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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.
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!’”
Madame Supreme b/w Shut Out
Regular price $19.99 Save $-9.99POSTER
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.
Build.Destroy.Rebuild. 7"
Regular price $7.99 Save $0.00"Build. Destroy. Rebuild" is the second fuzzy single from Hanni El-Khatib's upcoming debut album Will The Guns Come Out. El-Khatib touted as one of the most talented acts in L.A. right now is a a one-man band, singing, songwriting, and producing all on his own and synthesizing 50s and 60s garage rock, soul, blues, and even a bit of folk. His attitude is his greatest attribute; anyone who strives to write songs for "anyone who's ever been shot or hit by a train" and brings with him the rawness of Phil Spector, Jack White, the Shangri-Las, and the Black Keys.
Family b/w Penny
Regular price $8.99 Save $0.00Limited 12" Single of Family & Penny. Double A-Sided Single featuring a custom inner sleeve and dual cover.
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.
Island Universe
Regular price Sale price $12.99 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 JessieJones who channels the raw power of Jefferson Airplane’s Grace Slick and Janis Joplin at her most primal as she leads with strong, almost viciousvocals, bellowing blasphemies as if possessed by spirits with a masked sweetness reminiscent of Billie Holiday. Her siren call reeled in Chris Alfaro ofFree the Robots who produced some of the band’s earliest recordings, all of which were written acoustic and recorded electric in a single take in a’ 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, wherethey shared the stage with Radiohead’s Thom Yorke. This is the full length LP recorded andproduced by Jonny Bell of The Crystal Antlers and Hanni El Khatib.
Tony's Song
Regular price $7.99 Save $0.00The first single from Tijuana Panthers upcoming LP Semi-Sweet, “Tony’s Song” matches the relentless energy of the Wipers with instantly catchy beach-punk harmonies while the B-side is a pitch-perfect Nerves cover, a reverent redo of “One Way Ticket” by a band that in sound and sentiment both were pretty much the Tijuana Panthers of their day.
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.
Ouroboros
Regular price Sale price $9.99 Save $0.00Digital Only Compilation + Limited-Edition LP (500 Hand Stamped copies). When Low Limit, aka Bryant Rutledge 1/2 of the duo Lazer Sword, initially set out to create this compilation, the aim was to illustrate the diversity of North American artists bonded by, if anything, an appreciation for both old and new incarnations of dance music. For this project, he sought out producers with an alternate and timeless approach; producers who have paved new and experimental grounds while tastefully channeling the spirits of times before.
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.
Highway To Hell 7"
Regular price $9.99 Save $-2.00A new 7" from Innovative Leisure, composed by San Antonio's Mexicans With Guns with vocals by acclaimed rapper Freddie Gibbs out of Gary, Indiana as well as the legendary underground king Bun B of Port Arthur, Texas. Limited Edition Red Vinyl (500 copy limited press).
Holding On
Regular price $8.99 Save $0.00"Holding On" is the debut 12" single from the LA based DJ / Production duo known as Classixx. The group have been making a major mark in the world of disco, house & pop music over the past few years remixing the likes of Phoenix, Major Lazer, Gossip, Mayer Hawthorne, Holy Ghost & more. The 12" features exclusive remixes by Body High's Jerome LOL, French Touch artist Lifelike & Germany's LoSoul.
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.
Geri
Regular price $11.99 Save $0.00Superhumanoids Debut Single 'Geri' is a Limited-Edition 10" featuring the original version + an exclusive remix from Nite Jewel. Only 300 copies pressed and each jacket hand printed by Hit+Run. Available in 3 different colors (Red, Blue & Yellow). Designed by Hassan Rahim.
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.”
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.
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.
Playa 12"
Regular price $12.00 Save $0.00A 12" single from brand new imprint Innovative Leisure Records, acclaimed emcee Freddie Gibbs out of Gary, Indiana. Features edits and remixes from LA's Capski, Bay Area's Trackademicks, San Antonio's Mexicans With Guns, and Chicago's Maker. An eclectic set of tracks which create a futuristic, fresh, & new canvas for the emcee's witty and sharp street lyricism.
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.”
Do You Feel Ok?
Regular price Sale price $12.98 Save $0.00CD is a 4 Panel Digipack.
LP comes w/ Digital Download Card.
Do You Feel Ok? It’s a question you can answer with a shake of the head or an hour-long tangent. For Superhumanoids, it’s the title of their sophomore album, but it goes deeper than that.
It’s an inquiry that they kept asking each other throughout recording—a meditation on indecision, the infinite paths available, the dubious and righteous choices you’ve made, the changes in your own life that don’t always parallel those closest to you. It can be an obvious “yes” or “no,” or an existential inquiry without easy answers.
Since their 2013 Innovative Leisure debut, Exhibitions, the LA trio sound like they’ve traveled 30 years forward. Whereas their first album elicited comparisons to artists from the 1980s, Do You Feel Ok? reflects the present in all the power and clarity possible with modern technology.
The synths are phosphorescent. Lead singer Sarah Chernoff’s vocals are sleek, ethereal, and ignore gravitational limitations. With propulsive drum machines and feathery hooks, the band blends futuristic electronic textures with classic regard for songwriting. Superhumanoids are singular, but their grace at switching between dance music and rock recall similar hybrids, Darkside and Caribou.
“In the middle of recording, we went on tour with Erasure and realized that the songs we’d written weren’t achieving the energetic atmosphere we hoped for,” says Max St. John, the band’s synth programmer. When we got home we made the necessary changes to create that energy. We wrote additional songs, we sped up tempos, and made changes to the production that we felt were more exciting.”
All three members, Chernoff, Cameron Parkins, and St. John share writing credits and display a rare chemistry. But the durability of their bond comes from both an inherent connection and having been repeatedly tested.
“When we released our first record we had a lot of expectations, some of which weren’t met. The ensuing disappointment caused strain on our relationships as band mates and friends,” says Parkins, Superhumanoids’ guitarist.“When we got together again to start making music for the second album, our friendships felt re invigorated and our eyes were open as to what to ‘expect’ from releasing an album.”
Their debut found Pitchfork hailing them for their “sleepily epic dream-pop.” The Fader praised their “luxurious radio-friendly songs.”The New York Times' T Magazine called "So Strange" a candidate for song of the summer. But with their second album, they’ve ascended to a different elevation—retaining their pop infectiousness but adding an experimental edge.
Do You Feel Ok? is the leap that comes when a band figures out who they are, how to trust each other, and how to create a sound of their own. It’s fluid, full of movement, and capable of pushing people emotionally. If you’re exhausted from the monotony of Internet consensus and homogenous bands, press play. This can soundtrack summer pool parties or the drive home—when you feel okay and when you don’t.
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.
We All Gotta Die b/w Scientist Remix
Regular price $9.99 Save $0.00-100 Jackets hand painted and numbered by Jonny Bell
Bird Brains 10"
Regular price $12.99 Save $0.00Berlin Joe b/w Stranger Love
Regular price $9.99 Save $0.008" vinyl. Limited to 300.
De Lux pays homage to Woody Allen with their new track Joe Berlin exclusive for RSD. The B Side is a bugged out cover of Classixx Stranger Love.
It's A Combination (PEAKING LIGHTS Disco Dub)
Regular price $9.99 Save $0.00"Its A Combination" Remix by Solid Air AKA AC of PEAKING LIGHTS.
B-side features the Instrumental & DJ Harrison Remix of "LA Threshold"
Hand stamped 12" limited to 300.
All You're Waiting For Remixes
Regular price $9.99 Save $0.0012” vinyl single with sleeve art by Jonathan Zawada featuring remixes from Switch and Eric Broucek.
Nothing 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.
Manifest Destiny b/w Gemma
Regular price $8.88 Save $0.008" vinyl limited to 500 pieces.
A side Manifest Destiny
B side Gemma
All songs written by Tyler Lott and Richard Ray
Guitars, Bass, Vocals, Keyboards by Tyler Lott
Drums Richard Ray
Produced by Two Eights and Jonny Bell
Recorded at Jazzcats Studio Long Beach Ca
Engineered by Jonny Bell
Mixed by J.P Bendzinski
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.