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viewing 1 To 25 of 297 items
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CD
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KRANK 230CD
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$16.00
PREORDER
RELEASE DATE: 11/13/2020
"The sublime songs comprising Los Angeles-based musician Ana Roxanne's second record, Because Of A Flower, germinated gradually across five years, inspired by interwoven notions of gender identity, beauty, and cruelty. She describes her process as beginning with 'a drone element and a mood,' then intuiting melody, syllables, and lyrics incrementally, like sacred shapes materializing from mist. The experience of identifying as intersex informs the album on levels both sonic and thematic, from spoken word texts borrowed from tonal harmony textbooks to cinematic dialogue samples and castrati aria allusions. It's an appropriately interstitial vision of ambient songcraft, a chemistry of wisps and whispers, sanctuary and sorrow, conjured through a fragile balance of voice, bass, space, and texture. Despite a background studying at the prestigious Mills College in Oakland, Roxanne's music rarely feels conceptual, instead radiating an immediate and emotive aura, rooted in the present tense of her personal journey. She speaks of the flower in the title as a body, singular and sunlit, as many petals as thorns, an enigma beholden only to itself. But whether taken as surface or subtext, Because Of A Flower is a transfixing document of a rare artist in the spring of their ascension."
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LP
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KRANK 230LP
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$20.00
PREORDER
RELEASE DATE: 11/13/2020
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2LP
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KRANK 229LP
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$27.00
PREORDER
RELEASE DATE: 11/6/2020
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KRANK 229CD
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"Named after the geographic formations of the seismically volatile Cascadian coastal mountains, loscil's coast/range/ arc// reissue features new artwork and an additional track. Remastered by James Plotkin and available on vinyl for the first time."
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KRANK 044LP
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2020 repress. "Aix Em Klemm is the moniker of the ambient music project consisting of Adam Wiltzie (Stars Of The Lid/A Winged Victory For The Sullen) and Robert Donne (Labradford/Anjou). As Wiltzie told Sadness Is In The Sky fanzine, his collaboration with Donne began when 'we all met during a Texas swing of a Labradford tour that Stars Of The Lid opened for back in 1996. They stayed at my house for a few days and we became close.' A year later Wiltzie was asked to join Labradford for their Mi Media Naranja European tour of 1997 as the sound technician. This tour also included Bruce Gilbert of the legendary band Wire who was the opening act and joined them in the van for the entire tour. With Gilbert's nightly improvisations of minidisk field recording explosions running through a Sherman Filterbank, it left a profound effect on Wiltzie and Donne, and led to inspiring internal philosophical discussions on the importance of improvisation. After concluding six weeks in the van, the idea of creating a unique collaboration separate from their other projects was realized. The duo exchanged tapes over the course of a year and then Donne ventured to Austin, TX for a week to record at Wiltzie's home studio in 1999. The in-person collaboration moved much more quickly than the exchange of tracks by mail. One track on the Aix Em Klemm album, "Sparkwood And Twenty-One", was written and recorded in one day. The duo took the mysterious name Aix Em Klemm and the self-titled debut was released in the autumn of 2000. As of late, Wiltzie lives in Brussels, and Donne joined Stars Of The Lid on their last tour of Europe in 2016 playing modular synth. They still collaborate musically so new Aix Em Klemm recordings remain a possibility."
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KRANK 228CD
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"Melissa Guion's second offering for Kranky retains the glassy gauze of her debut, 2016's Precious Systems, but shaded starker and darker, framed by mechanical rhythms and humid industrial moods. She speaks of Sour Cherry Bell as something of a reckoning with her tools of creation: 'I was curious to see how far I could go with them, even if that meant reaching the ends of their capacity to do what I wanted. But I never exhausted them and they never exhausted me.' Utilizing her trusted combination of instrumentation, Guion tracked the record between her New Orleans home and rehearsal space, capturing chemistries both intimate and expansive. The songs sway between twilit shoegaze, downer ballads, and gothic pop, mapping a delicate palette of electric melancholies, though in retrospect she cites as her primary muse the notion of power: 'lost and found, corporeal and cerebral, harnessed and exploited, of one and many, in this reality and the next.' Sour Cherry Bell reverberates beyond the here and now into scenes unseen, worlds unheard."
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KRANK 228LP
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LP version. "Melissa Guion's second offering for Kranky retains the glassy gauze of her debut, 2016's Precious Systems, but shaded starker and darker, framed by mechanical rhythms and humid industrial moods. She speaks of Sour Cherry Bell as something of a reckoning with her tools of creation: 'I was curious to see how far I could go with them, even if that meant reaching the ends of their capacity to do what I wanted. But I never exhausted them and they never exhausted me.' Utilizing her trusted combination of instrumentation, Guion tracked the record between her New Orleans home and rehearsal space, capturing chemistries both intimate and expansive. The songs sway between twilit shoegaze, downer ballads, and gothic pop, mapping a delicate palette of electric melancholies, though in retrospect she cites as her primary muse the notion of power: 'lost and found, corporeal and cerebral, harnessed and exploited, of one and many, in this reality and the next.' Sour Cherry Bell reverberates beyond the here and now into scenes unseen, worlds unheard."
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KRANK 227CD
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"The sophomore offering by Julie Carpenter's textural orchestral entity Less Bells takes its title from a storied strain of decorative objects worn in remembrance of lost loved ones: Mourning Jewelry. The album shares a similar mood of devotional pageantry, stirring ornamental laments born from a need to 'create beauty out of grief.' Utilizing an amalgam of strings, synthesizers, and choirs, the pieces ascend and descend in grand, glimmering arcs, ebbing from passages of 'baroque complexity' to expanses of haunting emptiness. Certain songs also skew more overtly western than ever before, deeply reverbed plucks of banjo refracted against glowing horizons of sunrise drone: Americana gone ambient. Furthering the music's mystic intentionality, the track titles comprise 'the major arcana of a tarot deck from an alternate universe,' lorded over by the 'Queen Of Crickets,' ruler of 'The Gates,' 'The Fault,' and 'The Fang.' Even so, the record requires no psychic divination to glean its fragile majesty, its muted tumult of mirage and melody. The beauty it possesses is too blatant, and bountiful."
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KRANK 227LP
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LP version. "The sophomore offering by Julie Carpenter's textural orchestral entity Less Bells takes its title from a storied strain of decorative objects worn in remembrance of lost loved ones: Mourning Jewelry. The album shares a similar mood of devotional pageantry, stirring ornamental laments born from a need to 'create beauty out of grief.' Utilizing an amalgam of strings, synthesizers, and choirs, the pieces ascend and descend in grand, glimmering arcs, ebbing from passages of 'baroque complexity' to expanses of haunting emptiness. Certain songs also skew more overtly western than ever before, deeply reverbed plucks of banjo refracted against glowing horizons of sunrise drone: Americana gone ambient. Furthering the music's mystic intentionality, the track titles comprise 'the major arcana of a tarot deck from an alternate universe,' lorded over by the 'Queen Of Crickets,' ruler of 'The Gates,' 'The Fault,' and 'The Fang.' Even so, the record requires no psychic divination to glean its fragile majesty, its muted tumult of mirage and melody. The beauty it possesses is too blatant, and bountiful."
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KRANK 226CD
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"Legendary Dearborn duo Windy & Carl have been crafting inner space electric guitar and bass vistas for nearly three decades now, but their latest feels as vital and vaporous as any peak opus in their vast catalog. Written and recorded across six years, the songs swirl between shoegaze minimalism and stargaze drift, over which Windy Weber whispers veiled poetic narratives of transformation, isolation, and escape. Allegiance And Conviction is their first album since 2012's We Will Always Be. The six compositions are something of outlier in their catalog, shorter in nature than most on their previous releases. All of the tracks are saturated with Carl Hultgren's signature guitar work, intimate constructions of murmurs, drones and his trademark layered filigree, gently amassed into alternately lighter and heavier than air atmospheres. Despite being their first full-length in more than half a decade, the album fully belongs to the bewitching galaxy of sound Windy & Carl innovated and within which they remain the sole occupants: music of thresholds and peripheries and eternities. Allegiance And Conviction is the multifaceted, contemporary take on their sound."
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LP
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KRANK 226LP
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LP version. "Legendary Dearborn duo Windy & Carl have been crafting inner space electric guitar and bass vistas for nearly three decades now, but their latest feels as vital and vaporous as any peak opus in their vast catalog. Written and recorded across six years, the songs swirl between shoegaze minimalism and stargaze drift, over which Windy Weber whispers veiled poetic narratives of transformation, isolation, and escape. Allegiance And Conviction is their first album since 2012's We Will Always Be. The six compositions are something of outlier in their catalog, shorter in nature than most on their previous releases. All of the tracks are saturated with Carl Hultgren's signature guitar work, intimate constructions of murmurs, drones and his trademark layered filigree, gently amassed into alternately lighter and heavier than air atmospheres. Despite being their first full-length in more than half a decade, the album fully belongs to the bewitching galaxy of sound Windy & Carl innovated and within which they remain the sole occupants: music of thresholds and peripheries and eternities. Allegiance And Conviction is the multifaceted, contemporary take on their sound."
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KRANK 225LP
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LP version. "Legacy Chicago craftsman Mark Nelson's latest offering as Pan American is less a distillation or divergence than it is a return to his musical and spiritual beginnings. Spare, subdued, and largely acoustic, A Son unfurls like late summer dusk on the edge of town, expansive but intimate. Motivated by notions of 'moving backward' and tracing roots -- as well as a couple years of hammered dulcimer lessons -- the album's nine songs were written and recorded in his home in Evanston, Illinois, and honed during a recent solo tour in Europe. The emphasis on uncluttered arrangements and the centrality of the guitar and vocals reveal these songs as the most direct and emotional statement of his career. Nelson cites everything from June Tabor, The Carter Family, Suicide and Jimmy Reed as oblique inspirations, though his truest muse was creative self-inquiry: 'What does music do, Where does music start? How simple can it be? How honest can it be?' After decades of mining post-rock pathways and latticework electronics in Labradford and early Pan American, A Son strips away ornament and distraction in favor of a direct gaze into the heart of what is."
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KRANK 225CD
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"Legacy Chicago craftsman Mark Nelson's latest offering as Pan American is less a distillation or divergence than it is a return to his musical and spiritual beginnings. Spare, subdued, and largely acoustic, A Son unfurls like late summer dusk on the edge of town, expansive but intimate. Motivated by notions of 'moving backward' and tracing roots -- as well as a couple years of hammered dulcimer lessons -- the album's nine songs were written and recorded in his home in Evanston, Illinois, and honed during a recent solo tour in Europe. The emphasis on uncluttered arrangements and the centrality of the guitar and vocals reveal these songs as the most direct and emotional statement of his career. Nelson cites everything from June Tabor, The Carter Family, Suicide and Jimmy Reed as oblique inspirations, though his truest muse was creative self-inquiry: 'What does music do, Where does music start? How simple can it be? How honest can it be?' After decades of mining post-rock pathways and latticework electronics in Labradford and early Pan American, A Son strips away ornament and distraction in favor of a direct gaze into the heart of what is."
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LP
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KRANK 224LP
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"Out-of-print LPs from the critically acclaimed electronic experimental singer/songwriter. Unavailable since 2012.'This sound / synapse transposition is as haunting as it is beautiful -- surely Grouper's best.' --Tiny Mix Tapes. 'If past Grouper releases have inhabited abyssal trenches and damp backwoods, here Harris takes us journeying across constellations and stars. Two of the most beguiling albums of the year, exquisitely realized and singularly evocative.' --The Quietus. 'This music feels both spacey and expansive and also oddly intimate and grounded, the work of someone who has mastered her tools and knows how to get the most out of them.' --Pitchfork. 'Harris finds a way to dive deeper in simple and unassuming ways.' --NPR."
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KRANK 223LP
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"Out-of-print LPs from the critically acclaimed electronic experimental singer/songwriter. Unavailable since 2012.'This sound / synapse transposition is as haunting as it is beautiful -- surely Grouper's best.' --Tiny Mix Tapes. 'If past Grouper releases have inhabited abyssal trenches and damp backwoods, here Harris takes us journeying across constellations and stars. Two of the most beguiling albums of the year, exquisitely realized and singularly evocative.' --The Quietus. 'This music feels both spacey and expansive and also oddly intimate and grounded, the work of someone who has mastered her tools and knows how to get the most out of them.' --Pitchfork. 'Harris finds a way to dive deeper in simple and unassuming ways.' --NPR."
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2LP
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KRANK 221LP
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Double LP version. "Canadian composer Scott Morgan's 12th long-player as loscil takes its title from an influential series of early 20th century photographs by Alfred Stieglitz, abstracting clouds into miasmic, painterly canvases of smoke and shadowplay. It's a deeply fitting analog for Morgan's own musical process across the past two decades, fraying forms and tones into widescreen mirages of opaque texture and negative space. The name Equivalents referred to Stieglitz's notion of the photographs as being equivalent to his 'philosophical or emotional states of mind;' the same could be said of these eight weighty, shivering chiaroscuros of sound. Each piece unfolds and evolves enigmatically, adrift in low oxygen atmospheres, shifting dramatically from pockets of density to dissipated streaks of moonlit vapor. The entirety of the record was created specifically for the album with the exception of 'Equivalent 7,' which began as a dance score for frequent collaborator Vanessa Goodman. The album version of this track was reworked with Vancouver musician Amir Abbey aka Secret Pyramid. Cloud photographs taken by Scott Morgan at various locations throughout Cascadia in 2018."
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KRANK 221CD
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"Canadian composer Scott Morgan's 12th long-player as loscil takes its title from an influential series of early 20th century photographs by Alfred Stieglitz, abstracting clouds into miasmic, painterly canvases of smoke and shadowplay. It's a deeply fitting analog for Morgan's own musical process across the past two decades, fraying forms and tones into widescreen mirages of opaque texture and negative space. The name Equivalents referred to Stieglitz's notion of the photographs as being equivalent to his 'philosophical or emotional states of mind;' the same could be said of these eight weighty, shivering chiaroscuros of sound. Each piece unfolds and evolves enigmatically, adrift in low oxygen atmospheres, shifting dramatically from pockets of density to dissipated streaks of moonlit vapor. The entirety of the record was created specifically for the album with the exception of 'Equivalent 7,' which began as a dance score for frequent collaborator Vanessa Goodman. The album version of this track was reworked with Vancouver musician Amir Abbey aka Secret Pyramid. Cloud photographs taken by Scott Morgan at various locations throughout Cascadia in 2018."
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KRANK 222CD
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"Jacob Long's reductionist rhythmic ambient vessel, Earthen Sea, ebbs towards a more purely elemental state on his second excursion for Kranky, Grass And Trees. He describes the creative process as one of 'simplifying things as much as possible,' designing uncluttered spaces traced in nothing but breath, field recordings, and 'sounds that could be played by hand but weren't.' The results feel decentralized but dynamic, low-lit evocations of ambiguous nocturnal environments -- dub techno disassembled into stray pulses and spare parts. It's a music both interior and infinite, languorous yet transformative, made in the outer boroughs of a metropolis but existing in its own liminal wilderness. Long's vision is a grounding one, rooted in the physical body but attuned to larger currents: 'In response to living in a fairly hectic city, and at a very hectic time for the world at large, creating something more drawn back and restrained felt appropriate.'"
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KRANK 222LP
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LP version. "Jacob Long's reductionist rhythmic ambient vessel, Earthen Sea, ebbs towards a more purely elemental state on his second excursion for Kranky, Grass And Trees. He describes the creative process as one of 'simplifying things as much as possible,' designing uncluttered spaces traced in nothing but breath, field recordings, and 'sounds that could be played by hand but weren't.' The results feel decentralized but dynamic, low-lit evocations of ambiguous nocturnal environments -- dub techno disassembled into stray pulses and spare parts. It's a music both interior and infinite, languorous yet transformative, made in the outer boroughs of a metropolis but existing in its own liminal wilderness. Long's vision is a grounding one, rooted in the physical body but attuned to larger currents: 'In response to living in a fairly hectic city, and at a very hectic time for the world at large, creating something more drawn back and restrained felt appropriate.'"
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KRANK 220CD
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"Anoyo ('the world over there') draws from the same sessions which led to the 2018 work Konoyo but rendered starker, solemn, and stripped back, with more of a naturalist tint. Tim Hecker's processing here moves in veiled ways, soft refractions and whispered shrouds woven within improvisational sessions of traditional gagaku interplay, evoking a sense of vaulted space, temples at dawn, shredded silk fluttering in the rafters. This is boldly barren music, skeletal and sculptural, shaped from wood, wind, strings, and mist. Modern yet ancient, delicate and desolate, Anoyo inverts its predecessor to compellingly conjure a parallel world of illusion, solitude, and eternal return."
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KRANK 220LP
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LP version. "Anoyo ('the world over there') draws from the same sessions which led to the 2018 work Konoyo but rendered starker, solemn, and stripped back, with more of a naturalist tint. Tim Hecker's processing here moves in veiled ways, soft refractions and whispered shrouds woven within improvisational sessions of traditional gagaku interplay, evoking a sense of vaulted space, temples at dawn, shredded silk fluttering in the rafters. This is boldly barren music, skeletal and sculptural, shaped from wood, wind, strings, and mist. Modern yet ancient, delicate and desolate, Anoyo inverts its predecessor to compellingly conjure a parallel world of illusion, solitude, and eternal return."
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2LP
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KRANK 058LP
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"Scott Morgan's second Loscil full-length, Submers, took inspiration from salvaged Time Life classical music albums and 'the indelible mystery of submarines and the deep sea.' Composed using a custom-built Max / MSP sequencer-- with no external samplers, synthesizers, or acoustic instruments involved -- the limitations of the process shaped these masterful, minimal compositions. Each piece was produced as a live mix, direct to disk, with no separated tracks. Originally issued in November of 2002 on compact disc, Kranky is now making these timeless recordings available on vinyl for the first time. All of these tracks are named after submarines, the final cut being a requiem for the crew of the ill-fated Russian nuclear vessel Kursk. Recorded at home using only samples as sound sources, the album is rife with source-less echoes, steely surfaces and ominous melodic and rhythmic undertows. The sifted melodies are layered over muffled, clicking and pulsing rhythm tracks with an appropriately aquatic feel to the tracks."
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KRANK 214CD
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"Portland, Oregon resident Mary Sutton's solo debut materialized in the wake of a performance she gave at a clothing-optional soaking-pool sauna: 'I had never composed for synth before but wanted to make something people sitting motionless and naked in hot bubbly water would want to hear.' It was while in this headspace that she reconnected with Satie's entrancing cyclical motifs, particularly the way 'he subtly spins melodic fragments, and pivots harmonies and phrases so the repetitions feel new and surprising yet soothingly familiar, as if casting a spell.' The nine intuitive instrumentals comprising The Deep End accomplish exactly that, threading complementary shades of soft-hued hypnosis, dazed modal introspection, icy amusement park reverie, and lunar lullaby into a prismatic suite of contemplative melody and synthetic communion. Sutton's songs are active rather than ambient yet their structure is more suggestive than scripted, full of lulls, asymmetries, and daydreams. Each track was written specifically to be played live on an analog synthesizer, with no overdubs or post-production wizardry. The sound of Saloli is one of warm-blooded wiring, turned on and tapped into, emotive and electric, storied machines speaking through all too human hands."
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LP
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KRANK 214LP
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LP version. "Portland, Oregon resident Mary Sutton's solo debut materialized in the wake of a performance she gave at a clothing-optional soaking-pool sauna: 'I had never composed for synth before but wanted to make something people sitting motionless and naked in hot bubbly water would want to hear.' It was while in this headspace that she reconnected with Satie's entrancing cyclical motifs, particularly the way 'he subtly spins melodic fragments, and pivots harmonies and phrases so the repetitions feel new and surprising yet soothingly familiar, as if casting a spell.' The nine intuitive instrumentals comprising The Deep End accomplish exactly that, threading complementary shades of soft-hued hypnosis, dazed modal introspection, icy amusement park reverie, and lunar lullaby into a prismatic suite of contemplative melody and synthetic communion. Sutton's songs are active rather than ambient yet their structure is more suggestive than scripted, full of lulls, asymmetries, and daydreams. Each track was written specifically to be played live on an analog synthesizer, with no overdubs or post-production wizardry. The sound of Saloli is one of warm-blooded wiring, turned on and tapped into, emotive and electric, storied machines speaking through all too human hands."
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KRANK 204LP
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LP version. "Monument Builders is the new album from Loscil, the ambient/electronic project of prolific composer Scott Morgan. It was primarily created on sample-based instruments in Morgan's century-old Vancouver home. Like that aged space, this music is also rough-hewn, with rickety samples of boiling kettles and resonant moving air. Recordings from a vintage micro-cassette recorder contribute distortion, rattles and textures that serve as both percussion and abstract aural color. According to Morgan, the genesis for the album may have begun as he viewed an old VHS copy of the American experimental film Koyaanisqatsi. 'Something about the time-tarnished visuals and the pitch warble on Philip Glass's epic score added a new layer of intrigue for me,' says Morgan. 'Glass has always been an influence but lo-fi Glass felt like a minor revelation, as if the decay was actually enhancing the impact of the film's message.' The investigations on Monument Builders also took inspiration from the anti-humanist writings of influential philosopher John Gray, as well as photographer Edward Burtynsky's iconic aerial photographs of pollution and environmental destruction. 'Gray's writing, particularly his book Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals, reinforced a bleak notion I had that we humans don't have much say in how it all turns out,' says Morgan. 'With Burtynsky, I was struck by the fact that something so strikingly beautiful could be the result of large-scale waste and exploitation.' Monument Builders was composed during a period in which the life-and-death battles of close friends and family forced Morgan to examine his own feelings on mortality. In the course of that introspection, Morgan found himself buoyed by a feeling of celebration and a stubborn sense of survival -- an acknowledgement of what it means to be able to breathe and create amidst the clash of love and chaos. Ultimately, Morgan hopes the music here can offer listeners solace while leaving room for exploration and surprise."
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