)

“To be at the edge, at the precipice of anything, requires deep surrender. It’s like dying over and over again. In the tidal throes of life at its fullest and most intense is the space where grace and strength is fortified and cultivated, is what I am learning” Indigo Sparke ruminates on her magnetic second full-length album Hysteria, a huge and beautiful sweeping work, one that possesses a rare, reflective power. From the first few notes, in the first song, Blue, something chilling and captivating pierces straight into the listener’s chest. With harmonies reminiscent of the voices in our heads, she examines love, loss, grief, a newly realized rage, her history, dreams, and the emotional weather patterns surrounding those sensations: her words tell the stories, and the sounds act them out. It’s a diary built for big stages. ‘Hysteria’ arrives just a year after her striking, minimalist debut, Echo. Here though, Sparke offers an expansive body of work—it’s a simultaneously nostalgic yet clear and complex collection that expands her sound and outlook.

Work on the record began at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic while Sparke was stranded in quarantine in her native Australia waiting for her visa to be renewed so she could return to the States. Echo was being prepared for release, but Sparke was already experiencing a flow of creative thought as a result of shifts in her own life. “I was going through an intense separation and processing all of that in the deep flux of the world collapsing,” she recalls. “I was moving through huge waves of grief and trying to reconcile what was going on, internally and externally. The grief opened a doorway to the past I thought I had made peace with. But there were days where I just couldn’t get off the floor. It felt like everything was falling through this hole in my chest. It felt stark and nauseating to feel such immense groundlessness whilst also looking at all the different versions of myself I had been. All the varied different chapters I had experienced, from heavy drug use, to sexual abuse, love in all its forms, complex trauma and mental health, time spent living in India and Bali seeking something deeper to make sense of it all. It was almost like my life was flashing before my eyes. I realized I was in a profound altered state, as everything simultaneously stood still around me yet was flashing violently inside of me.”

After moving back to New York in the spring of 2021, Sparke finished writing the album’s 14 songs and decamped upstate with producer Aaron Dessner (The National, Taylor Swift). “I just had a really strong intuitive gut feeling that I would do this album with Aaron. We had met once years before in Eau Claire so I asked my manager to reach out to him. When we first talked, we talked about co-writing from scratch, I did have a big folder of demos but was nervous to share them, but after he heard them he said, ‘There’s so much to work with in here already,’” Sparke recalls on how Dessner, who also contributes instrumentation along with multi-instrumentalist and long time collaborator Shahzad Ismaily and drummer Matt Barrick (The Walkmen, Muzz), got involved in bringing Hysteria to life. “Aaron is such an incredible person, to feel his generosity and to feel him in my corner is a true gift. It definitely took a moment for me to get used to a different way of working and hand my trust and heart over to him and his vision but it also felt so natural and we became close friends in the process.”

The connection felt intuitive for both Sparke and Dessner who recalls “I started hearing ideas listening to her voice almost immediately. We connected by phone and had a long talk. She was incredibly open and gracious and really it was creatively inspiring from the moment we started working. It always feels like some weird miracle when songs emerge that you want to listen to all the time -- and this was definitely the case with her record. It feels cohesive and timeless and inspired to me in a way that I know I will keep coming back to. I think the chemistry is right.” Centering Sparke’s powerful vocals throughout, Hysteria is packed with big guitars and layered instrumentation that practically acts as the album’s lungs, giving every note breath. If Echo bore the mark of producer Adrianne Lenker’s intimate, spectral approach, then Hysteria is comparatively full-bodied and warm like a raging fire, as Dessner’s ornate instrumentation perfectly compliment Sparke’s songwriting. The result is music that sounds timeless.

This is music that sounds huge even as it zooms in on the trials and turmoils of one’s inner life, from the pulsing immediacy of “Infinity Honey” to the soaring “God Is a Woman’s Name” or the towering chorus on “Hold On.” You can hear Sparke reflecting on reconciliation, grief, hope, and the passage of time on the perpetually building “Pressure in My Chest” and the airy, Joni Mitchell-esque title track, which finds her embracing a gorgeous upper register over gently strummed guitar. “Set Your Fire on Me” builds and bursts not unlike Angel Olsen’s own raw folk-rock expressionism—and then there’s the stark opener and first single “Blue,” which acts as a cosmic road map for Sparke’s own journey in life. “It was very stream-of-consciousness—it just came out in one go,” she says while discussing how the song came together. “It’s almost like a biopic, or my own version of The Odyssey, charting what I’d been going through while traveling through the realms of time. Being in the movement of grief, memory, and love was intense and beautiful for me, because I didn’t feel stagnant—so the song has a galloping sense of expression as a result. It doesn’t let up.” While reflecting on the album’s thematic bent Sparke observes “My mum pointed out how often I use the word ‘blue,’ which is kind of ironic because that’s what my name means.” There’s all the shades of what blue could be, emotionally, and tonally throughout the record.

To Sparke, Hysteria is reflective of the growth she’s experienced over the last many years—to the point where, in her words, it almost presents a different artistic perspective entirely. “I feel like I matured a lot in this epoch of expression,” she explains. “When you are alone in the dark, you see yourself more clearly. I realized a lot of my behavior and patterns living at edge states. The edge of hope, sorrow, joy, etc. I was at the axis point inside of love right at the edge of a place that had been a home of hysteria for me in the past. Since this reckoning I’ve been determined to find a sense of surrender in the chaos. An unwavering trust and faith. And a will to remain kind and calm and patient with myself so that I can move towards embodying grace more and more. It’s the only way to survive for me now. So there’s a deeper acceptance of who I am and what’s made me, me. I think in the process of all of this somewhere along the road I quietly became a woman and now I don’t feel as fragile as I once did, or now, I accept the wild inner landscape of myself and my history and it gives me a different kind of strength to work from.”

While the world that Sparke inhabits is a rich tapestry of sound that pulls the listener into circular spaces of seemingly never ending minimalistic textures and harmonic suspensions, what’s most clearly on display is her voice and her song forms. Deceptively simple structures wind like labyrinths in a whirlwind of lyrical expression and vocal pageantry calling to mind the early works of PJ Harvey, Meredith Monk, and the like. These compositions are a warm invitation into her world

TRACK LISTING

CD
Blue
Hysteria
Pressure In My Chest
God Is A Woman’s Name
Why Do You Lie?
Pluto
Infinity Honey
Golden Ribbons
Real
Sad Is Love
Set Your Fire On Me
Hold On
Time Gets Eaten
Burn

Vinyl
Side A
Blue
Hysteria
Pressure In My Chest
God Is A Woman’s Name
Why Do You Lie?
Side B
Infinity Honey
Golden Ribbons
Real
Sad Is Love
Set Your Fire On Me
Hold On
Burn

7"
Side A
Hold On
Side B
Time Gets Eaten
Pluto

In the words of Jenny Hval: “Blood Bitch is an investigation of blood. Blood that is shed naturally. The purest and most powerful, yet most trivial, and most terrifying blood: Menstruation. The white and red toilet roll chain which ties together the virgins, the whores, the mothers, the witches, the dreamers, and the lovers. Blood Bitch is also a fictitious story, fed by characters and images from horror and exploitation films of the '70s. With that language, rather than smart, modern social commentary, I found I could tell a different story about myself and my own time: a poetic diary of modern transience and transcendence. There is a character in this story that is a vampire Orlando, traveling through time and space. But there is also a story here of a 35-year old artist stuck in a touring loop, and wearing a black wig. She is always up at night, jet lagged, playing late night shows - and by day she is quietly resting over an Arp Odyssey synthesizer while a black van drives her around Europe and America. So this is my most fictional and most personal album. It’s also the first album where I’ve started reconnecting with the goth and metal scene I started out playing in many years ago, by remembering the drony qualities of Norwegian Black Metal. It’s an album of vampires, lunar cycles, sticky choruses, and the smell of warm leaves and winter.”

Jenny Hval has developed her distinct take on intimate sound since the release of her debut album in 2006. For her last two solo albums, 2013's Innocence Is Kinky and 2015’s Apocalypse, girl, Hval has received thoughtful and widespread international acclaim for her fascinating voice, singular delivery and markedly non-traditional arrangements which incorporate elements of poetry, prose writing,
performance art, and film. She eloquently brings to light issues of both male and female gaze.

TRACK LISTING

1. Ritual Awakening
2. Female Vampire
3. In The Red
4. Conceptual Romance
5. Untamed Region
6. The Great Undressing
7. Period Piece
8. The Plague
9. Secret Touch
10. Lorna

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TRACK LISTING

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

Time is a beguiling, indistinct entity...sometimes standing still, sometimes bending back upon itself with premonitions or memories of the future. Growing out of a pen pal style correspondence that took place over the course of a year, separated by the Atlantic Ocean, Gloria de Oliveira and Dean Hurley passed thoughts and music back and forth that would eventually form their collaborative album, Oceans of Time. The result is an aural tapestry of that exchange: woven from conceptual threads of the celestial within, mortality and the realm beyond stars.

The duo’s partnership is an effortless merge, yet it’s the steady presence of de Oliveira’s vocals that endows the record with itssense of potency. Throughout the album, there is an innate understanding of how a lyric across a chordal color can sharpen an emotional truth. Much like a sunbeam that pierces a spiderweb to reveal its intricacy, her lyric and melody are purposely aimed in order to illuminate the truths deep within oneself... a process that ties us all to the universal. The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, a professed influence, wrote about the truth as something that was inherently subjective, less about the concrete reality of what is believed and more about how it is experienced by the believer.

Frequent David Lynch collaborator Dean Hurley sets the tonal and sonic landscape of each track on the album, lending a layered ether that envelops, frames and holds de Oliveira’s vocals. With its impressionistic synths, shimmering guitars, and ethereal sonics, Oceans of Time at moments recalls the foundational dreampop of 4AD acts like Cocteau Twins and Lush. The album feels especially attuned to the connections between the physical and transcendental realms, and the best dreampop has a way of making the veil between two worlds feel just a little bit thinner.

Oceans of Time is a key that has the power to release its listener from the handcuffs of reality, however briefly...

TRACK LISTING

1. Intro
2. I’m Nebel
3. Ashore Of The Cosmic
4. Seven Summits
5. Something To Behold
6. Hanging Gardens
7. Eyes Within
8. All Flowers In Time
9. Astral Bodies
10. In The Tenth Year Of
11. Picture Of A Picture
12. Further Than The Stars

Rob wanted the world of The Northman to feel harsh and uncomfortable, and for everything to feel like it was caked in mud and dry blood, so it was crucial for the score to mirror that.” Composers Robin Carolan (Tri-Angle Records) and Sebastian Gainsborough (Vessel) were given a task of epic proportions when director Rob Eggers(The VVitch, The Lighthouse) asked them to create the score for his ambitious and highly anticipated new film The Northman, releasing on April 22nd. They needed to make a score that both honored the immense research that had gone into the authenticity of this Viking era period piece and complimented the cinematic maximalism of the film for a modern audience. The artists stretched themselves to the depths of their creativity and the resulting album is a gorgeous sonic tableaux that places the listener right in the center of the film.



While arranging the score the composers consulted musician and ethnographer PoulHøxbro for inspiration and insight into the history of Viking music. Having backgrounds in left field electronic music, Robin and Sebastian felt liberated by the constraint of using a small selection of musical tools for this piece. “Electronic music has almost limitless potential when it comes to making sounds and that’s obviously an incredible thing, but you can also go down the wormhole and get lost in it sometimes. There’s no risk of that happening when you only have a few primary instruments to draw upon.” Robin remarked.



They utilized traditional instruments such as the tagelharpa, langspil, kravik lyre, and säckpip to build the cinematic world of The Northman but they also took creative freedoms in adding instruments likes drums, which some academics believe wouldn’t have played a big part in Viking musical culture, simply due to the lack of archaeological evidence of actual drums. “One of the pieces we wrote was intended to emulate the sound of a bullroarer; an ancient instrument used in sacred rituals or in battle to intimidate enemies. It makes a really disorienting roaring vibrato sound and low frequencies capable of traveling insane distances.” Robin says when asked about one of the more unique aspects of the score. Everyone involved put so much effort into both their research and their creativity and this richness is evident in every track. The album as a whole is a cinematic masterpiece of sound and ambiance, both gorgeous and disturbing, like the film it so beautifully accompanies.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: A wonderful soundtrack from the ever-reliable Sacred Bones, by music scene aficionados Carolan & Gainsborough. Tense, orchestral scores and deep ambient passages, both bleak and beautiful, perfect for listening to as meditative home listening as well as a perfectly measured soundtrack.

TRACK LISTING

1. Approaching Hrafnsey
2. The King
3. Entering The Temple
4. Last Teardrop
5. Blood Tree, Part I
6. Strike, Brother
7. Escape
8. I Will Avenge You, Father
9. The Land Of The Rus
10. A Burning Barn
11. Seeress
12. Raven’s Omen
13. Storm At Sea / Yggdrasill
14. Iceland
15. I Will Save You, Mother
16. Slave Work
17. Guðrún
18. Follow The Vixen’s Tail
19. He-Witch
20. Draugr
21. Mound Dweller
22. To The Games
23. Birch Woods
24. First Of Many
25. Trollish Sorcery
26. Svið Night, Part I
27. Svið Night, Part II
28. I Am Your Death
29. Come Morning
30. I Am His Vengeance
31. Óðinn
32. Valkyrie
33. Vestrahorn
34. Hidden Valley
35. Blood Tree, Part II
36. Blóð Inside / I Choose Both
37. A Maiden King
38. The Wolf Has Grow
39. The Gates Of Hel / Slain By Iron
40. Hekla
41. Cut The Thread Of Fate
42. Make Your Passage / Valhöll
43. Ættartré / End Credits

There is a way a voice can cut through the fascia of reality, cleaving through habit into the raw nerve of experience. Nika Roza Danilova, the singer, songwriter, and producer who since 2009 has released music as Zola Jesus, wields a voice that does that. When you hear it, it is like you are being summoned to a place that’s already wrapped inside you but obscured from conscious experience. This place has been buried because it tends to hold pain, but it’s also a gift, because once it’s opened, once you’re inside of it, it can show you the truth. Zola Jesus’s new album, Arkhon, finds new ways of loosing this submerged, stalled pain.

On previous albums, Danilova had largely played the role of auteur, meticulously crafting every aspect of Zola Jesus’s sound and look. This time, she realized that her habitual need for control was sealing her out of her art. Arkhon sees Zola Jesus’s first collaboration with producer Randall Dunn (Sunn O))), Earth, Mandy soundtrack, Candyman soundtrack) and with drummer and percussionist Matt Chamberlain, whose prior work appears on albums by Fiona Apple, Bob Dylan, and David Bowie. Arkhon runs the spectrum from songs whose weight lies in their bare simplicity, like “Desire,” an elegiac piano composition about the end of a relationship that was recorded acoustically in a single take, to towering, groove-oriented tracks like “The Fall” and the tight, interlocking percussion and samples of a Slovenian folk choir in “Lost,” which propel narratives of collective despair and mutual comfort in kind. Through these turns, Arkhon reveals itself as an album whose power derives from abandon. Both its turmoils and its pleasures take root in the body, letting individual consciousness dissolve into the thick of the beat.

Despite the darkness curled inside reality, there is power, too, in surrendering to what can’t be pinned down, to the wild unfurling of the world in all its unforeseeable motion. That letting go is the crux of Arkhon, which marks a new way of moving and making for Zola Jesus.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Zola Jesus' music has always been uncompromising, and had a distinct identity all of it's own, but on 'Arkhon', Danilova mixes her distinctive compositional style with a number of collaborators, resulting in a fractured, visceral hybrid of modern industrial music and abstracted synth-pop.

TRACK LISTING

1 Lost
2 The Fall
3 Undertow
4 Into The Wild
5 Dead And Gone
6 Sewn
7 Desire
8 Fault
9 Efemra
10 Do That Anymore 

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

Never Tell (4:17)
One Eye Open (4:43)
Daily Driver (3:54)
Feels (4:42)
The Usual (1:35)
Grey Eyeliner (3:32)
Bigger Than Life (3:54)
Private Show (4:41)
Shoulder (4:12)
Hit Show (1:36)
Call (3:43) 

This February the story of the infamous Unabomber Ted Kaczynski will receive its theatrical debut in a new Tony Stone directed film, Ted K. Kaczynski is notorious for both tragically murdering three people (and wounding an additional 23) via bombs sent in the mail and for his numerous writings on the evils of technology he composed during his primitive residency in the woods of Montana. Stone’s choice to have the renowned electronic artist Blanck Mass score the film is somewhat ironic and creates an obvious tension perfect for the controversial and complex subject matter.

2020 saw the first Blanck Mass movie score, for the soundtrack to Nick Rowland’s acclaimed cinematic debut Calm with Horses. This expansion into new areas of melodic composition and textural exploration won Blanck Mass many new fans, with the BBC’s acknowledged number one film buff Mark Kermode proclaiming the work the soundtrack of the year. In 2021, Blanck Mass won the prestigious Ivor Novello Award for Best Original Film Score and has firmly established himself at the forefront of the latest wave of experimental soundscape wizards.

Recording during lockdown at his studio in Edinburgh, Scotland, Blanck Mass’s Ben Power was in the perfect setting for a musical piece intended to capture the isolation central to Kaczynski’s story. Power was also working with a director in a time zone 10 hours behind and thus many sessions required working in the middle of the night, which added a fitting intensity to the composition process. He said of the project “I wanted it to feel like an ‘epic’” and drew on the legends Sergio Leone and Ennio Morricone for inspiration in encapsulating the energy of the perceived good vs. evil.

The gentle madness of sound achieved is exquisite and slowly builds in intensity and desperation as the score moves along. Power is able to perfectly capture the complexity, the terror and the deep emotionality of the film while presenting an often breathtakingly beautiful and always masterful album that stands on its own as a work of art.

TRACK LISTING

1. Scroll
2. Montana (Main Theme)
3. Noise Destroys Something Wonderful
4. Pesticides
5. Revenge
6. ComTech
7. Greyhound
8. Second Test
9. Desecration
10. Tell Me Your Heart
11. Dark Materials
12. Becky’s Theme
13. Blue Tunnel
14. Manifesto
15. Ranger Gary
16. At Peace - Freedom Club
17. Prophecy
18. Skidders
19. Montana (Reprise)

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

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

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

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

STAFF COMMENTS

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

TRACK LISTING

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

On the tribute album Songs for Tres, Psychic Ills band members come together to commemorate the late Tres Warren who passed away just as the world turned upside down in March of 2020. Isolated, feeling helpless and lost by the death of her musical soul mate and collaborator of 18 years, bassist Elizabeth Hart found making music to be her only outlet in a time where people were unable to be physically together to mourn. So, she reached out to Adam Amram, Jon Catfish DeLorme and Brent Cordero, the main players in the Ills line up since the release of their last full length album Inner Journey Out (2016), to ask if they would embark on this cathartic journey with her. This was a different kind of production endeavor for Hart driven solely by “the aching need and urgency” to do something to honor her friend.

Hart, Amram, DeLorme and Cordero reunited for the first time five months after losing Warren at Amram’s loft – the same spot where they’d rehearsed countless times before – although this time with a different objective. In an effort to share, support and create, the old friends joined in the painful and healing experience of making this tribute album to cope with their loss. The band members wrote, arranged, and rehearsed for months and the result of their work culminated in a weekend of recording in the southern Catskill mountains at the end of 2020. This isolated and intimate environment was a perfectly serene and fitting location to finalize their story.

Throughout the album, Hart, Amram and DeLorme take turns as the vocal lead on each of the songs while Cordero showcases his finger-picking guitar skills in addition to his piano and organ playing, which he is known for. Along with the core band members, a number of other musicians played on the album, many of whom had collaborated on prior Psychic Ills releases and wanted to be a part of this last collaboration in memory of Warren. Keeping the project in the Ills family, Hart produced the album alongside Iván Diaz Mathé, the long-time Psychic Ills sound engineer.

The album consists of five original tracks and four cover songs. Initially, learning the covers was just a method for the musicians to “break the ice” and play together again for the first time without their band leader. However, those tracks became just as important to include as the originals because of their essential role in the process of coming together to make the album. The cover songs were chosen because of their unique connections to the band’s memories of Warren. Dennis Wilson’s "Rainbows" and Fleetwood Mac’s "Station Man" come from two of Warren’s favorite albums, Pacific Ocean Blue and Kiln House. The band also recorded Blaze Foley’s "Clay Pigeons" and Powell St. John’s "Right Track Now." The idea for the latter was suggested by Amram. Warren once sent him a clip of Roky Erikson singing a moving rendition of that song in the film Demon Angel and it had stuck with him ever since.

Hart wrote "I’ll Walk With You" on the day of Warrens’ passing, at the time not knowing what it meant. When she got the call with the heartbreaking news, it became clear to her what the song was about. Relying on a gently lilting string arrangement to set the tone, this duet features Mazzy Star vocalist Hope Sandoval alongside Hart. Sandoval previously collaborated with Psychic Ills accompanying Warren on "I Don’t Mind" (2016). The ideas for "Home" and "Walk Around," two other songs on the album by Hart, started simply with an acoustic guitar and lyrics, a hopeful exercise to connect with her lost friend. Brent Cordero’s instrumental "Whole Lotta Piece of Mind" is nothing short of a transcendental experience. By running his pedal steel through a Leslie speaker, Jon Catfish DeLorme crafts the unique tone showcased on Wonderful Feeling, a moving example of studio experimentation combined with old school techniques. DeLorme describes it as “an attempt to highlight the musical experience I shared with Tres both sonically and thematically. What resulted is the unguarded exaltation I feel lucky to have shared with my fellow bandmates.” Adam Amram’s “Into the Sea” was composed spontaneously the week Warren passed. The melodic tune has a hopeful lightness and Amram describes it simply as “a song to my brother”. Their connection shines through.

In fact, the entire album is one that radiates the layers of friendship, love and music that will forever exist between this family of musicians. As the band themselves state: “This album was made out of love and a commitment to honor our dear friend and bandmate.” A portion of the proceeds from the album will be donated to RAICES, a charity who aids children who have been displaced at the Texas/Mexico border.

TRACK LISTING

Side A
1. Rainbows
2. I’ll Walk With You
3. Wonderful Feeling
4. Clay Pigeons
5. Home

Side B
1. Station Man
2. Right Track Now
3. Whole Lotta Peace Of Mind
4. Walk Around
5. Into The Sea

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)

Typically, a band’s big indie label debut doesn’t come 15 albums into its career, but with Constant Smiles’ Paragons, here we are.

Primary songwriter and sole “constant” member Ben Jones—who considers Constant Smiles a collective—sees its impressive output as a way to document the group’s evolution. Since its live debut as a noise duo on Ben’s home of Martha’s Vineyard in 2009, Constant Smiles has grown to include contributions from 50 other members, all of whom have personal connections to the group’s extended family. And while the collective has indulged an array of musical whims along the way - including Ben’s penchant for penning a new set’s worth of material for each live performance - Constant Smiles’ sound has tightened up considerably over their past couple of albums, in large part as a result of Ben’s working relationship with Mike Mackey, who has become his main creative partner. This increased focus manifests on Paragons in the band’s most cohesive batch of songs to date, ranging from shimmering psych-pop excursions to bittersweet, piano and string-accented strummers, and an execution that feels like a massive step forward for the band.

Through its recent forays into dream pop and shoegaze (Control) and synth-pop (John Waters), Constant Smiles has learned how to incorporate its experimental inclinations more fluidly into the mix. Artists like Yo La Tengo, and the more recent Rat Columns, are good touchstones for Constant Smiles’ musical approach - tethering to an indie-pop core while perennially mining genres, always finding new ways to intrigue listeners and pursue a unique vision

TRACK LISTING

01. Introduction
02. Run To Stay
03. Hope For Tomorrow
04. The Things I Miss
05. Learning To Start Over
06. With Death In Mind
07. Interlude
08. The Weight
09. Daisy, Table For Three
10. Please Don’t Be Late
11. Shame
12. Where Am I Now?
12. Outro

On Fast Idol, LA-based Black Marble reaches back through time to connect with the forgotten bedroom kids of the analogue era, the halcyon days of icy hooks and warbly synths. Harmonies are piped in across the expanse of space, and lyrics capture conversations that seem to come from another room, repeat an accusation overheard, or speak as if in sleep of interpersonal struggles distilled down to one subconscious phrase. At the same time, percussive elements feel forward and cut through the mix with toms counting off the measures like a lost tribe broadcasting through the bass and tops of a basement club soundsystem.

Melodies roll with the fizz and charm of Jacno and phrases repeated are electric torchlight ballads sung after hours in William Gibson’s San Francisco. ‘Somewhere’ opens in sombre herald, before dropping into a fast freeway tempo; the glassy synths and crisp beats cut through the anxious moods on ‘Bodies’ and ‘Try’ sits in a lineage with cult bands like Asylum Party. ‘The Garden’ is a journey through a post-apocalyptic cityscape, earthed by the pulse of a drum machine whereas ‘Ship To Shore’ could be a lost Oppenheimer Analysis B-side, and the album’s closer ‘Brighter and Bigger’ catches a sentiment like The Dadacomputer has learned to feel emotions. He captures the loneliness of Ray Bradbury’s atomic-era sci-fi and the apocalyptic but revolutionary spirit of Godard’s Sympathy for the Devil, as in ‘Preoccupation’, the beating heart of the album, which conjures ambivalent scenes of an empty world and the comfort to be found in a
shared humanity.

Emerging from the early 2000s New York synth scene, Black Marble carried on the tradition of early synthwave pioneers like Martin Dupont and Modern Art who repurposed synths once reserved for expensive studios and stadium rock superstars. Seeking to channel this spirit, Black Marble recalls the gauzy tape wow and flutter of The Membranes and the warbling VCO of Futurisk, carrying on a sound that seeks to channel the future while imprinting residue of the past.

TRACK LISTING

01. Somewhere
02. Bodies
03. Royal Walls
04. Try
05. The Garden
06. Say It First
07. Streetlight
08. Ceiling
09. Ship To Shore
10. Preoccupation
11. Brighter And Bigger

In 2018, David Gordon Green’s Halloween, starring icon Jamie Lee Curtis, slaughtered the box office, earning more than $250 million worldwide, becoming the highestgrossing chapter in the four-decade franchise and setting a new record for the biggest opening weekend in history for a horror film starring a woman. The film had 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 served as an executive producer, a creative consultant, and, thrillingly, as a soundtrack composer, alongside his collaborators from his recent solo albums, Cody Carpenter and Daniel Davies.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: John Carpenter is obviously one of the most legendary figures in the soundtracking biz, and in the newest iteration with Cody &co, we get possibly his strongest late-career work to date. 'Halloween Kills' is a wonderfully evocative, perfectly pitched soundtrack from one of the true masters. Everything you'd expect.

TRACK LISTING

01.Logos Kill
02. Halloween Kills (Main Title
03. The Myer’s House
04. First Attack
05. Stand Off
06. Let It Burn
07. He Appears
08. From The Fire
09. Strodes At The Hospital
10. Cruel Intentions
11. Gather The Mob
12. Rampage
13. Frank And Laurie
14. Hallway Madness
15. It Needs To Die
16. Reflection
17. Unkillable
18. Payback
19. Michael’s Legend
20. Halloween Kills (End Titles) 

Caleb Landry Jones is a continual creator. The Texan-born star found fame as an actor - you’ll recognise him from key roles in X-Men: First Class, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, amongst others - but music is perhaps his first love, and his source of greatest comfort. A chance encounter with famed auteur Jim Jarmusch brought him into the orbit of Sacred Bones, and the stalwart independent released Caleb’s 2020 debut album The Mother Stone. Psychedelic in a defiantly non-retro way, this indulgent, freewheeling trip won critical acclaim, but masked a secret - he’d already finished another album.

Filming alongside Tom Hanks in dystopian themed Finch, Caleb found himself writing during those long evenings after the shoot in locations across New Mexico, idling away his hours by focusing on creativity. “I need it,” he says, “I’ve tried working without it. On one acting job, I intentionally didn’t bring a guitar to try and do it without music... but that didn’t last long. I need to create something - it could be a drawing, it could be a song - because otherwise I feel like I’m wasting time. Which is something I do plenty of on my own!”

With his creative faculties burning, Caleb knew he had to get straight back into the studio when filming stopped. Linking with the same cast who formed The Mother Stone, he resumed his partnership with producer Nic Jodoin, based out of the elegant Valentine Recording Studio in Los Angeles. A studio steeped in history - everyone from Bing Crosby to Frank Zappa worked there - he interrupted mixing sessions for his own debut album in order to focus on something different.

Gadzooks Vol. 1 is unlike anything you’ve heard before - comparisons range from Skip Spence’s fractured masterpiece Oar through to skewed troubadour Robyn Hitchcock, via John Lennon’s black moods on The White Album and Frank Zappa’s caustic surrealism. Recording to tape, Caleb would hack away at each take, re-assembling the songs like Escher diagrams. “It’s like when you’re swimming in the pool,” he smiles, “and you’re doing a bit of butterfly, and then that gets old after a while. So then you start doing breaststroke, and then that gets old after a while. I think it’s just a reaction from the place where we were before.”

Part of a flood-tide of creativity - as its title suggests, a second half to this album is already on the horizon - Gadzooks Vol. 1 is thrilling, shocking, and wonderfully entertaining. Each song starts and finishes in entirely unique places, often totally divorced from each other. “I’m trying to write something very simple,” he says, “And it gets really abstract because I don’t know any other way.”

TRACK LISTING

1. Never Wet
2. Yesterday Will Come
3. The Loon (A Gate Away)
4. Bogie
5. Gloria
6. California
7. For A Short Time (There Was Loving)
8. A Slice Of Dream
9. This Won’t Come Back

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.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Brittle, lightly distorted guitar tastefully underpins the tender vocal delivery, swimming with influences from 70's psych folk to the minimalistic acoustic songwriting of Buckley or Joplin. Soulful and beautifully minimalistic.

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

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

Barry 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)

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)

“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

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

Barry 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

Barry 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

At first listen, The Practice of Love, Jenny Hval’s seventh full-length album, unspools with an almost deceptive ease. Across eight tracks, filled with arpeggiated synth washes and the kind of lilting beats that might have drifted, loose and unmoored, from some forgotten mid-’90s trance single, The Practice of Love feels, first and foremost, compellingly humane. Given the horror and viscera of her previous album, 2016’s Blood Bitch, The Practice of Love is almost subversive in its gentleness—a deep dive into what it means to grow older, to question one’s relationship to the earth and one’s self, and to hold a magnifying glass over the notion of what intimacy can mean. As Hval describes it, the album charts its own particular geography, a landscape in which multiple voices engage and disperse, and the question of connectedness—or lack thereof—hangs suspended in the architecture of every song. It is,an album about “seeing things from above—almost like looking straight down into the ground, all of these vibrant forest landscapes, the type of nature where you might find a porn magazine at a certain place in the woods and everyone would know where it was, but even that would just become rotting paper, eventually melting into the ground.”

Prompted by an urge to find a different kind of language to express what she was feeling, the songs on Love unfurl like an interior dialogue involving several voices. Friends and collaborators Vivian Wang, Laura Jean Englert, and Felicia Atkinson surface on various tracks, via contributed vocals or through bits of recorded conversation, which further posits the record itself as a kind of ongoing discourse. “The last thing I wrote, which was my new book, had quite an angry voice,” says Hval, “The voice of an angry teenager, furious at the hierarchies. Perhaps this album rediscovers that same voice 20 years later. Not so angry anymore, but still feeling apart from the mainstream, trying to find their place and their community. With that voice, I wanted to push my writing practice further, writing something that was multilayered, a community of voices, stories about both myself and others simultaneously, or about someone’s place in the world and within art history at the same time. I wanted to develop this new multi-tracked writing voice and take it to a positive, beautiful pop song place... A place which also sounds like a huge pile of earth that I’m about to bury my coffin in.”

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: 'The Practice Of Love' is a huge, synthy behemoth of an album, percussive and momentous, but wonderfully balanced with Hval's spellbinding vocals echoing over the top. Shining with influences from all over the dance spectrum, with Italo basses and trancy stacked waves fading into jazzy wind instruments and hypnotic soaring harmonies.

TRACK LISTING

1. Lions (3:58)
2. High Alice (4:46)
3. Accident (4:11)
4. The Practice Of Love (3:03)
5. Ashes To Ashes (4:15)
6. Thumbsucker (4:16)
7. Six Red Cannas (4:07)
8. Ordinary (5:18)

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

“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

Barry 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

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

Matt 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.

Barry 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 

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.

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 

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)

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

Barry 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

Barry 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)

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)

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

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

TRACK LISTING

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

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)

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

Martin 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)

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