Dark Entries 2020s 10 Items

The CTC - Creative Technology Consortium

Release: 2024 / US – Original

Genre: Rock & Indie, Pop

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Bay Area post-punk outfit Topographies deliver their sophomore LP, Interior Spring, via Dark Entries. Formed in 2018 in San Francisco by Justin Oronos, Jeremie Ruest, and Gray Tolhurst, Topographies link the icy riffs and gloomy atmosphere of early coldwave with the textural depth and warmth of classic shoegaze, emerging with a style that’s both contemporary and timeless. On Interior Spring, Topographies explore themes of guilt, inherited trauma, and recovery. The meaning of its title is triplicate: a submerged river carrying hope, an anxiously wound clock, and a season where wildflowers bloom on the graves of the past. While the work of Tolhurst’s father - Laurence Tolhurst from The Cure - provides a clear influence, Topographies expertly channel acts like Asylum Party or The Chameleons on anthemic pearls like “Night Sea” and “Chain of Days”. Tolhurst’s lyrics draw on his own experience in recovery from substance abuse to examine the cycle of use and hopelessness that characterizes addiction. Through these ten songs, the group hopes to present the idea that freedom is not an escape but an embrace of the quotidian beauty of human life.

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Panoramic Colorsound

3LP | 2023 | US | Original (Dark Entries)

46,99 €*

Release: 2023 / US – Original

Genre: Electronic & Dance, Pop

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The venerable Dark Entries celebrates it’s 300th release with Panoramic Coloursound, a triple LP from the Creative Technology Consortium. Traxx, Andrew Bisenius, and Jason Letkiewicz forged the CtC during the depths of pandemic isolation. Drawing from film and television music of the 80’s/90’s and armed with a mighty array of vintage analog and digital synthesizers, they set out to explore heists, vices, and catastrophe. Panoramic Coloursound collapses sound and image into a neon blur throughout its 25 tracks. While retro scores were the starting point for the CtC, the project does more than pay dutiful homage — these notes are warped and skewed, devolving into decaying digital soundscapes. EBM-inflected basslines pop up on tracks like “Catastrophe” and “A Retro Vice”, menacing numbers that recall Traxx and Letkiewicz’s legendary work as Mutant Beat Dance (a project also featuring Beau Wanzer). “Follow Our Kode” pairs heroic synths with funky bass, striking cosmic chords akin to the material that Traxx and Bisenius have released as An Anomaly. Krautrock-esque guitars slide along anthemic pads on “Beautifully Polluted Sunset”, which comes across like an alien Miami Vice closing theme. The CtC channel corroded VHS vibes while making music for the future. Panoramic Coloursound was mastered by Frédéric Alstadt. The sleeve was designed by Eloise Leigh, and features a photograph by Jason Letkiewicz. Also included is a postcard featuring liner notes, a gear list, and a photograph by Maria Tzeka.

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Ortrotasce

Dispatches From Solitude

26,99 €*

12" | 2023 | US | Original (Dark Entries)

Release: 2024 / US – Original

Genre: Pop

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Ortrotasce comes to Dark Entries with Dispatches From Solitude, their latest LP. For over a decade, Nic Hamersly has been using the Ortotrasce (pronounced: or-tro-task) moniker to unleash brooding-yet-propulsive darkwave anthems upon the world. Hamersly’s work explores the intersection between industrial and synth pop, drawing a line from the sounds of the past to the present. Recorded during the Covid and post-Covid era, Dispatches from Solitude brings 8 tracks of tightly wrought synth-pop exploring grief, romance, and our strange world - which just keeps getting stranger. The cover art was designed by Hamersly, and the record includes a postcard with notes. Dispatches From Solitude will thrill fans of classic industrial-laced wave bands like Hard Corps, Fad Gadget, and SPK

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Lust Pattern

Stand, Scatter

18,99 €*

LP | 2023 | US | Original (Dark Entries)

Release: 2023 / US – Original

Genre: Electronic & Dance, Pop

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Lust Pattern slithers its way to Dark Entries with four tracks of deviant electro-wave on Stand, Scatter. Ryan Armbridge has graced Dark Entries several times via his project Linea Aspera, a revered coldwave revivalist duo with Zoe Zanias. As Lust Pattern, Armbridge draws hypnotic paths through the reverb-laden halls of post-punk and electro-funk, coursing in a gait uniquely his own. Built up from improvised jams, the four cuts on Stand, Scatter defy neat categorization while spanning a wide breadth of genres. Opener “Forming Lines” features Drexciyan squelch, silky guitar, and bursts of live drumming; this sounds like a lot, but it coheres into a perfectly simmering stew of funk. “Choreography” preserves the aquatic vibes but bumps the tempo up into space disco territory, complete with laser bleeps and Moroder-esque pads. It’s a mark of Armbridge’s craft that closing track “No Floor” - a searing motorik synth punk jam that recalls Suicide at their finest - sounds not at all out of place, but rather serves as a logical conclusion to this illogical picture. Stand, Scatter drifts across genres but never loses its focus on the unorthodox groove.

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Loveshadow

Release: 2023 / US – Original

Genre: Pop

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Bay Area DIY pop duo Loveshadow join up with Dark Entries to release II, their sophomore LP. Anya Prisk and Izaak Schlossman met in Oakland in 2016, bonded over their love of ‘80s sounds and immediately began building their musical world with lush synths, funky basslines, and irresistible hooks. The past is always in their palette, but Loveshadow’s nostalgia doesn’t trace to any single locus; it’s more like a cloud, and it’s through this haze that they breathe new life into the music they love. Their debut album was released in 2021 on Music from Memory to acclaim. II presents a more subtle and refined statement from the band - laser-focused on the vaporous expanse. Album opener “Last Room” saunters with the confidence of Sade, while “Earthen Track” feels like Kate Bush covering a forgotten city pop anthem. The album is largely focused on club-friendly material, but mellower pieces like “Winter’s Door” and “Mirage” are sophisticated stand-outs that would make Ryuchi Sakamoto proud. Italo funk groover “Power Melts Away” closes out the album by upping the energy into fist-pumping territory. Anya’s lyrics on II use the unreality of dreams as a lens to examine the realities of change and personal growth; illusions made material. Loveshadow elegantly smear the lines between past and present, pop and avant, immanent and transcendent.

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Ike Yard

1982

12" | 2022 | US | Original (Dark Entries)

Release: 2024 / US – Original

Genre: Pop

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Dark Entries flashes back to the grimy streets of New York City circa 1982 to bring us an unreleased album from cult outfit Ike Yard. Comprised of Stuart Argabright, Michael Diekmann, Kenneth Compton, and Fred Szymanski, Ike Yard sits between the sinewy proto-body music of the Neue Deutsche Welle and the shattered grooves of their No Wave peers in New York. »1982« is essential for fans of post-punk and caustic electronics from Liaisons Dangereuses to Beau Wanzer.

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Forbidden Overture

Turned On!

LP | 2023 | US | Original (Dark Entries)

Release: 2022 / US – Original

Genre: Pop

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The master sleuths at Dark Entries bring us Forbidden Overture, another tantalizing mystery from the hidden depths of sleaze. It all began years ago when Bijou Video’s Jules Zinn introduced the label to the soundtracks of the pornographic films of legendary filmmaker Steve Scott and gay superstar Al Parker. It wasn’t until The Magazine’s Bob Mainardi gifted a cassette copy of the soundtrack to the film Turned ON—a bathhouse fantasy from 1982—that the wheels started turning. The steamy, hypnotic sounds were credited only to “Forbidden Overture…” but who was that? This question remained unanswered for some time, and countless hours of research, Venn diagramming, and elaborate flow charts all proved fruitless. It wasn’t until a chance screening of BAD Girls Dormitory, a 1986 women-in-prison movie from gay porn director Joe Gage that happened to reuse some of the same music did the answer become clear: Forbidden Overture was none other than the mighty Man Parrish! The soundtrack to Turned ON consists of two epic side-long pieces, both of which employ classic Man Parrish production techniques. “Primal Overture” slinks along with brooding pads and ominous chords, building and oozing throughout its 27 minute runtime like a sultrier Goblin soundtrack. “Strictly Forbidden” takes a similar groove to a major key, but it’s optimistic chirp conceals a wry, mysterious wink. Says director Steve Scott: “It took us about two weeks to find the right piece for the jockstrap scene. But it's like anything else—you know when it’s right.” Also included is a 20 page booklet featuring photos, archival material, a pull-out poster, and interviews with Steve Scott and stars Al Parker and Scott Taylor. Turned ON is an exciting musical rediscovery as well as a vital document of queer history.

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Brontez Purnell

No Jack Swing

17,99 €* 23,99 € -25%

12" | 2022 | US | Original (Dark Entries)

Release: 2023 / US – Original

Genre: Rock & Indie, Electronic & Dance, Pop

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Dark Entries and Papi Juice Records team up for No Jack Swing, the solo electronic debut of multi-hype man Brontez Purnell. The Southern-raised, Oakland-based musician and writer has centered his queerness and Blackness in projects Gravy Train and Younger Lovers as well as in his award-winning books 100 Boyfriends and Since I Laid My Burden Down. On No Jack Swing, Purnell gives us a love letter to the most beloved (and secularized) of drum patterns - that is, the electronic 808 “Amen Break”. Beginning recording in 2020, Purnell conceived of No Jack Swing as an audio zine of found sound materials: chain letters of instrumentals recorded in bedrooms, poems from boys in France, found gospel tapes from his childhood family Baptist Choir, and the sound of records skipping on his bedroom turntable. No Jack Swing is as much a homage to No Wave and New Jack Swing as it is an answering to the gods of Indie, Electroclash, Disco, and Gospel. Amidst all this background noise, the unexpected occurs: all the niche pretensions collapse to a singularity - the sound of High Pop! No Jack Swing was produced by Nightfeelings. Each copy of includes a lyric sheet with a photo of Brontez.

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Bezier

Valencia

17,99 €*

Driven To Fantasy Pink Vinyl Edition

Release: 2022 / US – Original

Genre: Pop

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Bézier returns to Dark Entries with Valencia, a six track rumination on memory, geography, and transmutation. Multi-instrumentalist Robert Yang’s Bézier project has appeared on Dark Entries many times over the last decade, most recently with the 2018 LP Parler Musique. Says Yang, “What started as a project to investigate the love of the sound and scenery while living in San Francisco quickly developed into a passionate search for interlocking melodies and driving rhythms.” On Valencia, Bézier invokes twinned places. The Valencia Street of San Francisco is channeled, which was the center of the city’s vibrant new wave scene in the 1980s. But also echoed is Valencia, Spain, and La Ruta del Bakalao aka La Ruta Destroy, the Spanish clubbing scene throughout the 80s and 90s famed for its aggressive and synthetic sounds. Valencia is a darker record for Yang, exploring themes of submission and catharsis with nods to SF’s gay leather bars of the 70s and 80s. The high BPM salvos of “Valencia” and “Scrupulous” capture the frantic energy of Bakalao and Valencian wave acts like Última Emoción. Elsewhere Yang mines the dreamy space disco and Hi-NRG sounds they’re known for, like on the brooding “Past the Marshes” or the anthemic “Reservoir”, which features their partner Len.Leo on vocals. Bézier deftly navigates past and present, light and dark, pain and pleasure, the stasis of memory and the flux of time. Valencia was mastered by Alex Michalski, with EQ for vinyl done by George Horn. Gwenaël Rattke designed the sleeve, which features an 80’s punk zine-esque geometric grid pattern mirroring San Francisco street maps. Also included is a 5x7 postcard with notes.

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Angelyne

25,99 €*