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12" x 12" Full Cover Sticker LP. Digipack with clear tray CD.

It all started over a year ago with the caption “MINDBLOWING PSYCHE- DELIA FROM THAILAND”—the Youtube video that accompanied this head- line 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 un- likely interpreters at his local Thai restaurant to get in contact with the band and inquire whether they’d be interested in having him travel to their town to record their music for a global audience. At first the band was naturally suspicious, but through subsequent interactions the group’s leader and namesake Khun Narin (also known simply as “Rin”) warmed to the idea of having Marcy come visit. And so began the journey of uncovering who these mysterious men from an obscure blog post actually were.

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 morn- ing 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 recent favorite) while the beer and whiskey flow freely. After a mid-day banquet, they start up the generator and lead a parade through the com- munity to the local temple, picking up more and more partiers along the way.

The music they play is called phin prayuk. The first word refers to the lead instrument, a 3-stringed lute known as the phin. Beer, 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. To capture the essence of the group and their sound, Marcy recorded th em in their natural environment by doing a proper field recording, literally in a field outside the city of Lom Sak, in the valley of mountains that form a rough border between Thai- land’s North and Northeast. The result was 40 minutes of hypnotizing psyche- delia filled with heavy drum breaks that sounds like something RZA would sample for a Quentin Tarantino film.

The Buttertones new album Jazzhound.

LP is Foldout Poster Insert + Download Card.

Before settling in to make Jazzhound, their most extravagant, ambitious, and fully realized album to date, the Buttertones had to face the hounds of real life. Prior to a headlining summer tour in support of 2018’s Midnight in a Moonless Dream, a fiery blast of an album capturing the band at their purest distillation, drummer/multi-instrumentalist Modesto ‘Cobi’ Cobiån had a sudden and serious medical scare involving his eye, requiring emergency surgery. He lost half his vision (it will hopefully return with a future operation), and the tour had to be cancelled. Music took a backseat for the time being. 

“It gave us some perspective on our health,” says bassist Sean Redman, “and the fact that we have to look after ourselves and one another first, or else the music just can’t happen.” Cobiån, Redman, and vocalist/guitarist Richard Araiza have been playing together for seven years now, having first come together for a self-titled debut in 2013; along with London Guzman on sax and keys, they’ve come to establish themselves as one of L.A.’s tightest groups, conquering stages from Coachella to Tropicalia. When one of their own had a scare, they rallied around him—and used the experience to come together stronger than ever for the record they were getting ready to make. 

“He says it adds charm to his character,” jokes Araiza, who led the Buttertones back into writing mode, taking the reset moment to really focus on the approach and style of the record. The material he was working on took the band forward into a heavier sound—and it also brought them back to the spark of their first album. “It allowed us to go back to the roots and the spirit we had when we started,” Redman considers. “We are kind of a new band, in a lot of ways, is what it feels like.” 

Continuing their partnership with producer Jonny Bell of Crystal Antlers, who produced Moonless Dream as well as 2017’s Gravedigging, the Buttertones waited until they were good and ready before hitting thelegendary Electro-Vox Studios in Hollywood, where they arrived knowing exactly what they wanted to lay to tape. Armed with an arsenal of the most propulsive music they’ve written yet, the band recorded the album mostly live—an ideal method for capturing their cult-status live show, which carries on the torch of acts like the Walkmen and the Fleshtones. “We’d do a few takes,” says Araiza, “and then it was, ‘Alright, we got all the main instruments done, now let’s record on the vibraphone that was used on Pet Sounds,’ you know?”

But Jazzhound is completely new territory for the group, too, with Araiza, who calls this album “probably thedarkest one” he’s written lyrically, pushing his Ian Curtis-via-Bobby Darin baritone to new depths, particularly on scorchers like “Phantom Eyes” and “Bebop.” It’s also the first album with Cobiån acting—and thriving—in his new role as a full-time guitarist (the drum parts were written by him and played by session musician Paul Doyle), and the first since the departure of guitarist Dakota Boettcher as well.

“We really worked our asses off on this one,” says Araiza, proudly, already talking about how he can’t wait to do it all again and make another record soon—after they tour the world, that is, making up for the lost dates last summer, and then some. “It feels like we’re still climbing.”

Gelli Haha exists somewhere between Studio 54 and Area 51, where dancefloors become playgrounds and cheeky aesthetics ignite imagination. A shapeshifter, a sonic acrobat, a performer with one foot in the cosmos and the other in a slapstick routine, Gelli Haha is a space for pure creative chaos.

For her opening trick, Gelli Haha presents Switcheroo, the debut album via Innovative Leisure, to be released in June 2025. With a shared taste for off-kilter pop and vintage gear, producer Sean Guerin (of De Lux) joined Gelli in turning freshly-formed demos into a high-voltage experiment, abandoning meticulous structure for something freer and more electrifying. Every song on Switcheroo makes use of a myriad of recording toys; wacky analog effects, such as the Eventide Harmonizer, MXR Pitch Transposer, and various Electrix units, fashion an intentionally flawed and strictly silly texture throughout the album.

Gelli Haha’s music thrives on duality: playful but profound, tongue-in-cheek but sincere. “Bounce House” is the child-like innocence; “Spit” is the S-words-only underground-club grit. “Piss Artist” revels in tequila-fueled storytelling about an infamous party moment (involving a jar — don’t ask, just dance), while “Normalize” feels like you’re stuck in Play-Doh.

It’s a practice in play - recording vocals mid-jump, translating drum fills into mouth sounds, granting your best friend’s wish for a song about them. A bear attack crashes through the happy-go-lucky “Dynamite”, “Funny Music” ends with a sudden “BONK!”— because why not?
The emotional rainbow stretches beyond the positive — Gelli pouts and wails on "Tiramisu", demanding to know and feel everything, while "Pluto is not a planet it’s a restaurant" closes the album in a darker, heart-throbbing track with the repeated cry: "I’m afraid."

Switcheroo is the soundtrack to the Gelliverse, a sensory adventure sphere created by Gelli. This live revue is an invitation into a world of dolphin balloons, flutes, mini trampolines, and a stage bathed in the project’s primary color, red - bold and full of mischief.

Gelli Haha isn’t foolproof. It’s by design. Switcheroo is an exercise in letting go, an inside joke turned theatrical spectacle. Participation is encouraged. Surrender is required. 

Jonah Yano is an artist’s artist. A producer and songwriter who has collaborated on projects by peers like Fousheé, Mustafa and Charlotte Day Wilson, he’s also co-written alongside Helena Deland, Ouri, Clairo and Monsune on his own releases. Yano is always shifting the unstable ground his songs rest on, revising it, making it anew. Often his compositions are warm, soulful, and hazily impressionistic, but he prefers to resist easy genre categorization, flitting, instead, between jazz and folk traditions, R&B and hip-hop, rock and ambient and electronic. On portrait of a dog — the 2023 album he made with frequent collaborators BADBADNOTGOOD, praised in Pitchfork for its “cryptic, diaristic intimacy” — the Japanese-Canadian musician weaved his lilting, wistful voice into a harvest-hued mosaic of heartbreak and family memory, for which he recorded hours of conversations and digitized thousands of old photographs to wrestle with his grandfather’s encroaching dementia. The album featured guest contributions from Slauson Malone and Sea Oleena, with string arrangements by Eliza Niemi, Leland Whitty, and Yano. On Jonah Yano & the Heavy Loop, his forthcoming record out Oct. 4, Yano has once again upended his musical direction, crafting an experimental, chimerical album with the live ensemble-turned-studio band (Christopher Edmonson, Benjamin Maclean, Leighton Harrell, Felix Fox-Pappas, and Raiden Louie) that he’s been painstakingly scouting for the last three years. Yano has conceived of this as a kind of double-record; the anchoring song, The Heavy Loop, is a 30-minute feat of improvisation that sees the band leaning into noise music and free sound, and constitutes the “raw materials” of the album’s freewheeling soundscapes. “Concentrate,” the lead single, smoulders over subdued keys, bright guitar arpeggios, jazzy drums, and clarinet work from Clairo, whom Yano and his band opened for during her 2022 EU/UK tour. “If souvenir is about what I feel, and portrait of a dog is about what I remember or want to remember, then this album is about what I think,” says Yano. “And maybe that’s the difference.”

Though he now resides in Montreal, Yano was born in Hiroshima in 1994, and emigrated to Vancouver when he was four. He grew up listening to blues guitar players and classic rock music, and after learning the piano under his grandmother’s tutelage as a child, picked up the guitar in a “School of Rock-esque” middle school program. He started recording demos on his cellphone in 2016, when he moved to Toronto and joined up with the city’s burgeoning underground music scene. Many of the people he met and jammed with there — Monsune, Jacques Greene, Joseph L’Étranger, BBNG — became his eventual collaborators, and taught him technical skills he would use to record his first real songs. His friendship with the Toronto-based experimental music duo MONEYPHONE culminated with a song they made together called “On Lock,” his first ever feature, and Yano released his first solo single later that year, “Rolex, the Ocean.” “It’s important for me to interface with what’s happening in whichever localized area I’m in,” says Yano. “I always want my music to reflect where I am as much as what I’m trying to say.” 

In his room and the home studios of friends, he began working on a suite of songs that would form his début project, the breezy, six-track Nervous EP (2019), which blended jazz, hip-hop, and R&B influences with subtle electronica. It introduced Yano as a soulful, genre-agnostic talent with an ear for melody and intimate songwriting, and he followed it up later that year with a lush cover of The Majestics’ “Key to Love (Is Understanding),” which the original Memphis funk/soul band praised as “well done with [a] slight personal twist.” Yano’s well-reviewed début album, souvenir, expanded the panoramic sonic landscape of his first EP, seamlessly weaving together drum’n’bass, rock, ambient, soul, jazz, and more. His free association-based songwriting introduced many of the themes that would prove central to his work — memory, family histories, the nuances of interpersonal relationships, identity fractured by diaspora — and the record included a reworked version of a song called “shoes,” which Yano’s then-estranged father, Tatsuya Muraoka, had recorded 25 years before their reconciliation. In Japanese, Muraoka sang about a pair of shoes he bought for his child son, and Yano, now older, filled it in by questioning his father’s absence from his childhood due to his parents’ separation: a duet traversing oceans and decades. He released the album on Father’s Day in 2020.

Since then, Yano’s work has earned praise in major international music publications, including Billboard, The Fader, CLASH, Exclaim, Complex, and Pitchfork. He’s been featured on NTS Radio, CBC Music’s The Intro, NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday, and performed on COLORS twice. He was twice nominated for the SOCAN Songwriting Prize, and has garnered the attention of Gilles Peterson, Benji B, and the late Virgil Abloh. He’s played the Montreal International Jazz Festival, the EFG London Jazz Festival, and toured Japan for ten solo shows in 2023. In 2024, he released the little italy demos, a three-song tape he made with his neighbour in Montreal, Le Ren.

*** releases October 4, 2024 ***

“This music is more for the creatures than for the humans” - Songwriter, producer, and multi-instrumentalist Sam Blasucci.

Having spent the last 10 years tinkering with his songwriting through his extensive catalog with folk/rock group Mapache, as well as his debut solo album ‘Off My Stars’, Sam works alongside co-producer Johnny Payne for his follow up sophomore solo album ‘Real Life Thing’ via Calico Discos. Sam & Johnny take a leap from everything they have done in the past into brand new territory for this collection of songs. Sam connects new dots and bends genres with unheard style and instrumentation on songs like ‘Death’, with words adding to the conversation of gender and sexuality. The occult-dancer lead single ‘Witching Hour’ pulses with feeling through a high energy chorus built around a beautiful and bold middle section of just percussion and vocals. In addition to new pathways, homage is also paid to Sam’s first loves of music through the notable Motown feel of the existential soul tune ‘Flower’, as well as the vintage pop gleam of ‘No Magic’. These songs are two examples of the recurring lyrical themes of life and death on this record. “Something clicked before I wrote these songs that put me in a place of wonder and confusion and bliss that I had never experienced before.” Some of the lyrics found on this record have been previously released in Sam’s debut book of poetry ‘Guidelines For Dying’, which quickly sold out of its first print.

While remaining quite elusive to genre or category, a few of Blasucci’s deepest influences can still be spotted throughout the musical and lyrical shape of his new album. New literary and musical discoveries seem to be constant for Sam, but shades of Leonard Cohen, Prince, and Bjork peak out behind this batch of songs as well as the writings of Ariana Reines, John O’Donohue, and Edgar Allen Poe. Sam notes that the many influences around him became heavier and more vibrant after falling extremely ill for two years between 2020 and 2022. “Gaining back my ability to be active, to travel, to live - it was all very much a rebirth in so many ways. Things emerged sharper and clearer from that period of my life”. Sam is healthy and moving forward at a seemingly fast pace with this new album and the accompanying conceptual concert film of the same name.

The film - directed by Sam and produced/shot by Bryce Makela - brings these influences and songs into a literal Real Life Thing through their collaborative visions and physical representations of the album. Filmed at the same studio where the album was recorded - Carbonite Sound in Ojai, CA - the film runs like a type of musical play. The album is performed live with stage hands and different set changes to accentuate each mood throughout the record - certainly Sam’s most ambitious project to date.

Sam was born in Los Angeles in November 1994 and currently lives in Ojai, CA. Having had residence in Los Angeles, CA / Coahuila, MX / Orem, UT & New Orleans, LA - it’s safe to assume Sam will be on the move again soon and with more fresh energy to give of himself through his art. Determined to live by creation, Sam is the type of artist that is always creating something, maintaining a sort of inexhaustible hunger to make his music. Expressing himself through sound has now gone beyond joy and into being second nature and Sam’s real first language. 

For his second full-length LP and most realized release as Serebii yet, Callum Mower had one thing he had to overcome first: he was “terrified” of himself.

After establishing the Serebii project with several albums’ worth of trancing neo-soul and shape-shifting ballads, much of it done in collaboration with fellow New Zealander Arjuna Oakes, Mower had no lack of confidence in his musical abilities. But much of Mower’s focus in the past was on instruments and production—swirling, cinematic instrumentals under his own name or funky art-pop jams with others on vocals. On Dime, however, Mower knew he wanted to push forward with his own singing placed center stage. “It’s exposing,” Mower says of releasing music so heavy on his singing. “It feels like you’re walking into a public space naked.”

Mower, it turns out, has nothing to be afraid of. He has a gentle croon deceptive in its power—on a song like “Feet for Pegs,” for example, he lures you in with a Tropicalia guitar progression, but carries the song on vocal subtleties that pass like wisps of smoke. And using that voice, he’s created an album unlike anything he’s done before, rolling seamlessly from track to track—not just a collection of songs but a singular project conceived to work together as a unified statement. “That was the approach with Dime,” Mower says. “To really focus on putting something together that sounded like it was done in one sitting. One chapter.”

For a few months, Mower did little besides eat, sleep, and make music. Outside of a deep love for the music of Aldous Harding, which he takes as inspiration, Mower didn’t listen to much outside of his own work. Instead, he focused on developing a routine: yoga, walks, free writing in the morning to get everything out instead of letting it bottle in. “Just trying to feel, trying to release, and then going in and conjuring that while you’re hovering over a chord progression,” he explains. “Just focus on expression.”

On “Verrans Corner,” the Serebii sound crests over a tall wave as Mower sings of “sailing like furniture on estuaries,” his voice recalling the jazzy falsetto of Thom Yorke. “Dime,” the title track, started as a finger-plucked guitar melody in a strange tuning that led to Mower putting the whole song together in a day. It’s a reflection on the feeling of having been cast into the world with little more than some loose change and ending up back where you started, wondering what it was all about: “Thought I’d never look back,” he sings, “Running a lie to keep on track.” But it’s also the word that came into Mower’s head when he wrote it—a dime, as in a perfect ten: “I just remember being like, that’s a dime. I got my dime.” (The album, notably, deliberately, features ten songs.)

Mower finished about 80 percent of Dime on his own before he realized that what was actually still missing wasn’t something he needed to do himself. “I got to a certain point where I just really missed working with people,” he says, laughing. “That is one of my favorite things to do: be in a room with someone and try to catch all those intricacies and bounce off each other.” Mower called up a few friends—Carla Camilleri, Leith Sye Towers, Skud Gambosi, Tessa Dillon—to add touches and write different parts. And then there was one last collaboration like no other.

For “The Randan,” Mower asked his grandfather, Allan Watkins, to read some of his writing he’d done about adolescence. As Mower recorded his grandfather’s live reading of words about growth and social confusion, he improvised a backing synth track. The result is a song that feels experimental and otherworldly, but surprisingly warm at the same time. Three generations of New Zealanders bridged over a love of music and art—and a grandfather and grandson both pushing aside apprehensions about their own voices to make something beautiful and meaningful. (Watkins’ voice was affected by a recent stroke.)

Watkins, a musician himself, was the one who got Mower into music as a kid; in more than one sense, there is no Serebii without him. “It felt appropriate to get my grandpa involved,” Mower says, “as an ode to him for encouraging me in the first place.” 

Growing up in Bulgaria in the late 1990s, brothers Stef and Yavor Lilov were shaped in a myriad of unseen ways by the centuries-old folk music that filtered through their daily lives. It helped mold their creative spirit and inspired them to begin making noise together at a young age, and that unique and intuitive creative alchemy has been a foundation of guitarist/keyboardist Stef and drummer Yavor’s band L’Eclair since they formed it in their adopted home of Switzerland a decade ago.

After spending the past two years meticulously crafting Cloud Drifter, their fourth album and debut for revered U.S. label Innovative Leisure, L’Eclair is for the first time now led by the Lilov siblings. The result is an album seamlessly melding modernity with nostalgia and played with a robotic tightness that remains deeply human. Indeed, Cloud Drifter will move the body as much as it does the brain.

“We really wanted to finally be able to capture in the studio the feeling that people had listening to us live,” says Yavor. “Part of that involved really taking the time to polish the music between recording and mixing. Can we make this more impactful? How can we make it more attention-grabbing? Putting in that work and really dissecting the production helped us achieve the sonic result we were looking for.”

L’Eclair has built an international fanbase thanks to its impressive command of rhythm, dynamics and electro/acoustic alchemy, which has nodded equally to vocal-free titans such as Can and Tortoise, expansive, spacey and blissed-out jams ((2021’s Confusions) and more stripped-down, feel-good and genre-jumping destinations (the 2018 debut Polymood). Two live sessions for KEXP have accumulated nearly 900,000 views combined, beaming L’Eclair onto the playlists of adventurous listeners around the world.

And although Cloud Drifter reverberates with heavy, party-starting grooves (“Vertigo”), electrifying future club anthems (“MEMPHIS”) and even trap-inspired beats (“Nova Umbra”), its true revelations come from L’Eclair’s first-ever use of vocals, which are performed in a dizzying variety of styles by such guests as Pink Siifu, Gelli Haha, Phoebe Coco, Girl Named GOLDEN, A Ghost Column and Forest Law. The title track is also the maiden appearance of new L’Eclair member and singer/keyboardist Inès Mouzoune, whose group Roshâni is signed to Stone Pixels, the The Orchard-distributed label co-founded by the Lilovs.

“That was a special song in the process, with the three of us in the studio, finding the melody together,” Yavor recalls. “It wasn’t like, we send the instrumental, you bring the melody and then we’ll see. It was collective work towards choosing the right ingredients.”

Elsewhere, former tourmate Girl Named GOLDEN sidesteps her familiar lo-fi indie pop sound to brings forth a captivating vocal atop the hypnotic groove of the aptly named “The Glitch,” while Phoebe Coco’s wordless intonations greatly heighten the ethereal ballad “Ocean Mind.” Forest Law’s sweet, heartfelt singing conjures the wistful vibe of a beach-adjacent drive with the top down on “Nostalgia,” while Gelli Hanna’s confident utterances (“something’s up with you” / “heaven can wait, should you be late”) help propel “Run,” the demo of which started in Afro-electronic/Nyege Nyege Tapes territory before morphing into something much more upbeat and crunchy.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, Pink Siifu’s dexterous flow on “Replica M001” unlocks a brave new sonic world previously unvisited in L’Eclair’s prior work.

“It was very important that the first hip-hop song L’Eclair releases didn’t contain a loop,” Stef says in reference to Siifu’s performance, which is almost on a jazz level in terms of its complexity. “It was more about using what Siifu does best, which is rapping on a drumless beat with timeless instruments. What you hear is a freestyle. He used his voice as an instrument and you see the full spectrum of his abilities. That's what we wanted of every guest — to push them where they're not used to.”

The Lilovs also pushed themselves to deepen the material by recording a string quartet, a choir and a harpist at London contemporary jazz hub Total Refreshment Centre, whose like-minded artists-in-residence provided an extra, intangible burst of inspiration (acclaimed saxophonist/composer Alabaster DePlume happened to be tracking his own session there at the same time and hung out with L’Eclair while listening to the playback).

“We were really, really proud of actually seeing our music written out as a score and executed with a string quartet,” says Stef, who enlisted longtime friend Arthur Sajas (HAHA Sound Collective) to write the arrangement. “I know some of us cried.” The final touches came from Electric Lady Studio mix engineer Matt Scatchell (Adele, James Blake), of whose work Yavor says, “it was a completely new experience for me as a producer and musician to hear something we did as equal to artists or songs that I’ve admired for a lot of years.”

Crystallizing Cloud Drifter’s musical voyage is Melissa Santamaria’s artwork, which depicts an alien world enriched by a living, flower-like structure that may or may not also serve as an interdimensional portal. Says Yavor, “This album is a trip to unknown territories, but it all goes back to what is close to us: what is human, and what brings us back to reality?”

“When Stef and I began playing music, we did it with our ears and without writing. It always started with the emotion. We are always in search of the tools to make those emotions stronger. L’Eclair wants to make you dance and cry, and this album is a great example of that,” he continues. “For me, that’s what L’Eclair is about.”