|
|
viewing 1 To 25 of 25 items
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
LP
|
|
LSSN 083LP
|
"Slovak-Hungarian musician Adela Mede explores the interplay between voice and technology with field recordings. She sings in three languages (Slovak, Hungarian and English). Intimate ambient utterances with themes of spiritual growth accompanied by experimental electronics with a wide scope of influences; from minimalism to folklore. Initially released in early 2022 to universal acclaim on digital and cassette, Night School is extremely excited to share Szabadság on vinyl. Mastered by Rupert Clervaux for vinyl, the clearer format teases out new nuances in the music, revealing a physicality and permanence to Mede's first masterwork. Szabadság is a navigation. This debut by Adela Mede, recorded in her family home on the Slovakian border with Hungary, searches through the personal, familial, cultural, folkloric and geographic of her past and present. Examining both the vulnerability and determination of her voice -- as it leaves the lips, raw, and in the ways it can be transformed with digital processing -- the embodied memories of language, of utterance, are explored. Airy, open sound worlds and tentative strings of improvised naked vocal transform themselves into insistent repetition. Fizzing, sparkling electronics are set against the beautiful grainy depth of field recordings. The locations, these places, are found and lost - home is found and lost -- in a dance of fragmented vocal harmonies. Three languages (English, Hungarian, Slovak) weave a song of spring, nature, forgiveness, togetherness and rebirth." --Lisa Busby
|
|
Artist |
Title |
Format |
Label |
Catalog # |
|
|
CD
|
|
LSSN 084CD
|
"Extreme is Molly Nilsson's tenth studio album. Recorded in 2019 and throughout the 2020 global pandemic at home in Berlin, it is a departure for Nilsson, an explosion of angry love. It's an album of anthems for the jilted generation, soaked with joy and offering solace, bristling with distorted, metal guitars and planet-sized choruses that bring light to the dark center of the galaxy. It's an album of the times, by the times and for the people. It's a record about power. About how to fight it, how to take it and how to share it. Every song here is a gleaming gem in a pouch of jewels. Examples include 'Kids Today,' where Nilsson is the voice of wisdom, archly commenting on the eternal struggle between youth and authority. 'They Will Pay' brings big, distorted power chords in the form of a agit-punk, pop slammer. Of course, when Molly Nilsson does punk pop one gets the catchiest chorus this side of The Bangles or The Nerves. However, it's on 'Pompeii' that Nilsson delivers the album's epic, emotional heartbreaker. Like '1995' on Nilsson's album Zenith, or 'Days Of Dust' on Twenty Twenty, the lyrics of 'Pompeii' are heavy with a transcendent sadness, an aching poetry that cuts to the truth of the heart like the best Leonard Cohen lines. It contains the most personal moments of Extreme, a song lit by the dying embers of romance. Yet it's here where the alchemy at the base of all Nilsson's best work is found. Turning small nuggets of personal truth into big, generous universal moments that invite everyone to cry, to love and to fight the power. In an album of jewels, it might be the shining star. This is Molly Nilsson's biggest, boldest and most vital album to date, Extreme is about power. Against the love of power and for the power of love."
|
|
Artist |
Title |
Format |
Label |
Catalog # |
|
|
LP
|
|
LSSN 084LP
|
LP version. "Extreme is Molly Nilsson's tenth studio album. Recorded in 2019 and throughout the 2020 global pandemic at home in Berlin, it is a departure for Nilsson, an explosion of angry love. It's an album of anthems for the jilted generation, soaked with joy and offering solace, bristling with distorted, metal guitars and planet-sized choruses that bring light to the dark center of the galaxy. It's an album of the times, by the times and for the people. It's a record about power. About how to fight it, how to take it and how to share it. Every song here is a gleaming gem in a pouch of jewels. Examples include 'Kids Today,' where Nilsson is the voice of wisdom, archly commenting on the eternal struggle between youth and authority. 'They Will Pay' brings big, distorted power chords in the form of a agit-punk, pop slammer. Of course, when Molly Nilsson does punk pop one gets the catchiest chorus this side of The Bangles or The Nerves. However, it's on 'Pompeii' that Nilsson delivers the album's epic, emotional heartbreaker. Like '1995' on Nilsson's album Zenith, or 'Days Of Dust' on Twenty Twenty, the lyrics of 'Pompeii' are heavy with a transcendent sadness, an aching poetry that cuts to the truth of the heart like the best Leonard Cohen lines. It contains the most personal moments of Extreme, a song lit by the dying embers of romance. Yet it's here where the alchemy at the base of all Nilsson's best work is found. Turning small nuggets of personal truth into big, generous universal moments that invite everyone to cry, to love and to fight the power. In an album of jewels, it might be the shining star. This is Molly Nilsson's biggest, boldest and most vital album to date, Extreme is about power. Against the love of power and for the power of love."
|
|
Artist |
Title |
Format |
Label |
Catalog # |
|
|
2LP
|
|
LSSN 024LP
|
Double LP version. Marble vinyl. "Night School announces a new pressing of the long sold-out debut album by Molly Nilsson, These Things Take Time. As a significant cultural artifact of the underground pop movement that bubbled up in the early 21st century, it's an important landmark. In Molly Nilsson's herstory it remains one of her most adored works. It would be easy to say that Molly Nilsson needs no introduction, but These Things Take Time is an introduction. Originally self-released in 2008 on a limited CDR run with handfolded sleeve, Nilsson's debut album has slowly taken over the hearts of many. In 2014 this modern classic of autonomous, DIY pop and punk-as-you-like attitude was released as a beautiful edition of double vinyl, featuring unreleased bonus tracks across two discs -- it sold out within a month of release."
|
|
Artist |
Title |
Format |
Label |
Catalog # |
|
|
CD
|
|
LSSN 024CD
|
"Night School announces a new pressing of the long sold-out debut album by Molly Nilsson, These Things Take Time. As a significant cultural artifact of the underground pop movement that bubbled up in the early 21st century, it's an important landmark. In Molly Nilsson's herstory it remains one of her most adored works. It would be easy to say that Molly Nilsson needs no introduction, but These Things Take Time is an introduction. Originally self-released in 2008 on a limited CDR run with handfolded sleeve, Nilsson's debut album has slowly taken over the hearts of many. In 2014 this modern classic of autonomous, DIY pop and punk-as-you-like attitude was released as a beautiful edition of double vinyl, featuring unreleased bonus tracks across two discs -- it sold out within a month of release." First time on CD.
|
|
Artist |
Title |
Format |
Label |
Catalog # |
|
|
LP
|
|
LSSN 081LP
|
"Fine Place is a new duo comprising Frankie Rose (Vivian Girls, Crystal Stilts, Dum Dum Girls) and Matthew Hord (Running, Pop. 1280, Brandy). Based in Brooklyn, NYC, together they've crafted a crystalline full-length of nocturnal, electronic pop music that charts a way out the post-global, cyberpunk dystopian environment it was crafted in. Their debut album This New Heaven drenches minimalist song structures in post-industrial washes of six-string delay and gothic post-punk synths. Presiding over it is the most evocative, emotive vocal performance Frankie Rose has committed to tape to date. Following Hord's relocation from Chicago, the pair wanted to explore new avenues apart from their respective bands or solo projects. 'The sound we were going for was an attempt to capture the dystopian feel of New York during a period of desertion by the wealthy. It was produced in a time-frame saturated in both uncertainty and serenity, and the soundscapes we created felt fitting and almost organic as a response to our surroundings. The title also reflects this in an arguably literal, maybe even satirical way.' Sonically, Fine Place references the pioneering mid-to-late '80s pioneers of icy melodrama The Cure and Cocteau Twins, while reflecting both the individuals'; music trajectories thus far. Modular synthesis triggers rhythm boxes and fluttery arps chirp around clanging 808-patterning as Rose's reverb-laden vocal layering envelops the remaining headroom. The result is massive; a towering, shadowy music that embraces darkness while offering Rose's bright vocal as chinks of light in the cracks; the production filling the head space of the beholder with preternatural imagery and emotional resonances that are real but not quite defined."
|
|
Artist |
Title |
Format |
Label |
Catalog # |
|
|
CD
|
|
LSSN 075CD
|
"When Molly Nilsson began recording her second album Europa in 2009, the world seemed to be at a turning point and she along with it. In the aftermath of a global financial crash, at the dawn of a new decade, the Stockholm-born, Berlin-based singer was busy molding her songwriting into an idiosyncratic, personal mythology that would take her to every continent, speaking directly to hearts in every corner of the globe. The first album on her own Dark Skies Association imprint, the first recorded in her home studio The Lighthouse, Europa broke new ground for Nilsson at the time. But also, it spoke earnestly to the world about an idealism, an openness and hope that has not dimmed in the eleven years since its release. Europa contains the songs of a young, idealistic songwriter coming to terms with her genius for cutting to the chase, saying it as it is and, most importantly, as it should be. Over ten years on the artist's vim and urge for...more."
|
|
Artist |
Title |
Format |
Label |
Catalog # |
|
|
LP
|
|
LSSN 075LP
|
LP version. "When Molly Nilsson began recording her second album Europa in 2009, the world seemed to be at a turning point and she along with it. In the aftermath of a global financial crash, at the dawn of a new decade, the Stockholm-born, Berlin-based singer was busy molding her songwriting into an idiosyncratic, personal mythology that would take her to every continent, speaking directly to hearts in every corner of the globe. The first album on her own Dark Skies Association imprint, the first recorded in her home studio The Lighthouse, Europa broke new ground for Nilsson at the time. But also, it spoke earnestly to the world about an idealism, an openness and hope that has not dimmed in the eleven years since its release. Europa contains the songs of a young, idealistic songwriter coming to terms with her genius for cutting to the chase, saying it as it is and, most importantly, as it should be. Over ten years on the artist's vim and urge for...more."
|
|
Artist |
Title |
Format |
Label |
Catalog # |
|
|
CD
|
|
LSSN 070CD
|
"Ta Da is the debut full length from J. McFarlane Reality Guest, the collective name for the trio headed by the eponymous Julia McFarlane. As a member of the group Twerps, McFarlane has traversed guitar-centric, melodic pop music for some years while honing a highly unique, personal musical language. This is the first recorded unveiling of her affecting, oblique songwriting panache, originally released in her native Australia on Hobbies Galore. Wheezing into view with a troubled reed instrument set against a series of whoozy synth lines, 'Human Tissue Act' is a foggy curtain the listener is invited to peel back. The dissonant notes are left to dance entwined, with clarinet heralding a Harry Partch-esque mallet percussion interlude. It's a mood. With no resolution in sight, an audience dragged closer into uncertainty is suddenly drenched with the light of inter-weaving wah wah synth and saxophone. 'I Am A Toy' introduces us to McFarlane's vocal, an effortless and matter-of-fact, accented statement that quietly takes the reins. While McFarlane's previous work in Twerps might reference '80s UK and antipodean guitar pop, Ta Da showcases different influences immersed in psychedelic music and synths. It's a brilliant, deft concoction swimming in Young Marble Giants-type minimalism, washed with bare pop and harmony similar to Kevin Ayers making sense of a Melbourne suburb, full of faces half-recognised in the blanching sun."
|
|
Artist |
Title |
Format |
Label |
Catalog # |
|
|
LP
|
|
LSSN 070LP
|
LP version. "Ta Da is the debut full length from J. McFarlane Reality Guest, the collective name for the trio headed by the eponymous Julia McFarlane. As a member of the group Twerps, McFarlane has traversed guitar-centric, melodic pop music for some years while honing a highly unique, personal musical language. This is the first recorded unveiling of her affecting, oblique songwriting panache, originally released in her native Australia on Hobbies Galore. Wheezing into view with a troubled reed instrument set against a series of whoozy synth lines, 'Human Tissue Act' is a foggy curtain the listener is invited to peel back. The dissonant notes are left to dance entwined, with clarinet heralding a Harry Partch-esque mallet percussion interlude. It's a mood. With no resolution in sight, an audience dragged closer into uncertainty is suddenly drenched with the light of inter-weaving wah wah synth and saxophone. 'I Am A Toy' introduces us to McFarlane's vocal, an effortless and matter-of-fact, accented statement that quietly takes the reins. While McFarlane's previous work in Twerps might reference '80s UK and antipodean guitar pop, Ta Da showcases different influences immersed in psychedelic music and synths. It's a brilliant, deft concoction swimming in Young Marble Giants-type minimalism, washed with bare pop and harmony similar to Kevin Ayers making sense of a Melbourne suburb, full of faces half-recognised in the blanching sun."
|
|
Artist |
Title |
Format |
Label |
Catalog # |
|
|
CD
|
|
LSSN 062CD
|
"Movies For Ears is a retrospective collection of works by Polish-born, Glasgow-based artist Ela Orleans, which navigates almost two decades of songwriting in the heart of the global pop underground. This remastered collection casts an ear over what Orleans might call the 'pop sensibility' within her back catalogue. Released previously on a number of small DIY labels, Orleans' music coincided with the explosion of auto-didactic musicians finding their voice in the age of the blogosphere, artists emboldened by the democratization of music-making afforded by the internet. From the outset, her childhood studying formal music mixed with cut-up techniques, sampling, sound-art and experimentation to create a distinctive signature cloaked in an innate melancholy and playfulness. Fully remastered by James Plotkin, featuring extensive sleeve-notes and rare photos from Orleans' archive, Movies For Ears presents an appraisal of the musician's work, painting a portrait of an artist with an uncanny ability to evoke emotions and ghosts of memories in the listener."
|
|
Artist |
Title |
Format |
Label |
Catalog # |
|
|
LP
|
|
LSSN 062LP
|
LP version. "Movies For Ears is a retrospective collection of works by Polish-born, Glasgow-based artist Ela Orleans, which navigates almost two decades of songwriting in the heart of the global pop underground. This remastered collection casts an ear over what Orleans might call the 'pop sensibility' within her back catalogue. Released previously on a number of small DIY labels, Orleans' music coincided with the explosion of auto-didactic musicians finding their voice in the age of the blogosphere, artists emboldened by the democratization of music-making afforded by the internet. From the outset, her childhood studying formal music mixed with cut-up techniques, sampling, sound-art and experimentation to create a distinctive signature cloaked in an innate melancholy and playfulness. Fully remastered by James Plotkin, featuring extensive sleeve-notes and rare photos from Orleans' archive, Movies For Ears presents an appraisal of the musician's work, painting a portrait of an artist with an uncanny ability to evoke emotions and ghosts of memories in the listener."
|
|
Artist |
Title |
Format |
Label |
Catalog # |
|
|
CD
|
|
LSSN 060CD
|
"Long overdue reissue of this Molly Nilsson early release (her fourth), now repackaged and reissued via Night School/DSA. By the time Molly Nilsson released History, she had already established a fledgling cult status built on homemade YouTube videos and home-burnt CDRs. Writing from a distance, it's clear that this is the first classic album in her canon and arguably a classic of the 21st Century underground music panorama. While the methodology on it hadn't changed from Nilsson's previous three albums -- it was recorded solo at The Lighthouse, Nilsson's home studio based on a Berlin crossroads -- on this record the songwriting reached a new peak and the emotional scythe cut deeper. Here, Nilsson managed to combine a cosmic, outward looking perspective with an intimate knowledge of the human condition and its place in these turbulent times. In truth, no other songwriter has excavated the modern psyche so clearly and perfectly."
|
|
Artist |
Title |
Format |
Label |
Catalog # |
|
|
LP
|
|
LSSN 060LP
|
LP version. "Long overdue reissue of this Molly Nilsson early release (her fourth), now repackaged and reissued via Night School/DSA. By the time Molly Nilsson released History, she had already established a fledgling cult status built on homemade YouTube videos and home-burnt CDRs. Writing from a distance, it's clear that this is the first classic album in her canon and arguably a classic of the 21st Century underground music panorama. While the methodology on it hadn't changed from Nilsson's previous three albums -- it was recorded solo at The Lighthouse, Nilsson's home studio based on a Berlin crossroads -- on this record the songwriting reached a new peak and the emotional scythe cut deeper. Here, Nilsson managed to combine a cosmic, outward looking perspective with an intimate knowledge of the human condition and its place in these turbulent times. In truth, no other songwriter has excavated the modern psyche so clearly and perfectly."
|
|
Artist |
Title |
Format |
Label |
Catalog # |
|
|
CD
|
|
LSSN 066CD
|
"Sinking Into A Miracle is the debut album by Glasgow's AMOR, a quartet of musical travelers exploring the sonic open-ended-ness of dance music. Following two critically acclaimed 12-inches, this is a fully developed treatise on ecstasy and transcendence. Here, Richard Youngs, Michael Francis Duch, Paul Thomson and Luke Fowler are more honed, razor sharp in focus and timing, testing their instrumental prowess on condensed song structures and new, enlightened feelings of expansive hope and bliss. From the outset, it's an ambitious yet ultimately inclusive journey. Recorded to 24-track tape at Chem 19 and mixed by Paul Savage and Richard McMaster (Golden Teacher), this full length retains the elastic grooves of Paradise and Higher Moment, the group's previous singles, but relinquishes the classic Philadelphia International-tinged sound in favor of looser rhythmic patterns. There are new depths to the compositions: a more free-flowing approach to percussion and deft experiments in hybridity make for a full and rounded, emotionally tinged record. Indeed, there are times when AMOR sound like the lost house band from David Mancuso's Loft parties: Richard Youngs' uplifting, gospel-tinged lyrics talk about moving beyond, universal truths, sailing through the horizon. It's a wide-eyed optimism Mancuso would perhaps have approved of and which is embroidered with spectral details that begs to be auditioned on large, tweaked out sound-systems."
|
|
Artist |
Title |
Format |
Label |
Catalog # |
|
|
LP
|
|
LSSN 066LP
|
LP version. "Sinking Into A Miracle is the debut album by Glasgow's AMOR, a quartet of musical travelers exploring the sonic open-ended-ness of dance music. Following two critically acclaimed 12-inches, this is a fully developed treatise on ecstasy and transcendence. Here, Richard Youngs, Michael Francis Duch, Paul Thomson and Luke Fowler are more honed, razor sharp in focus and timing, testing their instrumental prowess on condensed song structures and new, enlightened feelings of expansive hope and bliss. From the outset, it's an ambitious yet ultimately inclusive journey. Recorded to 24-track tape at Chem 19 and mixed by Paul Savage and Richard McMaster (Golden Teacher), this full length retains the elastic grooves of Paradise and Higher Moment, the group's previous singles, but relinquishes the classic Philadelphia International-tinged sound in favor of looser rhythmic patterns. There are new depths to the compositions: a more free-flowing approach to percussion and deft experiments in hybridity make for a full and rounded, emotionally tinged record. Indeed, there are times when AMOR sound like the lost house band from David Mancuso's Loft parties: Richard Youngs' uplifting, gospel-tinged lyrics talk about moving beyond, universal truths, sailing through the horizon. It's a wide-eyed optimism Mancuso would perhaps have approved of and which is embroidered with spectral details that begs to be auditioned on large, tweaked out sound-systems."
|
|
Artist |
Title |
Format |
Label |
Catalog # |
|
|
CD
|
|
LSSN 017CD
|
"The Travels represents a signpost in the continuing journey that is the songs of Berlin-based artist Molly Nilsson. Starting out by hand-dubbing CDRs and forging a singular path in the global pop underground, Nilsson's art has grown to the extent where hers is a precise songwriting devoid of unnecessary flourish. Her songs are perfect silhouettes of feelings everyone shares but that few can articulate with such heart-rending, icy pathos. Journeys offer change -- the possibility of renewal -- and on this album, Nilsson's resonant voice is found curling around a new sense of optimism and wide-eyed discovery that was only alluded to in her previous work. Songs like 'Dear Life' might be spiked with a barbed sense of the dejected, but the presiding feeling is one of optimism, of being in love with life despite a shield of cynicism. 'Dirty Fingers' brings a melancholy recognizable from previous work but with an incessant beat and ecstatic underpinning. In case the listener missed it, 'The Power Ballad' brings an endearing sincerity to proceedings that also offers a tantalizing question: can you be skeptical about love but still be bewitched? On this fifth long-player, Nilsson's perspective is challenged and manipulated by changes in environment and psychological space: like any other traveller the protagonist brings their own set of values and emotional states to new places, coloring them with a wash of subjectivity. Based loosely on Marco Polo's 'Travels' and reading like a map of the protagonist's geographical and inner journey, this album reveals new places and new emotions that are never the same to the beholder."
|
|
Artist |
Title |
Format |
Label |
Catalog # |
|
|
LP
|
|
LSSN 017LP
|
LP version. "The Travels represents a signpost in the continuing journey that is the songs of Berlin-based artist Molly Nilsson. Starting out by hand-dubbing CDRs and forging a singular path in the global pop underground, Nilsson's art has grown to the extent where hers is a precise songwriting devoid of unnecessary flourish. Her songs are perfect silhouettes of feelings everyone shares but that few can articulate with such heart-rending, icy pathos. Journeys offer change -- the possibility of renewal -- and on this album, Nilsson's resonant voice is found curling around a new sense of optimism and wide-eyed discovery that was only alluded to in her previous work. Songs like 'Dear Life' might be spiked with a barbed sense of the dejected, but the presiding feeling is one of optimism, of being in love with life despite a shield of cynicism. 'Dirty Fingers' brings a melancholy recognizable from previous work but with an incessant beat and ecstatic underpinning. In case the listener missed it, 'The Power Ballad' brings an endearing sincerity to proceedings that also offers a tantalizing question: can you be skeptical about love but still be bewitched? On this fifth long-player, Nilsson's perspective is challenged and manipulated by changes in environment and psychological space: like any other traveller the protagonist brings their own set of values and emotional states to new places, coloring them with a wash of subjectivity. Based loosely on Marco Polo's 'Travels' and reading like a map of the protagonist's geographical and inner journey, this album reveals new places and new emotions that are never the same to the beholder."
|
|
Artist |
Title |
Format |
Label |
Catalog # |
|
|
LP
|
|
LSSN 053LP
|
"Stacian is Person L -- Oakland resident, solo artist and academic Dania Luck. Beginning in the American Midwest, she has been an ongoing Bay Area concern since 2008, deeply involved in the minimal wave and underground electronic music scene. A dystopian vision of alienated humanity, broken communications and technoid mal-forms, this album is her most fully developed full length and a leap forward from 2012's Songs For Cadets. Moving away from the primitive Cold Wave of previous work, it creates a bleak dystopia without relying on Ballardian cliché, though still invoking concrete prisons and urban disassociation -- a throbbing, murky underworld that revels in imperfections; a submersive, digital swamp bleeding through the club."
|
|
Artist |
Title |
Format |
Label |
Catalog # |
|
|
CD
|
|
LSSN 046CD
|
"The beginning moments of Molly Nilsson's second album Follow The Light now seem like the start of a personal mythology that was to reach further than she could have imagined. Few contemporary artists have seeped into the underground pop psyche more thoroughly than the Stockholm-born songwriter. After releasing her debut These Things Take Time on hand-made CDrs, Nilsson's follow up was a leap in scope and ambition. Of course, the personal takes on a tumultuous life in Berlin and the journeys to and from it inform the songs, as before, but a growing maturity in the songwriting is in evidence. From the diary pages of her first album to a growing stature as a songwriter in touch with the universal, this album contains many of Nilsson's now firm fan-favourites. Follow The Light is the second installment of an ongoing Molly Nilsson reissue campaign and the first time the album has been available on vinyl."
|
|
Artist |
Title |
Format |
Label |
Catalog # |
|
|
LP
|
|
LSSN 046LP
|
LP version. "The beginning moments of Molly Nilsson's second album Follow The Light now seem like the start of a personal mythology that was to reach further than she could have imagined. Few contemporary artists have seeped into the underground pop psyche more thoroughly than the Stockholm-born songwriter. After releasing her debut These Things Take Time on hand-made CDrs, Nilsson's follow up was a leap in scope and ambition. Of course, the personal takes on a tumultuous life in Berlin and the journeys to and from it inform the songs, as before, but a growing maturity in the songwriting is in evidence. From the diary pages of her first album to a growing stature as a songwriter in touch with the universal, this album contains many of Nilsson's now firm fan-favourites. Follow The Light is the second installment of an ongoing Molly Nilsson reissue campaign and the first time the album has been available on vinyl."
|
|
Artist |
Title |
Format |
Label |
Catalog # |
|
|
CD
|
|
LSSN 040CD
|
"Circles of Upper and Lower Hell is the grandest, deepest work to date by Polish-born, Glasgow-based sound artist and composer Ela Orleans. From her beginnings inaugurating a lo-fi, homespun style that has since developed fully into a language uniquely her own, from tentative live outings featuring multiple instruments to a now-masterly command of sound, Orleans has become one of the most consistently surprising musicians of the global underground. The seventh album under her own name, this expansive vision, loosely based on Dante's Inferno but infused with deep personal experience, incorporates sound art, orchestral textures, synth pop and electronic music to construct a world equally peppered with loss and inspiration. It pulls all the strands of Orleans' previous work together into an epic depiction of turmoil wide in scope but reveling in detail. The album documents a far more personal approach to conventional songwriting. Previously, the artist's sonic textures have relied on samples cleaved out of context, buried songs beneath warped aural gauze, but Circles blows every element of Orleans's art upwards and further apart."
|
|
Artist |
Title |
Format |
Label |
Catalog # |
|
|
2LP
|
|
LSSN 040LP
|
Double LP version. "Circles of Upper and Lower Hell is the grandest, deepest work to date by Polish-born, Glasgow-based sound artist and composer Ela Orleans. From her beginnings inaugurating a lo-fi, homespun style that has since developed fully into a language uniquely her own, from tentative live outings featuring multiple instruments to a now-masterly command of sound, Orleans has become one of the most consistently surprising musicians of the global underground. The seventh album under her own name, this expansive vision, loosely based on Dante's Inferno but infused with deep personal experience, incorporates sound art, orchestral textures, synth pop and electronic music to construct a world equally peppered with loss and inspiration. It pulls all the strands of Orleans' previous work together into an epic depiction of turmoil wide in scope but reveling in detail. The album documents a far more personal approach to conventional songwriting. Previously, the artist's sonic textures have relied on samples cleaved out of context, buried songs beneath warped aural gauze, but Circles blows every element of Orleans's art upwards and further apart."
|
|
Artist |
Title |
Format |
Label |
Catalog # |
|
|
LP
|
|
LSSN 037LP
|
"Liberation is the latest evolution by David West, a dedicated underground dweller and traveler with his groups Rat Columns and Rank / Xerox who has also been spotted in Lace Curtain and Total Control. Familiar elements of West's songwriting creep out from the speakers this time around, albeit in a more adventurous and personal manner - swathed in analog and FM synths, pinned down by near-funk drum machines, and with a vision expanded into the past and future. In previous incarnations, West's alienated and fragile vocals have battled with jangling guitars and distortion, but Liberation sets free his woes and ruminations into space. Taking inspiration from the heyday of Mute Records and electronic dance music's early experiments with sampling, Liberation's debut LP is ten songs of the road, about the nameless ghosts on the highway, accidental lovers, the alienation of the stranger in a strange land, the unbearable weight of freedom. Esteemed engineer Mikey Young's (Total Control / Eddy Current Suppression Ring) production prowess makes for a distilled yet inviting loneliness."
|
|
Artist |
Title |
Format |
Label |
Catalog # |
|
|
CD
|
|
LSSN 036CD
|
"'How to find a centre here? The output? The hum-drum of the street's daily accent compels the sense of the immediate, the terrestrial; and then those primitive, primeval-seeming echoes of the earliest beginnings of the big bang and its wave-sound simultaneously releasing Sun Ra's reverb sensation of end time! This should not be danceable but these guys are suggesting the possibility of rhythm in the inchoate. Believe me, you can't miss the Lagos Faaji, Sakara flow, Awurebe, Afrobeat slices; its jazz, highlife / Euro-Afro funk / rock / rap and seedy night echoes, too. But in their otherworldly dimension. No matter the accolades, I will encourage a therapy of some sorts to the creators of this production.' --Sola Olorunyomi"
|
|
|