2010s Vinyl 220 Items

After his early material revealed an ambitious new sound borne on the forward-thinking experimentalism of influences like Nick Drake, David Byrne and Arthur Russell, Westerman’s single ‘Confirmation’ - available here on 7” - brought his music to new legions of fans, with Pitchfork profiling him in their Rising and Best New Music columns, saying it “captures a promising writer who’s learned how to take good ideas and warp them into stranger, more sublime shapes.” Gorilla Vs Bear placed it at Number 10 in their recent Best Tracks Of The Year (So Far) feature.

Always driven by his search for balance, Crayon delivers here his most personal work. Post Blue presents a digital soul, both contemplative and rousing, where acoustic and electronic sounds mingle. This taste of paradox is essential from the beginning, and remains throughout all the EP. One feels at once relaxed and anguished, optimistic and melancholic.

In May of 1966, the unknown singer Jack Wood recorded two songs at Great Lakes Studio in Sparta, Michigan. These unique, otherworldly songs “Born to Wander” and “So Sad” would be self-released by Wood on his own Lawrence Records imprint in an edition of 100 copies. Going nowhere and being quickly forgotten, it would take Wood ten years to pay back the $250 he borrowed for the entire endeavor. Fast-forward to the 21st century and the deepest of record collectors are intrinsically moved by the power behind Wood’s single, vacillating between Northern Soul, garage, big band and country music all within the same song. An unexpected placement in a major ad campaign for Bacardi Rum was a major boon for the burgeoning awareness of these timeless songs.

Third Man Records is proud to reissue “Born to Wander” and “So Sad” as part of its return to Detroit.

Watch the Barcardi commercial: https://youtu.be/Ogs6uD4xlNY

Manufacturer: United Record Pressing

TRACK LISTING:
A. Born to Wander
B. So Sad

Soul Sugar drop their own reggae version of Marvin Gaye’s "I Want You". French outfit Soul Sugar – the brainchild of Guillaume “Gee” Metenier – deliver yet another soulful reggae 12”, this time a cover version of Marvin Gaye’s 1976 classic "I Want You". Jamaicain native Leonardo Carmichael sings lead vocals and legendary drums and bass duo Sly & Robbie add their flavor to the mix, with two versions on side B. Marvin Gaye’s single "I Want You" was a big step forward for his sound & vision and marked a change in direction – from hip Motown Soul to a more sultry, Disco sound. Marvin's vocals are notably intimate and the lyrics are more explicit, more personal. An original soul classic, "I Want You" is memorable for its unique combination of lush harmonies, a mesmerizing groove and the apparent sexiness of the theme itself. Soul Sugar's Discomix version combines a smooth mixture of reggae, soul and funk over beefy bass lines, designed for heavyweight sound systems. Sly & Robbie, rhythm duo known for their studio work on countless reggae classics since the 1960s deliver their version, taking us back to the golden age of Reggae, the days when it was typical for Jamaican musicians to record their own versions of American soul tunes ... Ace producer Jahno dubs the mix live and direct to tape, from his very own ' N.O.F Studio'.

The title of Hannah Georgas' third album is a tribute to her beloved grandmother. Produced by Graham Walsh (Holy Fuck).

Clouds Clouds Clouds. With a weightiness the color of amethyst. Light on the horizon. A sun. No point, no pane, no space, no rainbow. A stripe. A circular course. A bee loop. Honey-colored amber. Words. Our glistening white glider jumps through with ease.

Cold Beat is a San Francisco-based quartet fronted by Hannah Lew (synths, vocals) with Kyle King (synths, guitar), Luciano Talpini Aita (synths) and Sean Monaghan (guitar). Formed in 2013 the band has released three albums and two EPs. A Simple Reflection is a 7-song collection of Eurythmics covers, yet feels just as personal as any of their original material. While digging through a collection of 12"s for her record shop Contact Records, Lew stumbled across the earliest Eurythmics B-sides and was floored. This lead to the discovery of their debut album In The Garden. Annie Lennox’s abstract and poetic lyrics really struck a chord with Hannah. What had started out as a single cover quickly snowballed into a full blown obsession. The synth and drum programming resonated with her songwriting process, so reimagining them was very creatively fulfilling. The covers on this EP are simultaneously dynamic and atmospheric post-punk that plays to Lew's ethereal vocals and King’s crystalline guitar. All songs have been mixed by Mikey Young (Total Control) and mastered by George Horn at Fantasy Studios. The record is housed in a jacket designed by Eloise Leigh, which features pink and purple clouds that evoke a dreamy softness and DIY playfulness and photos Lew in her best Lennox-inspired drag. Each copy includes a postcard with photos and notes.

Here is a pretaste for the upcoming Jungle album. Exclusively available at HHV.

A download code is included.

With Everything Matters, his debut album, Clement Bazin realizes one of his sweet dreams: to rethink electronic music and integrate the instrument from which he can’t be dissociate anymore, the steeldrum. Through this achievement, he sets bridges between his favorite music genders: calypso, soca, hip-hop or UK post-dubstep from the 2000’s; a synthesis of Machel Montano, J. Dilla, D’Angelo and James Blake.

The crossover between electronic music and classical composition has never been in more vibrant and dynamic health. Multifarious musician Emika explores this fertile ground on her ambitious new opus 'Melanfonie': her first orchestral composition, some four years in the making.
Funded by a hugely successful Kickstarter campaign that exceeded its target by an impressive €25,000.
While many rebel from their classical training never to return to it explicitly, Emika has always been attracted to the potential and freedoms offered by the symphony form. As well as taking inspiration from her electronic music background in composing the music itself, Emika also applied some of production and playback principles from that realm to create a piece whose every element has been carefully considered.
Emika is on a quest to try and change what we mean when we talk about ‘classical music’. For her, the magic of the ‘genre’ is about the instruments themselves and more importantly the people who play them; not the restricting traditions and conventions of the classical world itself. I want to change the face of classical music and give it a more honest and real image. It is time we had something other than pomp and circumstance and avant-garde squeaks and pops.”

A Day at United. The name practically says it all. An album recorded in a single day. No rehearsals. No second takes. Just Mocky and friends. Some instruments. Some songs Mocky sketched in the week leading up. Oh yeah, and a recording studio. United Recording, in fact.

Compilation of so far digital only/unreleased or japan only tracks by the canadian producer Mocky, who most recently co-produced/co-wrote Feist's „Pleasure“; Joey Dosik's „Inside Voice“ and Kelela's „Take Me Apart“. Featuring guests Jamie Lidell, Chilly Gonzales, Joey Dosik, Pegasus Warning, Moses Sumney.

For the first time on vinyl at album length this is Mocky’s collection of the best of Japan-only/unreleased gems and favorites from his so far digital only mixtape-series "The Moxtapes" Vol. I-IV. The A-Side delves deep into his songwriting/lyrical side and features some of his most intense and touching songs thus far like "The Fortress" (featuring Chilly Gonzales on piano), "Problematic" (which casts Mocky's crooning in a glitched-out new light) and "Exception To The Rule", a radiant track that features breakout artists Joey Dosik on keyboards and Moses Sumney on background vocals. The B-Side showcases Mocky's off the grid soulful groove compositions like "You Can't Rush The Funk", „How It Goes“ or "Keep Feelin This (feat. Jamie Lidell), bringing back memories of their classic work together on Lidell’s “Multiply”.

»The Room«, Fenster’s fourth album and their first release on Altin Village & Mine marks the beginning of a new chapter for the band. After releasing three albums, a feature length film, and touring extensively throughout Europe and North America since 2012, »The Room« serves as an entry point into their sonic evolution. The essential characteristic of the band is transformation—within and between genres, albums, and songs. Their sound is a window framing psychedelic, groovy, hypnogogic, playful pop. […]

Their mission in creating this album was to compose and arrange every song together in a room. It is an experiment in collective creativity that pushed all of them to transcend their individuality and create something together which is greater than the sum of its parts.« […]

—
All songs written and played by Fenster.
Recorded at Redroom Studios in Vecchiano, Italy.
Mastered by Josh Bonati in New York City, USA.
Album artwork and design by Lucas Ufo.

A fine pop LP, on transparent vinyl, by an upcoming Croatian singer. The album comes in a colourful gatefold sleeveand includes a booklet.

With Day Out of Days, Scratch Massive has made a modern electronic album, perfectly at ease with the influence of pop, as a way to revisit and reexamine its clichés, its stylistic effects, and the hungry nostalgia for the 1980s.

Pascal Pinon's third album is the Icelandic duo's rawest and yet most diverse musical statement within the frame of their Folk-influenced, minimalistic sound. Produced only by themselves, "Sundur" comprises material written over the course of 1 ½ years.

Her new album "Keys" shows Berlin-based musician Masha Qrella elegantly fusing disco-pop and songwriting. Written and produced by Qrella in her studio within one year, the album’s eleven songs feature well-known elements of fragility, perfection and understatement, while walking a fine line between laconic coolness and passionate uptempo melancholia.

Alone in the world, we find ourselves. Inside ourselves, we find something to share with the world.

The Essential John Moods, a solo album in all senses of the word, is what Jonathan Jarzyna of Fenster found in himself during a summer spent hiking along the Iberian coast, and he now wants to share it with you. A mini-guitar on his back and a copy of GarageBand on his phone allowed Jarzyna to record songs each evening as he arrived in a new town after a long day traveling by foot. (He did, admittedly, add live drum tracks and some additional instrumentation back in Berlin.) The album preserves this peripatetic feeling, each song relating to the next as one city or village relates to its neighbor, its unique situation contrasting with the shared architectural vernacular. Blipping instrumental interludes (“Trainride,” “Pontevedra,” “Coastal Way”) even capture the disordered, delirious feeling of transit hubs and the sleep-bleared mystery of waking on an unfamiliar road.

“I just came alive completely” are the first words Jarzyna murmurs on “New Spring,” invoking the spirit of the album. He speaks not of the liveliness of manic activity, but the heightened, tender sensitivity of presence. It’s a fullness of living captured by the transition from the lush, jangling groove of “The Weight” to the spacious contemplation of “Pawns.” The dreamy echo of the 60s’ and 70s’ soft rock and folk troubadours suffuses the album, and the organ-soaked “Where In The World” even has a psychedelic tinge. But the overall effect is quite contemporary, from the back-of-the-nightbus lounge funk of “Take It Home” (featuring an amazing turn from arch-crooner Sean Nicholas Savage) to the mournful cupboard jazz of “Almost Gone.” “Dark Wall” sounds like a honkytonk ramble alongside a robot tentatively learning to play lap steel. “Leap of Love,” an early album highlight, passes over the listener in shimmering waves, a love song which remains a mystery even to its creator.

In the meditation tape coda “Relax Your Foot,” Jarzyna selects the perfect sample to encapsulate The Essential John Moods’ hopeful receptivity: the late Professor Carl Sagan reminding us that “despite our limitations and fallibilities, we humans are capable of greatness.”

Hailing from Ireland, Bobby (originally from Liverpool) and Billie (Bosnian born) from the ephemeral Low Sea compose music that flows like a serpentine river through the uncanny valley. Indeed, the owls are not what they seem—but even such blatant allusions can’t sketch an intuitive image of the sound-scapes woven by this intriguing dyad.

Dita Von Teese – best known for her work as a burlesque dancer, model and fashion designer – is venturing into music with her self-titled debut LP. Composed and produced by Sebastien Tellier.

Two years after ".... and The Casiotone Orchestra", Odessey & Oracle continue their speculative and colorful explorations through an adventurous sonic quest, mixing acoustic sonorities and classical instruments, using a pallet of analog specimens dating back to the 60s and 70s.

Retro-futuristic music with sophisticated arrangements underlines unbridled songwriting with heterogenous influences (Brian Wilson, Caetano Veloso, White Noise, JS Bach, Moondog, Robert Wyatt...).
The lyrics, in French, both surreal and utopian, serve as witness to the contradictions of our times and invite the listener to imagine a revolutionary love.

A download code is included. The LP is a collaboration between oOoOO & Islamiq Grrrls. The album's title - "Faminine Mystique" - is an allusion to the Betty Friedan book 'Feminine Mystique' that inspired the 2nd wave feminist movement in the US. Freidan said that while society was providing (middle class) women with historically unparalleled material abundance, it failed to allow space for personal growth. A rigid apparatus was keeping women in a narrowly defined social role that all but excluded self-exploration. Pronounced 'Famine in Mystique,' the LP's name reflects our feeling that, in a similar way, an increasingly powerful set of contemporary social forces are aligning to, on the one hand, provide people with more music & art than we've ever had access to before, yet rigidly limiting the types of music offered to people to sounds that favor a rigid economics first model of clicks & easy consumption over exploration & experimentation.

Otis Stacks, three syllables. A name and a first name that recall a mythical singer as much as the Memphis music label that got him to it’s days of glory. A name that evokes him in particular and soul music in general.
Behind a name that sounds familiar are Elias Wallace and Justmike, two men united to become one: Otis Stacks. In truth, the optimized version of a work started long ago, when Justmike was producing the Danish hip-hop sound of Dafuniks and decided to get in touch with Elias after hearing his voice on a friend’s tune. He first wanted him to lay his voice on a chorus, then a verse, and ended letting him take over the lyrics of “All I Want”, the song that would later bring Dafuniks on air and around Europe. After traveling miles and miles across the ocean and the seas separating California from Denmark, Elias undeniably became a member of the group.
As gigs went on, stages after stages, Justmike got inspired by Elias’s voice and presence. Thus, the idea of a duo collaboration between the two men geminated and grew in his mind. As the evidence of their getting along, “Fashion Drunk” became the first tune to infiltrate Nova and FIP radio playlists, as its music video reached 8 million views. This now obvious complicity as extended in the form of an album, also called Fashion Drunk, released by Underdogs Records. With this French stopover, the line between California and Denmark is now completed. The result is an artistic fusion in which Justmike has plugged his instruments to the machines he uses to compose, letting Elias in charge of the lyrics and singing. Here, the soul music is printed as a guideline in an organic and digital composite matter. In an ethereal and aerial production that perches its arrangements in the air of the mix or buries them in its bases, letting electro music spread on a groove punched with black and white keys. Each element intervenes with discretion to let Elias stories be related with elegance. Frustrated, disappointed or aborted love stories.

Honey Child is a Chamber Pop Choir from Los Angeles, led by Opera singer Claire McKeown and featuring Claire Boutelle, Aimee Jacobs, Danielle Mandell, Dayna Richards, Jacquelyn Sky, and Cynthia Zitter. Originally formed as a cathartic place to let go of the pains of a slaughtered heart, Honey Child became a transformative creative endeavor filled with beauty and harmony. The debut album was recorded at EastWest Studios in the famed Studio 3 (Pet sounds). According to McKeown, The goal of the album was to celebrate musicians sharing time and space. We set up for three days and tried to capture as much magic as possible honoring the authenticity of our sound and ability to record live performances. For me, the orchestrations and vocal arrangements of The Beach Boys and The Beatles were huge inspirations for the album along with the vocal delivery of Harry Nilsson, Dusty Springfield, and the dramatic honesty of opera singer Maria Callas."

Reissue of ‘Yr Body is Nothing’, originally released by DKA (2016).

11 tracks with influences trip hop, Arabic music, soul or delta blues, whose proposals give rise to a lively psychedelism and an ardent shamanism. An experimental album of a rare eclecticism of the unclassifiable Dutch trio My Baby.

It is actually unbelievable what the 27-year-old producer from Cologne has achieved in the last two years. His debut album "Roosevelt" released on August 19, 2016, immediately made it into the top 100 of the German album charts and is considered to be one of the most important new pop albums in the German music scene and one of the few albums that also caused a sensation internationally. "He has the potential to go around the world," the Spiegel magazine attested, and he did.
With his debut album Roosevelt also managed to break into the US market, as well as the UK, France, Holland and Italy - even Mexico. Festivals around the world compete for him: Primavera Sound, The Governors Ball Music Festival (New York), Sónar Festival, Montreux Jazz Festival, Sziget Festival, Lollapalooza Festival and many others. Radio stations at home and abroad still play "Fever" and "Moving On" up and down. His listeners drive him to almost 80 million streams at Spotify. Everyone wants him to remix their songs (Chvrches, Glass Animals, RHYE, Who Made Who, Blossoms and Sinkane) And what does he do? He records a cover version of "Teardrops" and becomes subsequently a honorary member of the Womack & Womack family.