3 products
Fated
Regular price Sale price $14.99 Save $0.00CD Packaging is 4 Panel Digipack.
LP Packaging is a Custom Printed Inner Sleeve w/ Digital Download Card. Pressed on White Vinyl.
Free Flexi Disc Record w/ purchase featuring an exclusive bonus track "P8." Limited to 300. Flexi only available with orders at innovativeleisure.net.
We seek the new because of the numbness. If you listen to enough music, you’re familiar with the feeling. Sounds get recycled so often that they can seem like geometric configurations organized via Wav files. Trends get time-stamped faster than a triplicate trap hi-hat.
The most rare records emerge outside of any clearly delineated orbit. They’re solitary visions that supply their own rhythm and arsenal. Music that reverberates through heart, brain, and spine. This is Nosaj Thing’s third album, Fated.
“I just tried to escape really, and escape even what’s going on in the music world,” says Nosaj Thing, the LA producer born Jason Chung. “It just felt so suffocating in a way. I just wanted to do my own thing.”
It’s been six years since Nosaj Thing emerged among the vanguard of Low End Theory-affiliated producers. His debut Drift created 31st century tones and chromatic textures so sleek that they inspired innumerable Soundcloud imitators.
None could match its moody iridescence, faded sadness and funky swing. Bach collided with Boards of Canada. Spaceships came equipped with rear view mirrors and a booming system bumping G-Funk and warped soul. Pitchfork called it “gorgeously haunted.” Resident Advisor said it “exists in its own dimension and feeds off its own exhaust: full of alien choirs, conquered computers, and refracting stained-glass light.”
Fated exists in this same alternate dimension, but further out. If comparisons previously existed with other artists within the LA beat scene, Nosaj has rendered them baseless. His second album on Innovative Leisure (after 2013’s Home) seeks celestial escape through streamlining.
“The last record took out so much of me. I just wanted to go back to simplifying and overthinking so much. It was a battle,” Nosaj says. “The soul of a song, the essence of a song—whatever you want to call it—should be simple.”
By stripping away all but what’s really necessary, the sounds harness an unusual directness. Guest appearances are rare, save for vocals from Whoarei on “Don’t Mind Me,” and Chicago rap phenomenon, Chance the Rapper. The latter gravely spits on “Cold Stares,” invoking terminal fevers, empty beds, devil’s whispers, and insomniac fears.
If comparisons crop up, Fated has most in common with records like Burial’s Untrue or Dilla’s Donuts. Requiems that canvass the shadowy hinterlands between life and death, darkness and light, loneliness and love. Eternal themes re-imagined in ingenious fashion.
“The album name came from all these coincidences that just kept on happening to me,” Nosaj says. “Specific interaction with specific people in unexpected places. A perpetual feeling of déjà vu.”
It’s foundation rests on that intangible thing that some call fate or primordial feeling. Numbness receding, old emotions flooding back, un-tampered visions. Fated is what you can’t explain, so it’s best to just listen.
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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.
Parallels
Regular price Sale price $9.99 Save $0.00LP comes with Custom Inner Sleeve +Download Card.
CD is Jewel Case.
Parallels is the fourth full album released under Jason Chung’s distinctive moniker, Nosaj Thing. Masterfully dimensional, Parallels represents the acclaimed Los Angeles-based electronic producer/composer/performer’s most diverse, vital work yet. As such, Chung sees Parallels represents a kind of redemptive rebirth.
The album’s compellingly elusive, uncategorizable sonics developed out of what he terms a personal & musical “identity crisis.”
According to Chung, working with a group of collaborators on Parallels that combined both longtime friends and new creative partners added “new energy which pushed me not to limit myself. Everything felt fresh and alive.” The title Parallels in fact evokes the intense, intimate duality Nosaj Thing and his collaborators share. Chung is known specifically for his innovative, unexpected musical pairings: Kid Cudi hit up on Nosaj Thing via his MySpace page in 2006, resulting in Chung producing Cudi’s autobiographical classic “The Man on the Moon.” Kendrick Lamar flowed over Nosaj’s ethereal boom bap to create the YouTube gem “Cloud 10”; Chance the Rapper, meanwhile, freaked a Nosaj beat for his 2013 breakout masterpiece “Paranoia” and appeared on Nosaj Thing’s previous LP, 2015’s Fated. Chung and Blonde Redhead vocalist Kazu Makino are also longtime creative partners on each other’s work; her voice appears on Parallels as an otherworldly spirit animating the icily ‘80s-synthetic “How We Do.”