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SOOPER RECORDS

Rami Gabriel

Tunderizer

Rami Gabriel’s second LP 'Tunderizer' focuses the harsh experimentalism of post-punk industrial upon the intimate sphere of home. Like shadows crossing through mirrors, a mesh of lo-fi noise art and field recordings obscures expertly tuned songwriting. 'Tunderizer' fires in all registers, from irrepressible melody to deconstructive static, from country to tarab, skronk to delta blues.

Born in Beirut, Rami Gabriel is a composer and songwriter who plays Oud, Buzuq, and Guitar. He learned blues and jazz performing with legendary Chicago musicians and integrating it with Arabic traditions. Rami performs widely across North America and internationally including in Europe, India, Turkey, Lebanon and Ghana. He recently performed at the Portland Jazz Festival, the NYC Arab Festival, and the Festival International De Louisiane.

Rami leads Chicago favorites The Arab Blues and the R&B quartet Rami & the Reliables. He has shared bills with roots luminaries including Buddy Guy, Zakir Hussein, Bela Fleck, Edgar Meyers, and Rakesh Chaurasia. He opened for British songwriter Nick Lowe, and records regularly with members of American rock legends NRBQ. He also shared bills with Prostitute, Marvin Tate, and other punk and noise artists. His music has been remixed by experimental artists including Fire-Toolz, Beau Wanzer, Sen Morimoto, Lynyn, k-rAd, and Alex Hall of Chicago’s Reliable Recorders.

TRACK LISTING

1. Majesty And Misery
2. Tunderizer
3. Out Of Our Bed
4. Waiting For The Drugs
5. 680
6. Ain’t I Worth That
7. Whiskey On The Rocks
8. Greece Without The Greeks 9. Chennai
10. Nothome
11. Select A Room
12. Approaching Ramp
13. Money And Blood

Pile

Sunshine And Balance Beams

'Sunshine and Balance Beams', Pile’s ninth album, is a Sisyphean parable concerned with labor and living. To write it, singer Rick Maguire inhabited “a dark place,” wrestling with the concept that there is no enlightenment, no end to suffering. Maguire explores workaholism, the myth of meritocracy, and acceptance of mortality—all through a devilish allegory of trudging through a shadowy forest towards the uncertain dream of a bright clearing.

Pile wrestles with existential and social contradictions by evoking sonic in-betweens. The music exists somewhere in the temporary equilibrium of light and shadow, chaos and order. Heated rain-like guitars, shifting drums that pave sinuous roads in sound and pace, eerie synths, and aqueous strings add to a panoramic production of loud-quiet dynamism matching the emotionality of the band’s thunderous performances.

The group also favored freewheeling performances that would animate the storytelling, while enlisting a string section (violins, viola, cello) to perform incandescent, through-composed arrangements co-written by cellist Eden Rayz and Pile. They drew inspiration from cinema and opera scores by Chopin, Bernard Herrmann, and Ralph Vaughan Williams, lending 'Sunshine...' a larger-than-life sound that intensifies Pile’s blistering realizations of some of their most accessible songwriting to date.

The recording is a noticeable leap in production value, and centers Maguire’s vocals in new and exciting ways. Pile traveled to Pawtucket, RI for two weeks of tracking at Machines with Magnets with longtime engineer Miranda Serra (Kal Marks, Kira McSpice). The album was mixed by Seth Manchester (Lightning Bolt, Mdou Moctar), and Mastered by Matt Colton (Aphex Twin, Swans, Muse). 'Sunshine and Balance Beams' is Pile’s first album for Chicago’s Sooper Records.

TRACK LISTING

1. Balance Beams (LP Only)
2. An Opening
3. Deep Clay
4. A Loosened Knot
5. Bouncing In Blue
6. Uneasy
7. Holds
8. Born At Night
9. Meanwhile Outside
10. Carrion Song

Alicia Walter

I Am Alicia

I Am Alicia, the debut LP from the former leader of Chicago-based art-rock outfit Oshwa, is a bold retelling of Walter’s self-discovery that encourages the listener’s own story to take root in its universal truths; a soundtrack to get you up and over life’s hurdles when feeling like you are your only cheerleader. Embracing influences spanning from jazz and the classic composition of American standards to hip-hop and new wave to build her own brand of eclecti-pop, Walter paves a path toward actualization, acceptance and love that is fearless in its sound and lyrics.

The accompanying arrangements utilize a kitchen sink approach to production, spanning the poles from electronic to orchestral and everything in between (like talk box and tap dancing!). Known for her “near-cosmic voice” (WIRED) and “stratosphere of songwriting all her own” (Consequence of Sound), Walter invites you on I Am Alicia into the most dynamic iteration of her world as she knows it. Inspired by a life on the move and born from a restless passion for creation, I Am Alicia is part practice in personal mythology, part call to “set yourself free” and join Walter on her odyssey.

What developed in a time of intense change as she relocated from Chicago to New York City in 2016, where the only constant was the time spent with herself, the artist sees this 10-track collection as “a hero’s journey through the unconscious, driven by my desire to experience who it is I am, inside, and what it is I do in this life, outside.”

TRACK LISTING

Side A:
1. Prelude
2. House Of Yes
3. Who Am I
4. Suit Yourself
5. Just A Little

Side B:
6. Standing At Your Doorstep
7. I Feel You
8. Talking To Myself
9. A Toast
10. I Am

Jodi

Blue Heron

The Line of Best Fit once said, "Jodi has left us broken, bereft but in awe of a talent that can take a couple of seconds and make it your whole world." Jodi is the project of New Jersey-raised, Chicago-based multi-instrumentalist and songwriter Nick Levine, whose soft-spoken songs deliver a series of intimate world building moments capable of shattering a listener's temporal and emotional boundaries. It is a type of gentle yet deeply powerful songwriting for fans of artists like Jason Molina, Mount Eerie, Karen Dalton, Julie Doiron, and Duster. For Levine, Jodi is tentatively described as an alter-ego, a lens in which they can ask questions, push boundaries and step outside of their inner world.

Debut full length Blue Heron captures Levine's continued search for meaning; a search where a couple of chance encounters with a bird “a great blue heron” taught them to embrace the fortuity of creative expression and surrender to its symbolism as a metaphor for understanding their own work. Levine encountered the blue heron first while writing the project, and a second time while recording it. In the first encounter, "It pulled me out of a spiral," they say.

"Maybe you're not in the amount of control that you think and that's actually a good thing. There's so much life happening outside of your head and that's really grounding to remember." It was this initial chance encounter that urged Levine to get outside of their own head and breathe the bigger picture more deeply into their writing. Later, during their final days of recording those songs, Levine was visited by a second blue heron. For them, it was a sure sign.

Committing fully to the symbolism, Levine had a large blue heron tattooed on their back and submerged themself in a freezing Chicago pond as a means to forever memorialize the Blue Heron as both the album cover and title. Marking the dedication to their art "with wings wide open, ready to take flight" it also signifies the power of music, nature and friendship. While Blue Heron claws at the strands of meaning, and tries to make sense of the world, it's a work that ultimately only finds closure in the complete surrender to forces greater than oneself. It embraces chance, coincidence, and fate with a sublime curiosity, ultimately finding meaning in the randomness of it all.

TRACK LISTING

Side A:

1. Power
2. Go Slowly
3. Get Back
4. Hawks
5. Slug Night

Side B:

6. Buddy
7. Softy
8. Water
9. River Rocks
10. Blue Heron

Sen Morimoto

Sen Morimoto

Sen Morimoto is the gleaming new self-titled Double LP from Chicago multi-hyphenate producer, instrumentalist, and songwriter, Sen Morimoto. His breakout debut LP Cannonball! (Sooper Records, 2018) earned acclaim for its fresh take on "jazz rap" (Pitchfork), and brought Morimoto to national and international attention, including two tours in Japan and a national US tour with 88Rising (Joji, Rich Brian). Morimoto also produced the breakout 2019 debut Next to The Sun by KAINA (Sooper Records), and as her band director, crisscrossed the US on tour with Sleater-Kinney, Cuco, and Durand Jones amongst others.

As a result, Morimoto wrote much of his new album in transit and gazing out of windows, informed by an uncertainty between waking life and fantasy. The cohesive pop radiance and relentless soul sensibility imbued on Sen Morimoto firmly establishes Morimoto as a dynamic songwriter with yet another refreshing take on pop music. Across 15 songs, Morimoto's vocal hooks swim within an ethereal fount of synth, guitar, saxophone, and drum machines, and are bolstered by features from Lala Lala, KAINA, Joseph Chilliams (Pivot Gang), Qari, and NNAMDI. Sen Morimoto wrote, produced, and recorded the album himself, and is a co-owner of Sooper Records. 

TRACK LISTING

1. Love, Money Pt. 2
2. Woof
3. Symbols, Tokens Kara Jackson, Qari
4. Butterflies Ft. KAINA
5. Deep Down Ft. AAAMYYY
6. Tastes Like It Smells Ft. Lala Lala
7. Save
8. Wrecked Ft. NNAMDI
9. Goosebumps
10. Daytime But Darker
11. The Things I Thought About You Started To Rhyme
12. The Box Ft. Joseph Chilliams
13. You Come Around
14. Nothing Isn’t Very Cool
15. Jupiter

NNAMDI

Brat

During the past decade, the Chicago-based multiinstrumentalist and producer, NNAMDÏ, has quietly become one of the most prolific musicians of the modern era. Whether under his own name or one of the many bands he’s spent time in, either as a full-on member or merely a touring partner, there’s been an endless stream of music that NNAMDÏ has had his hands in. Pair that with the fact he co-owns his label, Sooper Records (KAINA, Sen Morimoto), and it’d be easy to wonder how he finds time to do anything other than make music.

On BRAT, the follow-up to 2017’s critically acclaimed DROOL, NNAMDÏ removes the veil to show just how much effort and energy it takes to work at such a high level without any breaks. That process of finding a balance between NNAMDÏ the performer and Nnamdi Ogbonnaya the person is what fuels BRAT, an introspective record that’s still as dexterous and exciting as anything that’s come before, but is intimate and hushed, commanding a listener’s full attention from the very start. Like all things he’s done before, BRAT proves that genre classifications don’t really work here. BRAT is part hip-hop, part indie-rock, part gospel, and part West African music, and in NNAMDÏ’s hands, these seemingly disparate pieces fit together snuggly, as if there was never a question of their compatibility. NNAMDÏ wrote, performed, and recorded BRAT by himself. 

TRACK LISTING

1. Flowers To My
2. Gimme Gimme
3. Bullseye
4. Everyone I Loved
5. Wasted
6. Glass Casket
7. Perfect In My Mind Demons
8. Semantics
9. Price Went Up
10. Really Don’t
11. It’s OK
12. Salut


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