Indierock | Alternative Tape 439 Items

The pre-cursor to Mid-Air Thief's cult-acclaimed album Crumbling, Gongjoon Doduk exhibits a distinct universality, merging disparate sounds and styles into a cohesive, electronic-infused folk amalgam that tactfully blurs the lines between organic and synthetic. Listeners are led through enrapturing passages of swirling melodies underscored with eloquent plucks, strums, and bursts of bubbly glitches. Individual phrases drift into one another as if in a dream, cohered by entrancing hooks and vocal soundscapes. Gongjoon Doduk is a compelling accomplishment of both composition and production, bending as it does to its unique contours of consonance and dissonance, always resolving to a place of calm and beauty.

The majority of the nine slithery songs that comprise supernowhere’s Skinless Takes A Flight were originally cuts that didn’t make their debut Gestalt. But after collectively moving across the country from Burlington, VT to Seattle, WA, the scrapped tracks transformed substantially into florid, at times entrancing compositions. The pulsating “Circles” opens the album with lilted reflections on empathy, breathing in midtempo syncopation with subdued guitar tip-toeing around melodic drumming. supernowhere’s cast of Meredith Davey (bass, vocals), Kurt Pacing (guitar, vocals), and Matt Anderson (drums) share a collective ambition for maximum interplay and collaborative writing, materializing cleanly knotted compositions that evoke vivid dreamscapes and the profound epiphanies drawn from them (“The Hand”, “Ecdysis”). On upbeat “Dirty Tangle” Davey’s voice glides through Pacing’s angular arpeggiations, carving her own rhythmic lane with her distinctive, descanting singing style. "Skinless Takes A Flight" notably would not have come to fruition without the help of engineer Dylan Hanwright (mix. Gulfer, mem. Great Grandpa, I Kill Giants), whom the band met shortly after relocating to Seattle. Hanwright offered up the studio where the album was recorded as a temporary rehearsal and writing space during the pandemic, which in turn gave him intimate familiarity with the music, resulting in an album that was recorded as intimately as it was written. Hanwright helped make the little moments shine too, as heard in the fleeting vocal harmonies on "Augury", or the spiraling chaos in "Basement Window," a further testament to the collaborative, everyone’s-input-matters nature that characterizes supernowhere’s dizzying yet meditative sophomore record.

Erica Eso is a Brooklyn and Kingston, NY-based project led by composer / vocalist / producer Weston Minissali. Minissali has participated in New York’s music scene for more than decade as a member of projects like avant-rock post-pop band Cloud Becomes Your Hand and chimeric musique concrète experimentalists VaVatican, while his work at the head of Erica Eso has manifested with varied ensembles on albums including 2019 and 129 Dreamless GMG. Minissali’s music under the Erica Eso banner fuses compositional strategies of the avant garde, including the use of microtonal note voicings and advanced synthesis, with songwriting in the vein of art pop. His lush, tightly structured songs teem with melismatic topline melodies, layered vocal harmonies, and fast-shifting narrative arcs, all built over a sturdy instrumental foundation. 192, the first Erica Eso release with Hausu Mountain, captures the project in the quintet formation that solidified in 2017 and rigorously rehearsed in the years that followed. Their recordings and the live shows from this period, which culminated in their final performance in this configuration in October of 2019, document the music of Erica Eso at a peak of live band complexity and near telepathic collaborative energy, giving life to Minissali’s music with a more solidified ensemble of hands and voices than ever before. In his attempt to balance pop tradition with experimentation, Minissali fills 192 with songs that work as much on the level of instinctive heartstring-tugging grandeur as armchair analysis. Listeners can lose themselves in the mosaic of pulsating synth tones and try to trace the sprawling structural maps that each song lays out, or full-on melt when confronted with those lead melodies and vocal harmonies.

Naoise Roo (“Nee-Sha Roo”) is a musician from Dublin, Ireland. Lilith is her debut album, originally released in 2015 available for the first time worldwide. Often described as the Irish PJ Harvey or Kate Bush, Roo often draws inspiration from mythology in her music to explore complex conceptions of feminine power and identity. The album title itself is a direct homage to the ancient Hebrew and Biblical Lilith – Adam’s first wife and, depending upon the version of the tale referenced, also the first witch or woman of power who eschewed male dominance. The album’s breakout track “Whore” is an examination of female sexuality and power as threats to male society and mainstream religion. The lead track has been remixed by famed producer John Agnello (Dinosaur Jr, Waxahatchee) and will be released on March 8th, 2022 to commemorate International Women’s Day. Single cover by Irish photographer & filmmaker Bob Gallagher.

Turbo World is the sunny and shady brainchild of co-conspirators Stephe Cooper and Caroline Bennett. Best known as the mastermind behind avant-prog boppers Cloud Becomes Your Hand and a member of Guerilla Toss, Cooper continues to stand out for his madcap compositions that embody the spirit and ethos of avant rock groups Aksak Maboul & Slapp Happy. Joining forces with Bennett, the manic scribe, singer, and multimedia wizard of digital hardcore duo Stice, their debut album, My Challenger, is an experimental prog-opera that leads listeners on a surreal, animated jaunt through the world of organized crime. The album’s north star is Joey the Hitman aka Max Kurschner, whose 1973 interview on The David Susskind Show, forever immortalized on YouTube, serves as inspiration and source material.

Mal Devisa is the songwriting, liberation, and poetry project of multifarious artist Deja Carr. Starting in 2014 and breaking through with 2016's Kiid, Mal Devisa's work spans a selfmade spectrum of sound from gravitic, soulful rock to soliloquy to unabashed hip hop. Although known for her unmistakable, smoldering voice and loop-based, bass-forward compositions, Carr's talents also extend to reaches of spoken word and production, paralleled by aspirations to start both a youth foundation and Afrobeat orchestra. Such boundless inspiration is a central facet of Mal Devisa's work, whose sonically and narratively unrestrained passages teem with empathy and liberatory visions for a better world.

Owing to a focused period of growth as a home recordist and producer, there is a distinct, refreshing current that charges outtakes from “bad summer”, the latest full-length album from Philly-via-Portland’s cool original (fka cool american). What under other circumstances might have been a string of homespun indie rock songs is instead an energized pop-focused collection of tracks born from what Nathan Tucker describes as “the contrast between total formlessness and rigid claustrophobia”. As heard almost immediately on album opener “monad, no windows”, an electric atmosphere envelops outtakes from “bad summer”. Pitch-shifted vocal samples and previously-scrapped drum recordings fill out the overture, setting the table for a patchwork of repurposed, resampled ideas shaped into songs that rarely end up in the same place they started. The unhurried and sentimental “i just need a second” boasts the full spectrum of cool original’s songwriting prowess: foregrounded, infectious melody over subtly chopped and screwed drums comprise the foundation for Tucker’s own take on a classic road song—a marked contrast to “breaking my own rules”, an experimental pop number unlike any previous cool original work. Similar contrasts abound throughout outtakes, making for a listening experience that’s equal parts rejuvenating and unpredictable.

"A mysterious object is revealed; the drum sound of the rite arouses; flares are blazing; the soul slides through water’s surface; the breath lights up the air; the body as a sacrifice, I hear myself, in this dream." The 12 songs that constitute Dreams, the third full-length from the Kaohsiung trio Elephant Gym, explore the deep spacetime continuum that consciousness cannot capture. Beyond the trio’s staple instrumentation of guitar, bass, and drumset, Dreams blends in wind instruments, traditional drums, and Taiwanese narrative. Through collaboration with Hakka singer-songwriter Lin Sheng Xiang and pop musician 9m88, notable for their accomplishments in jazz, soul, and R&B, Dreams is a sweeping narrative about a fantastical dream that crosses the boundary. After pressing play, please do close your eyes, and enjoy the dream.

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Emerald Sea, the third album from New York-based audiovisual project Sound of Ceres, tells the story of how the universe comes to know itself. Rendered in dynamic, ambitious orchestral passages, it forms the basis of future stage performances intended to draw its half-submerged narrative into the visual sphere. In its dreamlike impressions, it could also be the soundtrack to a long-forgotten early musical film - an experience that delighted and transported audiences and then vanished from record, surviving only in the imprint of memory. Written in three acts, Emerald Sea follows two deities who trail each other through the furthest reaches of experience. There is the Universe, all that exists, voiced by performance artist Marina Abramovic. And there is Venus, transformer of matter and avatar of love, sung by the group's lead vocalist Karen Hover (who goes by k). Through a dazzling suite of songs inspired by Les Baxter's midcentury exotica, Maurice Ravel's ballet Daphnis et Chloé, and Gustav Holst's The Planets, Emerald Sea studies intimacy on both an interpersonal scale and a cosmological one. Connection and severance, joy and grief, wonder and bewilderment all tumble through its scope. In the widest frame, the universe begins, meets itself, and ends. In the closest frame, two people encounter each other, grow close, and then separate. These stories are two views of the same fractal. In every intimacy human beings cultivate,every rush of connection, no matter how fleeting, we reenact the universe for ourselves. In its current cycle, Sound of Ceres is Derrick Bozich, songwriter, harpist, and flautist; Jacob Graham, synthesist, costumer, and light designer; K Hover, vocalist, lyricist, costumer, and choreographer; and Ryan Hover, songwriter and producer. They recorded Emerald Sea in collaboration with Jon Sonneberg at Ka-Boom studio in Ohio. It was mixed by Nicholas Principe and mastered by Kramer.

LIFE are anchored by their hometown; the geography, history and community has always been the inspiration behind their creativity and on their third LP, North East Coastal Town, the band pay homage to Hull and its folk. North East Coastal Town is mature; it finds the band at the height of their powers as they carve-up a wide-screen, brooding body of work that is drenched in a sense of belonging and reflection but still impressively maintains their trademark swagger and ear for pop sensibilities and guitar hooks."Hull and the surrounding area runs through our DNA and has shaped us, weathered us, empowered us, embraced us and made us feel accepted. North East Coastal Town is our love letter to the city. The album is an ode to kinship and relationship with its musical and lyrical spine picking out themes of love, desire, beauty, horror, chaos, pride and most importantly the sense of belonging. Upon writing and recording this album it was important to us that this sense of belonging was also reflected in the album's craft and therefore we used locally based studios, equipment, gear, and the community around us to establish what it means to belong in a North East Coastal Town."When the pandemic gripped the world in March 2020, LIFE were in the midst of promoting their acclaimed second album - A Picture Of Good Health (Sept 2019); they had just completed an arena support tour with Kaiser Chiefs in the UK, a triumphant main stage appearance at Rockaway Beach and flown to New York for New Colossus Festival ahead of a packed SXSW and a US tour with IDLES. They scrambled home on the last plane back from New York on 17th March.The album was BBC 6 Music's Album Of The Day, BBC Radio 1's Album Of The Weekend and was one of BBC 6Music's Albums of The Year; all four singles from the album were play-listed at 6Music, and the band were nominated for two AIM Awards 2020 - Best Live Act and Best (Difficult) Second Album and they played major UK festivals including Glastonbury, Latitude, Reading Festiva...

Australian art-punk group Tropical Fuck Storm continues its hotstreak of brain-bending releases with Moonburn, a maxi-singlecassette out on Joyful Noise Recordings.Side A offers new song, "Moonburn," a ballad in the classic TFSstyle written and sung by Gareth Liddiard. TFS bassist FionaKitschin steps up to the microphone on "Ann," a cover of TheStooges that swaps Ron Asheton's scorching guitar part for aderanged sound collage of guitar freakouts, siren noises, andelectronics.Side B includes an acoustic take on the fan-favorite song "Aspirin(Slight Return)" and a haunting cover of Talking Heads'"Heaven."

Since the band's inception in 1992, Built to Spill founder Doug Martsch intended his beloved band to be a collaborative project, an ever-evolving group of musicians making music and playing live together. "I wanted to switch the lineup for many reasons. Each time we finish a record I want the next one to sound totally different. It's fun to play with people who bring in new styles and ideas," says Martsch. "And it's nice to be in a band with people who aren't sick of me yet." Following several albums and EPs on Pacific Northwest independent labels, including the indie-rock classic, There's Nothing Wrong With Love, released on Sub Pop offshoot Up Records in 1994, Martsch signed with Warner Brothers from 1995 to 2016. He and his rotating cast of cohorts recorded six more great albums during that time - Perfect From Now On, Keep It Like a Secret, Ancient Melodies of the Future, You In Reverse, Untethered Moon, There Is No Enemy. There was also a live album, and a solo record, Now You Know. While the band's impeccable recorded catalog is the entry point, Built to Spill live is an essential force of its own: heavy, psychedelic, melodic, and visceral tunes blaring from amps that sound as if they're powered by Mack trucks. Now in 2022, Built to Spill returns with When the Wind Forgets Your Name, Martsch's unbelievably great new album (and his eighth full-length)... with a fresh new label. "I'm psyched: I've wanted to be on Sub Pop since I was a teenager. And I think I'm the first fifty year-old they've ever signed." (The rumors are true, we love quinquagenarians_) When the Wind Forgets Your Name continues expanding the Built to Spill universe in new and exciting ways. In 2018 Martsch's good fortune and keen intuition brought him together with Brazilian lo-fi punk artist and producer Le Almeida, and his long-time collaborator, Joao Casaes, both of the psychedelic jazz rock band, Orua. Martsch fell in love with their music the moment he heard it. So when he needed a new band for shows in Brazil, he asked them, and the partnership went so well Martsch, Almeida, and Casaes continued playing together throughout 2019, touring the US and Europe and ultimately recording the bass and drum tracks for When the Wind Forgets Your Name at Doug's rehearsal space in Boise. After Martsch tracked guitars and vocals, they group collaborated from afar to mix the album. What emerged is When the Wind Forgets Your Name, a complex and cohesive blend of the artists' distinct musical ideas. Alongside Built to Spill's poetic lyrics and themes, the experimentation and attention to detail produces an album full of unique, vivid, and timeless sounds, from guitar-driven rock odes to REM and Dinosaur Jr to bluesy '60s-style anthems to dub-reggae-inspired instrumentation. It may have taken us 30 years of obvious fandom and courtship, but on September 9, 2022, Sub Pop Records is unabashedly proud to finally release an excellent new album from Built to Spill: When the Wind Forgets Your Name. Sometimes persistence pays off.

Like the many Banded Stilts that spread across the cover of her newest album Flood, Stella Donnelly is wading into uncharted territory. Here, she finds herself discovering who she is as an artist among the flock, and how abundant one individual can be. Flood is Donnelly's record of this rediscovery: the product of months of risky experimentation, hard moments of introspection, and a lot of moving around. Donnelly's early reflections on the relationship between the individual and the many can be traced back to her time in the rainforests of Bellingen, where she took to birdwatching as both a hobby and an escape in a borderrestricted world. By paying closer attention to the natural world around her, Donnelly recalls "I was able to lose that feeling of anyone's reaction to me. I forgot who I was as a musician, which was a humbling experience of just being; being my small self." Reconnecting with this `small self' allowed Donnelly to tap into creative wells she didn't know existed. Soon songs were coming to her in a way she could not control and over the coming months, Donnelly accumulated 43 tracks as she moved out of Bellingen and around the country, often finding herself displaced due to border restrictions and a tough rental market. Though the writing of Flood was an intensely personal undertaking, Donnelly still saw the recording process as one of her most collaborative projects yet. Along with her band members, co-producing the record beside Anna Laverty and Methyl Ethyl's Jake Webb helped to foster an important spontaneity in the studio. With Webb, Donnelly could "dig in" and discover a "forward-leaning sound" she'd been searching for, while Laverty's ability to "capture the piano" and discern the "perfect take" allowed the songwriter to take risks, many of which have clearly paid off. Looking back at the Banded Stilt, Donnelly ultimately appreciates how when "seen in a crowd they create an optical illusion, but on its own it's this singular piece of art." While each song in Flood is a singular artwork unto itself, the collective shares all of Stella Donnelly in abundance: her inner child, her nurturing self, her nightmare self; all of herself has gone into the making of this record, and although it would take an ocean to fathom everything she feels, it's well worth diving in.

Smash cut to Kiwi Jr.'s third album, Chopper, overseen by trusted pilot Dan Boeckner (Wolf Parade, Handsome Furs) on storied Sub Pop Records. Turning nocturnal with necks mock turtle, our Local Kiwi Jr. takes neon flight off the digital cliff - like The Monkees starring in Blade Runner; like Michael Mann directs Encino Man. Ten songs with synth shimmer, zen gongs with yard strimmer. The signs along the highway read "less BAR, More Noir AHEAD." Ah, those late summer, Joe Strummer, Home on the Range Rover Blues. There's a melancholy to all forms of flight, and the view out the Chopper is as hazy as it gets: mission-oriented, both stealth and self-realized. This album is decidedly (yet almost secretly) anti-patio-sunscreen-Beach Boys bachelor cruise sing-a-long. Sure, these songs let a little light through the blinds, but they sting insomnia, corrupt mayors, Kennedy Curses, sex tapes, and deer rifles. Chopper is the bird's eye view of the big event - a real nighttime character of oil stain, film grain, search light, night flight. It is muscular and fragile; loud yet quiet: both an observer and somehow the observed spectacle itself. What was slack in the slacker phase, got tauter, with lacquer glaze. Slick gloss, rightened wrongs; murdered boss, promoted pawns. With Boeckner transmitting high-voltage shocks upon every reach for a familiar instrument, Kiwi Jr. expands the palette with string machine song, synthesizered oblong, and Dentyne Classic Menthol vocals from area soprano Dorothea Paas (US Girls, Badge Epoch Ensemble) like the missing piece all along. Kiwi Jr. brings the Chopper to a new space, demilitarizing the technology just like flasks, aviators, and cargo shorts. Graceful in the air above, but when the Chopper lands, there's chaos on the ground. Kiwi Jr. shout, "Look Out!" When it gets close, it'll blow the hat right off of your head. Hold onto your hats, Babies. Kiwi Jr. is Jeremy Gaudet vocals and guitar, Brian Murphy guitar, Mike Walker bass, Brohan Moore drums, and everybody played a little bit of keyboard.

"The best music reflects a wide-screen view of the world back at us, helping distill the universal into something far more personal. Since forming in Austin in 2004, The Black Angels have become standard-bearers for modern psych-rock that does exactly that, which is one of many reasons why the group’s new album, Wilderness of Mirrors, feels so aptly named. In the five years since the band’s prior album, Death Song, and the two-plus years spent working on Wilderness of Mirrors, pandemics, political tumult and the ongoing devastation of the environment have provided ample fodder for the Black Angels’ signature sonic approach.

Wilderness of Mirrors expertly refines the Black Angels’ psychedelic rock attack alongside a host of intriguing sounds and textures. There are classic blasts of fuzzed-out guitars meant to simultaneously perk up the ears and jumpstart the mind, alongside melancholy, acoustic guitar-driven newfound experiments. Mellotron, strings, and other keyboards also play a more prominent role on Wilderness of Mirrors than ever before.

Even amidst these new experimentations, The Black Angels remain masterfully true to psych-rock forebears such as Syd Barrett, Roky Erickson, Arthur Lee and the members of the Velvet Underground, all of whom are namechecked on album highlight “The River.” “The Velvet Underground song ‘I’ll Be Your Mirror’ – that’s what every Black Angels album has been about,” says vocalist/bassist Alex Maas. “You can’t work out your struggles unless you bring them to the forefront and think about them. If we can all think about them, maybe we can help save ourselves.”"

Julien Ehrlich and Max Kakacek could hear the staggering differences in the songs they were writing for their third album as Whitney, Spark _ the buoyant drum loops, the effortless falsetto hooks, the coruscant keyboard lines. They suddenly sounded like a band reimagined, their once-ramshackle folk-pop now brimming with unprecedented gusto and sheen. But could they see it, too? So in the ad hoc studio the Chicago duo built in the living room of their rented Portland bungalow, a shared 2020 escape hatch amid breakups and lockdowns, Julien and Max decided to find out. Somewhere between midnight and dawn every night, their brains refracted by the late hour and light psychedelics, they'd play their latest creations while a hardware store disco ball spun overhead and slowed-down music videos from megastars spooled silently on YouTube. Did their own pop songs _ so much more immediate and modern than their hazy origins _ fit such big-budget reels? "We'd come to the conclusion we weren't going to be filming Super 8 videos to this stuff anymore," Julien remembers with a grin. "How about something more hi-fi, cinematic?" When the footage and the tunes linked, Julien and Max knew they had done it, that they'd finally found Whitney's sound. Spark reintroduces Whitney as a contemporary syndicate of classic pop, its dozen imaginative and endearing tracks wrapping fetching melodies around paisley-print Dilla beats and luxuriant electronics. What's more, Whitney reduces three years of extreme emotional highs and lows into 38 brisk but deep minutes, each of these 12 tracks a singable lesson in what it is they (and, really, we) have all survived. The recalcitrant ennui of opener "nothing REMAINS," the devastating loss of "TERMINAL," the sun-streaked renewal of "real Love": However surprising it may sound, Spark is less a radical reinvention for Whitney than an honest accounting of how it feels when you move out of your past and into your present, when you take the next steps of your lives and careers at once and without apology. Spark maintains the warmth and ease of Whitney's early work; these songs glow with the newness of now. Listen closely, and you'll notice frequent references to smoke and fire throughout Spark, itself a double entendre for inspiring something new or burning down the old. Max and Julien were indeed in Portland for the Fall of 2020, when smoke from nearby fires choked the city at record levels. It was terrifying and tragic, but they pressed on. "We found a way to live while the world was burning/Real life was caving in," Julien sings almost merrily during "back THEN," an anthem for finding out what's on the other side of hardship. In these dire days, scientists speak increasingly of serotiny, an evolutionary miracle that causes some trees to release seeds only amid a season of fire. That is how Spark often feels _ Whitney's circumstances were so fraught on so many levels that they hung "the past_out to dry" and began again, finding a fresh version of themselves, their relationship, and their band after the blaze. Max and Julien are back in Chicago now, sharing a cozy walkup with a little studio, where they're already building songs for the next Whitney album. They're both in happy romances, too. Now that they let the past burn, everything is new for Max and Julien. Spark is not only Whitney's best album; it is an inspiring testament to perseverance and renewal, to best friends trusting each another enough to carry one another to the other side of this season of woe.

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Gather your loved ones, Together is here. Duster's fourth album is a 13-song exploration of comfortable, interplanetary goth. A sonic vaseline of submerged guitars, solder-burned synths, and over-driven rhythm tracks. "I know people say, `Oh Duster music so sad, we've even said it ourselves before," Clay Parton said. "But it's a lot more like absurdism than nihilism."

The third LP from the New Zealand quartet houses 12 jewels of tight, guitar-heavy songs that worm their way into your head, an incandescent collision of power-pop and skuzz. The Beths wanted to make an album meant to be experienced live, for both the listeners and themselves. They wanted it to be fun - to hear, to play - in spite of the prickling anxiety throughout the lyrics, the fear of change and struggle to cope.

For The Driver Era, music can't and shouldn't be forced. The band, formed by brothers Ross and Rocky Lynch in 2018 while on tour with their former group R5, aims to embrace the present moment, creating songs that reflect each experience and feeling as it comes.

It's a philosophy that pervades all of the duo's releases, from their debut Summer Mixtape (expected to release later this summer) features the band's two new tracks - the Rolling Stone- backed 'Keep Moving Forward' and lead single 'Malibu', inspired by summertime escapism.

In between polishing off the new songs and hitting the road, Ross is also a critically acclaimed actor (he drew rave reviews for his title role in the serial killer biopic My Friend Dahmer and recently starred in Netflix's The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina).

For their Drag City debut, the enigmatic duo expand into eight-armed wonder; all the better to reach ever-deeper into their bag o' tricks. Slinky and sliding elegantly, the kids forge tunes with a harmony of ambiguity and nostalgia, effortless yet precise, and rounded with thick bottom - a dancing clash of cognition and dissonance!Since 2015, Kamikaze Palm Tree have been a relative mystery. Now, in times no less mysterious, Drag City welcomes them, celebrating the energy of their second LP, where KPT play their offbeat strain of 21st century rock.Making MINT CHIP, Dylan Hadley and Cole Berliner reach deeper into their bag of tricks than ever before, dialoguing with an absurd shared intent they haven't yet paused to question. The off-center pieces gathered together for Good Boy have given way to pulsing aquatic compositions on MINT CHIP. Cole's guitar tones, wire thin, bell-like, bluesily downtuned, slinky and sliding elegantly, arc purposeful around their peripherals. Dylan's kit work, effortless yet precise, grounded with heavy bottom, drives and interacts organically with all the emerging structure, nailing down finely detailed frames and canvases to backdrop her singing and the unremitting landing of melodies and songs. With the addition of Josh Puklavetz, things that didn't make sense before - like bass - are now on the beach, fully lotioned, essence to essence. Violin and clarinet (Laena Myers Ionita and Brad Caulkins, respectively) round out the tonal spectrum. All strung together in the foothills of Altadena's Wiggle World Studios with Hartling back in the engineer's seat and Tim Presley producing the proceedings!

First time to cassette for 2006 album, yellow cassette & yellow norelco box, limited edition of 100.Limited edition reissue of the final Brandtson album, Hello, Control. Features previously unreleased alternate mixes from album producer Ed Rose and marks the first time the 2006 album will be available on vinyl and cassette. Presented with all new artwork. A pivotal release and the closing chapter on over a decade of making music for the Cleveland quartet. The first album with longtime friend and collaborator Adam Boose joining on bass, and the fifth release with producer Ed Rose. From the dusty lull of album opener "A Thousand Years" a new Brandtson begins to emerge. Putting a ready for the floor sneer to the road worn hallmarks of their back catalog, and taking a decided step into pop territory on singles, "Nobody Dances Anymore" and "Earthquakes and Sharks". The alternate Ed Rose mixes were curated from the bands archives and have been previously unreleased in any format. Originally released by The Militia Group in 2006. The 2022 reissue of Hello, Control was mixed by Ed Rose, mastered by Adam Boose, and lacquer masters cut by Bob Weston at Chicago Mastering Service.

The tenth studio album by Bjork on cassette tape.

each album always starts with a feeling
that i try to shape into sound
the feeling was landing
( after my last album utopia which was all island in the clouds element air and no bass )
on the earth and digging my feet into the ground
it was also woven into how i experienced the "now"
this time around 7 billion of us did it together
nesting in our homes quarantining
being long enough in one place that we shot down roots
my new album "fossora" is about that
it is a word i made up
it is the feminine of fossore ( digger, delver, ditcher )
so in short it means "she who digs" ( into the ground )
so sonically it is about bass , heavy bottom-end ,
we have 6 bass clarinets and punchy sub
i would like to especially thank bergur þórisson and heba kadry
and side project , el guincho , hamrahlíð choir , soraya nayyar , clarinet sextet murmuri , siggi string quartet ensemble , emilie nicolas , serpentwithfeet
viibra and last but not least : sindri and dóa .
visuals were made by viðar logi , james merry , m/m , nick knight , andy huang , edda , isshehungry , tomi , sayaka , sunna , sara and heimir
and my ever so loyal and magnificent team : derek , rosamary , catherine , chiara , hilma and móa

Trauma Ray is a band from Fort Worth, TX that blends grunge with shoegaze.

All the songs on Transmission are written and performed by Trauma Ray Trauma Ray is Nicholas Bobotas, Darren Baun, Coleman Pruitt, Jonathan Perez, and Uriel Avila. Instrumentation recorded by Elliott Page Vocals recorded by Brandon Sanders Mixed and Mastered by Zac Montez

Lacing is a fuzzy, grungy, & dreamy band from Chattanooga, TN. These tapes are professionally-duplicated cassettes w/ 4 panel color printed J-cards, housed in clear Norelco cases. Program repeats on both sides.

Several things happened before a warm day when I met the four members of Frankie Cosmos in a Brooklyn studio to begin making their album. Greta Kline spent a few years living with her family and writing a mere 100 songs, turning her empathy anywhere from the navel to the moon, rendering it all warm, close and reflexively humorous. In music, everyone loves a teen sensation, but Kline has never been more fascinating than now, a decade into being one of the most prolific songwriters of her generation. She's lodged in my mind amongst authors, other observational alchemists like Rachel Cusk or Sheila Heti, but she's funnier, which is a charm endemic to musicians. Meanwhile Frankie Cosmos, a rare, dwindling democratic entity called a band, had been on pandemic hiatus with no idea if they'd continue. In the openness of that uncertainty they met up, planning to hang out and play music together for the first time in nearly 500 days. There, whittling down the multitude of music to work with, they created Inner World Peace, a collection of Greta's songs changed and sculpted by their time together. While Kline's musical taste at the time was leaning toward aughts indie rock she'd loved as a teenager, keyboardist Lauren Martin and drummer Luke Pyenson cite "droning, meditation, repetition, clarity and intentionality," as well as "'70s folk and pop" as a reference for how they approached their parts. Bassist/guitarist Alex Bailey says that at the time he referred to it as their "ambient" or "psych" album. Somewhere between those textural elements and Kline's penchant for concise pop, Inner World Peace finds its balance. The first order of business upon setting up camp in Brooklyn's Figure 8 studios was to project giant colorful slides the band had made for each track. Co-producing with Nate Mendelsohn, my Shitty Hits Recording partner, we aimed for FC's aesthetic idiosyncrasies to shine. The mood board for "Magnetic Personality" has a neon green and black checkerboard, a screen capture of the game Street Fighter with "K.O." in fat red letters, and a cover of Mad Magazine that says "Spy Vs. Spy! The Top Secret Files." On tracks like "F.O.O.F." (Freak Out On Friday), "Fragments" and "Aftershook," the group are at their most psychedelic and playful, interjecting fuzz solos, bits of percussion, and other sonically adventurous ear candy. An internal logic strengthens everything, and in their proggiest moments, Frankie Cosmos are simply a one-take band who don't miss. When on Inner World Peace they sound wildly, freshly different, it may just be that they're coming deeper into their own. Inner World Peace excels in passing on the emotions it holds. When in the towering "Empty Head" Kline sings of wanting to let thoughts slide away, her voice is buoyed on a bed of synths and harmonium as tranquility abounds. When her thoughts become hurried and full of desire, so does the band, and she leaps from word to word as if unable to contain them all. As a group, they carry it all deftly, and with constant regard for Kline's point of view. Says Greta, "To me, the album is about perception. It's about the question of "who am I?" and whether or not the answer matters. It's about quantum time, the possibilities of invisible worlds. The album is about finding myself floating in a new context. A teenager again, living with my parents. An adult, choosing to live with my family in an act of love. Time propelled us forward, aged us, and also froze. If you don't leave the house, who are you to the world? Can you take the person you discover there out with you?" - Katie Von Schleicher

Green and red cassette shells Dolby B noise reduction Download card Will have some cool on-body printed design when we come up with it… you know, we always do.

Sorrow Wave duo BRING HER return with their second LP and first album since 2019, Comfort In The Shame. Based out of Pittsburgh, BRING HER play a distinctive brand of somber darkwave, defined by haunting and magnetic vocals over pounding and obsessive drum machines, penetrating guitar chords, and eerie and harrowing synths. Using DIY recording methods coupled with sound shaping, heavy layering, and meticulous editing the new album sees the two-piece at a new height, adding to the urgency and crushing weight of their already brooding sound. Elements almost industrial in nature shine through these 10 new tracks, yet the duo stays as gloomy and dismal as the self-described Sorrow Wave moniker implies.

Demons is a heavy four-piece punk band from Norfolk Virginia that pull from dimensions of noise rock, sludge, and hardcore to generate a sound that has been described as "raw and confrontational fury." Demons newest offering, 'Swallow', is a blast of all-killer-no-filler force that will appeal to fans of music characterized by chaotic energy and deeply rooted aggression expressed in "beautiful balance between ultra-catchy, driving riffs, burly grooves, and angular dissonance."

Smut shines a spotlight on the sounds of the 90s acrossgenres - a record scratch, a spacey synth line, a breakcorebeat - all while maintaining freshness and originality. Thecollaborative project of vocalist Tay Roebuck, guitaristAndrew Min, bassist and synth-player Bell Cenower,guitarist and synth-player Sam Ruschman and drummerAidan O'Connor, Smut have conquered national tours withBully, Swirlies, Nothing, and WAVVES. Based in Chicago, IL,the band hits their stride in `How the Light Felt'. It is anexercise in coping, an electrifying statement of hope in thethick of resounding loss, and a love letter to the peoplethat keep us going. With their powers combined, Smutmeld the songwriting sensibilities of Oasis with the vocaldelivery of the Cocteau Twins - the percussive grooves of...

Technological agitation. Narcissism fatigue. A galaxy of isolation. These are the new norms keeping Weyes Blood (aka Natalie Mering) up at night and the themes at the heart of her latest release, And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow. The celestial-influenced folk album is her follow-up to the acclaimed Titanic Rising. (Pitchfork, NPR, and The Guardian admiringly named it one of 2019's best.) While Titanic Rising was an observation of doom to come, And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow is about being in the thick of it: a search for an escape hatch to liberate us from algorithms and ideological chaos. "We're in a fully functional shit show," Mering says. "My heart is a glow stick that's been cracked, lighting up my chest in an explosion of earnestness." And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow opens with the wistful, winsome "It's Not Just Me, It's Everybody," a song about the interconnectivity of all beings, despite the fraying of society around us. "I was asking a lot of questions while writing these songs. Hyper-isolation kept coming up," Mering says. "Our culture relies less and less on people. Something is off, and even though the feeling appears differently for each individual, it is universal." Other tracks follow in kind. The lullaby-like "Grapevine" chronicles the splintering of a human connection. The otherworldly dirge "God Turn Me into a Flower" serves as allegory about our collective hubris. "The Worst Is Done" is an ominous warning, set against a deceivingly breezy pop melody. "Chaos is natural. But so is negentropy, or the tendency for things to fall into order," she says. "These songs may not be manifestos or solutions, but I know they shed light on the meaning of our contemporary disillusionment."