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viewing 1 To 25 of 310 items
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LP
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KRANK 234LP
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$24.00
PREORDER
RELEASE DATE: 6/3/2022
LP version. "Jacob Long's third Earthen Sea outing for Kranky, Ghost Poems, further refines his fragile, fractured palette into fluttering arrythmias of dust, percussion, and yearning. Composed during the first wave of lockdowns in New York, the pieces took shape patiently from samples of piano, texture, and domestic sounds (sink splashing, room tone, clinking objects), filtered through live FX to imbue them with an intuitive, immaterial feel. Wisps of melody splinter, shimmer, and refract, like light on water; pulses accrue and dissipate, as if mapping shifting sands. Throughout, there's a sense of matter made animate, of absences felt. Long cites notions of 'the studio as a dub instrument' and the melancholy of '7th chords on a fake Rhodes patch' as central elements in his process, transforming raw materials into rare thresholds of symbiosis and hypnosis. This is music for night skies in hollowed-out cities, for views across rivers towards unknown shores: restless, placeless, and profound."
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KRANK 232LP
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LP version. "The glacial distillation of Pan American aka Mark Nelson's 'romantic minimalism' achieves unique fruition on his latest Kranky collection, The Patience Fader. A suite of solo guitar instrumentals accented with lap steel, harmonica, and twilit atmospherics, the strings smear and sparkle in elegant, windswept swells, a guitar mode once described by Brian Eno as 'Duane Eddy playing Erik Satie.' These are elegies as much as songs, lulling and lilting in private currents of beauty and bereavement. Nelson speaks of the notion of 'lighthouse music,' radiance cast from a stable vantage point, sending 'a signal to help others through rocks and dangerous currents.' Composed during the highly isolated summer of 2020, the pieces took shape as meditations on 'roots and mourning, trying to connect with those deep hidden rivers that lead to a greater communality.' There's something ageless, scarred, and American about this music, both displaced and devotional, the ghost of rust belts and dust bowls looming in a horizon of deepening dusk."
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KRANK 234CD
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"Jacob Long's third Earthen Sea outing for Kranky, Ghost Poems, further refines his fragile, fractured palette into fluttering arrythmias of dust, percussion, and yearning. Composed during the first wave of lockdowns in New York, the pieces took shape patiently from samples of piano, texture, and domestic sounds (sink splashing, room tone, clinking objects), filtered through live FX to imbue them with an intuitive, immaterial feel. Wisps of melody splinter, shimmer, and refract, like light on water; pulses accrue and dissipate, as if mapping shifting sands. Throughout, there's a sense of matter made animate, of absences felt. Long cites notions of 'the studio as a dub instrument' and the melancholy of '7th chords on a fake Rhodes patch' as central elements in his process, transforming raw materials into rare thresholds of symbiosis and hypnosis. This is music for night skies in hollowed-out cities, for views across rivers towards unknown shores: restless, placeless, and profound."
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KRANK 232CD
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"The glacial distillation of Pan American aka Mark Nelson's 'romantic minimalism' achieves unique fruition on his latest Kranky collection, The Patience Fader. A suite of solo guitar instrumentals accented with lap steel, harmonica, and twilit atmospherics, the strings smear and sparkle in elegant, windswept swells, a guitar mode once described by Brian Eno as 'Duane Eddy playing Erik Satie.' These are elegies as much as songs, lulling and lilting in private currents of beauty and bereavement. Nelson speaks of the notion of 'lighthouse music,' radiance cast from a stable vantage point, sending 'a signal to help others through rocks and dangerous currents.' Composed during the highly isolated summer of 2020, the pieces took shape as meditations on 'roots and mourning, trying to connect with those deep hidden rivers that lead to a greater communality.' There's something ageless, scarred, and American about this music, both displaced and devotional, the ghost of rust belts and dust bowls looming in a horizon of deepening dusk."
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KRANK 233LP
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LP version. "The 12th full-length by Pacific Northwest artist Liz Harris aka Grouper is a collection of songs spanning fifteen years. She characterizes Shade as an album about respite, and the coast, poetically and literally. How one frames themselves in a landscape, how in turn it frames themselves; memories and experiences carried forward mapping a connection to place -- 'an ode to blue / what lives in shade.' Songs touch on loss, flaws, hiding places, love. Deep connections to the Bay Area, and the North Coast, with its unique moods of solitude, beauty, and isolation -- a place described and transformed by the chaos and power of rivermouth, wild maritime storms, columns of mist that rise up unexpectedly on the road at night. Portions were recorded on Mount Tamalpais during a self-made residency years back, other pieces made longer ago in Portland, while the rest were tracked during more recent sessions in Astoria. Throughout, Harris threads a hidden radiant language of voice, disquiet, and guitar, framed by open space and the sense of being far away -- 'Echoing a lighthouse, burying the faults of being human / Into things that we project upon the sky at night.'"
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KRANK 233CD
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"The 12th full-length by Pacific Northwest artist Liz Harris aka Grouper is a collection of songs spanning fifteen years. She characterizes Shade as an album about respite, and the coast, poetically and literally. How one frames themselves in a landscape, how in turn it frames themselves; memories and experiences carried forward mapping a connection to place -- 'an ode to blue / what lives in shade.' Songs touch on loss, flaws, hiding places, love. Deep connections to the Bay Area, and the North Coast, with its unique moods of solitude, beauty, and isolation -- a place described and transformed by the chaos and power of rivermouth, wild maritime storms, columns of mist that rise up unexpectedly on the road at night. Portions were recorded on Mount Tamalpais during a self-made residency years back, other pieces made longer ago in Portland, while the rest were tracked during more recent sessions in Astoria. Throughout, Harris threads a hidden radiant language of voice, disquiet, and guitar, framed by open space and the sense of being far away -- 'Echoing a lighthouse, burying the faults of being human / Into things that we project upon the sky at night.'"
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LP
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KRANK 217LP
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2021 repress. "Received a 7.8 rating from Pitchfork. Not long after recording her tenth album Ruins, Liz Harris traveled to Wyoming to work on art and record music. She found herself drawn towards the pairing of skeletal piano phrasing with spare, rich bursts of vocal harmony. A series of stark songs emerged, minimal and vulnerable, woven with emotive silences. Inspired by 'the idea that something is missing or cold,' the pieces float and fade like vignettes, implying as much as they reveal. She describes them as 'small texts hanging in space,' impressions of mortality, melody, and the unseen -- fleeting beauty, interrupted. Grid Of Points stands as a concise and potently poetic addition to the Grouper catalog. 'Grid Of Points is a set of songs for piano and voice. I wrote these songs over a week and a half; they stopped abruptly when I was interrupted by a high fever. Though brief, it is complete. The intimacy and abbreviation of this music allude to an essence that the songs lyrics speak more directly of. The space left after matter has departed, a stage after the characters have gone, the hollow of some central column, missing.' --Liz Harris"
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2LP
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KRANK 219LP
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2021 repress. "Received an 8.5 Best New Music rating from Pitchfork. Experiential composer Tim Hecker's ninth official full-length, Konoyo ('the world over here') was largely recorded during several trips to Japan where he collaborated with members of the gagaku ensemble Tokyo Gakuso, in a temple on the outskirts of Tokyo. Inspired by conversations with a recently deceased friend about negative space and a sense of music's increasingly banal density, Hecker found himself drawn towards restraint and elegance, while making music both collectively and alone. As with the Icelandic choir he arranged on 2016's Love Streams, the heights of Hecker's talent emerge in his manipulation of source material, bending and burnishing it into fantastical new forms. Keening strings are stretched into surreal, pixelated mirages; woodwinds warble and dissipate as fractal whispers of spatial haze; sparse gestures of percussion are chopped, isolated, and eroded, like disembodied signals from the afterlife. Both in texture and intent, Konoyo conjures a somber, ceremonial mood, suffused with ritual and regret. Visions flutter and fade; dreams gleam and decay. Hecker will stage a series of special performances in tandem with the album's release, featuring members of the gagaku ensemble on shō, ryuteki and hichiriki, accompanied by Kara-Lis Coverdale."
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2LP
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KRANK 231LP
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Double LP version. "The latest collection by Cascadian resident loscil aka Scott Morgan is a stunning meditation on light, shade, and decay, sourced from a single three-minute composition performed by a 22-piece string orchestra in Budapest. The subsequent recording was lathe-cut on to a 7-inch, then 'scratched and abused to add texture and color,' from which the entirety of Clara was sampled, shape-shifted, and sculpted. Despite their limited palette, the compositions summon a sense of the infinite, swelling and swimming through luminous depths. Certain tracks percolate over narcoleptic metronomes while others slowdive in shimmering shadowplay, sounding at times like some noir music of the spheres. Although Morgan's compositional premise for Clara was quite defined, the resultant work is wonderfully opaque and spatial, equal parts lush and lurking, traced in fine-grained gradients and radiant silences. The album's title comes from the Latin for 'bright': a fitting muse for this masterpiece of celestial electric currents and interstitial ether, where 'shadows are amplified and bright spots dimmed.'"
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KRANK 231CD
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"The latest collection by Cascadian resident loscil aka Scott Morgan is a stunning meditation on light, shade, and decay, sourced from a single three-minute composition performed by a 22-piece string orchestra in Budapest. The subsequent recording was lathe-cut on to a 7-inch, then 'scratched and abused to add texture and color,' from which the entirety of Clara was sampled, shape-shifted, and sculpted. Despite their limited palette, the compositions summon a sense of the infinite, swelling and swimming through luminous depths. Certain tracks percolate over narcoleptic metronomes while others slowdive in shimmering shadowplay, sounding at times like some noir music of the spheres. Although Morgan's compositional premise for Clara was quite defined, the resultant work is wonderfully opaque and spatial, equal parts lush and lurking, traced in fine-grained gradients and radiant silences. The album's title comes from the Latin for 'bright': a fitting muse for this masterpiece of celestial electric currents and interstitial ether, where 'shadows are amplified and bright spots dimmed.'"
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2LP
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KRANK 212LP
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2021 repress. "This is the first reissue for Tim Hecker's classic 2003 album. The original recordings were remixed by Tim Hecker and mastered by Matt Colton at Alchemy Mastering."
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2LP
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KRANK 211LP
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2021 restock. "This is the first reissue of Tim Hecker's classic 2001 debut full length release. The original recordings were remixed by Tim Hecker and mastered by Matt Colton at Alchemy Mastering."
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KRANK 230LP
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LP version. "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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KRANK 230CD
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"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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2LP
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KRANK 229LP
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Double LP version. "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 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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LP
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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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LP
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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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LP
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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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CD
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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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2021 repress; 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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LP
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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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