Western Vinyl Vinyl, CD & Tape 65 Items

Way Through is a collaborative album by Toronto musicians Chris Cummings, JosephShabason, and Thom Gill (as Cici Arthur). Inspired by moments of discovery in familiarplaces, the album's title reflects the feeling of uncovering hidden paths in life. Musically, itblends mid-century influences like Jobim and Sinatra, with producer-instrumentalistsShabason and Gill crafting lush, expansive soundscapes. Featuring a 30-piece orchestraled by Owen Pallett, the album brings a grand scale to Cummings' intimate, reflectivelyrics.The project began in 2020 when Cummings lost his job and turned to full-time music forthe first time in his life. His collaborators tailored the arrangements to showcase his understatedvocal delivery against sweeping orchestral backdrops. Songs like "Cartwheels forCoins" and "Prior Times" explore themes of regret and emotional complexity, contrastingthe grandeur of the music with Cummings' quiet introspection.Tracks like "Damaged Goods" provide upbeat moments with doo-wop harmonies, whilethe cinematic closer "No Fight Or Flight" emphasizes the filmic quality of the album.Through its orchestral richness and deeply personal lyrics, Way Through captures thetension between ambition and realism, offering a poignant reflection on life's unpredictablejourney.

The Anne, EP is the afterword to Joseph Shabason's acclaimed 2018 harmonic suite Anne, through which he examined and processed his mother's struggle with Parkinson's disease. Employing a small supporting cast that includes vocalist Dan Bejar (Destroyer) and guitarist Thomas Gill (Owen Pallett), Anne, EP spotlights the Toronto saxophonist as he builds empathic tropospheres of woodwinds and synthesizers, deepening the sentiment established by the EP's companion album. In doing so, Shabason further cements jazz, ambient sound design, and new age revivalism into a timely new genre all his own.

Across eight tracks that mesh spacious, jazz-laced composition with fourth-world and adult-contemporary tonality, Toronto saxophonist Joseph Shabason sketches an auditory map of the transcendence, unity, conditioning, and eventual renunciation of his upbringing in an Islamic and Jewish dual-faith household. The resulting album The Fellowship bears the name of the insular Islamic community Shabason's traditionally Jewish parents belonged to from a time before he was even born; a mental and spiritual push-pull which continued shaping, even controlling, his outlook well into his adulthood. As a listening experience The Fellowship follows a chronological arc that spans three generations covering his parents' early lives, his own spiritual and physical adolescence, and his subsequent struggle to eschew the problematic habituations of such a conflicted past. On The Fellowship, as on prior albums that bear his name, Joseph Shabason does what only the best instrumental music makers can: tell a story with emotional clarity that conveys even the subtlest of feelings, all without singing a single word. As wordless as ever-- with as complex a theme as ever-- this album may be his most emotionally articulate yet. Most importantly, those lost in the woods of repression and self-doubt that organized religion can be at its worst now have The Fellowship to help guide them into a softer light. R.I.Y.L. Brian Eno, Jon Hassell, Beverly Glenn-Copeland, Laraaji, Robert Rich, Harold Budd

Art Feynman (aka accomplished recording artist and producer Luke Temple) stitches art pop, Nigerian highlife, worldbeat, and other lesser-known genres into a musical quilt that displays his unmistakable guile and eccentric songcraft. On his sophomore album Half Price at 3:30 he delivers songs that side-smile while pointing out the emotional sinkholes that whirl beneath the most overlooked, seemingly commonplace scenarios. As effortlessly as he inhabits his Art Feynman character he also slips into the lives of other personalities, both living and fictional. Where previous entries in the Luke Temple discography -- including his well-liked former group Here We Go Magic -- have utilized organic timbres even while sailing far from the guitar-and-drums shore, Half Price sees him employing drum machines, slightly glossier production, and even autotune with a tasteful balance that suggests these tools have been in his kit all along. The result affectionately evokes guerrilla recording predecessors like Francis Bebey, Arthur Russell, and Haruomi Hosono in musicological detail, yet it's Temple's hard-won creative voice that resounds over top of it all facing Half Price forward instead of nostalgically backward.

Grooms' Exit Index combines the abandon of pop with the unease of American life in 2017, cloaking its hooks in a clamor of samples...

Ex-Here We Go Magic frontman Luke Temple emerges with a new project, LukeTemple and The Cascading Moms. Debut album, Certain Limitations.Lauded for his contributions to Here We Go Magic and Art Feynman, Luke Templebrings his signature off-kilter grooves and melodies to his new project's debutalbum Certain Limitations. The trio's sound takes influence from the likes of DireStraits and The Velvet Underground, weaving together intricate guitar work, and apropulsive rhythm section, with a touch of jazz sensibility that recalls the ECMcatalog.A product of serendipity, The Cascading Moms were formed when in need of aband for an upcoming show, Temple brought together Kosta Galanopolous, acollaborator from his Art Feynman project, and Stuart, a musician he already knewin LA. When these three came together to rehearse, a spark ignited, revealing acreative connection that transcended that first show that brought them together.The album's lead single, "I Can Dream," originally appeared on Art Feynman's HalfPrice At 3:30. However, aer reworking it with the Cascading Moms, the songtook on a new life. This reinvention exemplifies Certain Limitations' core concept:a collection of songs honed and reshaped through the improvisations and collaborativespirit of three musicians creating and exploring a new sonic world.

Rindert Lammers' debut album is a heartfelt exploration of gratitude, blending personalnarratives with cinematic imagery in a serene and soulful ambient jazz style. Inspired byJapanese cinema and the raw authenticity of YouTube confessions, the album captures amood of introspection and appreciation. Central to the album is the track "Thank You, KirinKiki," which draws from a powerful scene in the film Shopliers. Lammers explains "It's oneof my favorites. The Japanese actress Kirin Kiki plays the grandmother of a `chosen family',all of whom have fled or lost their own families in some way. In this scene, one of her lastscenes before her (real) death, Kirin Kiki (the grandmother) looks at her family and says,'Thank You!' twice towards the children and the sea. Kirin Kiki improvised these words onthe spot, and it's such a poignant moment in the film, but also indicative of her impendingdeath. I found the gratitude so moving it fit perfectly with the gratitude I found in thevoiceclip from "Thank You Hiroshi Yoshimura."The fourth song, "Thank You Hiroshi Yoshimura," opens with a voice clip that acts almostas the protagonist of a film, reflecting on a turbulent time of sleeping in parks and on thestreets. This voiceover was inspired by a comment on a Hiroshi Yoshimura video onYouTube that began, "This album reminds me of_" Lammers noticed the deeply personalresponses le on these videos, so he recorded various similar YouTube comments frompeople around the world, initially intending to set them to music. Though much of thisidea evolved, this particular voice clip remained a central influence, ultimately inspiring acinematic journey within the album. "Summer in Shibuya" sets the scene as a trailer,"Opening Credits" introduces the narrative, and "Closing Credits" gently brings it to aclose.While there's a Japanese and Tokyo theme running through the tracks, Lammers doesn'tview the album as a tribute to Japan or Tokyo specifically_he's never visited and admits toknowing...

Elori Saxl's soundtrack for the VR film Texada is an exploration of the smallness of humanexistence within the grand scope of geologic time, mirroring the film's exploration of TexadaIsland's limestone-rich landscape. Saxl, inspired by her own experiences of island life onMadeline Island, assembled a soundscape that captures both the vastness of Earth's ancientprocesses and the intimate moments of human existence. Using analog synthesizers, baritonesaxophone (performed by Henry Solomon), and processed field recordings of water androcks, she created ambient layers that evoke cycles, waves, and the transformative forces ofnature.The score begins with an exploration of Earth's origins and the emptiness of a rocky planetbefore life emerged. This foundation grows into pieces like "The Quarry," where the centralgeological feature, limestone, takes on a dynamic presence. As loops and rumbling texturesevoke the rise and movement of stone over millennia, as abstracted creatures spiral upwards,full of life. The album concludes with "The Most Special Place," which serves as a final bridgebetween the cosmic and the intimate, leaving a lasting impression of how deeply human livesare intertwined with the ancient geology beneath our feet.Saxl's compositional process itself mirrors the themes of transformation and cycles. Workingwith limited time and resources, she recorded Solomon's saxophone parts early in the project,later repurposing fragments through re-pitching, stretching, and digital effects. As sheexplains, "I experimented with bringing out the human character of the saxophone byhighlighting breath and imperfections while also pushing it into an alien/unrecognizable/biggerworld through digital processing and effects." The result is a soundtrack that feels bothorganic and otherworldly, capturing the grand scope of Earth's timeline while remaininggrounded in human emotion and connection.

Stillness can imply either tranquility or stagnation. Walt McClements grappled with theseopposing forces in the years it took to realize On a Painted Ocean: a suite of searchingaccordion and pipe organ-led pieces that travel a steady course, swelling and expandingwith a tide of tender emotion. The composer and multi-instrumentalist takes the title of hissecond album from Samuel Taylor Coleridge's famous epic The Rime of the AncientMariner and its depiction of a boat that's stalled at sea_As idle as a painted ship/ Upon apainted ocean. It's an impression that mirrors both the process and the product of McClements'sWestern Vinyl release, from the gentle unfurling of a raw reed tone on opener "APainted Ship" to the gritty ebb and flow of effects-laden drone on "Washed Up," and theclosing flutter and signal interference that noisily builds toward triumphant euphoria on"Clattering."On a Painted Ocean emerges at a confluence of events and inspirations that have shiedand changed like the weather itself. Its initial sketches began with unexpected access to aPasadena church organ in 2022, before being set aside to prepare for a busy year as amember of Weyes Blood's live band. Months on the tour bus with limited instruments ledMcClements to explore recreating the sound of his processed accordion on the synthesizer,layering it with the organ pieces. As that cycle came to end, McClements was eager tofinish the record, but was unsure how to pick up the thread. Stuck in the doldrums ofcreative block, McClements took his traces of processed accordion and synthesizers,reversed pipe organ and melodica, reeds and pipes run through pedals and computers tohis former home of New Orleans for Carnival.Having lived in the Louisiana city for a decade before moving to Los Angeles, McClementsfound renewed inspiration from his community during one of its most ecstatic and meaningfultimes of year. Its ethic of art for community's sake and practices of care inspired himto take fellow musicia...

On Labyrinth, Heather Woods Broderick serves as our reflective host, subverting expectations of conventional songcraft with impressionistic language and quietly relentless explorations of the human experience that's at once light and dark, more circular and less linear. "Many of us yearn for stillness and peace, as an escape from the movement all around us," she explains when asked about the themes of the album. "Yet movement is perpetual, happening all the time on some level. It's as wild as the wind, yet eternally predictable in its inevitability. It is linear in part, but infinite in its circuitry. Our lives just punctuate it." Broderick began crafting Labyrinth in March 2020, when most forms of move- ment were brought to a screeching halt. The Maine-born, Los Angeles-based songwriter _ who, in addition to her work as a solo musician, built a life playing and touring with acts such as Sharon Van Etten, Beth Orton, Damien Jurado, and Efterklang _ was suddenly forced off the road for the first time in her career. She used this disruption as an opportunity to pare down her creation process and construct the scaffolding for Labyrinth in her apartment. Employing only the most crucial tools at her disposal, Broderick found herself opening different artistic doors as she focused on sharpening her recording skills, capturing the majority of the album on her own before finishing the remainder with co-producer D. James Goodwin. For all of Broderick's sage lyricism and vocal authority, Labyrinth never provides the listener with any easy answers. If the image of the labyrinth represents the enormity of modern life and the difficulty of navigating it, Heather Woods Broder- ick provides a guide to its endless kinetic wonders _ of being present, aware, and connected despite its disconnects. She describes the texture of its walls, its indifferent rhythms, and the inherent poeticism of feeling lost amid the dead-ends and unexpected turns. At this point in our history, perhaps that's all we need to keep moving.

Heather Woods Broderick's new album Invitation is about rediscovering the everyday magic and healing potential found in nature. It's also about recognizing that even though it's not easy, we can shift our perspectives on our lives when our circumstances seem bleak. Ultimately it's about accepting the myriad little invitations the universe sends us to keep moving forward, and in so doing, redefining one's self-perception, in order to establish a new sense of equilibrium and inner peace. HWB's last album Glider was called "ethereal and perfect" by NPR, "exquisitely beautiful" by Mojo, and "Stunning" by The Sunday Times. Since its release she has toured with Alela Diane, and Lisa Hanigan, and has done one-off shows with The War on Drugs, Laura Gibson, and others, in addition to continuing her role in Sharon Van Etten's band.

On Origins Chris Bartels takes on the role of singer-songwriter for the first time under his Elskavon moniker, unveiling a voice that wouldn't sound out of place next to vocal-forward artists like Justin Vernon, Jónsi, or Baths, who master the balance between conventional songcraft and bold, idiosyncratic experimentation. Origins is vast yet intimate, fluttering yet cohesive, tattered yet clean, a little like rainfall during sunlight. Shedding the ambient-classical confines of his previous output, the album's opener and title track, offers a swirling mosaic of acoustic textures that recall the beloved duo The Books, laced with warped vocal utterances flitting in and out of a club-friendly beat. "Origins" is followed by the equally danceable "Coastline," which drives home the smiling melodies and intricate sound-design that form the spine of Origins, keeping Bartels' voice in a largely decorative and impressionistic role up to this point. "Blossom and the Void" dissolves the introductory tension as Bartels comes out lyrically swinging, his digitized voice chanting widely over the mutated New Wave-esque anthem. Here, Bartels shows his instinct for dynamics by rising to bombast and quickly dispelling it, making steep yet grace- ful descents into skillfully delicate sound-design. Throughout Origins, the patient glacial aesthetic of his previous work is still discernible-- there are wordless, expansive panoramas that stretch out patiently for minutes at a time and smartly resist the impulse to pack each moment with a persona made even more impactful when Bartels chooses to wield it. At other times, his spokesmanship is woven discreetly into a larger tapestry, like on "See Out Loud" (and its ambient reprise) where Bartels' voice shimmers from a distance, covering the scene in diffuse splendor. "There is so much warping, mangling, re-sampling, reversing and pitching," Bartels says of his intricate vocal manipulations. "I printed a lot of the vocal recordings onto a tape machine from the `60s, first at one speed, and then I'd halve, or double the speed going back into my comput- er," he elaborates, illustrating how this kind of analog processing freed him from his habits. "Sometimes I'd do this multiple times on one recording or layer-- it gave me such a unique and unexpected sound. At this point, I threw away any inhibition on what type of vocals to have, or not have, on the album." This newfound freedom is palpable in the peaks of soaring grandeur that dot the emotional landscape of Origins. "All These Years" cathartically reaches one such summit in its second half after laying a path of gently plodding indie-IDM in its first. The cinematic vignette "Dreymur Aftur" provides pause for reflection amid its brisk procession of string plucks and rhythmic synthesizer while marching wordlessly into album-closer "This Won't Last Forever." Here at the end, Bartels' guitar playing is laid bare in the mix, skeletally framing a single ribbon of his voice as it unfurls into the atmosphere. Though the track isn't expressly lyrical, its starkness still exemplifies the new leaf of vulnerability Bartels has turned over on Origins, an album that documents his hard-won evolution from musician, to producer, to composer_ and finally_ his confident arrival in the role of songwriter.

Hollie Kenniff's second LP for Western Vinyl, We All Have Places That We Miss, is a gallery of cloudlike synths, seraphic strings, and humming guitars, all coaxed into cohesion by Hollie's own wordless singing. The album's 2021 precursor, The Quiet Drift, landed on Bandcamp's Best Ambient list alongside the description "Drawing on the deep tones of drone, dream pop harmonies, and new age's bright tranquility, Kenniff evokes the forests, lakes and rivers of her past and present surroundings with a zen patience." Here on Places_ she strides even further into reminiscence, seeking and commemorating the fondly tragic ache of half-remembered locales lost to time: A grandparent's dim living room from an ambiguous decade; a lonely clearing beside a trail we can't remember if we walked or just dreamt; the calming light of a movie that aired years before we were born though our feelings insist we were there with the characters. We All Have Places That We Miss transmutes such glimmers into a palpable sonic kingdom that can be revisited at will, recalling the pedal-board ambience of Windy...

Voids employs the vocal talents of Bill Callahan, Emily Cross, Adam Torres, and Julia Holter across twelve genre-fluid, yet impressively cohesive tracks that span baroque dream-pop, filmic ambient, raga-like drones, avant-country, and even spiritual jazz, all imbued with poetic heft and seared by the West Texas sun. It was beneath this same sun that Lapham lost both of his parents, mourned a withering relationship, and shouldered the fallout of the pandemic, turning his life into the rusted-out scraps he then used to build Voids from the ground up. There is no better narrator for Lapham's story than fellow Texas resident Bill Callahan, whose iconic delivery perfectly personifies the core themes of Voids. By the time Callahan appears, he does so over a saw-blade drone that sounds like machinery echoing off the corrugated steel walls of a nearby workshop, which then breaks open into a loose yet pained confluence of violin and upright bass that recalls Joe Henderson's 1974 spiritual jazz album The Elements. On "Dreamless" the album crystallizes into its most straight-ahead moment as Lapham trains his compositional lens on a brilliant piece of pop songwriting. Featured vocalist Adam Torres soars over John Mark's punctual arrangement of stomping drums and rapturous string-work to anthemic, and gently psychedelic consequence. Voids concludes with the pleasant clatter of "Circles" wherein Lapham throws all his ingredients into a pot of celebratory catharsis. Drum sets collide with one another gleefully, and harmonized textures scatter and roll about the floor like a dropped bucket of ornate marbles. Lapham's collage-work, which up to this point has been smartly restrained, comes unglued as he transmutes grief into relief within a moment-of-death montage of aural imagery. Across Voids, that same awareness of tragedy and loneliness is made palatable by the album's exciting and varied topography, which stands insubordinately against Lapham's real-life surroundings. The settlers who established West Texas towns like the one he calls home must have done so with a sense of hope despite the hostility of their surroundings, however inevitable the withering. Similar spirits speak through John Mark Lapham's work, and he welcomes them as fascinating old friends. "That more than anything inspired a lot of what I try to express through Old Fire, faded memories, former glories, places lost in time," he discloses. "Whatever I was trying to express with Old Fire wasn't finished with the first album, like a story that was only half-read. It seemed like that was only the beginning, and there was a lot more ground to cover." If there is ground still uncovered for Old Fire after Voids, it's sure to be lush in spite of - or perhaps because of - the dusty soil beneath it.

"It's going to be hard to talk about this when it's done." So begins A Mold ForThe Bell, the new album from Colorado singer-songwriter and producer LoganFarmer. What follows that enigmatic lyric is a collection of stark and ambientfolk songs, tethered solely by Farmer's unadorned vocals, acoustic guitar, andmoving embellishments from contributors, including saxophonist JosephShabason (who also mixed the album) and renowned harpist Mary Lattimore.With the help of Grammy-nominated producer Andrew Berlin (Gregory AlanIsakov), Farmer tracked all of the vocal and guitar parts over two days in theearly months of 2021. The tracks were recorded quickly, live in the studio tocapture the raw intimacy and immediacy of Farmer's live performances. Therest of the album's creation occurred remotely, over texts, phone calls, andemails with Shabason and a handful of other musicians, as wildfires, insurrec-tions and the pandemic raged around them."I was working at a bookstore that winter," Farmer explains, "and I'd walk to myshift every day, obsessing over lyrics and early mixes in a cheap pair ofearbuds." These daily walks would take him past a church, where he'd oftenstop on the sidewalk and listen to the bells at the top of the hour. "I've alwaysloved the sound of church bells, but as the situation worsened, what began asa comfort began to feel ominous, almost threatening." This experience, along-side influences as disparate as Tarkovsky's film Andrei Rublev and the novels ofOlga Tokarczuk, led to a collection of songs that are similarly foreboding,expanding upon the stark and spacious universe of Farmer's last album(2020's Still No Mother) to reveal an atmosphere that's even more oppressivelystill, like an abandoned Victorian home.

There is a moment on Sides, the new album from Richmond, Virginia-based duo Lean Year, in which a hospital room floor is filled with white chrysanthemums. This imagery, based on an opiate-induced hallucination experienced by vocalist Emilie Rex's mother as she recovered from surgery, is a perfect encapsulation of the band's second album: dreamlike and beautiful, yet burdened with cold, stark reality. Sides is a harrowing journey through realms of grief and memory, a meditation woven into a tapestry of synth pads, woodwinds, and Rex's instantly recognizable voice.The duo of Rex and Rick Alverson - who also works as a film director (The Mountain, Entertainment, The Comedy) - originally set out to write an album about conflict, but during the writing and recording process, they were confronted with a number of personal tragedies. Alverson lost both of his parents in rapid succession, Rex's mother received a cancer diagnosis, and the couple's beloved family dog, Orca, died. Theseevents transformed the album into an exploration of loss - an attempt at processing the painful, complex, and private emotions that bubble to the surface when confronted withdeath. "We thought we'd do a concept album called Sides where we could reflect on all of the division in the world, and some in our own families, but then COVID transformed everything / everyone, and we suffered our own specific losses. The record became about loss and grief," Rex explains. "In this way, the title Sides was still appropriate: our individual grief and collective grief, the margins of before and after, the act and feeling of during and enduring. It felt like straddling a threshold between two opposing sides - the moment before conflict and the moment after it passes, life and death, the act of living and the memory of the act. Grief feels like a contention between what you knew and what you now know, and often both feel real and unreal at once."Sides - produced by Alverson alongside Erik Hall (In Tall Buildings) and featuring contributions from...

Amid massive global paradigm shifts Dave Hartley (aka Nightlands) became a father twice over and left his native Philadelphia for Asheville, where the pace of daily life is slower and it's easier to maintain a zoomed-out perspective on modern life. From the newfound refuge of a studio he built using the bones of a barn attached to his hundred-something-year-old house in the mountains, Hartley has tailored a collection of well-crafted pop rock, pointedly titled Moonshine. Guided by some of the harmonic sensibilities that have helped make The War on Drugs a force in modern music, Moonshine combines immaculate-yet-dense vocal stacks and billowy clouds of effected keyboards with classic songcraft, revealing previously unseen acreage in the unfurling dreamscape that is Nightlands. The surrealistic album art by Austin-based illustrator Jaime Zuverza depicts an archway opening to the stars over the surface of an idyllic sea flanked by both moon and sun. Similarly, Moonshine reveals portals within portals leading to ever deeper places in Hartley'svocal-centered labyrinth. Throughout the album, there are plenty of buoyant high moods where the pitter-patter of drum machine and humming digital organ hints at Hartley's low-key tropicalia streak, but the lyrics anchor the dreaminess in real-world sorrow andresignation. Nowhere are these sentiments more apparent than on the title track, a nearly acapella recitation of "America the Beautiful" that poignantly hovers over a mirage of soft keyboards before dovetailing into Hartley's own words about the hypocrisy of the American dream. "This was never intended to be an overtly political record" he admits. "I have so many friends who are able to process the frustration of current events gracefully or with wisdom or in a nuanced way, but I often find myself just consumed with anger about it all. I decided to just let that come out, and it manifested itself lyrically." Moonshine's wide-eyed, utopian instrumental backdrops provide sharp contrast to Hartley's lyrics, which sting...

Having crested the west coast modular-ambient wave in just a few releases - including 2018's Sharing Waves on the influential LA experimental imprint Leaving Records - Sean Hellfritsch has swapped the mossy analog synth improvisations of his prior output for refined melodic arrangements dressed in sprightly dawn-of-digital textures. Big Earth Energy plumbs the depths of Hellfritsch's multimedia mind and naturalist heart, spinning an impressionistic narrative world off of cultural touchstones like the PC game Myst, and the work of Studio Ghibli composer Joe Hisaishi. Inspired by the aforementioned, and guided by Hellfritsch's experience as an animator and filmmaker, Big Earth Energy is the soundtrack to a hypothetical video game with a pointedly ecological premise, and a twist of psychedelic charm. In Hellfritsch's imagined virtual journey, the player assumes the perspective of a treefrog sixty-five-million years ago, hopping epochs with each new level, forming a comprehensive picture of the massive changes the planet has gone through over the eons. The ultimate goal of the game is not to amass resources, defeat enemies, or gain power, but to fully witness the unfolding of one of the biggest systems of energy imaginable - or as the album's creator puts it - "to explore the incomprehensibly vast energetic expression and mystery that is Earth." Big Earth Energy is steeped in exploratory RPG intrigue, possibility, and contemplation, lovingly overlaid with Miyazaki-an sentiments and aesthetics. The through-composed, organic, meandering synthesis heard on previous Cool Maritime albums has been fully replaced by meticulous polygonal arrangements that recall the computerized sheen of late 80s work by composers like Hiroshi Yoshimura, and Yoichiro Yoshikawa - using true-to-period gear no less. Even given its referentiality, Big Earth Energy comes off as forward-facing where so much reminiscent music remains fixed to a bygone moment in pop culture. Hellfritsch has created a musical world where the endless verdancy of the biosphere finds its parallel in the golden age of early 1990s video games, and late 80s Japanese environmental music, all while pointing to a hopeful planetary and artistic future that vindicates the motives of all of these muses.

Transparent dark blue vinyl. Market is the songwriting project of Nate Mendelsohn, a Brooklyn based multi-instrumentalist. He has played live as a member of Sam Evian, Katie Von Schleicher, Emily Reo, and Lina Tullgren's bands, and has worked in the studio as an engineer and musician with Frankie Cosmos, Yaeji, and Wendy Eisenberg. Absorbing all of this music and supporting his musical community has been Mendelsohn's focus of the last few years, but with this record he steps out on his own with a clear identity and deep understanding of songcraft. After some cult internet following through early Market experimentations, The Consistent Brutal Bullshit Gong, produced by Katie Von Schleicher and recorded with a band of Brooklyn indie regulars, is a leap forwards in all categories, led by intimate open-book lyrics about family tree revelations and mental health struggles, with a slight edge and a sense of humour.

Rob Burger's keyboard work can be heard in everything from Guggenheim showcases to the blockbuster film Ocean's 8 -- in addition to albums by John Zorn, Laurie Anderson, and Iron & Wine -- but the moonlit compositions he spins up on his own may be his most compelling work. His newest solo venture, Marching With Feathers, departs from the controlled exotica and kosmische of 2019's The Grid towards a genreless seesaw of electrified apprehension and capacious piano rumination. Piano-based tracks like "Figurine" and "Still" draw the listener into a realm of quiet contemplation, while arid psyche vignettes like "Library Science" and "Hotel For Saints" imbue the collection with a vital groove, conjuring images of a searing, high desert plain. At the core of the album is a central dichotomy between strength and gentleness, power and vulnerability. By uniting these seemingly opposing concepts, Burger catches you off guard by carving trails that turn from mirage to starkreality at every bend. As the album draws to a close, the listener feels as though they're waking from a dream, pensive yet determined to rise, like a lost hikerreaching a vista - or a clenched fist full of feathers.

For nearly a decade now, Noah Kardos-Fein has been making post-industrial / neo-no wave music under the name YVETTE, building a distinct and arresting repertoire along the way. To fully appreciate YVETTE's latest release How The Garden Grows is to place it in context of the journey charted by Kardos-Fein.In 2012, Kardos-Fein and drummer Rick Daniel recorded a two song 7" with Nick Sylvester, which sparked the launch of renowned label Godmode (JPEGMAFIA, Yaeji, Shamir, Channel Tres). A year later, YVETTE released its debut full length PROCESS to widespread critical acclaim. Pitchfork declared in its 8.1/10 review, "They're an industrial act in the truest sense of the term, transforming scabrous raw materials into beautiful, glistening, chrome-plated objects that cast an uncanny allure. Theirs is a noise molded into the contours_if not the sound_of pop music, offering an accessible entry point into a world of ugly brutalism."Following the release of PROCESS, and a reissue in Europe by Tough Love Records (Ulrika Spacek, Big Ups, Moon King), Dale Eisinger took over on drums. After an extended round of touring, YVETTE released the Time Management EP in 2015. The band earned a reputation for bewildering, powerful live performances and shared the stage with acts like Sleigh Bells, Xiu Xiu, Lydia Lunch, Dan Deacon, Thurston Moore, Liars, Metz, and Liturgy.In 2016, with a chance to catch their breath, the duo began work on what would become their highly anticipated sophomore album How The Garden Grows. It took three years of stops and starts - multiple studios and different producers and engineers - to write and record. All the while, the duo watched developers raze many of its favorite NYC venues and haunts. Rather than disappearing into the rubble of its beloved city, How The Garden Grows grew out of that chaos.The album, now seeing the light of day in 2021, is the culmination of years of hard work, and countless obstacles. It marks a period of significant growth and change: not just within t...

Director David Lynch once said "I long for a kind of quiet where I can just drift and dream. I always say getting inspiration is like fishing. If you're quiet and sitting there and you have the right bait, you're going to catch a fish eventually. Ideas are sort of like that. You never know when they're going to hit you." Inspired by this quote in both name and spirit, Hollie Kenniff's The Quiet Drift is an ambient gallery of cloudlike synths, seraphic strings, echoing guitars, and other celestial textures guided to cohesion by Hollie's own wordless singing. Though the album certainly creates (and originates from) the kind of space where Lynch's proverbial "fish" can be caught, The Quiet Drift is a fitting title for Hollie's own history, both recent and distant. During the course of the album's creation, Hollie and her family moved cross-country from an island in Washington state, to an island in Maine before ultimately relocating to Canada. "As a child I visited Ontario year-round," she explains in her own words. She continues "More than any other landscape, I think the lake, rivers, and woods there left the most enduring impression on me. The landscape and pace of life of these places will always stay with me." But the reverberant spaces Hollie crafts need no physical headquarters. Instead of conjuring views of nature at the ground level, her sound more readily evokes a top-down perspective, with the distinct features of the land shrinking underfoot as the listener becomes untethered from geography altogether. The Quiet Drift belongs more to the liminal spaces between life and afterlife, memory and fantasy, landscape and dreamscape, than any mappable locale. Describing her formative years, Hollie says "As a dual US/Canadian citizen who spent my childhood in a rural town-- one that I haven't returned to in many years - I have a sense of not entirely belonging anywhere. When I was a teenager my close friends were male musicians, so I was also an outsider to the degree that they were wild and anarchic in a way that I wasn't. I was a quiet book reader and avid music listener who enjoyed being around a creative group. I was also a radio DJ for alternative and punk music throughout high school." In this light, The Quiet Drift attests that creativity is placeless, and calls into question the stereotype of artists as scene-centric city dwellers. Having come of age in the absence of metropolitan sensory overload, Hollie learned to spot the muse in nature, and within herself, instead of the echo chamber of a frenzied peer group. On The Quiet Drift Hollie Kenniff wholly escapes from such pop-culture feedback loops into transcendent, shimmering realms, and she brings the listener along with her. In this age in which we have all been called to reevaluate our relationship to indoor spaces, and seek refuge in the great outdoors, The Quiet Drift provides an apt soundtrack for such rebalancing.

Limited Editon Lp Format With Extra Heavy Textured Jackets And Metallic Silver Ink. Lp Includes 12" Square Insert With Lyrics And Images Of The Artist, And Download. The Raw Inspiration For Vague Tidings Came From A 2006 Diy Tour Of The 49th State. It Was A Trip That Went Off The Beaten Path-Sometimes A Bit Too Far For Comfort. Now, Over A Decade Later, Listeners Find Joe O'connell Aka Elephant Micah Stationed At A Creaky Spinet Piano, Singing About The Alaskansky. Throughout, His Lyrics Take A New Angle On A Pet Theme: Human Encounters With The Natural World. Vague Tidings Places These Encounters In The American West And, At Times, In Its Sci-Fi Corollary, Outer Space. Its Imagery Draws From The Allure Of Alaska, The Idea Of Western Prosperity, And The Human Relationship To Wilderness More Broadly. Often, O'connell Sings About The Goal Of Capturing And Commodifying Nature. In Poeticsketches Of Resource Extraction Industries And Dark Sky Tourism, Frontier Lust Runs Amok. Pipelines Catch Fire And Stars Disappear, All To The Tune Of A Stark, Uncanny Americana.Vague Tidings Is A Sustained, Hallucinatory Rendering Of This Theme. In Style, Its Eight Songs Follow A Switchback Path Between Foggy Incantations And Mountain Anthems. Made With A Small Cohort Of Acoustic Instrumentalists, The Record Is Rough Hewn, But Easy On The Ears. To Put Vague Tidings Down On Tape, O'connell Assembled Some Of His Favorite Musicians In Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina Area, Where He's Lived Since2015: Libby Rodenbough (Mipso) Bows And Plucks A Detuned Fiddle, Matt Douglas (Mountain Goats) Breathes Life Into Various Woodwinds, And Matt O'connell (Lean Year) Sets The Pace On A Two-Piece Drum Set. Their Loose, Imaginative Playing Pushes Vague Tidings Beyond The Singer-Songwritergenre Into Something Richer In Texture. Ultimately, This Is Foreboding But Spacious Music, With Plenty Of Room For Reconsidering Life On Earth. R.I.Y.L. Jason Molina, Bonnie Prince Billy, Bill Callahan, Damien Jurado.

Created Slowly Over A Years-Long Span That Encompassed The Recording Of 2019's Stray Fantasies, Wife And Husband Duo Hollie And Keith Kenniff Deliver In A Deep And Dreamless Sleep, A Distinctly Hazier Chapter Of Their Technicolor Pop Venturemint Julep. Where The Former Album Bore A Crystalline Latticework Of...

Across eight tracks that mesh spacious, jazz-laced composition with fourth-world and adult-contemporary tonality, Toronto saxophonist Joseph Shabason sketches an auditory map of the transcendence, unity, conditioning, and eventual renunciation of his upbringing in an Islamic and Jewish dual-faith household. The resulting album The Fellowship bears the name of the insular Islamic community Shabason's traditionally Jewish parents belonged to from a time before he was even born; a mental and spiritual push-pull which continued shaping, even controlling, his outlook well into his adulthood. As a listening experience The Fellowship follows a chronological arc that spans three generations covering his parents' early lives, his own spiritual and physical adolescence, and his subsequent struggle to eschew the problematic habituations of such a conflicted past. On The Fellowship, as on prior albums that bear his name, Joseph Shabason does what only the best instrumental music makers can: tell a story with emotional clarity that conveys even the subtlest of feelings, all without singing a single word. As wordless as ever-- with as complex a theme as ever-- this album may be his most emotionally articulate yet. Most importantly, those lost in the woods of repression and self-doubt that organized religion can be at its worst now have The Fellowship to help guide them into a softer light. R.I.Y.L. Brian Eno, Jon Hassell, Beverly Glenn-Copeland, Laraaji, Robert Rich, Harold Budd

Limited Edition Cloudy Clear Vinyl.Combining Processed Recordings Of Wind And Water With Analog Synthesizers And Chamber Orchestra, Elori Kramer's The Blue Of Distance Is An Audio Dissertation On The Role Technology Plays In Our Relationships To Geography And Nature, Unspoolinginto An Examination Of Memory And Longing Across Seven Sections That Layer Filmic Minimalism Over Churning Electronic Soundbeds. Half Of The Suite Was Written In The Adirondack Mountains During Summer Amid Lakes, Rivers, And Moss-Ladenforest Floors, While The Other Half Was Conceived On A Frozen Lake Superior Island In Deep Winter, Creating A Subtextual Dialogue Between The Two Extreme Settings. Kramer, Who Was Born In 1990 And Grew Up Alongside The Internet, Uses Her Musicto Explore Nature In The Actual And The Virtual World, Through Direct Experience And Facsimile Alike, Focussing And Blurring The Line Between The Two. "Looking Back At My Videos Of That Summer-- Which Is Where The Processed Audio Came From-- I Triedto Remember What It Had Felt Like To Be There," She Recalls, "Thinking About Questions Of Reality Versus Imagination; Physical Versus Digital; And The Ways In Which Memory Shifts Through Our Minds And Technology." The Title The Blue Ofdistance Was Derived From Rebecca Solnit's Book A Field Guide To Getting Lost, Referring To The Phenomenon Of Faraway Mountains Appearing Blue Due To Light Particles Getting Lost Over Distance. "If We Were To Go Up To The Mountains Thatappear Blue From Far Away, We Would See That They Weren't Actually That Color." She Says. "This Beauty Is Made Possible Because Of Their Distance," Much In The Same Way That The Splendor Of A Lush Season Is Only Fully Realized In The Throes Of A Bleak One, And The Joy Of An Event Can Only Be Felt When It Has Long Since Been Consigned To Remembrance.R.I.Y.L Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith, Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Josiah Steinbrick, Emily Sprague

Austin-based producer and multi-instrumentalist Spencer delivers a sample-studded mood board of bass-heavy hip hop, spiraling psychedelia, and disco-house, that explores time, aging, societal upheaval, the afterlife, and the cosmic perspective as they appear through the distorting, relentless heat of his native Texas.

Peter Oren's new album The Greener Pasture offers a bleak answer to the question "where will I go/ if I don't want to be/ with idle hands awaiting catastrophe/ here in the Anthropocene" posed on his title track of his previous album Anthropocene: "The greener pasture is also fenced in/ the wider trough has an asterisk/ rotate the herd every few days/ or is it every few years/ we got their tags on our ears/ standing in shit crying bovine tears." Indiana-born, everywhere-based singer-songwriter Peter Oren possesses a remarkable singing voice, low and deep and richly textured: as solid as a glacier, as big as a mountain. Similar in its baritone gravel to Bill Callahan, a hero of his, it rumbles in your conscience, a righteous sound that marks him as an artist for our tumultuous times, when sanity seems absent from popular discussions.

Limited edition for Record Store Day 2018!

Composer, performer, and producer Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith's new album EARS is an immersive listening experience in which dizzying swirls of organic and synthesized sounds work together to create a sense of three-dimensional space and propulsion. Dense and carefully crafted, each of the songs on EARS unfolds with a fluid elegance, while maintaining a spontaneous energy, and a sprightly sense of discovery. Listeners familiar with her previous album Euclid (an album that prompted Dazed to call her “…one of the most pioneering musicians in the world.”) will no doubt notice her heavier use of vocals on EARS. On all but one song, her gently ecstatic swells of vocals emerge to soar over a dense jungle of synths and woodwinds.
Much of the album's warmth and energy stems from Smith's use of the versatile analog synthesizer, the Buchla Music Easel. According to Smith, “…nothing compares to the sound of a Buchla. In my mind a Buchla synthesizer has the most human sound in it. I wanted to show the Easel’s versatility and range of motion within a live set. I also wanted to spend as little time as possible in front of the computer during the creation.” After initially composing on the Buchla, she wrote arrangements for a woodwind quintet, added vocals, and further refined the pieces with granular synthesis techniques she developed in her sound design work (she contributed sound design to Panda Bear's “Boys Latin” video, and handled sound design and original compositions for Brasilia co-written by and starring Reggie Watts).
Though the pallet of sounds Smith employs on EARS is darker than the ebullient tenor we heard on Euclid, she's careful to let in just enough light to covey a feeling of cosmic bliss and transcendence. Kinetic arpeggios of synths pulse, often buoying her graceful vocal mantras, while woodwinds breathe and flutter, emulating the wildlife Smith observed while growing up on the West Coast (she even studied recordings of slowed down bird calls prior to composing these pieces). Though some of her gestures echo the musical tropes used by early minimalist composers, the world she creates on EARS is uniquely hypnotic and full of life, not unlike Miyzaki's film Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, which she cites as an inspiration.
EARS is a masterful articulation of Smith's vision, which she achieved in part by spending time preparing her mind prior to composing the album. As she explains, “I am very intentional about the months leading up to when I am going to compose something new. I really trust the subconscious and try and feed it only information I want it to feed back to me. I make playlists that I listen to nonstop, or have images I look at daily, or I go to places I want to be inspired by…I do all this prep work and then try and forget it when I am writing.” Listening to EARS, it's clear that her approach paid off, and that the seeds she planted within have born a vibrant and hyper-natural world that's as joyful to experience as the flora and fauna that inspired it.

Born and raised in San Antonio, Texas, and currently residing in Beverly, Massachusetts, violinist, vocalist and songwriter Aisha Burns began playing violin when she was 10 years old, and has been touring and recording since 2006. Soon after moving to Austin in 2005, she gained her start with folk-rock outfit Alex Dupree and the Trapdoor Band, and joined the instrumental ensemble Balmorhea on violin in 2007. After years of secret singing, she released her solo debut Life in the Midwater in 2013. Called "twisting, ethereal...arresting" by Dazed Magazine, and praised for its "delicate intimacy" by NPR, Life in the Midwater explored mortality and relationships with candor and wisdom. Her new album Argonauta, is a collection of songs about her struggle with the grief of losing her mother, while also navigating a new relationship, and ultimately trying to figure out what the new normal is for her life.

50,000,000 Elvis Fans Can't be Wrong is the debut by Alabama-raised, Austin-based Caroline Sallee, aka Caroline Says. There are rays of youth beaming through this music, but they never outshine a kind of maturity that betrays the fact that Sallee was just 22 years old when 50 Million was made. After college she took a job as a waitress in Yellowstone as an exercise in solitude and independence. With the money she saved there, she took a transformative journey via Greyhound to explore the West Coast before returning to Alabama where she would record her debut album in her parents' basement. 50 Million puts us in the seat right next to Sallee where we can feel the...

The PBS series Earth Focus delves into the intricate connections betweenSouthern California's natural landscapes and urban development. Eachepisode explores a specific location, including the Los Angeles River, DiabloCanyon Nuclear Power Plant, Joshua Tree National Park, and the MojaveDesert. The series' soundtrack, composed by Elori Saxl, underscores theemotional narratives of these places, emphasizing the interplay betweenhumans and nature and the impact of human-constructed environments.Drawing inspiration from artists like Alice Coltrane and Hiroshi Yoshimura,Saxl craed the music using digitally manipul...

Since writing 2022's The Consistent Brutal Bullshit Gong, Market's NateMendelsohn has become more entrenched in the Brooklyn, NY music community,producing the recent Frankie Cosmos and Dougie Poole albums, performingin Vagabon and Sam Evian, and recording with Yaeji and Lady Lamb. Theseexperiences with adventurous artists likely resonate with fans of records like PetSounds, Fantasma, Insignificance, Blonde, or XO. Well I Asked You A Question'saforementioned sonic palette wonderfully melds the physical and the synthetic:sampled orchestras duel with real orchestras ("Fantasy"), a robot's spoken wordduets with a choir of humans ("Around"), and blasts of noise "solo" overtraditional rock instrumentation ("Rachel's Getting Married").Though many of the sounds on the record are augmented and fractured,Mendelsohn still worked with the Market band, consisting of Stephen Becker,Natasha Bergman, and Duncan Standish, to build out the songs. He wanted"musical accidents with frayed edges le in_still a group of people, in a room,playing songs." Beyond the core band, world-expanding contributions camefrom Katie von Schleicher, Mike Haldeman (Moses Sumney, Alto Palo), JustinFelton (L'Rain, Strugglin'), Rose Droll (Feist, Art Feynman) and Helen Newbywith engineering by Adam Hirsch (Sam Amidon, Stephen Steinbrink).Well I Asked You a Question is ambitious and complex, but Mendelsohntempers those goals by aiming at heart, toward the very human. Lyrically, it's anexploration of speaking, asking, responding and the muddled nature of talkingto one's self versus interacting with others. In his words, he's alternately "escapingthe noise of the world by going inward" and "escaping the noise of the brainby going outward." Whether swaddled in sound or absorbing the errantthoughts it carries, we're along for the ride.

Caroline Says' haunting new album, The Lucky One, is a poignant exploration of how the ghostsof past relationships linger, sometimes holding more sway over our hearts and minds than ourcurrent connections. We revisit these ghosts through evocative landscapes of our memories -hometown bars, road trips, and late-night swims. Through a series of fractured and persistentmemories these songs capture the bittersweet realization that the past, though imperfect, cansometimes be a more comforting and meaningful companion than the present.Opening track, "The Lucky One," confronts death's role in shaping our memories head-on, as itponders the way death freezes a person in time, forcing us to confront the complexities of griefand its lasting impact on our relationship with the one we lost. Other tracks delve into thecomplexities of relationships that naturally grow apart as life takes us in different directions. Forexample, "Faded and Golden" reflects on the bittersweet nature of reunions with old friends,where the idealized memories of youth can clash with the realities of the present. Then, "Actors"takes this a step further, acknowledging the influence of perception and desire in friendships,and the idea that in many ways "all friendships are imaginary friendships," as it confronts thedisappointment of inauthentic connections, and the facades we sometimes put on in relationships."Roses" began when Caroline was looking through her grandma's collection of commemorativeKentucky Derby glasses, each one etched with the name of a winner. The song delves into thestory of "Sunday Silence," the horse that won the year Caroline was born. Researching thehorse's journey from near-Triple Crown glory to retirement in Japan sparked a metaphor - apressured being (the horse) desperately trying to please but ultimately disappointing. Theowners eventually selling the horse becomes a relatable symbol of unmet expectations, and thesting of falling short despite our best efforts.Album closer, "Some...