- Alex Maas
- Allah Las
- BADBADNOTGOOD
- BADBADNOTGOOD & LITTLE DRAGON
- Bass Drum of Death
- Bun B
- Classixx
- Claude Fontaine
- Crystal Antlers
- D Tiberio
- De Lux
- Death Boner
- El Niño & The Southern Oscillations
- Feeding People
- Freddie Gibbs
- Gossamer
- Hanni El Khatib
- Harriet Brown
- Holy Fuck
- Iguana Death Cult
- Innovative Leisure
- Jim-E Stack
- Khun Narin
- Korey Dane
- Lazer Sword
- Lionel Boy
- Mapache
- Mexicans With Guns
- Mint Field
- Nguzunguzu
- Nick Waterhouse
- Nosaj Thing
- OTTOFIX
- Superhumanoids
- The Buttertones
- The Molochs
- Tijuana Panthers
- Traps PS
- Tropics
- Two Eights aka 8|8
- Various Artists
- Vicktor Taiwò
- Wall of Death
- We Break Cameras
103 products
Will The Guns Come Out
Regular price Sale price $12.99 Save $0.00Los Angeles based Hanni El Khatib grew up in San Francisco raised on skateboarding (former creative director at HUF), punk rock, and 1950s and 60s classic Americana. Influenced by pioneers of early rock and R&B, the multi-instrumentalist and producer derives his unique sound from a menagerie of inspirations: blues, soul, garage rock, doo-wop … and the most American thing of all, car wrecks. It's malt shop music for those who drink them spiked with bourbon or in Hanni's own words "these songs were written for anyone who's ever been shot or hit by a train. Knife fight music." No word yet on whether Hanni's tested that knife fight thing at any of his shows.
Will The Guns Come Out is his debut album on the Innovative Leisure label, following two 45s: Dead Wrong & Build Destroy Rebuild.
Hanging Gardens
Regular price Sale price $14.99 Save $-1.00Following acclaimed remixes for the likes of Phoenix, Mayer Hawthorne, Major Lazer, Holy Ghost, Gossip & more, L.A. natives and childhood best friends Classixx have been in the studio for the last few years whittling down hundreds of sessions to a svelte 12 songs. At once beming, breezy and wistful, Hanging Gardens features a variety of coastal summer anthems and special guests including Active Child, Nancy Whang (LCD Soundsystem), Sarah Chernoff (Superhumanoids) and Jesse Kivel (Kisses). Their full-length debut features impossibly sunny grooves, blithe melodies bred by the coast, coaxed out by the surf, expertly crafted for road trips, pool parties and dance clubs.
II
Regular price Sale price $19.99 Save $0.00LP comes with Download Card. CD is 4 Panel Digipack
It all started a couple years ago with the caption "MINDBLOWING PSYCHEDELIA FROM THAILAND" - the Youtube video that accompanied this headline on the Dangerous Minds Blog was exactly that. Here was a group of Thai musicians being filmed parading through a remote village hundreds of miles away from Bangkok playing some of the heaviest Psych known to mankind out of a crazy homemade soundsystem. Who were these men and how on earth was this not some unearthed archived footage from the '60s or '70s?! The Youtube clip quickly made its rounds amongst music enthusiasts leaving many in the Western hemisphere to question who this group of contemporary Thai villagers (loosely named Khun Narin's Electric Phin Band) was.
Six months after that first encounter with Khun Narin's Electric Phin Band, a Los Angeles music producer named Josh Marcy used Facebook and some unlikely interpreters at his local Thai restaurant to get in contact with the group's leader and namesake Khun Narin (also known simply as "Rin"). Rin eventually warmed to the idea of having Marcy come visit and record the group in their small village outside the city of Lom Sak, in the valley of mountains that form a rough border between Thailand's North and Northeast. The result of that initial encounter was 2014’s eponymous LP, 40 minutes of hypnotizing psychedelia filled with heavy drum breaks that sounds like something RZA would sample for a Quentin Tarantino film.
The music they play is called phin prayuk. The first word refers to the lead instrument, a 3-stringed lute known as the phin. The phin player, uses a string of Boss effects pedals, including a phaser, distortion and digital delay to get his sound. He also builds his own instruments, installing Fender pickups into hand-carved hardwood bodies, with elaborate mythical serpents adorning the headstock. The band takes pride in their custom PA system, as well as an imposing tower of 8 loudspeaker horns atop a huge bass cabinet. Khun Narin's Electric Phin Band's membership is always in rotation and spans several generations, from high school kids to men well into their 60s. A standard engagement has the band setting up at the hosting household during the morning rituals, playing several low-key sets from the comfort of plastic lawn chairs occasionally working in a cover version of a foreign classic (The Cranberries 'Zombie' is a favorite) while the beer and whiskey flow freely. After a mid-day banquet, they start up the generator and lead a parade through the community to the local temple, picking up more and more partiers along the way.
While the music was the first thing that engaged Marcy, this casual yet participatory playing environment connected him further with the band - so much so that he decided to travel back to Lom Sak in early 2015 to record more. As the band members rotate, the follow up to 2014’s LP (simply titled II) introduces some new players including new phin players Aob and Bas, while retaining some members of the old guard. The thing that remains consistent with Khun Narin’s Electric Phin Band is the authenticity of sound, which Marcy was able to capture again in LP2.
Wayne Interest
Regular price Sale price $12.99 Save $0.00Live and on record, the Tijuana Panthers are a great band. You could say garage, punk or surf while describing their sound, but they’re harder to pin than that. The truth is that they write classic songs that don’t depend on tropes from any genre. They craft perfect pop and deliver it with energy and immediacy. However, the real magic of this band is in their weirdness.
Behind their picturesque portraits of daily life is an aching despair. This subtle contrast creates an eerie tension between the ideal, the real and the surreal. You suddenly realize they’re not the happy-go- lucky beach boys you tried to pin them as, but more akin to sexually frustrated soda jerks in a David Lynch film. And this all makes sense with the fact that they come from Southern California’s shadier city of Long Beach, not exactly the fun in the sun that California dream- ers might expect.
For Wayne Interest, the Panthers team up with producer Richard Swift. The recordings took place at Swift’s studio in Oregon where the band decidedly took risks in performance and production. The risks paid off. With Swift’s direction and upgrade in fidelity, Wayne Interest sounds just as compelling in headphones as it would at a house party in East LA. It also gives the listener a closer look at the idiosyncrasies of the Tijuana Panthers, only making it clearer that there’s something off about these creeps. Their weirdness, or bold- ness to be whoever they may be, is what makes this band great. It’s a rare quality. The more you listen to the Tijuana Panthers the more you wonder about them.
Voyage
Regular price Sale price $12.99 Save $0.00L.A.'s De Lux are a post-disco dance-punk DIY duo that sound like they could have come out of 1979 or 1982 just as easily as 2013. Founders and multi-instrumentalists Sean Guerin and Isaac Franco didn’t meet so much as simply appear to each other, sometime before high school ended and after learning to correctly fall off skateboards began. Even at age 18, however, it was the kind of connection that had been years in the making.
Sean had been writing songs since he was 15 and had spent recent years recording and re-recording his own songs. And Isaac had been on a strict diet of classic and obscure disco and boogie music since he too was 15, figuring out the original source of hip-hop’s greatest samples thanks to an older brother with a DJ sideline and an enviable collection. They both were after the same thing in music—the groove, they say, where the bass and the beat align in a perfect way that makes you want a song to go on forever. They were even in a band together, but it wasn’t De Lux. But you can hear the exact moment De Lux became a band when you listen to “Better At Making Time,” the song they built from Isaac’s out-of-nowhere bassline just before practice for that other band was supposed to start: “Sean was like, ‘You should record that!’” says Isaac, “and I was like, ‘What, really?’”
From lead track “Better At Making Time,” De Lux roars through Psychedelic Furs or Duran Duran-style pop (“Love Is A Phase”), delivers shouts and whispers like James Murphy at his most frantic (“Make Space”), sinks into Eno-esque moments of bliss (“On The Day”) and rockets through the agit-funk David Byrne-style rave-up finale “Sometimes Your Friends Are Not Your Friends.” And this is all from the first-take—they never re-record, says Sean. If they don’t perfectly catch that beat as it happens, they let it go. That’s probably why Voyage sounds as wild and alive as it does. Just like on that surprise recording “Better Making Time,” you’re not hearing a band come together. And just like how they met, you’re hearing a band appear.
ART DIRECTION BY TOFER CHIN
Never Twice
Regular price Sale price $14.99 Save $-1.01LP is Tip-On Jacket, Download Card & Printed Insert.
CD is Tip-On, "Mini-LP" Jacket w/ Insert.
Many moons ago Primo Pitino, the DJ of San Francisco’s legendary Oldies Night, passed me a copy of his friend Nick Waterhouse’s “Some Place.” Nick was a local vinyl DJ and the kid working at our Shangri-la, Rooky Ricardo’s Records. Though he didn’t have a band at the time, Waterhouse assembled some local musicians to cut a one-off 45 in the vein of the electrifying mid-century modern rhythm and blues he loved. I threw “Some Place” on the Technics during sound check a few cities down the line and was blown away from the howling falsetto all the way to the end! I gave it a whirl every night from Texas to Tennessee and all the way back home to New York. Not only were the dancers’ feet responding, but they were also asking about the track on a nightly basis. The Nashville Scene was so blown away that they printed a piece on Nick after a single listen. DJs and collectors everywhere wanted it so bad that the little record with the big sound started fetching upwards of $300 on Ebay.
The immediate and unprecedented underground dance party success of Nick’s DIY record resulted in a full band, gigs, and, after a number of obstacles, the widely acclaimed 2012 LP Time’s All Gone. Nick’s music, vision, and fully formed aesthetic caught on globally and he was instantly a fixture at nearly every major nightclub and festival on both sides of the Atlantic, Australia, Japan, and Russia – hitting stages everywhere from Primavera to Montreux Jazz Festival and charting on college, public, and commercial radio.
Only a year after self-releasing his first single, Nick Waterhouse was thrust into the chaos of leading a band, touring, and recording in the big leagues! Pummeling high speed down a bumpy hill of lineup changes, economic problems, and general chaos without any breaks, Nick made it through and the challenges made him more focused. 2014’s Holly captured a more experienced artist upping the ante in writing, performance, recording, and production, inspiring a new level of critical and commercial success.
In addition to a jam-packed five years on the road, in the studio, and in the practice space, Waterhouse also produced septuagenarian soul legend Ural Thomas, Los Angeles Latin stars the Boogaloo Assassins, and garage rockers the Allah-las. He’s currently collaborating with the likes of young Grammy-nominee Leon Bridges and Steven Colbert bandleader Jon Batiste. The Rolling Stones blast Nick’s version of “I Can Only Give You Everything” at stadiums before they go onstage. Vogue hired him to pose with Kendall Jenner. He hipped her to Little Willie John while Anna Wintour complimented his shoes. While a lesser artist would get lost in these distractions, Nick Waterhouse’s acclaim only seems to energize him and make him work harder and push his music to the next level.
Nick’s latest Never Twice is a culmination, intensification, and realization of everything he’s been developing throughout this prolific frenzy. Catchier and loaded with more hits than its predecessors, Nick’s new LP is at the same time harder hitting, more rhythmic, more harmonic, more diverse, and more adventurous than any of the excellent work that already separated him from the pack. A cool and elegant post-post-modern cocktail of 1950s r&b and club jazz, mixed with 1960s soul and boogaloo, and shaken with a minimal contemporary sensibility, Never Twice finds the artist taking his time, refining his vision, and speaking with new authority. In five short years Nick Waterhouse has come a long way and it looks like he may have just painted his masterpiece.
Home
Regular price Sale price $12.99 Save $0.00It's been three years since the release of Nosaj Thing's highly acclaimed debut album, Drift, which topped countless best of year lists, but 2013 will mark a new chapter for the 27-year-old producer, musician and DJ from Los Angeles. With a new album, label and imprint for Innovative Leisure, Home marks the first time Nosaj has incorporated guest vocalists. Having remixed and worked with the likes of The XX, Flying Lotus, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Beck & Kendrick Lamar, it was time to incorporate of his own with Toro Y Moi and Kazu Makino (Blonde Redhead) providing ethereal vocals for two of the tracks on home. The rest of the album is rounded with Nosaj's signature cinematic soundscapes that explore the space from where Drift left off.
Savage Times
Regular price Sale price $13.98 Save $0.00LP is Limited-Edition Custom Hardcover Booklet with Three 10" Vinyl LP's & Download Card.
CD is 4 Panel Digipack.
Hanni El Khatib’s first idea for his Savage Times project was to do something he’d never done before. Instead, he ended up doing … well, everything he’d never done before. He’d be playing new instruments, writing in unfamiliar new ways, opening himself up to an unrelenting stream of ideas and dedicating himself totally to pure musical instinct. And the result? 19 best-of-the-sessions songs, destined for vinyl release as a Limited Edition 10” LP Box Set, as well as the kind of creative revelations that only happen when you quit looking around and start looking ahead.
Originally, he’d hoped to explode the lingering idea that he was simply a blues-rock guitar player, but that’s why Savage Times touches on everything from garage rock to punk to disco, hip-hop and even some unexpected solo-guitar self-portraiture. But on the way, he also exploded his own idea of what he could do—even maybe who he was, or would be. Savage Times was an experiment as well as an experience, that touched on some of the most personal, social & political elements to date.
POSTER
Regular price Sale price $12.98 Save $0.00CD Packaging is a 4 Panel Digipack.
LP Packaging is a Printed Inner Sleeve w/ Digital Download Card.
The Tijuana Panthers are from Long Beach, a great band, staring at the sea, staring at the sand... POSTER is their latest album.
POSTER? As in Post Punk? Post Surf? Post Cowpunk? How about post any wave that has come and gone and will come back and go again? Post all that. How about putting the ‘post’ back in posterity? POSTER is another great record by the Tijuana Panthers! Not just for posterity's sake - for RIGHT NOW!
Earlier Tijuana Panthers albums were urgent - as if cranking out the hits was objective number one. They cranked out the hits and they did it true. From point A to point B. But POSTER is the Tijuana Panthers now, at their most confident and present minded. They have arrived. They’ve stepped out of the past or future and into the now. Go back if you must to revisit the hits, but POSTER is now, I say! There is no longer a race against time.
On this album the hit feeling is all around you. They are exploring the time and space of that feeling. Sounds come and go, maybe to return, maybe not. This is the Tijuana Panthers freed from the tried and true structure. They have freed themselves only to be trapped again and again, in this moment, making noise, stretching out, letting odds and ends fall where they may. After all, this album was recorded in just two days! No time for fallacy! No time for façade! POSTER is but a moment to be lived and continually re-lived! What else do we have? Truth itself?! All I know - and can ever know - is this moment now, POSTER, apartment windows opening and closing, lyrics passing like ads on buses, tones swelling and crashing through breezeways.
Pasar de las Luces
Regular price Sale price $9.99 Save $0.00Double LP is Gatefold Jacket w/ a Download Card. CD is 6 panel digipack.
Even though the Mexican border-town of Tijuana has a stigmatized history it has managed to produce many vibrant and unique artists. None are quite like Mint Field.
Comprised of 21-year-olds Estrella Sanchez (vocals & guitar) and Amor Amezcua (drums & synths), Mint Field’s sound is organic, spacious, and inhabited by specters that lurk behind rhythms, where Estrella’s angelic voice evokes a supernatural world of beauty and melancholy.
Their new record, Pasar De Las Luces, first for LA-based Innovative Leisure Records, is “a compilation of our lives from two years ago to now” says the band. Since recording an initial EP in 2015 in their hometown of Tijuana, Mint Field have played Coachella, SXSW and have extensively toured the US and Mexico. In the summer of 2017 the band traveled to Detroit to record with producer Christopher Koltay. “We had a much clearer idea of what we wanted
and we had the tools to make it. When we recorded [our debut EP] Primeras Salidas, it was a homemade album and we didn’t know what we were doing.” This time, they managed to channel their inspirations and influences to transmit sentiments of profound sorrow, nostalgia and immaculate beauty…revisiting sounds from the past to make them contemporary.
Mint Field’s vision comes alive on Pasar De Las Luces ‘s 13 immaculate tracks that nod to everything from dream pop to fuzz-saturated shoegaze. Album opener “El Parque Parecía No Tener Fin,” is a melodic number with haunting melodic lines where we can appreciate their post-punk tendencies. “Ciudad Satélite” has woven harmonies and crescendos that detonate into a flurry of feelings anchored by a dramatic bassline. “Quiero Otoño De Nuevo” goes full krautrock and is like an introverted, reflective and delicate Neu!. ”Combos Del Pasar” borrows the distorted and imperfect guitar sounds of ‘90s indie bands like Yo Lat Tengo. “Nada Es Estático y Evoluciona” develops from minimalism into a silent scream and “Club De Chicas” is probably the peppiest song of the bunch.
The whole record has a unique sound that makes it stand apart from projects by contemporaries. While deceptively young themselves, Sanchez and Amezcua not only show the potential of influencing even younger fans, but of also defining themselves as stand alone voices in emotional music. Although they have a foot in the past, they never let themselves get caught by nostalgia; they reinterpret the best of what the past has to offer in order to better express their feeling in the present. It’s a timeless quality that will surely take them far into the future.
More Disco Songs About Love
Regular price Sale price $12.99 Save $0.00LP comes with custom inner sleeve & download card.
CD is 4 panel digipack.
After establishing a sound on their debut Voyage and then establishing an identity with the revelatory Generation, L.A. disco-not-disco duo De Lux took a moment to re-center and come back leaner, sharper, clearer and deeper on
their new album More Disco Songs About Love. Now that co-founders Sean Guerin and Isaac Franco know how to play and what to say, they’re ready to just get lost in the music. As the band puts it: “We like to say Voyage was our
baby, Generation was our baby all grown up and More Disco Songs About Love thinks growing up sucks and just wants to party smart.”
They started in 2013 with a happy accident called “Better At Making Time,” the lead track of their 2014 debut Voyage and an unexpected practice-space jam session that crystallized a sound, a philosophy and a future direction all
at once. In that sudden moment DeLux snapped into focus as an outfit matching post-punk sentiment and the-sociopolitical-is-personal perspective to joyfully indulgent analog synthesizer soundscapes and a deliriously transportive musical joy. And the press was ready to take the ride, with the Guardian calling Voyage “intricate, witty, inventive, dazzling in its detail” and Billboard celebrating its “lush, eclectic dance music.”
On their 2015 sophomore album Generation—a title activating every sense of
the word—De Lux added a new almost-documentary aspect to their dance music, delivering clearly personal stories of anxiety and hopeful aspiration from the place where IRL L.A. exhaustion collides with a digital city that never sleeps. (As Guerin sang: “All of these things that they put us through / I’m writing it down / I’m writing it down.”) And they were growing up in other ways, too: 2015 saw their first major festival appearance at Bonnaroo, where
they delivered the first of many stand-out big-show performances. Then in 2016, they made a hotly tipped Coachella debut and shared a bill with Arcade
Fire at New York City’s Panorama fest. And then at the end of that summer, they started the very first experiments that would lead to their new album.
Like Voyage, More Disco Songs About Love starts with the song that made
everything clear: “875 Dollars,” a song (in part) about losing the place you’ve always called home. From there it’s a stream-of-consciousness tour through
De Lux’s reality, from the family and friends who helped focus the sound of the album to everyday L.A. experiences, including but not limited to elections, evictions, even porn—although in the context you’d least expect, of course.
New York City dance-punk legend Sal P. of Liquid Liquid—who did a De Lux remix on their first-ever release—takes featured vocals on the relentless “Smarter Harder Darker” and the Pop Group’s maniacal Mark Stewart pushes
“Stratosphere Girl” into interstellar overdrive. (Plus Guerin’s mother Marie helps out with some very French examination of crepe preferences on “Music Snob,” mutant sibling to Generation’s surreal “Oh Man The Future.”)
And even though the title might seem like some kind of clever reference to something, it’s really just as simple and direct as it seems. The disco is the sound—in the most innovative way, of course—and the love is the sentiment:
“‘875’ is love for a house,” they say. “‘These Are Some Of The Things That I Think About’ is love for thought. ‘Keyboards Cause We're Black and White’ is
our love for a friend. ‘Writing Music For Money, To Write More Music’ is love for music—or money. It's all literal to us but we realize that it might not be for others. We like the idea of giving listeners something to question and wonder
about. But there's love in there.”
Say I Wanna Know
Regular price $8.99 Save $0.00Limited Edition 45 with custom sleeve.
Generation
Regular price Sale price $15.99 Save $0.00CD Packaging is a 4 Panel Digipack.
Double LP Packaging is a Gatefold Jacket w/ a Custom Printed Inner Sleeve & Digital Download Card.
Artwork by Tofer Chin.
On their full-length 2014 debut Voyage, L.A duo De Lux learned how to take their influences and create a sound all their own—a beyond-their-years synthesis of post-punk, disco, funk and of course synthesizer wizardry, drawing inspiration from the same combination of agitation and exhilaration that helped LCD Soundsystem and Talking Heads deliver some of the most danceable social commentary ever. And now that they’ve found their sound, De Lux are creating a story to go with it on their new album Generation: “All of these things that they put us through,” sings co-founder and multi-instru- mentalist Sean Guerin, “I’m writing it down / I’m writing it down.”
They first started writing Generation in the kind of uncommitted instances that happen so rarely once a new band puts out its first album. Once Voyage was released, De Lux found themselves playing and interviewing and touring and remixing—“All fun!” says Sean—but they had to fight to find time to write. A random Instagram of work-in-progress song “It’s A Combination” was the tipping point, when Sean and co-founder Isaac Franco realized they’d been rough-drafting for a year: “Let’s finish it now,” they decided, and that’s the exact moment when Generation officially started.
They returned to the L.A. practice space where they wrote and recorded Voyage, this time with new instruments—like the little-known but sought-after synthesizer guitar beloved of King Crimson’s Adrian Belew—and new inspira- tions, chief among them punk peformance artist Karen Finley, whose 1987 debut album Sean discovered at a Seattle record store simply because it looked promising. Her infamously uncensored lyrics made him realize there was more he could sing about, too: “You admire the ambition behind her saying whatever she wants,” he says.
So if Generation is a darker album than Voyage—and it’s inherited plenty of the modern urban anxiety of David Byrne—that’s because it’s a fearlessly honest and candid album, too. In fact, call it a millennial documentary. In Generation’s eleven songs, De Lux chart the distance between childhood and adulthood, nostalgia and aspiration and dream and reality, all with unflinching autobiographical detail. (And with a secret nod to the Pokemon theme, too.) Says Sean: “When I write lyrics, I try and be as specific as possible. We think about if someone listens to us in 30 years: ‘Oh, that’s what was going on at that time.’”
The result is a sort of Less Than Zero for the post-Social Network era. Think of it as a nighttime freeway drive that starts with the propulsive “L.A. Threshold” and rides the borderline between feel-good rhythm and artfully sophisticated sentiment. “There’s dark moments, but it’s still fun,” explains Sean. “The first album was just more innocent.” There’s new space in De Lux’s sense of rhythm and groove, says Isaac, for Sean to say what he needs to say: “The song gives him the freedom to be himself.”
And so Generation is an album about high highs, low lows and the vast space in between. “Center of L.U.B” is a roller-skate jam that starts with a Can-style guitar riff before spinning into an examination of one utility compa- ny employee’s ennui—you knew this wasn’t going to be a love song, right?—while “It’s A Combination” is a brooding Italo disco track and unexpected piano piece “Conditions” is like Harry Nilsson or John Lennon suddenly transplanted to Rough Trade Records. Then there’s the alternately hilarious and harrowing “Oh Man The Future”—a satirical reading on the shape of things to come, propelled by a bass-and-drum rhythm right off one of ESG’s first EPs—to the desolate-yet-funky “When Your Life Feels Like A Loss,” where De Lux dissect just what happens when “you think you’re special/no, you’re not special/you’re just an average guy.”
In other words, Generation isn’t a departure. This is De Lux going deeper, not farther away, and the result is surely the most anthropologically daring dancefloor album of the year. That might seem difficult to pull off, but that’s why they did it, explains Sean: “At some point we realized creativity is just limitless,” he says. “You can do anything. There might be certain people who think, ‘Oh, you can’t do that.’ That’s when you say, ‘Well—I’m doing it!’”
Claude Fontaine
Regular price Sale price $9.99 Save $0.00LP is Standard Jacket, Custom Inner Sleeve & Download Card.
CD is 4 Panel Digipack.
Claude Fontaine is an American girl with a French name who never felt like she fit in anywhere she happened to call home, and one particular year she was awash in a grey London fog that matched the fog and grey in her own too-recently broken heart. While living right off Portobello Road, she stumbled into the record store down the street. And in a flash of luck (or fate) that particular record store turned out to be Honest Jon’s, a long-lived spot for records collected from the furthest edges of the world. She’d never heard those old Studio One and Trojan and Treasure Isle reggae and rocksteady and dub records before—the same records that got the Clash covering “Police And Thieves,” and the Slits sharing a bill with Steel Pulse. And she’d never heard bossa nova and tropicalia and Brazil’s incandescent música popular brasileira, either. But instantly, she understood that it was exactly and perfectly everything she didn’t know she needed: “I wandered in one day and from the first moment I was under a spell,” she says. “I was transfixed. I’d go in there daily and have them play me every record in that store probably to the point of driving them completely mad! But I had fallen in love …”
And because she loved those records so much, she decided to make a record of her own—an album singing her own love songs (with Jane Birkin-style ye-ye elan) that was itself a love song to classic reggae and Brazilian music, and an album honoring that feeling of finding a home away from home. Ferociously inspired, she demo-ed a set of songs about heartbreak and loneliness, and drafted a wish list of musicians she’d hope would help out. At the top were guitarist Tony Chin, whose playing with Althea and Donna, King Tubby, Dennis
Brown and so many more very arguably defined a gigantic part of the classic reggae sound, and Airto Moreira, the Brazilian drummer whose work both solo and in collaboration with Miles Davis, Astrud Gilberto, Chick Corea, Annette Peacock and more make him an actual living legend. “A pipe dream” to chase them, she says, but still she tried.
But after diligent detective work and long chains of emails and voicemails, tracing between L.A. industry veterans and globetrotting photographers and the label that would put out her finished record—though she didn’t know that yet—she found them. Then she sent them her demos. Then they said yes. And when she finally met them that day in Chet Baker’s old studio (“A time warp,” she adds dreamily) or at King Size in northeast L.A. and she heard her songs the way she’d been hearing them in her head for so long, she was was overcome with emotion. “It was surreal and magical,” she says. “I cried. To watch those songs come to life… it’s why we do what we do.”
She finished her album in two potent sessions with Chin, Moreira and a murderer’s row of their connections—bassist Ronnie McQueen of Steel Pulse and Ziggy Marley drummer Rock Deadrick, Now Again Records guitarist Fabiano Do Nascimento, Sergio Mendes percussionist Gibi Dos Santos and Flora Purim bassist Andre De Santanna. (Trust that each of these people have credits on albums like you wouldn’t believe.) Side A is the reggae, five songs about love gone wrong that sound like they came out of Jamaica in the early 70s. Yes, “Love Street” sounds happy, but “it’s really just a fantasy,” says Claude. And side B wasn’t specifically designed to be the bossa or Brazilian side, but that’s how it worked out, closing with the spare and even haunting “Last Goodbye,” a song about the heartbreak of what could have been. All together, it’s a valentine to this special music that called out to her from the other side of the planet: “I hope this record will transport people,” she says. “I wanted it to feel like those lost records, like it got lost in the bottom bin of some world music store in London because that’s how I felt when I walked in to that record store. I wanted it to be its own world.”
Nick Waterhouse
Regular price Sale price $24.99 Save $0.00LP is 180 Gram Vinyl w/ Tip-On Jacket, Download Card, & 4 Page Insert.
CD is Tip-On, "Mini-LP" Jacket w/ Insert.
Nick Waterhouse grew up in a coastal town near Long Beach, CA. It was a serene setting: the ocean stretching out for miles to the North and South, manicured lawns, two-story homes, long swathes of concrete highway, fast food chains and mega malls. He was there for two decades. Then, he left.
He found a home in his early 20s in San Francisco, working at record stores alongside a collective of likeminded young crate-diggers and 45 collectors. And then he started making his own records: “Time’s All Gone” in 2012, “Holly” in 2014, and “Never Twice” in 2016. These were evocative albums, steeped in a perfectionism and clarity of vision that informed every choice, from the studios to the players, the arrangements to the album art. Everything, deliberately designed and purposeful, bubbling over with power and feeling.
And as those records rolled out into the world, Waterhouse found a dedicated audience of his own as well as a bevy of influential champions and collaborators, including garage-rock mystic Ty Segall, retro-futurist R&B bandleader Leon Bridges and the LA-based quartet Allah-Las, whose first two albums he meticulously produced and played on. There is a “Waterhouse Sound” and it comes from both the man and the method — recording everything on magnetic tape, through analog equipment, and playing live (!), eyeball to eyeball, whenever possible.
Now, he’s finished his fourth album. He’s calling it “Nick Waterhouse.” And whether intentional or not, it is perhaps his most reflective — and reflexive — album, employing all of the mature production techniques learned throughout his professional career while retaining a viscous edge that allows it to land with colossal impact — more raw, heavy and overtly confrontational than anything he’s made before.
“Nick Waterhouse” was recorded at the finest working studio in Los Angeles, Electro Vox Recorders, and co-produced by Paul Butler (The Bees, Michael Kiwanuka, Devendra Banhart), the master of all things warm, rich and wooly. Nick’s songs here are personal, but personal in the way that “Please Mr. Postman,” “What’s Going On” and “Cathy’s Clown” are — intimate, direct, yet still malleable enough for listeners to suffuse their own life stories into the mix. The album is thick with talented players, including Andres Rentaria, Paula Henderson and the staggering, howling saxophone of Mando Dorame.
All of the new Waterhouse songs sound big. Brawny and muscular. The lyrics are suspicious, outraged and, at times, very vulnerable (muscle is just flesh, after all). Waterhouse uses an economy of words to deliver complex, coded messages. He offers up equal parts criticism of the time we live in and innate human flaws. He paints relationships under the cover of darkness, slashing through neo-noir fantasies that are romantic, blood-spattered and bracingly aware of the powerlessness felt among people, amid the rapid onslaught of commercialism and technological progress. And, as has become his signature, he throws in a tune written by a close friend. On this record, he covers “I Feel an Urge Coming On” in tribute to the song’s author, Nick’s own mentor and collaborator Joshie Jo Armstead, who wrote music with Ray Charles and sang as both an Ikette and Raelette in the ’60s and ’70s.
He’s four albums in, but it makes sense that this specific record is the one that takes his name. You can really here Nick on this one. Not just the band. Not just the songs. Not just the sound. HIM. You can hear his mind at work. His passion. His focus. More importantly, you can feel it.
Congrats
Regular price Sale price $21.98 Save $0.00LP is a Gatefold Jacket with Custom Die Cut, Printed Inner Sleeve & Download Card.
Holy Fuck took the world by surprise around 2005 because there was just nothing like them—a hardcore thrift-store found-object punk band with a relentless commitment to rhythm and a sense for atmosphere better matched to a close encounter of the third kind than a simple rock concert. Think Einstürzende Neubauten re-inspired by Fela Kuti with Brian Eno working as keyboard tech and every channel on the mixer set to max power. It was the best ride out there while it lasted, up to and including their 2010 full-length Latin, recorded largely in too-brief breaks while on the road. That album cemented Holy Fuck’s sound and reputation for unapologetic instrumental noise but at the end of yet another insane touring cycle, it was time to take a break ... which turned into a hiatus ... which turned into a chance to explore other projects and production work. (Like the bands Lids, Dusted and Etiquette, or production for Metz, Alvvays and Viet Cong.)
They’d been moving faster than they’d ever expected, especially after a 2007 sophomore release that came close to securing Canada’s prestigious Juno and Polaris Music Prize. (Not to mention festival slots at All Tomorrow’s Parties, Glastonbury, Coachella and more—plus Lou Reed said they were the best band he’d seen at SXSW.) The strategy was just to stay busy, says founder and noisemaster Brian Borcherdt, but soon they started to feel like Indiana Jones running from that boulder: “He had to step aside and let things settle!”
But there’s nothing Indiana Jones does better than the shock reveal, is there? And so in 2016 Holy Fuck suddenly announced the release of Congrats, a surprise full-length two years in the making that is by any scientific measure their holiest fuckiest release ever: “When you’re sitting still in a van and staring out the windows, you start to dream about all the other things you want to do,” says Borcherdt. “This album is exactly what we couldn’t do then.”
Checking into a “proper” studio, rather than the barn in rural Ontario where most of Holy Fuck’s records were made, Congrats was recorded by the same lineup that recorded Latin: Borcherdt, Graham Walsh, Matt “Punchy” McQuaid, and Matt Schulz. As they worked, they discovered that Congrats was a process of refining things, Walsh says—both physically and philosophically. Their ad hoc arsenal of low-budget hi-tech toys has been streamlined down to what he calls the nervous system of the band: “What gets run through our system is the seed of the idea for our music, and the system is what we play. This record is almost a beginning—the first stage of a new way for us.”
So consider those previous albums prelude to Holy Fuck’s true breakthrough, and recognize Congrats as the moment when Holy Fuck take the chaos and craziness (and charm) that have always been at the heart of their band and not so much control it as concentrate it. Now they’re heavier, wilder, leaner, sharper, more daring and more unpredictable than ever before, on fire with the power of inspired outsiders like Suicide, Silver Apples, Can, Mission of Burma or the Monks or even Sun Ra, says Borcherdt, whose pursuit of his own kind of musical purity is exactly what Holy Fuck are after. Yes, it took them a few years, which in 2016 is supposed to be the career suicide, but they took that time to take chances. “We were told we did everything wrong,” Borcherdt says now, laughing—but really Congrats is the sound of a band doing absolutely everything right.
I Feel An Urge Coming On b/w I'm Due (For A Heartache)
Regular price $11.99 Save $-2.00Limited Edition 45.
Nick Waterhouse grew up in a coastal town near Long Beach, CA. It was a serene setting: the ocean stretching out for miles to the North and South, manicured lawns, two-story homes, long swathes of concrete highway, fast food chains and mega malls. He was there for two decades. Then, he left.
He found a home in his early 20s in San Francisco, working at record stores
alongside a collective of likeminded young crate-diggers and 45 collectors.
And then he started making his own records: “Time’s All Gone” in 2012,
“Holly” in 2014, and “Never Twice” in 2016. These were evocative albums,
steeped in a perfectionism and clarity of vision that informed every choice,
from the studios to the players, the arrangements to the album art.
Everything, deliberately designed and purposeful, bubbling over with power
and feeling.
And as those records rolled out into the world, Waterhouse found a dedicated
audience of his own as well as a bevy of influential champions and collabora-
tors, including garage-rock mystic Ty Segall, retro-futurist R&B bandleader
Leon Bridges and the LA-based quartet Allah-Las, whose first two albums he
meticulously produced and played on. There is a “Waterhouse Sound” and it
comes from both the man and the method — recording everything on magnet-
ic tape, through analog equipment, and playing live (!), eyeball to eyeball,
whenever possible.
Now, he’s finished his fourth album. He’s calling it “Nick Waterhouse.” And
whether intentional or not, it is perhaps his most reflective — and reflexive —
album, employing all of the mature production techniques learned through-
out his professional career while retaining a viscous edge that allows it to land
with colossal impact — more raw, heavy and overtly confrontational than
anything he’s made before.
“Nick Waterhouse” was recorded at the finest working studio in Los Angeles,
Electro Vox Recorders, and co-produced by Paul Butler (The Bees, Michael
Kiwanuka, Devendra Banhart), the master of all things warm, rich and wooly.
Nick’s songs here are personal, but personal in the way that “Please Mr.
Postman,” “What’s Going On” and “Cathy’s Clown” are — intimate, direct, yet
still malleable enough for listeners to suffuse their own life stories into the
mix. The album is thick with talented players, including Andres Rentaria, Paula
Henderson and the staggering, howling saxophone of Mando Dorame.
All of the new Waterhouse songs sound big. Brawny and muscular. The lyrics
are suspicious, outraged and, at times, very vulnerable (muscle is just flesh,
after all). Waterhouse uses an economy of words to deliver complex, coded
messages. He offers up equal parts criticism of the time we live in and innate
human flaws. He paints relationships under the cover of darkness, slashing
through neo-noir fantasies that are romantic, blood-spattered and bracingly
aware of the powerlessness felt among people, amid the rapid onslaught of
commercialism and technological progress. And, as has become his
signature, he throws in a tune written by a close friend. On this record, he
covers “I Feel an Urge Coming On” in tribute to the song’s author, Nick’s own
mentor and collaborator Joshie Jo Armstead, who wrote music with Ray
Charles and sang as both an Ikette and Raelette in the ’60s and ’70s.
He’s four albums in, but it makes sense that this specific record is the one that
takes his name. You can really here Nick on this one. Not just the band. Not
just the songs. Not just the sound. HIM. You can hear his mind at work. His
passion. His focus. More importantly, you can feel it.
America's Velvet Glory
Regular price Sale price $12.98 Save $0.00LP comes w/ Download Card & Printed Insert.
CD is Four Panel Digipack.
Singer and songwriter Lucas Fitzsimons came to his calling in an appropriately mythic way, born in a historic city not far from Buenos Aires and raised in L.A.’s South Bay—just outside of Inglewood—where he was immersed in the hip-hop hits on local radio. (Westside Connection!) The summer before he started middle school, a close friend got an electric guitar, and Fitzsimons felt an irresistible inexplicable power. When he was 12, his parents took him back to Argentina, and on the first night, he discovered a long-forgotten almost-broken classical guitar in the basement of his ancestral home: “It sounds made-up, but it’s true,” he says. “I didn't put the guitar down once that whole trip—took it with me everywhere and played and played. When I got back to L.A., I bought my first guitar practically as the plane was landing.” This started a long line of bands and a long experience of learning to perform in public, as Fitzsimons honed intentions and ideas and tried to figure out why that guitar seemed so important. After a trip to India in 2012, he returned renewed and ready to start again, scrapping his band to lead something new and uncompromising. This was the true start of the Molochs.
The first album Forgetter Blues was released with Fitzsimmons’ guitarist/organist and longtime bandmate Ryan Foster in early 2013 on his own label—named after a slightly infamous intersection in their then-home of Long Beach—and was twelve songs of anxious garage-y proto-punk-y folk-y rock, Modern Lovers demos and Velvet Underground arcana as fuel and foundation both. It deserved to go farther than it did, which sadly wasn’t very far. But it sharpened Fitzsimons and his songwriting, and after three pent-up years of creativity, he was ready to burst. So he decided to record a new album in the spirit of the first, and in the spirit of everything that the Molochs made so far.
The result is America’s Velvet Glory, recorded with engineer Jonny Bell at effortless (says Fitzsimons) sessions at Long Beach’s JazzCats studio. (Also incubator for Molochs’ new labelmates Wall of Death and Hanni El Khatib.) It starts with an anxious electric minor-key melody and ends on a last lonesome unresolved organ riff, and in between comes beauty, doubt, loss, hate and even a moments or two of peace. There are flashes of 60s garage rock—like the Sunset Strip ’66 stormer “No More Cryin’” or the “Little Black Egg”-style heartwarmer-slash-breaker “The One I Love”—but like one of Foster’s and Fitzsimons’ favorites the Jacobites, the Molochs are taking the past apart, not trying to recreate it.
Youngblood
Regular price Sale price $14.98 Save $0.00CD is a 4 Panel Digipack.
LP comes w/ Poster Insert & Digital Download Card.
Prufrock had the Emperor of Ice Cream in a headlock when the roar of a ’37 Triumph Speed Twin made them both forget what they were fighting about. In walked an Anglo-Cherokee-Japanese skateboarder. “I’m Korey Dane, and you’re both acting like children.”
He had ridden from Joshua Tree where his father was rebuilding a 1953 Chevy Hardtop. “I’ve put my board away, gentlemen, and I’ve picked up a guitar. I figure the board will never really let me say what I want to say, and frankly, nothing makes me cry like the 3 minor chord.” The table was cleared for a round of Old Pulteneys as Korey Dane began his tale of woe and redemption.
“I’m twenty-five years old. My mother handed me East of Eden when Iwas twelve and I’ve never been the same since. Neither has she. Mom and Dad headed in opposite directions; academe called her name and Dad, well Dad drove into the desert until he ran out of gas. And there he hung his hat. I tumbled for a while...and grumbled. But four wheels brought me where I needed to go. I probably did a little too much of this and way too much of that, but that’s ok. I’m better for it. Lera says I’ve still got a long way to go. Hell, she’s from Ukraine, for Christ’s sake. She should know.
“Luckily, I heard and saw some things; Tom Waits, Bruce Davidson, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Aaron Embry, The Beatles and the Stones, Blake Mills, Mark Gonzales, Karen Dalton, and the ‘Mats. Hitching across the country is like a 72-day answer to the question, ‘What’s the worst thing that could happen?’ Well, I’ve gathered a lot of answers to that question. But the bestthing that could happen was going around the country until I found myself back home. Listen to me. I’m Dorothy fucking Gale!
“Home is where I decided to take a position. Orville Gibson and Ernie Ball were my earliest accomplices. The three of us were sequestered for a couple of years until we all agreed I needed to step outside. I played for a few friends and nobody hit me. I felt this might work out.
“I rolled some Legend of 91 and got to work. A hundred songs...three of them decent. Then I slept for three days. Woke up and wrote a hundred more. This time, two of them were worthwhile. This wasn’t going well. After a while I met some folks. They were nice. They were encouraging. And they said, ‘Surely you can do better than this.’ They introduced me to a man—a cruel man—who made me do things no man should have to do. Scansion, modulation, chromaticism...he was mean and relentless.
“But here I sit. Open to whatever comes. You’re both older gentlemen, now. Go home to your wives, your families. I feel ready.”
The three of them went their respective ways. Prufrock and the Emperor are now long gone.
Korey Dane is standing right outside your door.
Island Universe
Regular price $7.99 Save $0.00Beyond the real deal is the unreal deal, and therein lies Feeding People, a band of teenagers making some of the heaviest psychedelic around decadesafter the 13th Floor Elevators declared their hallucinatory sense of purpose. Feeding People was founded and is headed by nineteen-year-old Jessie Jones who channels the raw power of Jefferson Airplane’s Grace Slick and Janis Joplin at her most primal as she leads with strong, almost vicious
vocals, bellowing blasphemies as if possessed by spirits with a masked sweetness reminiscent of Billie Holiday. Her siren call reeled in Chris Alfaro of Free the Robots who produced some of the band’s earliest recordings, all of which were written acoustic and recorded electric in a single sweaty take in drummer, Michael Reinhart’s parents’ 6’x10’ walk-in closet with a 4-track recorder and mic stands made of broom handles taped to fire extinguishers. After playing only a couple shows, Feeding People became the second band ever invited to play storied electronic music club Low End Theory, where they shared the stage with Radiohead’s Thom Yorke. “Island Universe” is the first single from their upcoming 2013 release which was recorded and produced by Jonny Bell of The Crystal Antlers and Hanni El Khatib.
Rapture
Regular price Sale price $12.98 Save $0.00CD Packaging is a 4 Panel Digipack.
LP Packaging is a Gatefold Jacket w/ Digital Download Card & White Vinyl.
The new album from Tropics, aka 27 year old Chris Ward, looks outwards, armed with a newfound confidence that foregrounds his vocal performance and songwriting.
It’s a musical progression that mirrors a personal one: the early Tropics
output was all made in the idyllic, if isolated setting of Ward’s
grandmother’s empty house in the seaside town of Southsea, which
he moved into after graduating from university to focus on writing
and recording. He was alone there - “like, really alone. For days, I had
literally no distractions.” Having moved to London in 2013, Ward now splits his time between the city and the road, having played in America, Mexico and across Europe throughout the past year with his live band Keith Vaz and Morgan Hislop.
Tropics’ new full-length Rapture, set for release on the 16th of February, is the culmination of this journey. A multi-instrumentalist from an early age, Ward has always drawn on his musical upbringing when composing, but this time around he’s pushed himself to develop a fuller sound than ever with the help of Vaz, Hislop and specialist jazz drummer Gillan McLaughlin. Taking influence from Beach Boys, Max Roach and Arthur Russell, Ward has crafted an album that fuses his love of avant-garde percussion, 70s and 80s singer-songwriters such as Peter Gabriel known for pop-leaning hooks, and deep production that takes cues from ambient music.
The very first iterance of the record is the crystal clear vocal that kicks off ‘Blame’. Ward explains that performing live so much caused him to step outside of his comfort zone: “I used to be a bit dubious about using my vocal too much, and felt like my strength was in sampling and playing keys. It’s kind of switched now in that I feel a lot more comfortable just holding a microphone and losing myself.” Inspired by the vocal performances of the likes of Little Dragon and Innovative Leisure labelmates Rhye, Ward also found a new lease of life in experimenting with more androgynous vocals.
But even as his sound has greater scope than ever before, Rapture is still a deeply personal endeavour. The majority of the songs started life in Ward’s home, in front of a piano, before being built on in the studio. The first half of the record is a chronicle of a whirlwind relationship: the piano-led title track “Rapture” addresses this theme, striving for the throes of ecstatic happiness but never quite making it there. “It’s got this feeling of hope and joy, even though it is coming from a sad place,” says Ward. “It’s about the struggles in your life to get to where you want to be.” Elsewhere, lyrics such as, “You ran away just like my luck did” hint at Ward’s love for literature and his poetic touch, something he further explores on the album’s second side.
Later, the album grows more ambient and the literary references more apparent. “Gloria” takes its name from the character of a frustrated wife in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Beautiful and Damned. Likewise, “Torrents of Spring” - also named for a work of 20th century American fiction - builds to a sax-led climax over two painstaking minutes, and the penultimate “House of Leaves” is “a really slow-burning ambient instrumental; it’s kind of a nod to the first stuff I made”.
Whether filling dance floors or simply filling up your headspace, Rapture is an intricate and intimate record that presents the many faces of Tropics in a more revealing light than ever before.
Faraway Reach
Regular price $9.99 Save $-9.99Double LP is Standard Jacket w/ Printed Inner Sleeve & Download Card.
CD is Four Panel Digipack.
Like a balmy breeze from a world of endless summer, Classixx are back with Faraway Reach, a buoyant follow-up to their 2013 debut - something to cruise to with the top down, from festival fields to the beach, from the dance floor to the shotgun seat. Faraway Reach casts the duo's young-but-nostalgic melodies and sublime chords in a more mature, restrained light, albeit no less lively and bright. Establishing themselves as producers of note on their debut LP (Pitchfork called them “great songwriters, too”), Faraway Reach delivers powerfully smooth and soulful jewels that are still decidedly their own - the Classixx signature is one that can’t be traced. Their love of plaintive voices and disco-inspired grooves is as evident as ever, but this time around everything is a bit bolder, the cast is bigger, the melodies distilled into a higher potency - it’s all just as good, but better. The album traverses locales, vocalists and inspirations. It's a fitting movement for the duo, from Venice beach to the mountains of South Africa and everywhere in between - a Faraway Reach.
Jules Verne b/w Fade Into You
Regular price $8.99 Save $0.00Limited-Edition 7" Vinyl featuring an exclusive B-Side Cover of Mazzy Star's 'Fade Into You'
Automaton
Regular price Sale price $12.98 Save $0.00CD Packaging is a Jewel Case.
LP Packaging comes w/ a Digital Download Card.
Art by Dr. Woo.
Gossamer is Evan Reiner—the producer, guitarist, synthesizer scientist and urban-spelunking field recorder whose full-length debut Automaton dissolves the genre-breaking electronica of Autechre and Boards of Canada into a bottomless sea of found sound and ambient atmosphere. It’s less an album than an environment all its own, or a journey into the unexplored. And whether it’s inspiring a trip deep into the discography of Steve Reich or into California’s beautifully desolate Ansel Adams Wilderness, it’s that fearless spirit of exploration that brought Automaton to life.
Reiner grew up in the L.A. neighborhood of Eagle Rock with a father telling war stories about seeing Black Flag and the Germs play and with a set of cousins who’d get him started listening to hip-hop. (Especially instrumentals by iconoclastic producers like Premier, RZA and New York’s crushing DITC crew, Reiner remembers.) As he turned 16, he was playing guitar “religiously,” he says, as well as listening intently to Slayer and Cannibal Corpse on the way to ferocious hardcore shows on the fringes of Los Angeles.
By the time he graduated high school, he was a hardcore kid with a heavy grounding in hip-hop who’d developed so tremendously as a guitarist that he was practicing notoriously formidable Django Reinhardt songs for fun. The connection might not seem obvious, but it was there nonetheless—these were three distinct musical forms equally dedicated to passion, individual technique and total commitment to expression.
He won admission to the prestigious Berklee School of Music in Boston, where his first semesters in the fall of 2009 were everything he’d hoped. But the more he studied, the clearer it became that he’d need to strike out on his own: “So many professors would tell their students what the right thing to do was in a creative setting,” he says now. “There is no right way.”
He’d once used his computer just to help with his composition homework, but now he was restless. So he began to focus on the potential of electronic music: “I realized it was like having every component of a band at your fingertips,” he says. “It felt free and genuine with no distractions.” He’d begun to make his own field recordings, too, capturing the sounds of Boston at sunrise and stirring them into his beat experiments. Intense study of movie sound and foley artistry, like pouring sand across drum cymbals or using spent shells from a gun range for percussion, gave him a whole new vocabulary, and he found further inspiration in artists from Ai Weiwei to Maya Duren to Stanley Kubrick to Delia Derbyshire—people who blew open the boundaries of their own disciplines.
Then in July 2013, he began to make what would become his first full-length album as Gossamer. He’d rent an armful of microphones and hike to the tunnels under Pasadena’s eerie Devil’s Gate Dam, site of suicides and barely-thwarted summonings in the tradition of Aleister Crowley. (“The echo is crazy,” he says.) During a month in Japan, he recorded “terrifying trains” and cicadas and the squeals of a rusting bicycle. He’d record himself smashing trash under a bridge in downtown L.A., or knocking rebar against rotting wood 8,000 feet above sea level in California’s Ansel Adams Wilderness Area. Then he’d come home—whether “home” at that particular moment was his own studio, a capsule hotel in Japan, a friend’s place in Boston or a temporary space in New York—and “make accidents happen,” he says, with recorders and samplers and guitar and (this time) a stable of analog synthesizers.
The result was Gossamer’s Automaton, a precise and gentle dreamscape of experimental electronica, where the ambient atmosphere of Gas drifts across the fractured beats of Autechre or Boards of Canada. It starts with its own sunrise on “Thoughtform,” where birdsong melts into ghostly vocals and waves of synthesizer, and then shifts into the haunting “Print,” which transplants the sci-fi sensibilities of Vangelis to some desolate and wild new world. His “Okuma” is like a Tortoise song that never touches solid ground, while tracks like [3] and [5] recall the Brian Eno of Fourth World, somehow ancient and futuristic at once. When the crickets start chirping on closer “-;- ”, it’s a signal that the day—and the journey—are both coming to an end. It’s might be his first album, but it’s also a first step towards something new.
“Automaton is me,” Reiner explains. “It's my process. It’s a symbol of having accepted that there is a difference between being alone and being lonely. It’s a coping mechanism for the struggle to realize and balance what I am and am not in control of in my life. It reminds me of playing Bioshock and watching Blade Runner at the same time while naked in the jungle on another planet. It makes me think of watching an old home video of myself and seeing Neptune right outside my window. The list goes on and on—I could go forever.”
Tell Me I Belong
Regular price Sale price $12.99 Save $0.00Jim-E Stack has come a long way. Born and raised in San Francisco, the now Brooklyn-based artist born James Harmon Stack cut his musical teeth as a jazz drummer, but it wasn’t until he entered the world of solo production at the age of 16 that he found the freedom necessary to write and record how he wanted. After see- ing a set from Fade to Mind boss Kingdom in 2009, freeform DJ sets and hybridized club music planted the seeds of inspiration in the burgeoning producer. He made his first splash with a bass-loaded remix of Nuguzunguzu’s “Mirage”, and went on to release the bright and drum-focused Come Between EP, garnering acclaim from international DJs and tastemakers alike.
Following time spent in New Orleans, James moved to New York in summer of 2012, and started the slow process of sketching, refining, and developing the diverse tracks that would make up his captivating Tell Me I Belong LP. The album was equally fleshed out by looking forwards and backwards, which gives it the kind of purpose and cohesiveness many debut outings lack. In every corner of Tell Me I Belong, you can hear an artist who reveres classic jazz musicians like John Coltrane and McCoy Tyner, experimental pioneers like Steve Reich, and Detroit techno greats Omar-S and Robert Hood, but contemporary boundary pushers Arca, Oneohtrix Point Never, and Actress are no less inspiring for Stack. “More so than anything, it’s really on some personal shit,” he says of the themes woven into his debut LP. “The time period between leaving San Francisco and moving to New York was a tough time for me, and the music is kind of a reflection of that, the feeling like you don’t belong.” The music may speak about a kind of alienation, but it also abundantly offers the chance of collective experiences in the form of hard-hitting, club-specific dancefloor jams. That fearless juxtaposition is the lifeforce of Tell Me I Belong.
Bird Brains 10"
Regular price $12.99 Save $0.00Nothing Is Real
Regular price Sale price $12.99 Save $0.00Nothing Is Real is Crystal Antlers going beyond the beyond, with songs that rattle and ricochet from desolation to delirium. Opener “Pray” sounds like what would have happened if Black Flag’s Greg Ginn had produced the first Psychedelic Furs single; “Persephone” and “Anywhere But Here” match the desperate, relentless rhythm of the Wipers with the inside-out guitar melodies of the Pixies. “Li- corice Pizza” recalls lost cult-punk heroes like the Flesh Eaters or the Embarrassment. On Nothing Is Real, you’ll feel as much as hear echoes of bands like Wire, Sonic Youth and Dinosaur Jr. Nothing Is Real features cover art by famed surf/skate/ graffiti legend C.R. Stecyk III and recorded as the band returns to its most fundamental roots as an agile power trio - Jonny Bell, drummer Kevin Stuart and guitarist Andrew King.
Chamber Girls
Regular price Sale price $18.98 Save $0.00LP comes w/ Poster Insert & Download Card.
CD is 4 Panel Digipack.
Korey Dane grew up in Long Beach, California, as a skateboarder kid with a gearhead father and an English teacher mother and with a guitar he learned to love as he learned to play, letting a few inherited books and a handful of records lead him away from home and into the great American unknown. That’s where he found his last album Youngblood, born from months exploring and hitchhiking and putting songs together piece by piece, then presented as promise and potential to veteran producer and A&R man Tony Berg (X, Public Image Ltd.). He set up in Berg’s Zeitgeist Studios and with a crew of top-notch sessioneers—just like they used to do with the Wrecking Crew during L.A.’s golden age—he hammered Youngblood into something real, releasing it with Innovative Leisure in the fall of 2015.
Then smash-cut to September of 2016, with Dane coming off tour, a relationship about to crack in a half, and his 27th birthday about to hit, just like he’d predicted—unwittingly—in his song “Hard Times.” (The day before he started recording, he’d had a fortune teller tell him hard times were coming, but that was a waste of money—he already knew that.) He was left standing at the leading edge of his new album with … well, nothing ...but his songs and a beautiful room where he could record them. Oh, and 96 hours to get it all done.
So he got it done: he tapped a few close friends to back him and cut Chamber Girls almost completely live, searing instinct and experience direct to tape at L.A.’s analog time capsule Valentine Recording Studios. He produced everything himself, too, except for a quick assist from Berg on one a song, inspired by the deceptively simple ethos he’d internalized while making Youngblood: pursue greatness. “Writing a song that you know someone might skip over later is sacrilege,” he says. Instead, he wanted every song on Chamber Girls to feel not only live but alive, too, with that go-for-broke spirit that animates everything he says, does, or sings: “I’m writing all the time,” he says. “I’ve lived by a line a day sometimes. I try and stop when it’s good. If you try and simplify it down to its bare elements … it’s truly a redemptive act.”
That’s why he calls Chamber Girls—despite those hard times, or because of them—a celebration. “It’s a rock ‘n’ roll record”, he says. It’s got a lot in it, and “it talks about important shit,” he adds. And it does—it’s poetry at velocity, a trick that goes all the way back to Dylan and the Hawks. Opener “Half Asleep” is a Westerberg-style wake-up call (“Five, four, three, two, one, gone / I'm a cloud of smoke”) and from there it’s an album made from ash and fire, with a burner like “Hard Times” (and its swaggering Big Star guitar) only steps away from the smoky but stark “Always.” “Down In The Hole” is like Tom Waits back alley cabaret by Leonard Cohen’s deathless ladies’ man. Closer “Steady Forever” is a streak of light like the hungry young Springsteen, with lyrics hiding literature and a line that catches the spirit of the whole album: “Such a strange bell we’ve been ringing / Like rock n roll on a church organ.”
You can feel it everywhere on the album and you can see it on the album cover too, with the sunlight, the shadow, the eyes closed and the hand reaching out—it’s somewhere between an awakening, a resurrection and a last goodbye all at once, shot at that special half-there time of day that could be sunrise as easily as sunset. It’s a moment when possibility is endless, and when the past and the future and the hard times and good times find a perfect instant of sublime balance. Chamber Girls started as an ode to those who stay at home, Dane says, but you know how it goes: you can’t love your home if you don’t ever leave your home, and part of Chamber Girls is that mythic trip between the unknown and the known. In that very first second before he started this album, Dane was standing in the wreckage of everything he’d had planned for so long—but then he stepped through that studio door and made the record anyway. And in a way, Chamber Girls is the story of that step.
Loveland
Regular price Sale price $21.98 Save $0.00CD is a 4 Panel Digipack.
LP is Gatefold & comes w/ Digital Download Card.
There’s so much that went into French psychedelic trio Wall of Death’s new album Loveland. There’s the band itself: Gabriel Matringe, the guitarist and ex-cello player, and Brice Borredon, who grew up in the country in the south of France and who dedicated himself completely to the piano at age 6, and Adam Ghoubali, who taught himself drums after hearing the Doors. Then there’s Innovative Leisure’s Hanni El Khatib, the genre-smashing guitarist who shares songs with GZA and who’d devote his most ambitious production work yet to Wall of Death. There’s the giant stack of vintage equipment—organ, synthesizer, electric piano and a positively luscious Mellotron. There’s the live chicken named Chickpea, who guarded the outside of the Jazzcats studio in Long Beach and wouldn't let anyone pet her except Borredon. (“We directly understood and respected each other,” he explains.)
And of course there are the decades of inspiration and dedication that push Loveland past the limits of what “psychedelic” means in 2015—a connection that sparks to life with 60s groundbreakers like Soft Machine and King Crimson and leaves a comet trail across Creation Records on its way to Radiohead (and past Tame Impala!) to a destination beyond the horizon. With able and agile studio help from El Khatib and engineers Jonny Bell (also of Innovative Leisure’s Crystal Antlers) and Sonny DiPerri, Wall of Death have created a dense and deeply individual album that makes an instant into a lifetime and more: “Loveland is like the last steps you do in the desert,” says Matringe. “Dry and exhausted, one minute before dying.”
Produced by Black Angels compatriot (and BBQ expert) Texan Brett Orrison, their 2012 debut Main Obsessions on France’s Born Bad label was like if Ennio Morricone had taken over for John Cale on that first Stooges LP—an album as desolate as it was heavy. But for their new album, Wall of Death wanted something ... well, new, in every way. They wanted to take that extra step—to make modern music with the most exquisitely vintage equipment possible, explains Ghoubali, and to seek out a new producer with unfamiliar ideas to make it happen. The idea, says Matringe, was pure and simple: “I was interested in getting lost in some uncomfortable ways.”
Enter Hanni El Khatib, who met Wall of Death on tour in 2013. El Khatib was then fresh off his Head In The Dirt album and full of his own ideas about music production, thanks to particularly instructional sessions with Dirt producer Dan Auerbach. That same year, he’d do his first official production work on California psych-garage band Feeding People’s LP, and then in the spring of 2014, he’d lock himself in L.A. studio the Lair for 30 days and emerge with his ferociously experimental and album Moonlight. While on tour, he discovered that Wall of Death were just as ready to break the rules, he says: “I saw a fresh group that was open-minded and ready to do something drastically different. They talked about risk and experimentation and that’s what drew me to working on this record.” And when Wall of Death heard Moonlight, that sealed the deal: “It’s hard sometimes to let people touch your music,” says Matringe. “But he found what we were looking for.”
And so Loveland became a psychedelic album, but in its own irreproducibly unique way—and not like the usual bled-dry psychedelic albums of 2015, which smear reverb across almost everything and put fuzz on whatever’s left. Instead, Loveland is a work of art or even architecture, a castle-slash-cathedral built on catacombs and caverns and secret passages, where the way in is also the way out. Precisely one minute into Loveland, Matringe’s vocals suddenly explode into infinity, and then the bottom drops out of the song—and from there, Wall of Death dive into the void. There are no brutish garage ragers here, and no plotless jam sessions, either. Loveland is the definition of a slow-burn, with cinematic pace and limitless space and a mellotron that’s practically another member of the band. The idea, says el Khatib, was to make Loveland sound like a dream come true: “Although I played quite a great deal on this album, I wanted to make sure that first and foremost it sounded like Wall of Death. This wasn’t about me trying to put my personal stamp on it, but rather to help my friends make an album they were dreaming about in their heads
If there’s one album everyone in Wall of Death owns, they say, it’s Pink Floyd’s transcendental Meddle, and that underwater sound—as depicted on Meddle’s famous album cover—is everywhere on Loveland, especially on nod-along songs like “For A Lover” or “Blow The Clouds.” (They probably all also own the soundtrack to trip-out film extraordinaire La Planéte Sauvage, too.) But then there’s suddenly an unexpected Terry Riley-style synthesizer fractalization, and then suddenly an unexpected Pink Fairies-style guitar-break, and then the song itself powers down to make space for “Dreamland,” which plays like This Heat miraculously allowed to remix slivers of My Bloody Valentine. (Yes, it’s as hypnotic as the title promises.) Listen close and hear how the final moments of closer song “Memory Pt. 1 and 2” slip seamlessly into the title-track opener—that means this album is endless, if you’d like it to be. And in between, says Matringe, is exactly everything Wall of Death knew they really needed on this album: “The sound between love, paradise and fantasy,” he says, “with songs about love, freedom, youth and hope. For me, it’s the spectrum of what we love.”
Flowers in the Spring
Regular price Sale price $19.99 Save $0.00LP is Standard Jacket w/ Printed Inner Sleeve + Insert + Download Card.
CD is 4 Panel Digipack.
First, let’s meet back up with the Molochs—you remember them, right? Their America’s Velvet Glory was the earliest burst of light and energy to hit in 2017, an album of electrified rock ‘n’ roll like Dylan and Lou Reed by a band named after the Ginsberg-ian glutton god who demanded the sacrifice of all things good and pure. But now it’s 2018 and Moloch himself is fatter and happier than ever, so the Molochs couldn’t just make another record. After Glory showed the world who they were, they needed to make an album that showed what they could do. So Flowers In The Spring is where the Molochs worked harder, thought harder and fought harder to be the kind of band that the times demand: “I like to think the world just needs some good solid songs out there,” founder Lucas Fitzsimons says. “It’s simple. It’s not easy … but it’s simple.”
America’s Velvet Glory, their first-ever record for L.A.’s Innovative Leisure label, had sparked their first-ever U.S and European tours, first-ever festival sets, first-ever international press and more. (Top music mag Mojo even said they’d made one of the year’s best albums—“Any year!”) Follow-up Flowers bloomed almost exactly a year later at Long Beach’s Jazzcats studio between December of 2017 and January of 2018, where Fitzsimons and longtime band member Ryan Foster had recorded Glory. By the time they’d returned, they had a slate of songs that had come to Fitzsimons in flash moments, written on nerve-wracking transcontinental flights or on isolated nights in an L.A. apartment, captured at once in bursts of insight or rescued from almost-abandonment in discarded notebooks.
As on Glory, inspiration from Syd Barrett, Dylan, Nikki Sudden and kindred spirit Peter Perrett of the Only Ones was at work, but the Molochs are endlessly (appropriately?) ravenous when it comes to things to read and listen to and learn from. On Flowers they’d refine and recombine their sound, working in that long tradition of poets who cover (or discover) themselves in pop songs. “To Kick In A Lover’s Door” blows Flowers open with the wit and precision of the Go-Betweens, and “I Wanna Say To You” draws more from some of Creation Records’ dreamiest dreamers than it does from any esoteric 60s howlers. “Flowers In The Spring” and “Pages Of Your Journal” could be two lost Kinks singles from two different Kinks eras—that Ray Davies-ian venom stays the same, of course—and the charming/disarming “Too Lost In Love” makes feeling down sound like cheering up, just like the Clean did.
Yes, they do have their first-ever string section here, and that could confuse some people. (“People go, ‘Wow, it sounds more mature.’” says Fitzsimons. “What kind of boring shit is that?”) But Flowers isn’t a grown-up album or a show-off album or a break-up album or a just-had-to-make-another-album album because the Molochs don’t pick targets that tiny. Love and disgrace and life and death blur and bleed into each other, but at the core of Flowers is a story about standing against the inhuman by being more human, however messily honest that needs to be. (Or like Fitzsimons sings at the end of the record: beware that “determination by a whole / to destroy the human soul.” Funny how that comes in a song where he claims he can’t explain everything that happens to him, because he sort of just did.) So consider their new Flowers In The Spring a meticulously plotted counterattack against all things Moloch-ian, with clear, concise, immediate, undeniable, simple, direct pop songs, says Fitzsimons, each sharpened enough to cut through anything it touched. That’s what he needed to do, he says, because that’s what felt most true. Maybe it really was that simple, even if it wasn’t easy. Like he’d explain in a song with just seven words: “There’s something I wanna say to you.”
El Niño & The Southern Oscillations 10" EP
Regular price $12.98 Save $0.00Limited Edition 10" EP.
Brooklyn musician and Red Bull Music Academy alum Sam Posner created El Niño & the Southern Oscillations as a meditation on the the Beauty and Power of the Ocean. The tracks flow through timeless electronica influenced by Selected Ambient era Aphex Twin and early Larry Heard as well as contemporary artists like Carribou and Jamie XX. Posner sketched the framework and palate for the project over a few years of travel, bringing the final EP together in a sea-side cabin watching waves crash against the rocky Maine coast. Visual artist Hisham Bharoocha provides the cover art for this Limited Edition Record Store Day 10” Vinyl LP, the fractured yet floating water a reflection of the sounds inside the sleeve.
New Chants
Regular price Sale price $18.99 Save $0.00LP is Standard Jacket + Download Card.
First 15 LP orders come with Limited Edition Custom Booklet.
Traps PS are a band that breaks “less is more” all the way down to “less is everything.” You get it: like the Minutemen, the songs are short because they don’t need to be long. And like the Minutemen, sixty seconds of Traps PS hits harder and resonates longer than five-ten-twenty sloppy minutes from somebody else. Or like Gang of Four, who got it from James Brown, who is a fundamental Traps PS inspiration—Traps PS cares about discipline, rhythm and clarity. Says drummer Miles Wintner: “We don’t waste time.” They’ve always been unafraid to do what needed to be done, this practically telepathic trio of Wintner, bassist/backing vocalist Danny Miller and singer/guitarist Andrew Jeffords. They recorded and released records on their community-oriented/community-involved label Papermade and played any space they’d fit—lost all ages institutions like L.A.’s Pehrspace or not-exactly legal “guerilla” shows on city streets and in dusty Inglewood oil fields. But with their first full-length in three years coming into focus, they found L.A. independent label Innovative Leisure ready to amplify that DIY capability:
“We’ve done so much in our own bubble that it was exciting to explore another aspect,” says Jeffords. “I’m enjoying inviting people into our family. By the time they walked into Long Beach’s Jazzcats studio—where label mates like Hanni El Khatib and the Molochs recorded with producer Jonny Bell—they had more than twenty songs nearly fully finished, trimmed to their most necessary components and rehearsed only enough to sharpen the original inspiration. That was the most important part, says Jeffords, to capture that ecstatic lightning-strike instant that sparked a song in the first place, and to make sure it never fizzled out. “If we didn’t have that feeling,” he adds, “the song would have never made it out of the rehearsal studio.”
Their last full-length was about energy, says Jeffords, an echo of the helicopters that shook the walls in his old apartment and the car crashes in the street. New Chants would be darker in tone and color, he thought—about people and their machines, and the blurring relationship between them. Like the way you can sometimes see your reflection in a TV screen—maybe you lose track of where the media starts and you begin. If “Fourth Walls” didn’t make it obvious, the black border around their cover art does: Traps PS knows there’s always a frame around the image.
This is where the real spirit of that first wave of post-punk is at work on New Chants. It’s that uneasiness with the future and the unpredictable effects it brings, and an effort to make an unpredictable new music to meet it. (Possibly related: there’s actually one of the Jazzcats studio cats playing piano on this album, but not where you’d think.)
New Chants is an album about watching and being watched, about white noise and negative space, about how what’s undone or unplayed or unsaid is just as deliberate and meaningful as everything else. Jeffords even perforated his lyrics sheet with “…” ellipses—negative space in the language itself. So think Wire’s precision minimalism, antidote to the over-the-top spectacle of punk and pop both. You’ll hear it in “Seven Voices” or the album’s title track. Think Public Image and that caustic, corrosive—and purer for it—dissonance.
You’ll hear it in “Two Truths,” with its ragged semi-chorus of “Emmmmmmbrace …” Think the Contortions, who tore out everything in their songs except the rhythm and discovered there wasn’t much else they’d needed anyway, except for some saxophone used more as flamethrower than musical instrument. You’ll hear that as “Fourth Walls” falls in on itself. And then think about Traps PS, who thought about what they didn’t need and then threw it out, and who made an album only out of what they felt mattered most: “Let it be what it is,” says Jeffords. New Chants is barely twenty minutes long—but it’s got everything.
Death Boner
Regular price $9.99 Save $0.00As the fabled Phoenix rises from the ashes, so too has Death Boner sprung from the flames which had previously engulfed it to spread five rounds of love and longing. Having played in various broken-up bands around the LA area, the four members of Death Boner came together one Sunday to record this EP in the shipping room of their record company's office. The recordings are reminiscent of the early Atlantic Records studio process - pushing the desks to the side of the room and replacing them with instruments + microphones capturing one or two live takes to be mixed down at a later time. The end result is raw and accelerated; how a listener should feel after hearing Death Boner.
Nude Casino
Regular price Sale price $9.99 Save $0.00LP is Gatefold Jacket + Download Card.
CD is 4 Panel Digipack.
Rotterdam’s Iguana Death Cult hasn’t exactly been shy about causing havoc on whatever stage they set foot. That’s likely been the one constant since establishing their giddy brand of protopunk and garage rock on debut LP The First Stirrings Of Insect Life. Iguana’s pending follow-up Nude Casino marks a swift and sobering departure from the miasma of psychedelics they purvey so fervently. But no less intense: this band has been sharpening their tools, reemerging from their concrete cavern with a ragged and convulsive post-punk attack akin to Devo, The Gun Club, and Richard Hell.
Nude Casino sporadically evokes Iguana Death Cult’s more hedonistic tendencies, but the album’s crisper, more unvarnished sonic makeup illustrates a seething skepticism as a counterbalance. Frontman Jeroen Reek finds himself teetering in demented neurosis between vivid dream states and stark reality. The album’s beating heart is ‘Tuesday’s Lament’, an arresting five-chapter monologue that wrestles with the strains of mortality and belief. As Reek narrates the invasion of existing evils into his phantasmagorical, aquatic dream world, somehow, Iguana Death Cult manage to jam it all into a belter of a melodic hook: “Swimming upstream for the sake of paradise, it’s up there still.” A bashful resolution, albeit one that balances on the edge of fatalism.
Adding a touch of sobriety, both sonically and lyrically, hasn’t stifled Iguana Death Cult daredevil ways the slightest. The mighty triptych of ‘Nude Casino’, ‘Bright Lights’ and ‘Lorraine’ was pretty much written simultaneously, a testament to the off-the-chain chemistry the Dutch quintet has developed over the years. Axe-wielder Tobias Opschoor once again brandishes his resourcefulness for licks that penetrate the skull with charm and impertinence. He is the brains behind Nude Casino’s manic, climax-building pinnacle ‘Nature Calls’, a juggernaut of a track that ironically captures a yearning to drift away from the civilized world. Though more grounded in reality, sonically speaking, ‘Nature Calls’ might be the closest kin to the more surrealist pronouncements of First Stirrings.
Playing an abundance of shows – at small clubs, squats and festivals such as The Great Escape, Lowlands, c/o pop, Plissken and Reeperbahn – has whipped Iguana into even more ferocious live band, and that experience carries over in the recordings. The tandem of Justin Boer (bass) and Arjen van Opstal (drums) is still the engine that drives the group’s helter-skelter horsepower. Jimmy de Kok adds a new melodic dynamic, assaulting the neurons with feverish organs and synths. With yet another erratic element in the fold, Nude Casino invokes something more claustrophobic and barren, tackling themes like sleep paralysis (‘Half Frisian’) and lost innocence (‘Castle In The Sky’).
Indeed, Iguana Death Cult isn’t gleefully surfing that mighty tidal wave anymore, but giving in to destructive currents that enwrap everything in chaos. Nude Casino is an intrusive, spastic affair, streamlined into a propellant, hook-heavy yomps, never more obvious than the cadaverous disco pulse of ‘Carnal Beat Machine’. Like The Clash and Minutemen before them, Iguana Death Cult have embraced the art of rocking the fuck out with all senses and impulses up to eleven. Rapturously sinking in their claws, and never letting go.
Joy Comes In Spirit
Regular price Sale price $9.99 Save $0.002LP is Gatefold Jacket, Custom Inner Sleeves + Download Card.
CD is Jewel Case.
In a world where art is compromised and commodified, shrunk down and boxed in, Vicktor Taiwò wants us to open up. The vibrant young singer-songwriter traffics in subtle hints and soaring melodies, slow creeps and grand climaxes. Taiwò is on a mission to collect something from himself, and it’s a journey worth following.
It is the frigid winter of the year 2000 and Vicktor Taiwò, an eight year old, accompanied by his mother and siblings, arrive in East London after leaving behind the visceral warmth of Abeokuta, Nigeria behind. Raised in a Christian home, his exposure to performing music came as it does for many with gifted vocal ability; honing skills and crafting harmonies in church choirs.
Years forward and disillusioned by his decision to study Law & Business at university, Vicktor Taiwò makes a choice that alters the course of his life permanently. After encouragement from friends and a brief stint as a frustrated photographer, Taiwò decides on January 1, 2012 precisely - as he does with most things - that he would make music his medium.
Once he started uploading his songs online, listeners caught on quickly. Without label or publisher, he found himself synced on shows like Girls and Dear White People. JUNO, Vicktor’s self-released debut EP, was met with praise by the likes of Vice, Billboard, and Okayplayer for its lean, focused approach to song structure, and for its withering, poetic lyrics.
Even at such an early stage in his development, Taiwò was finding angles that most songwriters would neglect. “At this point, all I really think there is for humans to do is to explore detail,” he says. “To see how infinite an infinitely expanding universe really is, and how small the smallest particle really is.”
His debut album, Joy Comes in Spirit, is at once experimental and comforting – collected shards of soul and style reassembled into something entirely new. Due out on Innovative Leisure, the record introduces a bold new artist willing to take musical and lyrical risks, and to bare himself to an international audience. The result is an arresting, unforgettable work that shrugs off the expectations we have that musicians fit easily into recognizable molds.
A fearless writer, on “Letters I Wrote,” Taiwò opens with a remarkable scene: “If you never see sunlight again / And the sun turns black and makes you so afraid / Can you find the light within to fight the night?” It’s a note to self of course; from Joy Comes in Spirit’s first note, Vicktor is mining his own psyche for its dark depths and hidden crevices, demanding from himself the sort of emotional reaction his work incites in others.
Songs like “Subducta. Psalm 69,” a seven-minute, multi-part epic, echo contemporary hip-hop; “tDS (Surf)” seems designed to be sung around campfires in the distant future; “Supernatural Women” traces 808s & Heartbreak back to its Zappian roots. And “Summon,” one of the record’s highlights, is like if you trapped a troubled spirit in a GameBoy Colour.
Vicktor Taiwò is emotionally complex. His album’s beautiful closer, “Morning Joy,” is redemptive, an optimistic look toward better days. It’s hard not to be optimistic in the face of Taiwò’s talent, the kind of which is rarely harnessed so seamlessly, and at such a young age. He’ll be an artist of consequence for years to come, no matter what outside forces threaten to block his path.