MODERN LOVE - Forced Exposure

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For 46 minutes, Alex Zhang Hungtai punctures the perception of linearity, working like a conductor, encouraging percussive flurries to trip and fall over each other, sometimes tempered by contact mic feedback to help skewer the chronology. He's assisted by three additional percussionists -- Wet Hair's Ryan Garbes and Shawn Reed, and Leonard King - while Signal Decay's Nick Yeck-Stauffer plays trumpet, with each extra voice blurred into the middle distance, curling like pipe smoke into convulsive whorls. The piece is frankly astonishing in its grasp of the maelstrom. Initially tentative, searching, with higher register hits like moths butting lone lightbulbs in an abandoned apartment block, the distant, plangent peal of twin brass wafts between rooms to impart a distinctly floating, OOBE-like feel for space. The brass recedes while the drums' low end thickens and roils like a gamelan tempest, blurring impressions of knackered buildings or the temple rituals of ancient epochs, with sounds wafting in from other rooms to mess with the stereo field like ghosts of worshippers doing their thing. Remarkably, it conjures a fever dream miasma of ricocheting, thunderous polymetric clatter and proprioceptive fuckery without ever losing its head. Hungtai's canny use of contact mic feedback drone and cymbal saw gives the whole thing a sense of gauzy delirium that unites the grouches like mildewed grout and cobwebs, coarsely gelling the elements in a way that resonates with Pauline Oliveros and co's Deep Listening band acousmagique as much as Basil Kirchin's keeling World Within World classic, the ghosts of Sun Ra's Nuclear War, the possessed atmosphere of the cabin where Harley Gaber recorded Wind Rises in the North, and no doubt Harry Bertoia's massive metallic sculptures, agitated at midnight. Humid, menacing, and wraithlike, the album's sense of keening chronics belies a visionary hand at the tiller, here tightened by Rashad Becker's mastering, which faithfully brings to light, and shadow, the depth of perception and wild but concentrated energies at play, sealing in place a truly staggering session for adventurous ears, cineastes and Lynchian acolytes alike. The LP is pressed on transparent orange vinyl. Hungtai is a saxophonist-composer and actor renowned for his work as Dirty Beaches and Love Theme, appearing in David Lynch's Twin Peaks: The Return, and more recently scoring the award-winning Godland.

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Lucy Railton trusts in the nuance of her own creative instincts on an intensely modern, quietly radical new album, her second for Modern Love. Following her 2018 solo debut Paradise 94 (LOVE 108LP), and countless collaborations in the time since, Railton's diverse musical circles here bleed into each other, creating an insoluble testament to a lifelong pursuit of sound. The multi-instrumentalist further articulates her own tonal register, embracing her solo strengths and trusting the process to reveal vulnerable and compelling emotional facets through a fluid mix of composition, and pure expression. On the simplest level, Corner Dancer is a record that revels in the momentum of creation. Through a range of approaches, Railton gradually loosens her grip and allows her identities to expose themselves; cut to the bone, sinew and spirit of music making. Reaching outside tried and tested zones, she lands at a charged space characterized by unmetered pacing and an embrace of imperfection, using cello, viella (a medieval cello), Buchla, 808, a fan, synths, horse hair whips, a handheld harp and her own voice, across eight tracks that arc from an opening sequence of ruptured asymmetries, to something bordering the sublime on "Blush Study," the album's masterful closing flourish. In between, Railton invokes psychoacoustic, heady spins and repetitions, while also allowing space for live performance, a mode to which she feels most attuned, and here captured best on "Held in Paradise" (her violin debut) and "Rib Cage." Collapsing boundaries, Railton harnesses a lifetime of formal training in order to patiently trace more ambiguous, intimate and sometimes deviant shapes, operating to a fuzzed logic that loops back to themes with an ingenious underlying dramaturgy of energies, dismantling the form from the inside out, in a way that bends through feeling, rather than design.

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Flora Yin Wong's ravishing interiority finds lucid expression on an absorbing second album for Modern Love, manifesting her instrumental storytelling in a syncretic bind of supernatural themes with hyperrealist, concrète sound design. Through ten parts, Flora crystallizes the ennui that followed an uncanny, disorienting trip to East and Southeast Asia. She spent solitude in a haunted house during the quiet snowfall of Kyoto, where she might have offended some spirit, and nights in mountain temples with South Korean monks, and an equally strange feeling return to the Island of the Gods. Heavy with a sense of nightmarish dissociation and grief, Flora read about Giuseppe Tartini's Violin Sonata in G Minor, aka the "Devil's Trill Sonata," a notoriously tricky c.18th composition which attempted to transcribe music heard in a dream, which the composer felt he could never fully bring into reality. It's this soporific motif that binds and underpins Cold Reading, finding Flora chasing the dragon of fleeting fantasy through passages of etched melancholy, pinched with hypnagogic jerks that linger in the memory. From her use of the "Devil's Trill' Sonata" in "All My Dreams are Nightmares" through evocations of subtropical humidity in the Bryn Jones-esque, resonant hand-played percussion of "Konna" and "Banjar", to a breathtaking dreampop denouement "Nectar Dripping" and the Enya-like lush of "Beautiful Crisis", Flora blooms her ideas with an open-ended ambiguity so often missing from so called ambient music, ushering the listener into a sound world that disturbs and displaces, just as much as it calms. Clear vinyl.

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Mary Jane Leach is a composer focused on the physicality of sound, its acoustic properties and how they interact with space. She has played an instrumental role in NYC's pioneering Downtown scene alongside Arthur Russell, Ellen Fullman, Peter Zummo, Philip Corner, and Arnold Dreyblatt, as well as devoting years to the preservation and reappraisal of Julius Eastman's work since his death in 1990, compiling Unjust Malaise (2005) and editing the book Gay Guerrilla: Julius Eastman and His Music (2015). Woodwind Multiples features four pieces for multiples of the same instrument: four bass flutes, nine oboes, nine clarinets, and seven bassoons. Each piece works closely with the unique sound of each instrument, combining pitches that create other, sometimes unexpected, tones, primarily combination and interference tones, as well as rhythmic patterns. What you hear is what happens naturally -- there is no processing or manipulation. 8B4 (1985/2022), played by Manuel Zurria, is for four bass flutes. It is a revision of 8x4, which was written in 1985 for the DownTown Ensemble and was only performed once, due to its unusual instrumentation: alto flute, English horn (originally bass oboe), clarinet, and voice. Xantippe's Rebuke (1993) was written for Libby Van Cleve, for eight taped oboes and one live, solo oboe. The eight taped parts are equal and dependent, while the solo part is meant to be a solo with the tape as accompaniment. The piece works with the unique sound of the oboe, starting with unison pitches that create the richest sound, building the piece from there. Pitches and rhythmic patterns that occur naturally are notated and then played later, which in turn create other pitches and rhythmic patterns. Charybdis (2020), played by Sam Dunscombe, is for solo clarinet and eight taped clarinets. It combines a somewhat obscured reference to Weep You No More, a John Dowland piece, which combines with the sound phenomena created from the melody and supporting chords of the Dowland. Feu de Joie (1992) was written for bassoonist Shannon Peet and is an homage to the bassoon and its wonderful sound. It is for seven parts -- six taped and one "live." The taped bassoons combine to create a bed of sound that exploits the unique qualities of the bassoon, creating combination and interference tones, starting off with unison pitches, creating a rich sound that builds from there. Most of the subsequent pitches and phrases occur naturally, and are then notated later on in the piece, which in turn creates other notes and phrases. Engineered by Manuel Zurria, Bryce Goggin, and Sam Dunscombe, mastered by Rashad Becker.

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2022 edition. New cover art. Andy Stott's radical 2011 bonecrusher returns on its first new pressing for almost a decade, still screwing the dance and heads like nothing else with its lo-sprung suspended takes on boogie dub and claggiest rhythmic thumpers. The sludgy, slow-motion slug of Passed Me By marked a pivotal point when Stott swam against the grain of prevailing currents of the post-dubstep era's turn toward garage-techno and UKF-inspired percussive house. Working loosely adjacent to a then emergent witch-house sound, Andy screwed templates associated to Salem and Holy Other into a more muscular, thrumming style of drug chug more in key with early Actress, arriving at his own distinctive sound that sent us reeling. Between the intoxicating, syrupy gnarrr of "New Ground" with its Proustian vocal motifs, and the head-wobbling Pennine weather system compressions of its titular curtain closer, it's a stone cold classic; eliciting heads-down, wall-banging reactions in the side-chained thrum of "North To South" and a lip-biting MDMA-buzz come up with the thriller funk of "Intermittent", while sore thumb "Dark Details" gives shivering flashbacks to warehouse brukouts and "Execution" curbs the high with a K-holing drag. Delivering a narcotic, keeling dose of nostalgia that slings us back to late hours in the office and blunted afters with the goodest kru, Passed Me By was one of those records that made you reassess pretty much everything else around at the time, practically forcing you to play other stuff on the wrong speed if we wanted to DJ with it, or more simply letting it run and slowly shift temporal perceptions and paradigms in the process. Mastered and cut by LUPO. Clear vinyl; edition of 700.

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2022 edition. New cover art. Andy Stott's ultra-classic bout of screwed, knackered house is a shapeshifting, hardy perennial whose crushing traction and atmospheric grip has only deepened in the decade (+1) since it was first issued, as part of a now notorious one-two in 2011 beside Passed Me By (LOVE 069LP). Out of print for almost a decade, it's now finally available again in a new edition that's still sounding unlike pretty much anything else we've heard in the intervening years. We Stay Together was a proper watershed moment for Andy Stott in the nascent phase of an inspirational stylistic arc. While he'd spent the previous six years constructing everything from warehouse-shuddering deep house and dub techno to bare-boned dubstep, the arrival of a new decade paid witness to Stott turning inward, collapsing what he'd learnt from late night sessions with the Modern Love crew into a radical new sound that was arguably without precedent in its field. The simple move of screwing the tempo to circa 100BPM would, in turn, open out his sound, prising room between the rhythms which he colored with a palette of particularly bruised, processed outside-the-box textures gleaned from an array of guitar pedals and endlessly churned samples. There were, of course, parallels in DJ Screw's codeine-infused treatments of classic rap and soul, and their influence on the contemporaneous "witch house" style, but few, if any, were doing it within a techno and club music context that hewed so close to the darker, gristlier underbelly and animus of Manchester's warehouse heritage. This style of viscous, cranky chug proved fertile ground that would be explored in-depth over the next decade -- you can hear traces of it on everything from Overmono's sludge to Low's acclaimed Double Negative -- and it's the source of it all. But, still, nothing twats quite as smart or heavy as We Stay Together. From an opening that uncannily echoes the rinsed-out empty warehouse scenes in the closing stages of "Fioriucci Made Me Hardcore", the serotonin-depleted "Submission" triggers a side-chained momentum that helplessly drags users thru the gnarly mire of "Posers" to the zombied lurch of "Bad Wires" and its title tune's ket-legged strut. He pushes the aesthetics to asphyxiating degrees on "Cherry Eye", but not without a glimmer of hope in its underwater choral motifs that always buoys his best bits from utter doom, before "Cracked" stresses the metallic tang of his textures with a bloodlust and vital, systolic throb whose effect has only been galvanized with age. Clear vinyl; edition of 700.

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Paloma, meaning the symbol of peace, a white dove, is the fourth LP by Laila Sakini, and her debut for Modern Love. Invoking hope, in hopeless times, is perhaps the central aim of this album -- which has links and references to similarly spirited exercises: the aspirations of Veronica/Veronique to fatefully discover herself through song in Kieslowski's The Double Life of Veronique, a high school band readying their first performance, a theater production cutting stars and props to decorate their small but important production. Endeavors, fraught with risk of failure and which are quintessentially naive, are attempted with whatever material is within reach. In Paloma, piano and recorder form the core instruments, with a reluctant vocal, a borrowed violin, some glockenspiel, a timbale. Sakini sings of reflections, shadows, optical illusions, tricks of light, tricks of the mind, secret meanings, magic and mysteries. Charged and coded, forlorn and impressionistic, it's a mystifying album of unapologetically elementary instrumentation, arranged with cinematic ambitions.

Multi-instrumentalist, vocalist, producer, and performer Laila Sakini is London based, but Melbourne born. Her works include Like A Gun (EP), Vivienne (LP), Strada (EP), Into The Traffic, Under The Moonlight (LP), Princess Diana of Wales (ACOLOUR 038LP) and her 2017 collaboration with poet Lucy Van, Figures (BKEDIT 022LP). Laila has been featured in The Wire Magazine, graced the cover of Switzerland's cult Zweikommasiben music magazine, been featured on BBC1, in Frances' Les Inrockuptibles, LA's AQNB, Belgium's Gonzo magazine, Italy's Blow Up and in several specials on NTS Radio, LYL, Dublab and Red Light.

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Delia Beatriz's musical output straddles two distinct artistic poles; her debut solo album, 2017's acclaimed Animus, oozed from sensual, beatless soundscapes to high-octane club music, while her 2019-released EP SYSTEM harnessed tribal guarachero elements while simultaneously scraping ideas from industrial techno. On The Long Count, the Mexican-American producer has inked her most rigorous statement to date, sublimating opaque ancestral knowledge into vaporous AI-stirred fog banks, activating an ancient rite that reaches into tomorrow. It's audacious electro-acoustic archaeology that sounds disorientating, anachronistic and arcane. The Long Count is rooted in research Beatriz made into Mayan wind instruments -- whistles, ocarinas, flutes, and trumpets -- using the archive of the Mayan Studies Institute at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, the oldest and largest collection of its kind. Developing a set of digital instruments that could be played using different types of temperaments and scales, Delia processed these sounds using machine learning techniques to shuttle the distant past into our extant artistic universe, peering into Mexico's pre-colonial history and weaving those ideas into complex tonalities gleaned from musique concrète and contemporary electro-acoustic music. The ten tracks of The Long Count form a ritual that's a few footsteps out of time -- neither a part of our present, nor the past. Beatriz describes the Mayan instrumentation as ancestral technology, part of a world that's not so much been forgotten, but purposefully erased. And although it's impossible to know exactly how Mayan music may have sounded, it's feasible to converse with history using modern technology to conduct a ceremony of remembrance. Beatriz's soundscapes are haunted by indistinct, shared memories and centuries of pent-up emotion, and are as intentional, direct and meticulously crafted as the work of Deathprod or Thomas Köner. Her microtonal compositions are psychedelic to their core, shapeshifting through dimensions and painting complex mental images, while retaining a stylistic focus and lucidity that's all too rare. Although The Long Count was nurtured by machines, human experience is coded into its DNA - an ancient-future heirloom that whispers through countless generations. File under: magick concrète. RIYL: Kali Malone's just intonation work, CC Hennix's concentrated music. Clear vinyl; printed inner sleeves.

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Double LP version. It's been a decade since Andy Stott released Passed Me By (2011), a radical re-imagining of dance music as an expression of "physical and spiritual exhaustion" (Pitchfork). What followed was a process of rapid remodeling: We Stay Together (2011) -- slow and fucked, for the club, Luxury Problems (2012) -- greyscale romance, Faith In Strangers (2014) -- destroyed love songs, Too Many Voices (2016) -- 4th world Triton shimmers, and It Should Be Us (2019) -- the club, collapsed, a run of releases that gradually untangled complex ideas into a singular, chaotic body of work somewhere between sound-art, techno and pop. In early 2020 - with a new album almost done and an offer to produce for a completely mainstream artist on the table -- personal upheaval brought everything to a sudden standstill. Months of withdrawal eventually triggered renewed curiosity, a different approach. Stott began to record hours of raw material; slow horns, sibilance, delayed drums, wondering flutes -- whatever, whenever. And although software made it possible to iron out every kink and knot, Stott tirelessly looked for them -- in pursuit of a sound that was human in all its awkward asymmetry. With vocals recorded by Alison Skidmore, the album was finally completed late in the year -- taking on a completely different shape. Its songs were desolate, melancholy, defiant, beautiful -- often all at once. The sounds echoed music around Stott during those months: Prince, Gavin Bryars, A.R. Kane, Bohren & der Club of Gore, Robert Turman, Cindy Lee, Leila, Catherine Christer Hennix, Junior Boys, László Hortobágyi, Nídia, Prefab Sprout -- the unusual, the familiar. And echoing that mix of new and old, each of the songs on Never The Right Time seem woven from the same thread despite following different trajectories; from the lovelorn shimmer of opener "Away Not gone", to the clattering linndrum pop of "The Beginning", through "Answers" angular club haze, and the city-at-night end-credits "Hard To Tell". These are songs fueled by nostalgia and soul searching, but all hold true to a vision of music making as a form of renewal and reinvention. A ten-year cycle, complete. Mastered by Rashad Becker.

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It's been a decade since Andy Stott released Passed Me By (2011), a radical re-imagining of dance music as an expression of "physical and spiritual exhaustion" (Pitchfork). What followed was a process of rapid remodeling: We Stay Together (2011) -- slow and fucked, for the club, Luxury Problems (2012) -- greyscale romance, Faith In Strangers (2014) -- destroyed love songs, Too Many Voices (2016) -- 4th world Triton shimmers, and It Should Be Us (2019) -- the club, collapsed, a run of releases that gradually untangled complex ideas into a singular, chaotic body of work somewhere between sound-art, techno and pop. In early 2020 - with a new album almost done and an offer to produce for a completely mainstream artist on the table -- personal upheaval brought everything to a sudden standstill. Months of withdrawal eventually triggered renewed curiosity, a different approach. Stott began to record hours of raw material; slow horns, sibilance, delayed drums, wondering flutes -- whatever, whenever. And although software made it possible to iron out every kink and knot, Stott tirelessly looked for them -- in pursuit of a sound that was human in all its awkward asymmetry. With vocals recorded by Alison Skidmore, the album was finally completed late in the year -- taking on a completely different shape. Its songs were desolate, melancholy, defiant, beautiful -- often all at once. The sounds echoed music around Stott during those months: Prince, Gavin Bryars, A.R. Kane, Bohren & der Club of Gore, Robert Turman, Cindy Lee, Leila, Catherine Christer Hennix, Junior Boys, László Hortobágyi, Nídia, Prefab Sprout -- the unusual, the familiar. And echoing that mix of new and old, each of the songs on Never The Right Time seem woven from the same thread despite following different trajectories; from the lovelorn shimmer of opener "Away Not gone", to the clattering linndrum pop of "The Beginning", through "Answers" angular club haze, and the city-at-night end-credits "Hard To Tell". These are songs fueled by nostalgia and soul searching, but all hold true to a vision of music making as a form of renewal and reinvention. A ten-year cycle, complete. Mastered by Rashad Becker.

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When you make a record that doesn't conform, expect to divide opinion. Like Weather was released in 1998, on Rephlex -- run by Grant Wilson Claridge and Richard D James -- an often great label that had a following largely made up of Aphex-logo wearing fanboys who couldn't quite deal with electronic music made by a girl -- let alone one that used vocals. Everything those lads couldn't fathom about Like Weather is essentially what makes it untouchable; one of the greatest, most effortlessly esoteric pop albums ever made, not in the lineage of IDM or trip-hop, genres it has so often been awkwardly lumped in with, but something else that can't quite be categorized -- even 22 years later. Like Weather echoes the world-building energy of Prince's Sign "O" The Times (1987) -- every track is a self-contained universe all its own, there are no rules or conventions -- it's full of hooks, but also insular as fuck, the production is all over the place and it still sounds like nothing else (although if you're into the Mica Levi-produced Tirzah album (2018), know that this here is the aesthetic, spiritual blueprint). It feels analog, then digital -- it's R&B, but also baroque music box, drone pop, experimental, electronic, junglist -- attempting to define it is like trying to cup mercury in the palm of your hands; it'll just find something else to slide into. Newly remastered by Rashad Becker; cut by Lupo.

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LP version. Includes 7". When you make a record that doesn't conform, expect to divide opinion. Like Weather was released in 1998, on Rephlex -- run by Grant Wilson Claridge and Richard D James -- an often great label that had a following largely made up of Aphex-logo wearing fanboys who couldn't quite deal with electronic music made by a girl -- let alone one that used vocals. Everything those lads couldn't fathom about Like Weather is essentially what makes it untouchable; one of the greatest, most effortlessly esoteric pop albums ever made, not in the lineage of IDM or trip-hop, genres it has so often been awkwardly lumped in with, but something else that can't quite be categorized -- even 22 years later. Like Weather echoes the world-building energy of Prince's Sign "O" The Times (1987) -- every track is a self-contained universe all its own, there are no rules or conventions -- it's full of hooks, but also insular as fuck, the production is all over the place and it still sounds like nothing else (although if you're into the Mica Levi-produced Tirzah album (2018), know that this here is the aesthetic, spiritual blueprint). It feels analog, then digital -- it's R&B, but also baroque music box, drone pop, experimental, electronic, junglist -- attempting to define it is like trying to cup mercury in the palm of your hands; it'll just find something else to slide into. Newly remastered by Rashad Becker; cut by Lupo.

$25.50 NOT IN STOCK

2020 black vinyl repress. Andy Stott's first release since 2016 and first EP since 2011, It Should Be Us is a double EP of slow and raw productions for the club, recorded in 2019 and following a series of EPs that started with Passed Me By (LOVE 069LP) and We Stay Together (LOVE 072LP) early this decade. Recorded fast and loose over the summer, these eight tracks harness a pure and bare-boned energy, melodies subsumed by drum machines and synths; slow, rugged hedonism. It's all about rhythmic heat and disorientation, pure dance and DJ specials rendered at an unsteady pace, from percolated house and percussive rituals to moody tripped-out burners. There'll be a new Andy Stott album in 2020, but in the meantime... this one's for dancing. Mastered and cut at Dubplates & Mastering, Berlin.

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After a five-year pause for breath, last releasing in 2014, Rainer Veil return with their debut full-length for Modern Love; an immersive, kinematic tumble through electronic forms from hyper trance to tape dub experiments and loose polyrhythms -- a summoning of 'ardcore spirits in flux. A hypnotic sound world tempered by weighty bass and angular construction, Vanity marks a breaking away from the binds of overthinking, an embrace of imperfection. It's a brighter set of tracks then anything we've heard from Rainer Veil before, discarding the foggy filters and guitar pedals that were the signature of their first two EPs in pursuit of a more loose-limbed and swung ideal. Opening on the skeletal trance vapor-trail "Sim Screen" and the agitated "Repatterning", you head into a ferociously asymmetric warehouse swerve "In Gold Mills" conjuring an uncanny, nighttime vision of suburban bass riddled with tension and bliss. "Shallows" retreats through isolation dub, echoing "Change Is Never Easy", a re-worked house template fractured to its bare percussive core, while "FM2" entwines a double helix of DX7 patches with a heart wrench, and "Gauze" dismantles a mosaic of Kwaito patterns, buried under a haze of smoke. Tracing rapidly mutating electronic forms, from ringtone hooks to latinate rhythms and Razor synth edits, Vanity explores an instinctive swell of ideas and influences in perpetual and unstoppable forward motion, a sequence of flash frames captured and distilled for posterity. RIYL: Photek, Caterina Barbieri, SND, Lee Gamble, Gábor Lázár. Mastered and Cut at Dubplates & Mastering, Berlin. Edition of 500.

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Since the release of their album Wonderland (LOVE 105JC-CD/105LP, 2016), Demdike Stare have been recording material for this new double album Passion; an asymmetric re-imagining of UK club styles taking in frenzied drum trax, shortwave jungle, pinging dancehall and clipped, post-punk riddims. During this time they've been busy curating their DDS label (releases from Shinichi Atobe, Mica Levi, Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe, and Equiknoxx, among others) and have been commissioned by both the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM) and the surviving members of Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza to mine and rework their archives. Enlisting visual artist Michael England (Autechre, Gescom, Leila), they've created a cinematic accompaniment for their collaborative live shows, resulting in the image which adorns this cover - a hybrid/composite portrait exploring/questioning the current use of software in creating hyper reality and the manipulation of the self. The accompanying film includes documentary footage filmed at a Voguing event in NYC, a Blackpool promenade and a Newark, New Jersey roller rink, the end result smudging the lines between live performance, documentary and sonic cinema. It's an idea that's echoed on Passion, continuing a process Demdike began on their Testpressing series of dismantling lines between analog and digital realms, between urban realism and fantasy, between experimental, pop and soundsystem cultures. An outlandish configuration of avant-garde and ultimately functional club weapons designed and honed for the weightiest bassbins, it's also their most direct and fucked up record to date -- a raucous, joyful 9-track smash that comes off like a night on a glamorous, neon-lit bender. Mastered by Matt Colton. RIYL: Errorsmith, Príncipe, Dem 2, Jon E Cash, Wiley, Joy Division, DJ Scud, Equiknoxx, Anthony 'Shake' Shakir, Bernard Parmegiani. High-gloss varnish sleeve.

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For Mary Jane Leach's Flute Songs, Modern Love is honored to bring together four pieces composed for flute and voice, spanning a period of over 30 years and triggered by a fascination with sound and performance. As Leach explains, "In the late 1970s I was practicing playing and singing with tapes that I had made of myself performing long sustained tones. It had started out as an exercise in intonation, and ended up with a fascination for sound phenomena: difference, combination, and interference tones. The first piece I wrote for an instrument that I couldn't play was Trio For Duo (1985), for live and taped alto flute and voice. I had noticed that my voice matched the sound of the bottom fifth of the alto flute, and so the voice in this piece is sung to sound as much like an alto flute as possible. By using glissandos, more 'extra-notated' sounds are created than appear on the page. Bruckstück (1989) was originally written for eight sopranos, but is played on flutes on this recording, using the same pitches, but sounding very different. The piece is polyphonic, with a lot of closely resolving intervals; primarily major and minor seconds. I initially wrote Dowland's Tears (2011) for nine flutes, thinking of it as a recording project and not a concert piece (it now has a 'solo' tenth part added), while Semper Dolens (2018) is for solo and six taped flutes, with sustained harmony and dissonance in mind". These four recordings feature noted Roman flutist Manuel Zurria, who has worked with some of the most important composers around the world. In 1990 he founded Alter Ego, a leading group for contemporary music in Italy. Numerous composers have written pieces for him, and he has expanded the repertoire even further by re-orchestrating compositions into pieces for multiple flutes, as heard on almost forty albums. Mary Jane Leach has played an instrumental role in NYC's pioneering Downtown avant-garde community since the 1970s, working alongside peers including Arthur Russell, Ellen Fullman, Peter Zummo, Philip Corner, and Arnold Dreyblatt, as well as devoting years to the preservation of Julius Eastman's legacy since his death in 1990. Her vinyl debut Pipe Dreams was issued via the Blume imprint (BLUME 011LP, 2017). Mastered and cut by Matt Colton.

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2019 repress. Lucy Railton is a prolific performer who has appeared on countless recordings and collaborations with many important figures in contemporary music over the last few years. Paradise 94 is, remarkably, her solo debut -- featuring archival, location, and studio recordings which serve as a time capsule of all the myriad disciplines and influences that have brought her to this point in time. It both plays up to and shatters expectations of her music, which harnesses a duality of energies -- acoustic/electronic, real/imagined, iconic/iconoclastic, pissed-off/romantic; out of place and androgynous -- resulting in a visceral emotional insight and rare narrative grasp. Variegated, asymmetric, and located somewhere between her usual fields of exploration, Paradise 94 gives free reign to aspects of her creativity that have previously been subsumed into collaborative processes and interpretations of other composers' work. Here, she's free to probe, sculpt, and layer her sounds through a much broader range of techniques and strategies, placing particular focus on non-linear structural arrangements and exploring the way her cello becomes perceptibly synthetic through collaging, rather than FX. At every turn Paradise 94 is bewilderingly unique. The A-side unfolds an oneiric, inception-like sequence traversing temporalities, timbres, and tones from what sounds like a spectral ensemble playing on a traffic island in "Pinnevik", to bursts of rabbit-in-headlights trance arps emerging from meticulously dissected musique concrète in "The Critical Rush", and a collision of masked vocals, string eruptions, and a deeply moving, light-headed Bach rendition in "For J.R." On the other hand, "Fortified Up" on side B tests out a far rawer approach, sampling herself playing the same glissandi over and again, which she layers into a sort of perpetual, sickly motion, the Shepard tone riffing on the listener's psychoacoustic perceptions before calving off into a cathartic dissonant folk coda in its final throes. In the most classic sense, you can only properly begin to fuck with something from the inside once you truly know it. Railton's dedicated years of service have more than equipped her with the nous and skill to do just that, gifting us with what will no doubt be looked back on as a raw, exposed and important solo debut in years to come. RIYL: Mark Leckey, Alvin Lucier, Beatrice Dillon, Nate Young, Valerio Tricoli, Popol Vuh.

$27.50 IN STOCK

After nearly a decade in the making, Zomby finally dispatches Mercury's Rainbow, his astonishing and uniquely formulated dedication to Wiley's series of Eskibeat releases, aka the cornerstone of grime. Originally recorded over an intense couple of weeks while suffering from circadian dysrhythmia, Mercury's Rainbow documents Zomby riffing on intricately hand-programmed arpeggios, using theories of color and its relation to the sonic chromatic spectrum -- the circle of fifths -- to place an expressively avant spin on the Wiley Kat's sliding Triton squares and frozen, post-garage drum patterns. Rather than simply imitating Wiley's foundational unit of grime currency, Zomby innovates with a structure of bewildering, modal styles, refracting 16 diamond-cut permutations according to a color-sound spectrum of tonalities. In the process he effectively loosens up and liquefies the Eski riddim, rendering its bones and sinew in varying states of reactive, physical deliquescence or GIF-like micro-organisms. For dancers and DJs, the fluid contours and viscous, displaced rhythmic anticipation of Mercury's Rainbow suggests myriad geometries for movement in-the-mix, and serves to single-handedly put to sleep a whole genre of also-ran, prosaic "future grime" through its methodical, inventively ground-up construction. While it's difficult to say with certainty, if Mercury's Rainbow was issued at the same time it was created, it may have arguably altered the course of UK grime instrumentals in much the same way Wiley's original template coined a whole new genre, essentially making it the last word in grime futurism, proper. Master and lacquer cut by Matt Colton at Alchemy; Limited edition vinyl.

$25.50 IN STOCK

Double LP version. Philippe Hallais returns to Modern Love with An American Hero, the first album under his own name. It follows his label debut as Low Jack with Lighthouse Stories in early 2016 (LOVE 102LP). An American Hero is by some distance his most important work to date, setting aside the squashed dancefloor productions of his Low Jack alias for an album of emotive, indefinable ambient pieces. After working through different subcultural musical languages as Low Jack, with An American Hero, Philippe takes inspiration from the TV biopics of high-performance athletes for an album of exceptional emotive impact; somewhere between pastiche, tragedy, and electronic futurism. Fascinated by the sports documentaries mass-produced by the US TV channel ESPN, Hallais transcribed and amplified its dramatic recipes. These form the material of tearful soap operas which develop the same narrative ad nauseam; the rise to the top, the betrayal, decline, salvation, comeback, and ultimately, nostalgia and regret. The TV formatting reduces the life of these high-level athletes to a generic tale, transforming them into impersonators of their own lives through extreme use of editing, slow motion, and musical themes. Acting as a Greek tragedy, An American Hero delves into the dislocations of the mythology of sports and its achievement in mass entertainment; whereby the hero becomes a dispensable and mimetic body. Hallais delves into this unusual portrayal of triviality and disaster, naivety and cynicism that make the real life and ordeals of the hero indistinguishable from their scripted form on TV. This obsession with storytelling and the creation of bigger-than-life characters forms the narrative of An American Hero, a parable for our times. RIYL: James Ferraro, Yves Tumor, Hype Williams, My Bloody Valentine, Leyland Kirby. Artwork and photography by Ethan Assouline; Mastered and cut by Matt Colton.

$12.50 IN STOCK

Philippe Hallais returns to Modern Love with An American Hero, the first album under his own name. It follows his label debut as Low Jack with Lighthouse Stories in early 2016 (LOVE 102LP). An American Hero is by some distance his most important work to date, setting aside the squashed dancefloor productions of his Low Jack alias for an album of emotive, indefinable ambient pieces. After working through different subcultural musical languages as Low Jack, with An American Hero, Philippe takes inspiration from the TV biopics of high-performance athletes for an album of exceptional emotive impact; somewhere between pastiche, tragedy, and electronic futurism. Fascinated by the sports documentaries mass-produced by the US TV channel ESPN, Hallais transcribed and amplified its dramatic recipes. These form the material of tearful soap operas which develop the same narrative ad nauseam; the rise to the top, the betrayal, decline, salvation, comeback, and ultimately, nostalgia and regret. The TV formatting reduces the life of these high-level athletes to a generic tale, transforming them into impersonators of their own lives through extreme use of editing, slow motion, and musical themes. Acting as a Greek tragedy, An American Hero delves into the dislocations of the mythology of sports and its achievement in mass entertainment; whereby the hero becomes a dispensable and mimetic body. Hallais delves into this unusual portrayal of triviality and disaster, naivety and cynicism that make the real life and ordeals of the hero indistinguishable from their scripted form on TV. This obsession with storytelling and the creation of bigger-than-life characters forms the narrative of An American Hero, a parable for our times. RIYL: James Ferraro, Yves Tumor, Hype Williams, My Bloody Valentine, Leyland Kirby. Artwork and photography by Ethan Assouline; Mastered and cut by Matt Colton.

$23.50 NOT IN STOCK

Outta the shadows and into the strobe-light, Alex Lewis, aka Turinn, debuts on Modern Love with a debut double-pack of sawn-off bruk-beats and anxious, nerve-riding grooves brewed in the ravines of North Manchester. Turinn emerges from a new generation of producers in the city that include longtime spar Willow, and upcoming producer Croww. Crooked and rugged, but tempered by an acute emotive sensitivity, 18 1/2 Minute Gaps renders a bleedin' cross-section of mongrel, hybrid style 'n pattern in a breathless, deceptively freehand fashion that comes riddled with an electric blue energy all of its own. Committing ten tracks of fractious, mutant funk and sore feels, 18 1/2 Minute Gaps serves to cap Turinn's formative phase of production like a lead lid on a nuclear rave implosion; trapping original 'ardcore 'nuum, Detroit booty and dank post-punk elements in a perpetual flux of in-the-pocket grooves which ravenously attempt to split at the seams, alternately pushing into Muslimgauze-like buffer zones of distortion or resoundingly wide ambient dimensions, and often both at once. This ambiguous dichotomy is epitomized between the rare surge of quick/slow torque in "Ovum", which almost sounds like Chris Carter sparring with Burial Hex, and then in his nod to the Italian new wave with "Elba", which seems to find the square root between Lorenzo Senni and some skudgy as heck Kassem Mosse grind, whereas the bittersweet soul of "1625" finds compatible links with his close peer, Workshop's Willow as well as Japan's Shinichi Atobe and scene enabler Move D, while "Parratactico" swaggers into quantum dancehall meters. The album title track runs at a next level Detroit momentum like DJ Stingray flipping Derrick May and Carl Craig's "Kao-tic Harmonies", before "ESO" cuts in like a super cranky El-B wearing itchy Primark underwear, and the bone-rattling hardcore jungle of "Spawn" soon enough gives way to the sweet lad couplet of "Petrichor" and "Ondine", where his elusive, distressed melodic touch really shines thru. Mastered and cut by Matt Colton at Alchemy; Pressed at Pallas.

$12.50 IN STOCK

A project that came to life fueled by collector's obsession and a life-long willingness to dive head-first into unknown musical wormholes, Miles Whittaker and Sean Canty have never been defined by a singular musical trajectory. Their opening salvo of releases dabbled with the aesthetic of the occult and provided an alternate, parallax view of the Italian Library records with which they were both obsessed at the time, but as their long running mixtape series and brilliantly curated DDS label attest, their interests extend far outside the crevices of early electronic music and into dance music, dancehall, roots, jungle, techno, industrial, noise and beyond. While 2013's Testpressing series provided an outlet for mostly club-based productions shot from the hip, Wonderland, their first album since 2012's Elemental, has been constructed with a narrative in mind. From the clipped hard-style of the opening "Curzon", through the jaunty dancehall mutations of "Animal Style" and "FullEdge", exotica/house refractions on "Hardnoise", the frankly ridiculous, bass-bin destroying jungle ructions on "Sourcer", or the extended tease of "Overstaying", it's probably the most enjoyable and loose-limbed hour of music in their catalog, or that you'll likely hear in these weird, angst-ridden times. Mastered and cut by Matt Colton. Comes in a jewel case.

$25.50 NOT IN STOCK

Limited repress; Double LP version. Gatefold sleeve. A project that came to life fueled by collector's obsession and a life-long willingness to dive head-first into unknown musical wormholes, Miles Whittaker and Sean Canty have never been defined by a singular musical trajectory. Their opening salvo of releases dabbled with the aesthetic of the occult and provided an alternate, parallax view of the Italian Library records with which they were both obsessed at the time, but as their long running mixtape series and brilliantly curated DDS label attest, their interests extend far outside the crevices of early electronic music and into dance music, dancehall, roots, jungle, techno, industrial, noise and beyond. While 2013's Testpressing series provided an outlet for mostly club-based productions shot from the hip, Wonderland, their first album since 2012's Elemental, has been constructed with a narrative in mind. From the clipped hard-style of the opening "Curzon", through the jaunty dancehall mutations of "Animal Style" and "FullEdge", exotica/house refractions on "Hardnoise", the frankly ridiculous, bass-bin destroying jungle ructions on "Sourcer", or the extended tease of "Overstaying", it's probably the most enjoyable and loose-limbed hour of music in their catalog, or that you'll likely hear in these weird, angst-ridden times. Mastered and cut by Matt Colton.

$23.50 NOT IN STOCK

From the disputed border somewhere between Lancashire and Yorkshire, G.H. (Gary Howell) claims a no man's land where he is free to decimate distinctions between black metal and concrète techno by drawing upon an elusive, metaphysical force that's exclusively common to music rooted in that region; from Muslimgauze and Autechre thru Shackleton and Demdike Stare. The inarguably mongrel Housebound Demigod is G.H.'s debut solo album, following the Ground EP (2011) and his involvement with the hexed Pendle Coven project and HATE, alongside Miles Whittaker and Andy Stott, respectively, between 2003-2009. It sounds like nothing out there; the result of countless hours at the grindstone, using sound as tonal therapy and a purely expressive sculptural material to best render the feel of his bleak but extraordinarily beautiful surroundings, with all the rugged texture and captivating aesthetic of some ancient cave graffiti. The album unfolds as a treacherous topography of boggy drones, entrenched sub-bass and deforested, windswept feedback, strewn with the charred remains of black metal in opener "Screaming Demon Pickups" and the hollow-eyed stare down of "Angels And Doormen", or prone to bury the senses with unpredictable slow techno mudslides in "Mickey Cosmos" or the subsidence of "Packhorse". He often underlines that physicality with a drily ambiguous wit; check the bitterly clipped narrative on "Yorkshire Fog", or, equally, when he puts all his weight behind the stylus-troubling, bestial shudder of "Devils Bit Scabious", and you can't shake the feeling that he's gurning like an evil loon behind the rotten torque of the album's titular parting shot. While ostensibly monotone and overcast, the devil is found in the album's subtleties of timing and mixing detail; riddled with phantasms that lurk and lash out from the crevices of its granite slabs and pitch black ravines, all placed at oblique angles in his surreally folded, labyrinthine and unheimlich sound-field. Recorded with a DR550, a battered Charvel guitar and assorted guitar pedals. Mastered and cut by Matt Colton at Alchemy, pressed at Pallas. RIYL: Nurse With Wound, Stephen O'Malley, Autechre, David Lynch, Shackleton.

$25.50 NOT IN STOCK

Repressed. Double LP version. Too Many Voices is the fourth album from Andy Stott, a follow-up to 2014's Faith in Strangers (LOVE 098CD). It was recorded from 2014-2016 and sees a diverse spectrum of influences bleed into nine tracks that are as searching as they are memorable. The album draws inspiration from the fourth-world pop of Japan's Yellow Magic Orchestra as much as it does Triton-fueled grime made 25 years later. Somewhere between these two points there's an oddly aligned vision of the future that seeps through the pores of each of the tracks. It's a vision of the future as it was once imagined; artificial, strange, and immaculate. Full of possibilities. The album opens with the harmonized, deteriorating pads of "Waiting For You" and arcs through to the synthetic chamber pop of the closing title-track, referencing Sylvian and Sakamoto's "Bamboo Houses" (1982) as much as it does the ethereal landscapes of This Mortal Coil and Dead Can Dance. In between, the climate and palette constantly shift, taking in the midnight pop of "Butterflies"; the humid, breathless house of "First Night"; and the endlessly cascading "Forgotten." Longtime vocal contributor Alison Skidmore features on half the tracks, sometimes augmented by the same simulated materials as on the dystopian breakdown of "Selfish," and at others surrounded by beautiful synth washes, such as on the mercurial "Over" or the dreamy, neon-lit "New Romantic." It's all far removed from the digital synthesis and the abstracted intricacies that define much of the current electronic landscape. The same cybernetic palette is here implanted into more human form; sometimes cold, but more often thrumming with life. Mastered by Matt Colton at Alchemy.