Bandcamp Daily's Best Albums of 2019

Harriet Tubman didn’t run TO freedom. Harriet ran cause she was free ALREADY. She wanted her body to be aligned with what her mind and spirit already KNEW of herself - Dr. Rev. Deac. Bro. A. R-rah whenever in the midst of spreading the good news about Mama Harriet dedication. fo(r) my holy trinity [MUDDA MARY, LIL LILLIE & NINA-BABY] & all de golden chirrun who never learn(t) to dance on beat in public space(is) cause dey didnt have de proper rearin or soul train to teach dem bedda #noshade ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS cuddnt have done any of dis w/o Todd Carter | Nicole Mitchell & my Mandorla Awakening Family [Tomeka Reid, Tatsu Aoki, Alex Wing, Renee Baker, JoVia Armstrong, Kojiro Umezaki] | Parneshia Jones for smiling when i said de book is call(d) neckbone & de soundtrack will be call(d) tubman | de deacon board [Cream, M.E., Jeff, Tina, Marcus, Gogo, Justin] & all de other musician(s) [Baba Billy Branch, Chris Paquette, Sam Trump, etc,] who came thru & bless(d) dis project(t) wif yo enthusiasm & inner-gee … i truly appreciate de way you play(d) what i hum(d) &/or beatbox(d) blk! | nephew Sharrieff Muhammad | my sista(s) by blood & relation who was my ban(d) all dress(d) in white derr are so many mo(re) of u who are not in dis photo (but u are in de photo) | Cecil McDonald Jr. [my man 50 gran(d) blk!] | jr. [Shadell] cause u truly be a sun | baby girl Erika fo listenin & talkin lead in de wattah on thru| Jamila Woods cause u truly be HEAVN in so many way(s) | Roger, Krista Franklin, Cheryl Reese, Chinaka Hodge, Madrid Perry, Marvin K. White, Mahogany L. Browne, T’ai Freedom Ford, Weezie, Deana Dean, Ayanah Moor, Jamila Reagan, Janice Lowe, Aricka Foreman, Tony Bolden, StaceyAnn Chin, Big Bro. Mario, Khari B., Yini, Maceo, Sylvia Ewing, Boss Lady (C.C. Carter), Fathom, Mama Brenda Matthews [asé] , Baba Kent Foreman [asé], Coolout & Amina Hawkins, Dirty MF, Shawn Wallace, Mecca, Medea, D. Stovall | Naima Dawson, Derek, Aymar, Erika (Jones-Purvis) thanks for holdin me down & being my jedis out in joint call(d) de world | Baba Billy Branch!!!!!!! | my niece(is) & nephew(s) especially Ashley, Aranda, Shania & Austyn (the runaway star) | Emily Hooper- Lansana … oooo weeee … i hope at least one of deez rekkid(s) will make u boogie & remember U DE PRIZE & DIS HERR CRACKER JACK BOX blk! | Elyse Blennerhassett i dunno what i did to get such angel sent my way, but i gotta keep doin it | there are so many poets, artists & people Greg Tate, Cauleen Smith, Heroes are Gang Leaders, Tyehimba Jess, Theaster, Yaw, Corey, Meagan … so many of yall workin in & pushin tradition | gotta thank Rebirth (supersuits) | Lise Ross | my The Poetry Foundation family | my FCAN family | my 3Arts family | my Urban Gateways family – Jill “the real deal” Potter | my University of Chicago family | my The California Clipper family | my Floating Museum family | Cave Canem (who say poets cant boogie) | Baba Phil Cohran [asé], Baba Douglas Ewart & de AACM, Gil Scott-Heron [asé], Oscar Brown [asé], Donny Hathaway [asé], Nina Simone [asé], Billie Holiday [asé], James “J-Boogie” Baldwin [asé], James “J.B.” Brown [asé], Roy Hargrove[asé], Funkadelic, Sly Stone, Betty Davis, Baba Bill Withers, James Cleveland [asé], Clara Ward [asé], all dem rekkid(s) lil lillie rock & bop to | thank you Matt Pakulski for believing in this project | chi-town (wessyde) | big mama [Mary A. Booker aka mudda mary] | nina-baby | Big Brother Jarvis | Tracey King & Smokie (Innervisions forever – like Wakanda – ha!) | The Lit-Ex Massive | my family & cousin(s) [by relation & choice] | de Booker(s), de Curry(s), de Mason(s) | jee-sus buddah & re-re | Lil Bruh Perre & dat dude Digga | tubman. is brought into dis worl(d) thru blk bone & blood; fish grease & murray pomade; pound cake sunday(s); Mama Lee’s sweet potato cobbler | joy can be a underused feelin but never be an overuse(d) word | if its on de other side of de cliff … leap fo(r) it! | de magic is in de leap!!!!

London's Touching Bass are excited to be collaborating with Melbourne's Wondercore Island to present 'Pareidolia' — the debut album from self-taught, multi-instrumentalist producer and Hiatus Kaiyote drummer, Clever Austin (aka Perrin Moss). Born near the Blue Mountains in Australia and originally a hip-hop producer, Moss counts some of the world’s most acclaimed drummers and producers as his fans (Questlove, Pharrell Williams, Erykah Badu, Chris Daddy Dave, Flying Lotus). Much like his Grammy-nominated work for HK, Pareidolia is a genre-bending sonic and emotive pilgrimage with virtuosic, percussive groove at its core. Conceived via countless nights in his home studio, it dreamily roams across 16 tracks which slowly unravel with the cinematic feel of a movie; all mixed and self-produced over a period of two years. Guest appearances are spontaneous, late night drop-ins, cross town musical crossovers and moments of respect paid to established and emerging innovators. Touching Bass are proud to be the first UK label to introduce the mesmeric talents of Texas native, Jon Bap on first single “Blue Tongue”. Elsewhere, fresh from her well-received 2018 release on Brainfeeder, Georgia Anne Muldrow blesses “You Are All You Need” with her mercurial voice. Closer to home, Cazeusx O.S.L.O’s baritone spoken word grounds “Mothership Strip” and Brisbane-born multidisciplinary artist, Laneous (aka Lachlan Mitchell) croons on “Catapult”. As with most organic collaborations, the label connection was a result of sheer serendipity. Touching Bass founder, Errol, has been following Clever Austin and the Wondercore Island mixtape series since 2013. But it took until 2018 — during their debut Australia/Japan tour — for him and Alex Rita to make their own way to Melbourne. One night, following on from a Touching Bass event, the pair got involved in a late night jam session at Clever Austin’s studio with Lori, Silent Jay and Mandarin Dreams’ Kuzich. “We were all bigging up and sharing music made by friends in our respective homelands but when Perrin started playing his own project, everyone was just in silence. He’d crafted something that was equal parts peculiar, innovative and so beautiful that it brought us to tears. That’s when we knew it was special.” Pareidolia further cements a trans-global cultural exchange between the soulful sounds emanating from Melbourne and London.

This is not idle music! London has long been a hotbed for experimentation for music from West Africa, and it’s into this global-local story that we can situate London’s newest afrobeat innovators: Kokoroko. In the 40’s World War Two veteran Ambrose Campbell and his West African Rhythm Brothers, were enticing Soho music lovers with sweet palm wine sounds. The following decade, a young Fela Kuti (and his Koola Lobitos outfit with drummer Tony Allen), would jam with Campbell, and the seeds for his global Afrobeat revolution were sown. The band’s name is an Urhobo – a Nigerian tribe and language – word meaning ‘be strong’. Sonically living up to their name, Kokoroko are an all star band featuring leading lights from the London jazz community. Powered by seismic horn section (Maurice Grey, saxophonist Cassie Kinoshi, trombonist Richie Seivewright), guitar (Oscar Jerome), keys (Yohan Kebede), drums (Ayo Salawu) and percussion (Onome Edgeworth); Kokoroko are on a mission to fashion new languages using the medium of afrobeat. “This is not idle music!” says Sheila Maurice-Grey, reflecting on the rich history of sounds that have inspired the band. Whether it's the social commentary, the political stance of acts like the Black President, or the high power energy of afrobeat nights: the music is teeming with a potent energy the band want to propel forwards, London style. Make no mistake, this is not a band interested in performative tributes or pastiche. For Maurice Grey, part of the drive behind their creative impulse to is ask: “what does this music sound like for my generation?” “We love this music and want other people to love it the way we do”, shared Edgeworth. Aside of the primacy of love for the music, a subtext of the bands creation was a sense of alienation at London’s thinning pool of afrobeat and highlife nights – particularly of black listeners and players. “We don’t want this music to die”, he added. Rather than launching straight into writing their own music, since the band’s formation in 2014, they immersed themselves in the sounds of Pat Thomas, Ebo Taylor and others by playing covers to sell out crowds. “I remember speaking with Dele Sosimi about the structure of Fela’s songs – every element plays a part. But, before melody or harmony, there’s rhythm. The rhythmic aspect of the solos from that era is amazing. The West African approach to jazz and improvisation is hip!”, offered Maurice-Grey. In writing their own music, Edgeworth emphasised how much the KOKOROKO sound is shaped by the capital. “We didn’t want it to sound too clean – that doesn’t really fit into the London sound”, he said. Instead, the band opt for grooves with added grit: “we wanted it to sound rough, like going out and hearing music pushed through speakers or the energy of people dancing at afrobeat parties: its music we’ve seen work on dancefloors”. Drawing as much from nightlife, the musical influences of West African Pentecostal churches, jazz and Western classical, its both in the middle of and beyond this mix of influences that Kokoroko’s self titled EP takes shape. Adwa opens deep-ridge grooves. Drawing from the syncopated funk of Ethio-jazz, it takes its name from the Ethiopian city of the same name. Composed by keyboardist Yohan Kebede, the victorious spirit of the track is a meditation not only on the infamous Battle of Adwa, but of the way societies evolve in the aftermath of conflict. Ti-de is a soft lullaby taking its cue from a medley of old West African folk melodies. A meditation on remaining present through change, the track is laced with opiating guitar lines, soft percussion and languid vocals that feel at times interchangeable with the grand sway of the horn section. The jubilant Uman arrives as a “celebration of women, black women in particular,” shares Maurice Grey. “I wrote the tune with my mother in mind”. The track tackles the cultural trope of the ‘black superwoman’ and – similarly to Maurice-Grey’s visual artwork – asks questions about why misrepresentations about black women exist. Ultimately, it's a redemptive track that makes space for both the unique struggles black women face, and their vulnerability. Like Ti-de, Absuey Junction takes its lead from Ebo Taylor’s horn led approach, and showcases the band’s deft hand with palm wine infused ballads. The hit single, first featured on the We Out Here compilation, reached 18 million + views on YouTube. Based on a composition by guitarist Oscar Jerome, the track captures the sunset hum of Gambia’s nocturnal soundscapes, winding horn solos and haunting vocals. A precursor to their album, “it’s an honest capture” of the band’s progression and a stunning introduction to their sound. Written by Teju Adeleye. Tracklist: 1. Adwa 2. Ti-de 3. Uman 4. Abusey Junction Musicians: Sheila Maurice-Grey - Trumpet Cassie Kinoshi - Saxophone Richie Seivewright Trombone Oscar Jerome - Guitar Yohan Kebede - Keys Mutale Chashi - Bass Ayo Salawu - Drums Onome Edgeworth - Percussion

Five years after releasing Return of the Astro-Goth, Yugen Blakrok descends from the vast cosmos and delivers to the world an impressive lesson in style, with her second album Anima Mysterium. Far from the stars but heavy with their radiant wisdom; it’s towards Earth, humanity and the obscurity at its core that the South African rapper directs her incantations. Accompanied by Kanif the Jhatmaster’s beats, Yugen’s flow sows the frontiers of a world where the subconscious frees itself and confronts man with his most hidden secrets. Yugen’s poetry has something Ovidian, depicting her as an agent of Metamorphosis, a reincarnated goddess in terrestrial form calling humanity to itself. “Why in the deepest darkness my soul beams like a lantern Engineered in female form...silent carrier of the force I'm a sandstorm in desert dunes, a shadow with a torch” Land of Gray, Yugen Blakrok The osmosis between Yugen’s words and Kanif’s instrumentals comes across from the first listen. On Return of the Astro-Goth, the astrological ideas covered by the rapper found a perfect canvas in the mix of wind instruments, dub and electronic echoes from the beatmaker. Here, Yugen lays hers flow over instrumentals of rock, jazz and even at times something that sounds close to witch-house. The project, released under French label I.O.T Records, extracts the essential oils from hip-hop as seen by the two artists, whose creative freedom and artistic integrity contrast with the current rigid codes of the genre. At their sides they have rallied to their musical odyssey artists from South Africa and the US, including hip-hop legend Kool Keith himself. //////////// SOS MEDITERRANEE //////////// (UK) Because it goes without saying that every human being has the right to life, I.O.T Records is now a partner of the organization SOS MEDITERRANEE, which comes to the rescue of people trying to reach the European coasts by sea. As a sign of support, for any order on our Bandcamp shop, if you register an amount higher than the displayed price, the surplus will automatically be donated to SOS MEDITERRANEE, to which will be added 1€ (max.) from I.O.T Records. For more information about their actions, visit this website sosmediterranee.com/about-us/ (FR) Parce qu'il va de soi que chaque être humain a droit à la vie, I.O.T Records est désormais partenaire de l'organisation SOS MEDITERRANEE, qui vient en secours aux personnes tentant de rejoindre les côtes européennes par voie maritime. En signe de soutien, lors de toute commande sur notre shop Bandcamp, si vous inscrivez un montant supérieur au prix affiché, l'excédent sera automatiquement reversé à SOS MEDITERRANEE, auquel s'ajoutera un don à hauteur de 1€ (max.) de la part de I.O.T Records. Pour plus d'informations sur leurs actions, visitez ce site www.sosmediterranee.fr

London-based band Hejira announce their second LP Thread of Gold, released on the 22nd of February 2019 through their own Lima Limo Records. Borne from an astonishing and acutely personal sequence of events, Thread of Gold tells the story of vocalist, bass guitarist and co-songwriter Rahel Debebe-Dessalegne’s changing relationship with her homeland of Ethiopia after the death of her father. She took the band with her on a pilgrimage to Addis Ababa, looking to reaffirm her own ancestral roots and cultural identity, and subsequently on a deeper exploration into the unique, ancient and far-flung lands, peoples and musics of Ethiopia. On this journey, the band members worked through loss and bereavement, through discovery and new experiences, through a moveable songwriting that took place across many years and many locations. The displacement, write the band, gave deeper meaning to their own identities. The results - as documented on Thread of Gold - weave together the many ribbons of Hejira’s musical outlook. Years of performing together in jazz and big-band ensembles, and alongside such profiles as Amy Winehouse, Nitin Sawhney, Floating Points and Eric Lau has informed an instinctual and mutually inspiring compositional relationship within the band. Their intelligent, soulful, leftfield-aligned take on pop music underpins their love of the otherworldly, the mesmerising, and the unpredictable. Their time in Ethiopia eventually became the binding force around several years’ worth of songwriting and self-recording. “Ethiopia became a backbone and a point of reference,” multi-instrumentalist and producer Sam Beste offers. “The experience helped to galvanise everything we had written into a cohesive work.” Partly dedicated to the memory of Rahel’s uncle Gashe Seleshie (“the type of person you learn so much from just by being in his company”), Thread of Gold sparkles with articulate and subtle instrumentation, earworming choruses, orchestral arrangement, emotive confession, East African field recordings and close vocal harmonies, all illuminating a profoundly moving and intimate personal expression. Hejira formed in 2010 after Beste, Debebe-Dessalegne and fellow multi-instrumentalist Alex Reeve set up their home studio in South East London. The line-up expands to include additional musicians both in the studio and onstage. These are never hired hands, but musical ‘cousins’ to the ‘siblings’ of the core members. In 2016, following the release of their acclaimed 2013 debut LP Prayer Before Birth on Matthew Herbert’s Accidental Records, and EPs on Accidental and Floating Points’ Eglo Records, the band set up their own Lima Limo Records. The label - named after a winding mountain path in northern Ethiopia - has become a home not only for their own releases, but also for like-minded creative souls releasing music just as strange and wonderful as Hejira’s.

Conceived in the Mushroom Hour Half Hour lab, SPAZA is a band with no permanent personnel, with each lineup assembled for the express purpose of recording once-off improvised or workshopped material. For this, the initial salvo, SPAZA was put together from a group of musicians with individual and collective links to Johannesburg’s jazz, afro funk and experimental electro scenes. In the context of this completely improvised album, the term “spaza” not only refers to the gallery in Troyeville, Johannesburg where this project was recorded live (and in one take) in the autumn of 2015, but to South Africa’s thousands of informal neighbourhood stores. In South Africa, “spaza” has come to signify an entrepreneurial spirit, especially in the country’s black townships where economic barriers to business ownership mean that only a few can attain the status of formal business ownership. In the country’s socio-political context, spazas, usually operating out of converted garages, shacks or repurposed shipping containers, are also contested territories. They are sites of often fatal bloodshed where financially disenfranchised South Africans routinely mete out their frustrations on those they consider “foreigners” and “outsiders”. It is these outsiders who have come to dominate the spaza economy. However, spazas are also colourful, with their facades branded, styled and designed by each owner. They can become the nerve centres of social activity in the communities they occupy and are often stocked with an array of iconic South African brands and products, many of which are referenced in the track names of this album. Perhaps obliquely, there are musical sensibilities to be grasped at the mention of the term. “Spaza,” the recording, the location, the revolving ensemble - all evoke a spirit of independence, a D.I.Y aesthetic, a propensity for spontaneity, and, literally, a coming together of minds at the corner to shoot the breeze or let off a seriously considered prognosis. True to this, there is a heightened and sustained sense of intuition running through this recording whose sonic palette is so wide it captures - through soundscaping, invocation, lament, impressionistic vocal weaving - not only the transient and hybridised nature of life in Johannesburg, but also the heaviness of the air at the time of its recording. More ambient, controlled swirl of rhythm and experimental mixing than incessant groove, the album is an outpouring of a range of expressions that exist between the supposed binaries of indigenous forms of music and the electronic experimentation Johannesburg is known globally for. Between percussionist Gontse Makhene on the bottom end of the scale, and sound sculptor Joao Orrechia on the nebulous end of it, vocalists Nosisi Ngakane and Siya Makuzeni (who also plays trombone) marshal a vocal experiment that is as tense as it is playful. From their respective posts, bass player Ariel Zarmonsky and string wizard Waldo Alexander stitch, stretch and add body to the various strands of sound being created. There is an intelligence to the vocal sculpting that gives structure and coherence to the music, creating a sonic monolith that honours various aspects of South African life, including divination, burial rites, as well as the precariousness of a simple trip to the cornerstone. The interlude Tigerbalm noBuhlebakho, for instance, relays the sometimes charged atmosphere of a trip to the spaza, one laced with catcalling indicative of the war over womens' bodies. While this can end in violence and, in some cases, death, ultimately this album seems to point to the liberating feeling of levitating above it all. At times opaque, and at others direct, SPAZA is always unyielding and propulsive. This could be the sound of the city turned inside out, ruminating on its troubled history and ever morphing present. There are pensive and celebratory streaks crisscrossing the album, not to mention a vulnerability that is in keeping with the spontaneous ethos of Mushroom Hour Half Hour. The results, shaped in the Pan African milieu that is Johannesburg, is a freewheeling representation of continental astral travel.

Yves Jarvis is a clean slate, a recasting of Montreal-based musician Jean-Sebastian Audet. Audet previously created under the name Un Blonde, a name which he says was, at one point, all he wanted. But of course, things change. “Now I’m at a place where I feel like when I hear it, I don’t like it because I don’t identify with it at all,” he continues. “I knew I needed something that I could identify with.” Each aspect of Audet’s work is immensely personal, and Yves Jarvis reflects this literally. Yves is Audet’s middle name, while Jarvis is his mother’s last name. He is thrilled to announce his new album The Same But By Different Means, to be released on March 1 via ANTI- Records and Flemish Eye Records in Canada. Each of Yves’s albums is informed and driven by a colour; it is both a visual and thematic palette that reflects and refracts intentions. Un Blonde’s 2017 album Good Will Come To You was yellow, which Audet cites as his favourite colour. It is, for him, the colour of the daytime. Blue, the colour of The Same But By Different Means, is less endearing. “Blue is more so the colour that I think is imposed on me,” he remarks quietly. “Where the last record was the joy of the morning, and optimism, this record is the pain of the night before sleep. I find it so painful before sleep, and this midnight blue is what this whole world is. The night is just completely imposed and weighing so heavily and this is a much more difficult realm to walk around in, texturally.” But with The Same But By Different Means Audet continues to create music that is at once warm, haunting, and unfamiliar while remaining singularly inviting and kind—a mélange that reflects both comfort and its counterpart. Good Will Come To You was celebrated universally for the things that make Audet’s work compelling: careful folk noir, tender R&B flourishes, pillowy vocal beds that somehow seem to neither begin nor end, and a punkish ambivalence towards saccharine melodics that traditionally dominate the previous three structures. These same qualities are present across The Same But By Different Means, a record that builds a delightful, imaginative framework from which to explore what it means to be Yves Jarvis. Songs on the record range from 14 seconds long to over eight minutes. The record’s title is itself a step further: with each new project, Audet adds a word to the title. “This year is my transition into Yves Jarvis where I’m not only widening the scope, but deepening the picture altogether.”

“This album is a celebration of female courage, determination and creativity. In 2015, the Tomorrow’s Warriors commissioned me to write an extended work, to be performed by members of their Nu Civilisation Orchestra, for a concert at the Women of the World Festival, in London’s Southbank Centre, on International Women’s Day. Whilst gathering ideas for my composition, I came across the character of Polyhymnia, the ancient Greek Muse of music, poetry and dance: a Goddess for the arts. Perhaps inspired by her, I conceived the form of a suite of movements, each dedicated to women of outstanding qualities, role models, with whom I felt a strong connection. Whereas La Saboteuse, the embodiment of my inner-destroyer and the catalyst for the creation of my last album, could be viewed as my anti-muse, maybe Polyhymnia herself became my Muse, inspiring an intense period of creativity, which resulted in the six pieces on this album. Since its conception, composed and arranged over the six weeks leading up to the first rehearsal for the premiere, the music has evolved and expanded. During the recording process I began incorporating new elements and drawing on a wider pool of artists, including members of my own Hafla band, alongside some of my favourite musicians working on the London scene. By sharing my musical response to the stories and achievements of these exceptional women, and celebrating the creativity and talents of my co-contributors, I hope to inspire others, in the words of Malala, “to be brave, to embrace the strength within themselves and realise their full potential” - Yazz Ahmed -- Yazz Ahmed is a British-Bahraini trumpet player and composer. Through her music, she seeks to blur the lines between jazz, Arabic folk and electronic sound design, bringing together the sounds of her mixed heritage in what has been described as ‘psychedelic Arabic jazz, intoxicating and compelling’. Already established at the centre of London’s dynamic new jazz scene, her second album, La Saboteuse, made a global impact. It clocked up multiple rave reviews, making many cross-genre ‘best of 2017’ lists around the world, including Jazz Album of the Year in the Wire Magazine. It has recently been recognised as one of the albums of the decade: “for sheer, unconquered beauty, there are few albums of any genre that reach these heady heights. Ahmed, in diving deep within herself, comes back up for air with a mysterious, wondrous artefact humming in her hands.” the2010s.net

Luke Younger returns to PAN with an eight-track album of his most direct work to date. Composed alone at NO studio in the Essex countryside, to start an album with a piece called ‘Capital Crisis (New City Loop)’ seems an intentional misnomer. Long, sustained periods in the rural studio setting see Younger working with an array of fragmented, disassociated sound sources to build upon 2015’s Olympic Mess. It shares a similarly inclined vision of the urban environment, but here Chemical Flowers makes reference to paradoxical notions of authenticity and creative practice by way of questioning the structures around us. Collages are assembled and dismantled, temporal and spatial boundaries fluctuate and movement is an overarching theme. Surrealist drowned world atmospheres sculpted far enough away from the source of inspiration leave plenty of room for ambiguity. The nocturnal nature of the recording process is self-evident, and pieces like ‘Leave Them All Behind’ tap into a deep psychedelic undercurrent. Confused narratives, emotions and aleatory hallucinations ebb and flow throughout. ‘I Knew You Would Respond’ evokes murky soundtrack terrain with eerie repetitive strings and ambient respite, disrupted periodically by brief bursts of granular noise. It’s one of the records most unnerving moments, possibly as it’s one of the most recognisably human. The album navigates dense passages with recurring signifiers. Hollow percussion, modulating delay and curious field recordings come and go, maintaining a perpetual state of flux where nothing stays the same for long. The drowned world theatricals return on the swamp-like ‘Lizard in Fear’ whilst string rhythms creep in on the penultimate track to incite momentary electroacoustic harmony. Floating synthesis slowly washes over and the title track unfolds - five minutes of reverb-laced portamento, visions of decay and Editions EG influenced world-building. Movement is key.

Global ambassadors for the contemporary digital cumbia scene, the Lima-based duo of Felipe Salmon and Rafael Pereira, aka Dengue Dengue Dengue, delve deep into Afro-Peruvian musical traditions for their third album. With inspiration and input from the revered Ballumbrosio musical family, *Zenit & Nadir* brings the group’s already experimental approach into even more ambitious spaces. The resulting tracks blend electronics and acoustic instrumentation with ease, making for a momentous journey. The twinkling “Lagos” and the loping “Ágni” sit somewhere between West Africa and Drexciya’s Detroit techno, while the vocal cut “El Cavilante” unites the various elements into a meaningful mix.

Dengue Dengue Dengue continue expanding their carefully created aesthetic on their new album ‘Zenit & Nadir’ by diving into the deep and rich musical history of Afro-Peruvian music, already hinted in the first single ‘Ágni’, which is the inversion of the traditional Afro-Peruvian rhythm Ingá. The ongoing exploration of the vast and rich musical heritage of the descendants of the former African slaves in Peru has become the main focus of their new album. Their interest in Afro-Peruvian music has led them to meet and record extensively with several members of the Ballumbrosio family, a renowned musical dynasty in Peru that has kept Afro-Peruvian musical traditions alive, masters of rhythms like landó, festejo and crioullo music, with traditional dances and instruments such as the iconic quijada - a rattling percussive instrument made out of a donkey’s jawbone. The introduction of live recordings with the Ballumbrosio brothers has given a whole new dimension to their always-expanding sound, and they feature extensively all throughout the album. As they were such an integral part of the recording process it made perfect sense that they would contribute to expand Dengue Dengue Dengue’s memorable audiovisual performance as well, and have began playing live shows together this year. The marriage between the traditional and organic percussion of the Ballumbrosios with DDD’s hypnotic electronic production has created a whole new chapter for the band. After debuting in 2012, they established themselves as a driving force in the thriving South American digital cumbia scene, but have since expanded their hybrid approach to music to introduce more references such as kuduro and zouk - and more recently the above mentioned Afro-Peruvian styles - which they fuse with traditional Latin American rhythms to build a sonic identity that is hypnotic and dark, while simultaneously festive and life-affirming. With the band being a visual project as much as a musical one, their carefully created aesthetic can be immediately noticed in the iconic masks they wear, often referencing traditional or indigenous elements while being artful and futuristic, a striking visual representation of their approach to music. Their new masks, which are being debuted on their upcoming tour, were handcrafted by Barcelona-based artists Twee Muizen.

Dexter Story is an artistic spirit in the truest sense of the phrase. From his work as a multi-instrumentalist for acts like the Sa-Ra Creative Partners, to his management role with Snoop Dogg and his turn producing Daymé Arocena’s 2017 album Cubafonia, Story understands the business from every conceivable angle. Initially inspired by the music and cultures pervasive throughout the Horn of Africa, Story translated his experiences there into his previous album Wondem, followed closely by the single Wejene Aola featuring jazz luminary Kamasi Washington, both on Soundway Records. If Wondem was a brief glance into Story’s new creative vision, Bahir is a pinpoint refinement of that purpose, the fine-tuning and expanding of the world he created on his Soundway debut. On Bahir, Story steps in front of those influences and melds his world into the one he fell in love with so strongly while in Africa. One way in which he’s done so is by incorporating musicians from both sides of this coin. LA luminaries are featured throughout, as are African contemporaries he encountered throughout his travels. Sudan Archives gives a show-stealing vocal performance on “Gold”, while the Ethiopian producer Endeguena Mulu adds impenetrable and psychedelic texture to the album’s title track. So Bahir finds the polymath musician not stuck between two worlds, but as a member of both. We get Ethiopian tonalities, Ethio-groove, eskista, gurage and North Sudanese shaygiya dance rhythms, Afro-funk, Somali soul and forays into more contemporary global rhythms, too. Angelenos like Miguel Atwood-Ferguson and Josef Leimberg give the record its backbone, while tributes to Ethiopian devotional music such as "Desta's Groove Pt.II" give Bahir its glimmer and shine.

Like all the best bands, Automatic came together organically. Izzy Glaudini (synths, vocals), Lola Dompé (drums, vocals) and Halle Saxon (bass, vocals) met while immersed in LA's DIY band scene, and started jamming together in 2017. Gaining notoriety for their explosive live shows, they were invited to share the stage with bands like Surfbort, Wand and Flatworms. Lola was born into a punk household (her father is Kevin Haskins of Bauhaus) and joined her first band, art-rock outfit Blackblack, when she was just 13. Halle and Izzy met playing in local bands in Northeast LA; Izzy was a guitarist and vocalist, and Halle liked to plug her fretless bass into a guitar amp. Uninspired by the masculine energy of the local scene and rock music on the radio - "pumped out like plastic bottles into the ocean" - Izzy ditched the guitar for a synth, and in 2017 she and Halle joined forces with Lola. They named themselves Automatic after a song by the Go-Go's - the only all-female rock band to have written and played instruments on an album to reach #1 in the US. Izzy studied film at college and Halle used to work at cult video store Kim's Video in NYC, and the band also counts film as an important influence on their music. In particular, David Lynch and Dario Argento's fingerprints are all over Signal's ambiguous lyrics and eerie atmospheres. 

Kate Davis picked up a violin at age five, a bass at age thirteen. She entered the Portland Youth Philharmonic before puberty, the Grammy Jazz Ensemble before adolescence. By the time she graduated high school, Kate won the Presidential Scholar in the Arts Award and a full ride to the Manhattan School of Music. By the time she graduated college, ASCAP's Robert Allen Award and slots at Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center. As a young adult, the virtuoso claimed enthusiastic endorsements from NPR, MTV, PBS and BBC as well as coveted invitations to the stage from Herbie Hancock, Ben Folds, Alison Krauss, Jeff Goldblum and the like. Most recently, she co-wrote Sharon Van Etten’s hit single “Seventeen.” Yet, Kate Davis considers her debut indie rock album her hardest-earned accolade to date. Kate grew up as a jazz darling, but she grew into something significantly more dynamic. Days spent practicing and performing became nights spent writing — cathartic indie rock — music simultaneously informed by and rebutting of her training. Forbidden chord progressions emerged like diary entries, documents of an internal reaction to routine. Time intended for technique slipped into secret listening sessions of Beach House and Death Cab for Cutie. In the same bright, arresting croon that ignited her youthful stardom, Davis created confessionals. Now 28 and audibly matured, Kate is prepared to properly share the artifacts from her late night craft, a full length reaction to ritual required of perfection, an outburst from the pedestal. Trophy will be released in the fall of 2019 on Solitaire Recordings. Throughout twelve tumultuous tracks, Kate poetically reflects upon the intricacies of what it is to live, ruminating on topics too close to her heart — identity, self-worth, loss.

Released in September of 2018, Mother of My Children was the debut album from Black Belt Eagle Scout, the recording project of Katherine Paul. Heralded as a favorite new musician of 2018 by the likes of NPR Music, Stereogum, and Paste, the album was also named as a “Best Rock Album of 2018” by Pitchfork, and garnered further end-of-year praise from FADER, Under The Radar and more. Arriving just a year after that debut record, At the Party With My Brown Friends is a brand new full-length recording from Black Belt Eagle Scout. Where that first record was a snapshot of loss and landscape and of KP’s standing as a radical indigenous queer feminist, this new chapter finds its power in love, desire and friendship. At the Party With My Brown Friends is a profound and understated forward step. The squalling guitar anthems that shaped its predecessor are replaced by delicate vocals and soft keys, sentiments spoken and unspoken, presenting something shadowy and unsettling; a stirring of the waters. The end result presents a captivating about-face that redefines KP’s beautifully singular artistic vision.

Brijean Murphy was born to make you move. Stepping out in 2018 as one of indie’s most in-demand pop percussionists, Murphy spends much of her time on back-to-back runs with a dozen different acts including Poolside, Toro Y Moi, and U.S. Girls. It’s a marvel that, somewhere in the whirlwind of the past year, she found time to collaborate with producer Doug Stuart to record their first communiqué to the world: the dreamy, back-room disco of WALKIE TALKIE. Combining Murphy’s upbringing heavily steeped in latin jazz and soul, BRIJEAN is a hypnotic and danceable new direction for Murphy, and a fine compliment to her contemporaries on the 2019 indie circuit. Equal parts dance production, organic percussion and melodic mantra, WALKIE TALKIE transmits Murphy’s essence perfectly. Murphy’s musical talents are family heirlooms: her father, percussionist and engineer Patrick Murphy, taught Brijean her first patterns on a pair of congas that she inherited from the late Trinidadian steel drum legend Vince Charles. Growing up in LA’s Glassell Park, Brijean was raised by a cadre of honorary aunts and uncles – a deep bench of jazz, latin and soul musicians in their own rites. This meant she grew up regaled by musical lore – larger than life tales of jazz luminaries, psychedelic trips and obscure cultural enclaves – sampling some of those family stories and weaving them into the EP. WALKIE TALKIE is Murphy’s collaboration with producer Doug Stuart, who shares a background as a jazz, pop, and session musician (Bells Atlas, Meernaa, Luke Temple, Jay Stone). In marathon sessions at their intimate home-studio, wedged between touring schedules that rarely-overlapped, BRIJEAN formed. Murphy’s layered percussion and hypnotic, expressive vocals coupled with Stuart’s harmonic palette and intuitive production evokes 70s disco, 90s house, and sly pop sensibilities. WALKIE TALKIE is a pure expression of the home-cooked, effortlessly chic aesthetic that is BRIJEAN.

"I’d like to write about the dread that reaches a convulsion now on 'Nocebo'. I’d like to write about the kind of dread that prompts Blanchot, for instance, to write: Dread: ‘Do nothing, and it is still too much.’ The kind of dread that 9T Antiope conjures in 'Nocebo', as in the interstices of this whispered dialogue. A dread that sustains without collapsing the tension between a throbbing electronic doom and the mercurial, almost heavenly break in the clouds, where out of clear light, a fragment of violin quivers like a choir from afar. The dread that, like a silent scream, though silent, screams endlessly. The dread that even the scream can’t silence. The dread that even the scream can’t silence dread. The worse than dead and dying dread. The dread that I’d like to write about is the dread that, as soon as I write it, is the dread that writes me and I say nothing. In the panic of the heart’s hysterics, dread morcellates, hammers, pulverizes. It ravishes, slashes, seething, flesh, any pain to silence its silence; yet its calm, its indifference, its tranquility, from which I (it) witness my (its) frenzied horror with remorse is the utmost agony. Far worse than the ache, the gash, the pang is the silence, the swoon, the stillness of eyes with no beyond to their depth. The pain that severs the pity from the flesh, the silence from the doom, is dread, the dread of all dread, the dread no dying can free, no sleep can soothe." - 4/5 on Tiny Mix Tapes, Mar. 1, 2019. Web. www.tinymixtapes.com/music-review/9t-antiope-nocebo ----------------------------------------------------------------- "9T Antiope’s 'Nocebo' is an intensely personal document—dense, visceral, and sensory. ... (The album) takes the idea of a coma and uses it to build an imaginative world, creating a story of beings who have given up on their time and space, eventually reaching a comatose state. It’s an emotional meteor of a concept, devastating and long-reaching … with throbbing, uncomfortable soundscapes. ... By the end of the recording, the listener is spent, and the beings are comatose. It’s a light drop into unconsciousness, but there may be no gentler way to go.” - 'Album of the Day' on Bandcamp, Mar. 1, 2019. Web. daily.bandcamp.com/2019/03/01/9t-antiope-nocebo-review/ ----------------------------------------------------------------- "It might only be the second month of the year, but we’ve already found something necessary, haunting, and beautiful. ... Never has the concept and experience of withdrawal sounded so present, so immediate." - Igloo Mag, Feb. 24, 2019. Web. igloomag.com/profiles/9t-antiope-reaching-across-isolation ----------------------------------------------------------------- "This is music to reshape your reality to. This is music to unlock your nightmares to. This is music that will never make you feel comfortable. ... Allow this tape to be the soundtrack to the beginning of your new life…" -CVLTNATION, Feb. 15, 2019. Web. www.cvltnation.com/listen-psychological-sonic-disorder-9t-antiopes-nocebo/ ----------------------------------------------------------------- "('Nocebo') fixates on the absence (of space). They refer to it as an exploration of “non-location,” and it’s a music of isolation, and disjunct. “It’s like an implosion,” they write. “That moment when everything slows down before a blast maybe, that pulsating state where you go back and forth between a nightmare and a sweet second before waking up."" - 'Heavy Rotation' on Noisey, Feb. 15, 2019. Web. noisey.vice.com/en_us/article/xwba37/mijas-unexpected-ambience-and-11-other-albums-for-heavy-rotation ----------------------------------------------------------------- "(T)he duo’s most ambitious work to date, the listener response being a sort of spellbound reverie induced by the album’s harrowing and austere musical reality. … (V)ast sonic walls constructed through the juxtaposition of divergent elements and atmospheres … a sort of sonic thought experiment as cerebral as it is visceral. ... The tension of these multiple realities, coupled with the chaos of psychological disorder, is heard and felt across the album, like a pill prescribed for depression that ends up exacerbating mania. … (C)ollisions of sound with colour, the organic with the inorganic, to create a purgative environment dripping with decay. … (T)he arrival into an alternative world that might just replace the old one as we know it." - The Wire #421, March 2019. Print. www.instagram.com/p/Bt1XGIrF0I3/ ----------------------------------------------------------------- "Nocebo is a work of dust and bone, subtle cracks and deliquescent fluids, endless lives and buried memories. An intense album with voracious density. Vital." (translated) - SightAndSound, Feb 13, 2019. Web. silenceandsound.me/2019/02/13/9t-antiope-3/ ----------------------------------------------------------------- "(T)wo sidelong compositions that slide from the grasp whenever one tries to define them. The mood is darker, the vocals sparser, more spoken than sung. ... Have conditions deteriorated to the point that song has fallen prey to poetry, melody to abrasion? The recording is claustrophobic, menacing, jaded. This is the proper place for such a downward slide, as the tape sits in the spot of The Empire Strikes Back, the big question being, what happens next? We knew that Han Solo would be rescued; we’re less sure about the dreamers of Iran. ... Nocebo, much more than Isthmus, ends on a cliffhanger. There’s no way to predict which way 9T Antiope will go, as they’ve only now started to record the final chapter. Pyrrhic victory, noble defeat or unexpected triumph? If the conclusion is released before the world ends, we’ll be there to poke through the embers." - A Closer Listen, Feb 9, 2019. Web. acloserlisten.com/2019/02/09/9t-antiope-isthmus-nocebo/ ----------------------------------------------------------------- "Machine music at its finest with a few ominous vocals. Plenty of twisting and cracking that forms a staggering beat. Transmission-like waves become uncontrollable, making this track feel like a soon to be aborted space ship." - '15 Best Ambient... of January 2019' on Magnetic Magazine, Feb 2, 2019. Web. www.magneticmag.com/2019/02/15-best-ambient-and-chill-tracks-of-january-2019/ ----------------------------------------------------------------- "(E)qually sublime, disorienting, and psychedelic ... a claustrophobic, uneasy listen that manages to compel as much as terrify." - Ears To Feed: Tracks, Feb 5, 2019. Web. www.earstofeed.com/9t-antiope-living-through-sleeping-through/ +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 9T Antiope's 'Nocebo' LP - out Feb 15, 2019 on PTP cassette and digital 'Nocebo' is the second phase from a trilogy - 'Isthmus:Nocebo:Placebo' – by Paris-based, Iranian composers, 9T Antiope (Nima Aghiani and Sara Bigdeli Shamloo). The album addresses space and time so as to create alternate worlds – those which would eventually stand to substitute the ones already in existence. "'Nocebo', recounts the stories of beings, who have given up on their space and time, thus forcing themselves into complete isolation and eventually a self-induced comatose state. The coma state within 'Nocebo' is explored through a text and imagery which still remains inside the brains of these beings – while simultaneously addressing the personal experiences of the artists' own loved ones.” Commissioned and produced by CTM Festival and SET Experimental Art Events, supported by the Goethe Institute.

Covert contracts rule our world: manipulative relationships, encoded social norms, opaque technologies. “With a covert contract, the trick is that the agreement is only known by the person who makes it,” says Ali Carter, singer and bassist of Philly post-punk trio Control Top. “The other person is oblivious. Consent is impossible. A void of communication opens up a world of misunderstanding.” In an era of such impossibilities, Control Top—Carter with guitarist Al Creedon and drummer Alex Lichtenauer—rip open space for catharsis. Their explosive songs are a synthesis of varied interests and backgrounds: Carter’s innate sense of new wave melodies, Creedon’s sirening noise guitars, Lichtenauer’s feverish hardcore drumming. On their debut full-length Covert Contracts, out now via Get Better Records, the songwriting is fully a collaboration of Carter and Creedon. Carter’s voice thumps and screams and deadpans while her driving, hooky basslines play out like guitar leads. Creedon, also the band’s engineer and producer, balances composition and chaos, equally inspired by pop and no-wave. With her lyrics, Carter responds to feeling trapped and overwhelmed in a capitalist patriarchy, offering indictments of wrongdoing and abuse of power, odes to empathy and ego death, as well as declarations of self-determination. These songs hit even harder when you consider how close this band came to not existing at all. Despite being involved in underground music communities for years, Carter didn’t start Control Top (her first band) until age 25. Disillusioned by punk, Creedon had all but abandoned guitar. But Control Top felt exciting, a chance to experiment: to rethink the relationship between guitar and bass and use samplers to add new dimensions. Meanwhile, Lichtenauer had quit playing drums after an abusive situation in a previous band that had ruined playing music for them, and joining Control Top was an opportunity for rebirth. At once anthemic and chilling, Covert Contracts puts words to today’s unspoken anxieties. Brimming with post-punk poetry for 2019, it’s the sound of agency being reclaimed.

Day turns to night as Mark de Clive-Lowe’s Heritage II takes us from the meditative zen of Heritage into a world of jazz and Japanese roots culture fused with hip hop, drum’n’bass and broken-beat. ‘Heritage is a legacy we receive from our ancestors to pass on to future generations. It’s the thread that holds us together in lineage and cultural identity,’ posits jazz and electronic music pioneer Mark de Clive-Lowe. The half-Japanese half-New Zealander presents his new album Heritage II - the partner and second installment to his critically acclaimed album Heritage, a deeply personal exploration of his Japanese cultural and ancestral roots. “Heritage is what gives our relatively short lives context and meaning in the bigger picture of generations past and future. We are the new ancestors, and with that in mind, it’s important that we act - and contribute - accordingly. This is my identity search and journey to better understand where I’ve come from, what ancestry means to me and where I’m going to. ” Heritage II opens with a meditative solo piano introduction, conjuring up the evocative folkloric sounds of the preceding part one album, which soon gives way to a J Dilla inspired interpretation of the traditional folk song “O-Edo Nihonbashi” - de Clive-Lowe programming beats, basslines while playing piano and keyboards live along with his band. Although the Heritage albums were recorded over three nights live at LA’s Blue Whale and one subsequent day in a North Hollywood studio, nothing you hear is overdubbed or the result of post-production “studio magic”. De Clive-Lowe’s live workflow often sees him labeled an “alien”, leaving audiences captivated by his seamless juggling of grand piano, synths, drum machines, samplers and more to create layer-upon-layer of musical stories in real time. O-Edo Nihonbashi gives way to “Bushido II” (the way of the warrior) - recontextualizing the familiar theme from Heritage into a wildly experimental drum’n’bass ride, evoking images of great Japanese samurai warriors in full fighting mode. These opening two compositions set the scene for Heritage II - the flipside of the coin to Heritage - continuing the same story, but with new perspectives. ‘I came up loving jazz, hip hop, drum’n’bass, house, broken beat and so much more. I like to lean into these different inspirations at the same time, balancing the sonic aesthetics and stylistic approaches in unexpected ways. That’s a huge part of my own ‘in’ and ‘yo’ (yin and yang in Japanese) balance in my process and creativity. To be able to bring all of this together with musical stories of my ancestry, roots and identity is something that’s very special to me.’ De Clive-Lowe resumes his culture-rich journey throughout Heritage II, showcasing his breadth of skill as a producer, composer and instrumentalist. An artist who is as indebted to the jazz greats as much as hip hop, house and experimental music icons, de Clive-Lowe challenges us to leave our preconceptions at the door and follow him down the path on a journey of his own discovery. Like his peers Kamasi Washington, Makaya McCraven and Robert Glasper, de Clive-Lowe isn’t content to simply play the jazz lane and he purposefully reaches across a diverse palette of genres and influences to create something quite unlike anything else. Heritage II captures the essence of childhood folk-tales (“Ryūgū-jō - The Dragon Palace - immortalized in the story of Urashima Taro), Buddhist myths ('‘Shitennō’ - The Four Heavenly Kings - exploring the idea of ancestral protectors and guardians) and ‘The Silk Road’ - a broken-beat riding composition born from de Clive-Lowe’s learning of the identical scales used in both Ethiopian and Japanese traditional music - ‘these musical building blocks, or DNA, of traditional melodies and harmonies in Ethiopia and Japan are literally identical. Not approximately, but exactly. Understanding this helped me conclude that a common musical language traveled the old world Silk Road as much as trade, commerce, customs and learned knowledge. This is inspired by that idea and imagining a whole new world which it all leads to.’ On Heritage II, de Clive-Lowe is joined by a cast of world-class musicians: Josh Johnson (Leon Bridges/Esperanza Spalding), Teodross Avery (Talib Kweli/Mos Def), Brandon Eugene Owens (Terrace Martin/Robert Glasper), Brandon Combs (Moses Sumney/Iman Omari), Carlos Niño (Build An Ark/Lifeforce Trio) and Tylana Enomoto (Kamasi Washington/Bonobo) - who all contribute stellar performances in support of de Clive-Lowe’s music. ‘These are not only my favorite musicians, but my friends, and that they were all able to be part of this project really means a lot to me. They’re all such incredible musicians, and no one brings any ego to the table - that’s one key thing that makes it possible to explore this music with a real sense of vulnerability and honesty.’ Heritage II is the partner album to Heritage. The album’s original artwork by Tokio Aoyama depicts Bon Odori - a summer festival dance under the night-time sky - surreally all happening inside de Clive-Lowe’s grand piano... -- Track by Track by Mark de Clive-Lowe Heritage is my personal exploration of my Japanese roots - understanding who I am, questioning the meanings of cultural and ethnic identity and what that means to me, especially with the art I create. O-Edo Nihonbashi O-Edo Nihonbashi​ is a traditional Japanese folk song. I’ve always loved the melody – there’s so much story in it – and wanted to include it on this project along with the other folk song homage, ​Akatombo from Heritage. ​Edo​ is the old name for Tokyo and ​Nihonbashi​ is an area of Tokyo where there were bridges which the tradesmen, merchants and travelers would enter Tokyo by. For this interpretation, I wanted to bring in the influences I love from 70s fusion through to J Dilla. Bushidō II This is the partner to ​Bushidō I​ from Heritage – a composition inspired by the Way of the Warrior – the Bushidō​ code. Righteousness, courage, compassion, respect, honesty, honor, loyalty and self-control are the characteristics that define the Way of the Warrior, and where on Heritage, ​Bushidō I​ was a somewhat more-introspective interpretation, this time around it’s a relentlessly dense drum’n’bass-meets-avant-jazz head-first leap into the warrior’s world in full battle mode. Presenting it in both ways is my way of showing that the Bushidō code can apply to any situation or reality. Ryūgū-jō “The Dragon Palace” in English, ​Ryūgū-jō​ imagines the underwater kingdom of the dragon sea god. The folk tale of Urashima Tarō tells of a man who through his compassionate actions gets rewarded with a ride on the back of a giant turtle down into the ocean to the Dragon Palace. There he’s treated like a king and spends three days indulging in all the sea god’s palace has to offer, only no one tells him that one day in the Dragon Palace is equivalent to 100 years on land. He returns home after three days and finds 300 years have passed, leaving him alone in the world with no family or friends. It’s not the happiest of tales, but my imagination was in awe dreaming up the Dragon Palace! Isan Isan​ means Heritage. This brief interlude is intended as a channel between the past and the present moment. I love the feeling of being free of tempo and rhythm, allowing a floating moment to exist without any pulse. There’s magic in these moments. Shitennō “The Four Heavenly Kings” can be often found protecting Japanese temples – intimidating giant statues wielding swords from within the gates of the temples. For the shogun and great rulers, their ​shitennō would be their four right-hand men – bodyguards, protectors and aides. In keeping with this whole project, I see my ancestors as my ​shitennō​, watching over me and protecting me as I journey and walk forward. The compositions paints the picture of them in two ways – the warrior embodiment of the shogun’s four protectors represented in the main melodic theme, and the metaphysical idea of the shitennō​ in ancestry and the spirit world in the lush harmony of the second section. Mizugaki (reprise) A momentary reprieve from the warrior world with an ambient piano and synths reprise of the ​Mizugaki theme from Heritage. ​Mizugaki​ is my family name on my mother’s side and through this project I’ve come to understand the depth of the name. It’s an unusual name and represents the idea of a protective wall around a sacred object. The original ​mizugaki​ was a wall of trees around a mountain area where a deity would live, the ​mizugaki​ serving as protection for the deity. Similarly to ​Shitennō​, I’ve come to see this composition as a direct homage to my ancestors and a way to channel my connection with them, knowing that they are with me and support and protect me through this life. The Silk Road In Ethiopia, traditional music is built from very identifiable scales called ​kiñit​, specifically altered pentatonic scales. As it would happen, traditional Japanese music is also built off specifically altered pentatonic scales that are literally ​identical​ to those used in Ethiopia. This revelation was mind-blowing for me and leads me to the idea that these musical building blocks traveled the Silk Road along with commerce, cultural customs and academic knowledge creating an ethno-musical thread from North Africa, throughout mainland Asia to Japan and all the way back again. Broken-beat rhythms lay the foundation for the pan-Asian melody to take guide all along the Silk Road to a place of infinite possibility and new sounds. Mirai no Rekishi Literally “The History of the Future”, and the name of the very first concert I did which some of the Heritage music was initially composed and performed for. The wording captures the essence of this project and my outlook on music – the past informs the present which leads us to the future. All of this is inextricably intertwined and knowing where we come from gives us all the information, knowledge and guidance for where we want to go to. Without our past, our history and our ancestors, we’re nothing more than empty shells going about our daily grind. With our ancestral connection grounded within ourselves though, the possibilities are infinite.

Nigerién composer Hama presents a groundbreaking album of traditional electronic desert folk songs, hovering somewhere between early 90s techno and synthwave. Nomadic herding ballads, ancient caravan songs, and ceremonial wedding chants are all re-imagined into pieces seemingly lifted from a Saharan 1980s sci-fi soundtrack or score to a Tuareg video game. With a deep love and respect, Hama effortlessly takes back and re-appropriates fourth-world ethnoambient music. One of only a handful of electronic musicians in West Africa, Hama a.k.a. Hama Techno follows in the footsteps of avant-garde electronic pioneers like Mamman Sani Abdoulaye, Francis Bebey, and Luka Productions. His debut release was a huge success on the underground mp3 networks of West Africa and was featured in The Wire, Pitchfork, and Rolling Stone. Hama continues with his signature digital folk with an expansion into computer-based compositions. Painstaking crafted on the spotty electric grid in Niamey with earbuds and a hacked copy of FruityLoops, Houmeissa is the result of remarkable passion. Inspired by diverse sounds spanning Tuareg guitar to second wave Detroit Techno, Saharan folk songs are transformed into atemporal works that defy categorization. Hama builds patterns of varied time signatures and distinct polyrhythms, deconstructing and rebuilding ancient traditions on drag and drop virtual keyboards. Airy sweeping pads evoke the open desert while rumbling dark undertones warn of a coming dust storm. Instrumentals layer looping pentatonic melodies into a blissed-out trance, while soft synths and fake electric guitars cry out a call and response. The effect is charmingly unexpected, as the plastic sounds of early PC music are imbued with a new life. A singularly unique production, Hama's Houmeissa stands to be a future classic and an embodiment of the digital Sahara to come.

"There’s a rage trembling under the group’s chiming post-punk, which winds itself around an ultimatum about self-preservation..." - The New York Times "Secret Shame channel both the tragic beauty and spooky ambience of a graveyard." - Paste Magazine "Secret Shame’s new album Dark Synthetics is a seven-song tempest of guitar-driven dark post-punk in the vein of Skeletal Family, Rubella Ballet, and Look Back in Anger." - post-punk.com "The band thunder around Lena like a horde of bats..." - bandcamp.com "I can’t get over the vocals – they soar high above many out there right now. Not only am I transfixed by the vocal tone, but also the driving and intense music that the whole band creates." - CVLT Nation "Secret Shame make gloomy, melodic rock steeped in '80s goth and post-punk." - BrooklynVegan

Angel-Ho's debut album for Hyperdub features her singing rapping and producing with help from fellow producers, Asmara, Gaika, Bon, Baby Caramelle and Nunu, and features Guest rappers K-$ and K-Rizz.

is the fourth and most recent studio album by the Brazilian band O Terno. The record, which follows the acclaimed 2016 release "Melhor do Que Parece", features 12 unreleased compositions and musical experimentations that show a new path for the band. Released by Selo RISCO, it's filled with orchestral arrangements that add up the sound of the trio, formed by Tim Bernardes, Biel Basile and Guilherme d'Almeida, and also features special appearances by Devendra Banhart and Shintaro Sakamoto.

After composing 1980’s *The Expanding Universe* on software proprietary to Bell Laboratories, New Yorker Laurie Spiegel designed her own computer-music system, Music Mouse. (It was eventually commercialized for Macintosh, Amiga, and Atari.) The long-out-of-print *Unseen Worlds*, from 1991, is proof of her instrument’s expressive capabilities: Metallic drones shape-shift like thunderheads, while plucked and hammered string-like sounds suggest futuristic harpsichords. The album is darker and more ominous than her debut, less minimalist and more atmospheric; “The Hollows,” in particular, points the way for decades of dark ambient to come. But these compositions are as searching as any of her other work, with an emphasis on unfamiliar timbres and unexplored terrain; the brief “Strand of Life (‘Viroid’),” meanwhile, rises like a single blade of grass from an alien landscape, beautiful in its familiarity and simplicity.

Laurie Spiegel’s second full-length album, Unseen Worlds, arrived just over ten years after her debut album. Having realized the pieces found on The Expanding Universe (1980) on an instrument no longer available to her, the GROOVE System at Bell Laboratories, Spiegel moved on to composing and developing for the Alles Machine, alphaSyntauri, McLeyvier and various other instruments before creating an instrument entirely her own. Spiegel created “Music Mouse - An Intelligent Instrument” on a Macintosh 512k so that she could have an instrument that was not general purpose but a small, specialized, and well defined musical instrument for and by her that she did not have to compromise on or risk losing access to it. While it was a very personal instrument for Spiegel, demand among friends and colleagues nevertheless grew until “Music Mouse - An Intelligent Instrument” became a commercial product for the Macintosh, Amiga, and Atari personal computers with a devoted popular following that continues to this day, despite the obsoletion of those platforms. At the time of her Unseen Worlds album’s original release in 1991, the issuing record label turned out to be going out of business, dissolved and disappeared, sending the album immediately into obscurity. Outside of a private CD edition issued by Spiegel on her own Aesthetic Engineering label in 1994, this new edition represents the first proper commercial release of Unseen Worlds. “Unseen Worlds is not so much based on melody and rhythm as it is on textures, pulses, and sonic environments. Sometimes dark, sometimes light, its drama pulls in the adventurous listener who wants to take a musical journey. Using computer software she wrote in order to implement a unique musical vision, Unseen Worlds blends the artistic and the technical, the cerebral and the sensual, and revives the virtually abandoned tradition of electronic music. Unseen Worlds is the work of a sonic explorer whose music can both challenge and caress. Those looking for other worlds of sound can put on headphones and find them here.” - Craig Anderton

With a slight line up change in the drum department we see RAKTA tighten up their more tense, soundtrack natured developments alongside their more sparse and vulnerable elegance. They consistently manage to create a tripped out creep chamber with room to explore as the aura builds to nightmare crescendos juxtaposed with shaking silences. Simultaneously eerie and serene. With each new release we see more and more of what makes this group so essential in the canon of modern music. Jensen Ward ------- Inicialmente orbitando ao redor do pós-punk, o Rakta foi gradativamente compondo um universo sonoro abstrato e particular. Falha Comum, seu terceiro álbum, consolida esta direção unindo técnicas da música experimental com certos aspectos estruturais da canção para inventar o seu próprio ser em um pequeno manifesto sobre as ruínas do mundo. Ao lado do baterista e percussionista Maurício Takara (que firmou-se na banda após a mudança de Nathalia Viccari para Buenos Aires), Carla Boregas (baixo e eletrônicos) e Paula Rebellato (sintetizador e voz) criam uma atmosfera de transe expansivo. Mas de o que é esse transe? Nas músicas de rave acelerada, as batidas eletrônicas eliminam a rigidez entre corpo e alma, abrindo o indivíduo para ser "possuído por uma selvageria sagrada". Na ambient music, o caminho para o cosmos é uma imersão profunda em um espaço psicoacústico imaginário. Já no dub, o som torna-se incenso, um aroma sagrado que preenche o ambiente e possibilita o estado de desativação total. Ao mesmo tempo em que articula-se com estas três dinâmicas, o ritual cósmico do Rakta tem uma liturgia só sua. A voz fanstasmagórica arrebata e desaparece, como uma alucinação ou miragem. A acumulação dos loops percussivos do baixo e ritmos repetitivos da bateria não evocam o relaxamento meditativo. Ao contrário, há um caos discreto, uma tensão permanente, uma violência sempre à espreita. O mantra raktiano não diz respeito a uma calmaria transcendente, mas à concentração como dispositivo político de ação e transformação — abrir e fechar-se em si. Em “Estrela da Manhã”, somos lembrados: há um labirinto e a guerra está sobre nós. Vemos o mundo acabar pela janela. Mas o que fazer das nossas ruínas? Falha Comum está nesta encruzilhada à procura de modos para revirar os escombros da existência em um mundo cada vez mais sem sentido. Não há respostas. Mas persiste, ao longe, uma esperança inútil e necessária: edificar o espírito sobre essas ruínas. O riso do qual “笑笑” é antes de tudo uma vitória sobre o medo. O fim está no começo e no entanto continua-se. GG Albuquerque

Nérija is Nubya Garcia (tenor saxophone), Sheila Maurice-Grey (trumpet), Cassie Kinoshi (alto saxophone), Rosie Turton (trombone), Shirley Tetteh (guitar), Lizy Exell (drums) and Rio Kai (bass). Blume is a truly breath-taking collection of compositions that perfectly encapsulates everything Nérija. Vibrant, engaging, infectious and truly current, Blume takes you on a sprawling wonderful journey, arriving at what is a majestic body of work of their personal and collective experiences and inspirations over the last half decade or so.

The debut full- length album from Lafawndah, ​ANCESTOR BOY,​ announced today and releasing on 22nd March 2019 via her own label imprint CONCORDIA, is a bracing statement of intent, heralding an artist unbound in scope, scale, and intensity. She opens 2019 with bold single DADDY, plotting new territory onto her own highly personalized map of influence – a map drawing the club, composition, and pop into thrillingly unresolved, ultramodern erotics. Lafawndah’s 2018 was filled with myriad musical highlights and successes - including a celebrated performance featuring peers Tirzah, Kelsey Lu and more at London’s South Bank in December, growing from her acclaimed HONEY COLONY mixtapes. Meanwhile her heart-stopping inter-generational music & film collaboration with japanese ambient legend Midori Takada in Le Renard Bleu (with KENZO and Partel Oliva) continues to echo into new forms, with a full production performance titled ‘Ceremonial Blue’ premiering at the Barbican, London in April. And streaming now, her achingly beautiful self-directed video for JOSEPH - a lullaby and an ode to newborn life co-written with Jamie Woon and also featuring on ANCESTOR BOY - has set Lafawndah apart as an independent director with a singular vision spanning multiple media and artforms. Having in her prior self-titled and TAN EPs upturned geography, in ANCESTOR BOY Lafawndah digs deep to unravel geology, mining emotions of the deep past and future. The album’s physicality is elemental; its memory, mineral. It is a becoming- of- age story for a people yet to come, created out of a need to find the others. In the middle of the album’s sonic and lyrical onslaught is the desire to share the uncertainties of growing up when you don’t belong anywhere. Crafted with the aid of fellow travelers Nick Weiss, Aaron David Ross, and James Connolly, ANCESTOR BOY’s maximalism- it’s overflow of detail, of feeling, of ideas- serves to amplify a frequent lyrical motif: the sensation that one body, one lifetime, isn’t big enough for what you’re feeling. The record is pregnant with memories shared across more than one mind, recalling the storytelling antagonisms of Nina Simone at her most strident and unpredictable. In response, the rhythmic aggressions of her music have grown even more determined and psychedelic, drawing a line in fire between Jimmy Jam’s turnt industrialism on Control ​and the furious unease of ​Red Mecca-​era Cabaret Voltaire. With a palate equal parts chrome and dirt, ice and depth, Lafawndah’s finesse with song architecture imbues the LP with an uncanny addictiveness: anthems loaded with trap doors. ANCESTOR BOY imagines a pop music that is neither imperial nor local, but a freedom of movement; a residue, perhaps, from the album’s nomadic creation between Los Angeles, Mexico City, New York, London, and Paris.

DIÄT - Positive Disintegration LP w/ download (LUNGS-121) Years in the making, the follow-up or maybe even companion piece to 2015's "Positive Energy", "Positive Disintegration" sees the band with a bit more of a pop zap to the ever present post punk dreariness of modern Berlin life... Or even modern life at large as most of the lyrical content has to do with the monotony of barely getting by or trying to have a meaningful exchange with a remotely interesting person. These things are hard to come by most of the time and this music eats at that very feeling. It's almost enough to make you wanna throw in the towel and move to Spain without a care in the world to haunt your remaining days. You probably won't though, you'll most likely listen to this record while you sip your overpriced room temperature coffee drink whilst ordering new bulbs for your anti depression lamp from a major online retailer. It just feels like life is getting away from you, ya know? Dark. 200 copies on translucent orange, 550 on black 140gr vinyl housed in a 24pt reverse board jacket with lyric sheet, poster and download card included. Recorded by Ducky. Mastered by Daniel Husayn. Art by Yuta Matsumura and Made Ollosp. Positive Disintegration was originally released in 2019. Re-released in 2022 on La Vida Es Un Mus with a totally new mix in time for DIÄT’s rare appearance at Static Shock Weekend in London. Marking the 10 years since their first London show. Remastered by Guitarist Tobias Lill at Dong Xuan Productions, the new edition sounds deeper and highlights many parts of the album buried in previous editions, breathing new life to it.

Salami Rose Joe Louis announces new album “Zdenka 2080” out 30 August via Brainfeeder and releases double single ‘Octagonal Room’ / ‘Cumulous Potion (For the Clouds to Sing)’. Check the video for ‘Octagonal Room’ directed by Japhy Riddle. Salami Rose Joe Louis (real name Lindsay Olsen) - the Bay Area based musician, composer, and producer - will release her new album “Zdenka 2080” via Brainfeeder on 30 August 2019. It follows a busy start to the year in which she joined Toro Y Moi’s “Outer Peace Tour” in the US and supported The Cinematic Orchestra on their European tour. Olsen hails from Crockett in Northern California. “It’s a tiny, very strange and sleepy little town. There is a giant sugar factory and the whole town often smells like marshmallows and caramel, which is ideal,” she says. She lives in the basement of her friend’s house which is the perfect place “to get very weird”. In 2017, in the wake of the release of her album “Zlaty Sauce Nephew”, Olsen sustained a wrist injury in a car accident that forced her to miss a fortnight of her regular job at an asbestos lab in Berkeley. Serendipitously, this coincided with one of her tracks unexpectedly being licensed for a TV commercial and Olsen decided to take the plunge. “I felt like it was a sign from the galaxies to take the leap to concentrating on music full time,” she smiles. Drawing inspiration from film, literature, art, and music, “Zdenka 2080” was heavily influenced in particular by a series of apocalyptic sci-fi novels by Octavia Butler and Gene Wolf. “They inspired me to explore the realms of fantasy as a means of illuminating concepts and truths about our own society and humanity,” she says. “I also was very inspired by the movies Tekkonkinkreet and Embrace of the Serpent - a beautiful exploration of capitalism, colonialism and greed.” Musically, Olsen references fellow members of Oakland record label/musical family Hot Record Societe: Cheflee, Mejiwahn, Asonic Garcia and Pacific Yew as ever present influences, alongside musical giants Shuggie Otis and Herbie Hancock, composer, bandleader and all-round visionary Raymond Scott, plus the likes of Stereolab and Flying Lotus. “Sometimes my songs can be very silly and whimsical,” Olsen explains - with new single ‘Cumulous Potion (For the Clouds to Sing)’ being a case in point. “Sometimes they are more serious and emotional. I was looking for a way to weave all of my styles into a cohesive narrative, and I found a lot of inspiration in the way often movies and shows in the animé tradition seamlessly connect the whimsical, silly, serious, and meaningful.” Olsen’s music is highly conceptual and “Zdenka 2080” describes a future dystopian Earth in the year 2080 that has been mis-managed by unethical governments and corporations. An initiative by greedy big business to capture solar energy to power a super-sized spaceship, results in a rapidly cooling Earth, and the elite escape via the spaceship to colonize another distant planet. The earthlings left behind find themselves fading with the cooling sun. The first half of the album follows the journey of a young earthling left behind. She discovers an octagonal room with eight paintings, each one leading to a new dimension, and travels through the dimensions in search of a way to save her planet. Her journey eventually leads her to a window where we discover that the octagonal room is the brain of the Earth and the paintings and coinciding dimensions are the thoughts of the Earth creature. The imagery of the paintings affect the thoughts of the Earth creature. Zdenka is the name of the artist who creates the paintings inside the octagonal room. Thus, she can influence the thoughts and actions of the Earth creature and humans on Earth based on what she paints. In this story, Zdenka is lost and confused and she paints very dark imagery. The young earthling begins a quest to find and convince her to paint more positive imagery. Olsen says that her moods are often very connected to whether or not she is feeling creatively inspired and productive. “I have noticed creative blocks for me can be dark spirals into ego-centric, self loathing, isolating, and selfish tendencies,” she explains. “In this story, I wanted to explore the ways in which art can easily take dark and careless turns, but how important it is to remember the effects art has on others. I am not advocating for optimistic art only - I just wanted to write this story as a reminder to myself to strive to be intentional in the art I create."

Oneknowing is the debut artist album by acclaimed composer and producer Lena Raine, most recently known for her multiple award-winning soundtrack for the video game Celeste. Based in Seattle, Raine has been composing soundtracks for games and media for 12 years, her breakout moment coming with her work on the classic PC game Guild Wars 2. Her most celebrated work, however, has come in the form of 2018’s Celeste soundtrack. A game based around themes of anxiety, self-examination and more, Celeste is considered by many to be the key indie game of 2018, and has won multiple awards for both game and soundtrack - something which Raine painstakingly developed in tandem with the game’s design since its first steps. A flagship year for Raine was capped off in December, when she performed live with soundtrack legend Hans Zimmer at The Game Awards, the video game industry’s flagship annual award show (Celeste was nominated for four awards, and won two). Although she’s released several non-soundtrack releases, both under her real name and her Kuraine alias, Raine considers Oneknowing her debut artist album - a 10 track set that ranges from distorted paranoia to ambient pop, brought together by the shimmering melodies that make her soundtracks so memorable. An album that draws from “personal experiences, important places, dreams and the lack of dreams”, Oneknowing’s tracks are also threaded together by Raine’s own vocals, sung in a language unique to the album and manipulated by the software Vocaloid. In Raine’s words, “I have nostalgia for my voice as it sounded when I was younger. I can't de-age my voice, but I was able to use software and tweak its settings to a point that it has a similar quality to my voice from back then”. At times (‘Tsukuyomi’, ‘Light Rail’) her vocals lean towards traditional pop structures, while on tracks such as ‘Wake Up’, they’re repeated, chant-like, to create a hypnotic effect. As well as vocals and software, Raine plays rhodes piano, zither and various hardware synthesizers on Oneknowing, while Michaela Nachtigall contributes violin and viola to various tracks. A succinct but expansive record full of detail, Oneknowing represents Raine’s most personal and realised original material yet, while showing a different side to one of the most unique and accomplished composers of the modern era.

Ami Dang fuses sitar, voice, and electronics to create east-meets-west, ambient/trance music. On the all-instrumental album Parted Plains, she draws inspiration from South Asian and Middle Eastern folktales, specifically, the four tragic romances of Punjab, Sohni Mahiwal, Sassi Punnun, Heer Ranjha, and Mirza Sahiba; Flora Annie Steel’s Tales of the Punjab: Folklore of India, and selected stories from One Thousand and One Nights. Galvanized by the Western interpretations of these stories, Parted Plains unfolds as a new sort of soundtrack for a yet-to-be written folktale that is neither Eastern nor Western, not traditional or contemporary--but somewhere in between. ~

Jazz has long accommodated collage techniques and studio trickery, but the genre’s digital-fusion wing took a major leap in the 2010s as virtuoso instrumentalists adopted tactics forged in hip-hop. Count New York-by-way-of-Seattle drummer/producer/vocalist Kassa Overall among this post-everything avant-garde: His debut album stakes out turf midway between Makaya McCraven’s jam-session cutups and Kendrick Lamar’s headiest beats. He’s an intricate rapper with a seductive, sandpapery voice well suited to evocative sketches like “What’s New With You,” a rueful breakup song over languid piano-trio balladry, and he’s an insightful lyricist, too (“What’s the best stocks?/Prison and pharmaceuticals”). His rhythms are innovative across the board, whether he’s letting brushes dance over the snares or folding sampled breaks like origami squares. It doesn’t hurt that he’s surrounded by top-notch players: On “Who’s on the Playlist,” pianist Sullivan Fortner, bassist Stephan Crump, and flautist Anthony Ware all melt like butter into the mix; Arto Lindsay, a veteran of both \'80s No Wave and Brazilian jazz, brings smoldering, overdriven guitar to the dubbed-out “My Friend.” And “La Casa Azul,” a neo-neo-soul vamp par excellence, even features trumpet from the late Roy Hargrove, a titan of the instrument. Few jazz/hip-hop fusions are this credentialed—or, indeed, this essential.

The Loop' is the new LP by Los Angeles based polymath Shafiq Husayn, an epic project which saw its inception in 2012 through a series of studio sessions at Shafiq’s home, including collaborations with the likes of Thundercat, Erykah Badu, Flying Lotus, Bilal and Anderson Paak. Amongst a close knit circle of friends and family the golden tones of The Loop were created, deeply rooted in ideas of song, story, history, guidance and spirituality. The album bumps, jumps and jangles through progressions in jazz, hip hop, soul and funk, following on from his debut album ‘Shafiq En’ A-Free-Ka’ and adding further to his rich history of timeless, unique music. On The Loop past, present and future are brought together through a psychedelic concoction of time traveling drum machines, celestial string sections and trails of synthesizer vapour. Inflections of Sly Stone, Pharaoh Sanders and Earth Wind And Fire traverse with Marley Marl and Dilla-esqe drums making for an organic yet LA-trifying experience. Shafiq has brought together an impressive array of LA's musical royalty, enlisting the likes of Thundercat, Miguel Atwood-Ferguson, Kamasi Washington, Chris ‘Daddy’ Dave, Eric Rico, Coultrain, Computer Jay, Jimetta Rose, Om'Mas Keith, Kelsey Gonzalez, I-Ced and more to provide the backbone to his recording sessions. Drawing in features from an international cast of performers and artists like Erykah Badu, Robert Glasper, Hiatus Kaiyote, Fatima and Karen Be amongst others. Now complete and finally ready for release in 2019 The Loop is truly something to behold. The records is accompanied by a series of paintings by acclaimed Japanese visual artist Tokio Aoyama, who worked in tandem with Shafiq to create a painting for each song on the record.

When Julia Shapiro flew home from a cancelled Chastity Belt tour in April 2018, everything in her life felt out of control. Dealing with health issues, freshly out of a relationship, and in the middle of an existential crisis, she realized halfway through a tour supporting her band’s third album I Used to Spend So Much Time Alone that she was going through too much to continue. “I was really struggling; I was really depressed. I felt like I couldn’t sing or be a person,” Shapiro recalls. “At that point I couldn’t even imagine playing a show again, I was so over it.” Returning home to a newly empty Seattle one-bedroom apartment, Shapiro had wanted for a long time to learn how to record and mix her own music, and out of the uncertainty of the future of her music career and her health, she began to record the songs that would become Perfect Version, her solo debut for Hardly Art. What she created in the space of ten songs is an intimate and beautifully self-aware examination of feeling lost in the life you’ve created for yourself. It’s an album of shimmering guitars and layered vocals that feels vast in the emotional depth it conveys and masterful in the way each song is intentionally crafted and recorded. Throughout the record Shapiro tries on different ways of living, all thematically centered around the idea of what it would be like to be a perfect version of yourself. “How can someone be so blindly confident/I wanna know that trick,” she wonders on “Natural,” the opening track that begins using another person as a mirror and then pans back to a bigger picture: what would it take to really love yourself? The album is peppered with ideas of what self-improvement could look like—whether it’s learning a skill and living out in the woods, going to bed at a reasonable hour, or even more playful, deeply relatable lines like “I should really delete my Instagram.” Shapiro has a knack for turning simple images into something profound, drawing influence from songwriters like Elliott Smith to capture complicated moods. The everyday act of circling the block trying to find a parking spot becomes a metaphor for trying and feeling like you can’t quite get anything done. “All my problems feel like paper/I can finally rip them up,” she sings on the title track, describing a moment of lightness in hanging out with friends who can find humor in your failure “at least I have my friends to laugh at what I’ve done.” Over the course of a tumultuous year of trying to find stability amidst depression and surgery, Shapiro ultimately rediscovered the parts of music that she loved through the process. Her perfectionist qualities create an album that shines in tiny lyrical moments and meticulous guitar parts. “When the rest of my life felt out of control, I felt like this was my chance to be in control of everything,” says Shapiro. She plays all the instruments (save for a mouth trumpet solo by Darren Hanlon and guest violin by Annie Truscott) and after recording and mixing the first batch of four songs at the Vault studio with Ian LeSage decided to record the final six tracks alone in her apartment, adding drums in the studio later and learning to mix them with the help of her friend David Hrivnak. Perfect Version is a fully realized vision from a gifted songwriter finding a more intimate voice. “So what comes next?” she questions on the album closer “Empty Cup” which explores the quiet satisfaction of being alone with yourself and creating a blank slate. “A lasting sense of self,” she concludes. -- Robin Edwards

After the release of her sublime, critically acclaimed sophomore solo album ‘Penelope Two’, Penelope Trappes and Houndstooth are pleased to announce ‘Redeux’; an album of top-drawer reworks of tracks from ‘Penelope Two’, which showcase not only the intrinsic brilliance of Penelope’s composition and performances, but also her far-reaching and all-encompassing musical influences and significance. “There were no preconceived notions of how the reworks would work together, just total freedom. I’m absolutely in love with all of these! I never really thought I’d get the chance to collaborate with such an array of creative artists who have inspired me, but at this point, I’ve learned to never say never” explains Penelope. On ‘Redeux’ ‘Penelope Two’s’ themes of life and death and of hope and dismay are still prevalent, being brought to the surface in a myriad of ways. Scottish post-rock legends Mogwai stretch out ‘Burn On’ into a scorching, warbling drone that flips the original sombre subtlety for grandeur and in-your-face majesty. Factory Floor member Nik Colk Void offers up a wayward, statically charged reworking of ‘Nite Hive’ which reimagines the track’s solemn beauty as a heads down roller and Throbbing Gristle’s Cosey Fanni Tutti’s dystopian, avant-garde and jazz tinged electronics are deployed alongside her signature Cornet to flip the album single ‘Carry Me’. Other reworks are proffered by Shelter Press label founder, producer and visual artist Félicia Atkinson, off the back of an incredible 2018 for both her and the label, Félicia’s rework of ‘Burn On’ digs for the skeletal awe by stripping away many of Penelope’s multi-layered effects and pushing the bare vocals to the front with manipulated field recordings. Houndstooth mainstay Throwing Snow demonstrates his ineffable brilliance, delivering an elastic yet powerful subdued rework of ‘Farewell’. Icelandic multi-instrumentalist and vocalist Jófríður Ákadóttir aka JFDR injects nimble rhythms and guitar into piano ballad ‘Maeve’. Poppy Ackroyd, composer, violinist and pianist, Hidden Orchestra member and One Little Indian signee transposes ‘Kismet’ onto the piano adding eerie percussive embellishments. Savages producer Jonny Hostile takes ‘Farewell’ and utilises the space within to add more noise and energy. Oneohtrix Point Never, Ben Frost and Tim Hecker collaborator and Sigur Ros’ musical director Paul Corley, delivers a forlorn take on ‘Nite Hive’, whilst Swedish techno duo Aasthma (Peder Mannerfelt and Pär Grindvik) - the former of the pair having just finished work on live version for tracks on Fever Ray’s ‘Plunge’ world tour - take album single ‘Connector’ to an entirely different realm. Adding rattling drum patterns and skidding synth leads which overthrow the sober original to a joyous dancefloor slayer. Penelope Trappes is a London based Australian born vocalist, musician and soundscape artist signed to Houndstooth. She spent 2016 writing and recording what would become her first solo album, ‘Penelope One’ in a piano studio in East London. Composed of mostly percussion-less, reverb-heavy atmospherics with dystopian themes, the LP was released via Optimo Music in 2017 on vinyl and as a photo book. Penelope signed to Houndstooth in 2018 and released her sophomore LP (and photo book) ‘Penelope Two’ in October 2018. The minimalist, ethereal album was built around field recordings, meditations, guitars, synth drones, piano and reverb, and deals with mortality, predestination and empathy. Previously known for her work in the electronic duo The Golden Filter” Under the latter moniker the duo released albums with Brille, Vinyl Factory and Optimo that were praised by The FADER, Pitchfork, NME, Gorilla Vs Bear and Resident Advisor. Additional endeavours included sound-tracking short films and feature films and are currently releasing new material. When not making music Penelope works on photography, video and performance art as part of a visual arts collective, Agnes Haus. Praise for ‘Penelope Two’: “Summoning the great ghosts of vintage 4AD and Kranky, the Australian singer and producer makes inky dream pop that’s as heavy and welcoming as a weighted blanket.” Pitchfork “A hauntingly spectral Under the Skin vibe, with harrowing but hopeful themes…beautifully blurring the lines between eerie conjuring and meditative lullaby.” Gorilla vs Bear “Like Scott Walker collaborating with Julee Cruise” FACT “Penelope offers up remarkably sparse torch balladry” The Wire “Heavy with both hope and portent, it’s a moving listen from a deeply centred artist.” Crack “Trappes’ vocals float over minimal soundscapes, wrought with emotion and ambience. The results are quite beautiful.” DJ Mag penelopetrappes.bandcamp.com/album/penelope-one www.penelopetrappes.com www.instagram.com/penelopetrappes/ www.facebook.com/penelopetrappes/

Austin, Texas-based songwriter Christelle Bofale will be the first to tell you the importance of family roots and mental health, considering how much those things aided her own self-discovery. Being the first American born in her family, the rich heritage of the Congo is deeply rooted in her upbringing and relationship with sounds.From singing and dancing with her mother as a child, to praying to Congolese music with her grandmother, to her father, a soukous guitar player and musical director for the Congregation at his church, Bofale’s journey as a musician has been defined in tiny intervals throughout the course of her life. As a songwriter, she infuses hints of the Congo into various aspects of her music, bridging the musical influences of the diaspora with juxtaposed elements of indie rock, soul and jazz respectively. Weightless guitar tangents and lush, aquatic soundscapes are a vital part of what embodies Swim Team, her debut EP that serves a powerful introduction to Bofale’s budding artistry. Somewhere between influences like Joni Mitchell and Alex G, Bofale has found a sweet spot for her sound that lives between both harsh and gentle terrain, achieving a relaxing, yet rugged tonality.Each track pictured on Swim Teamis brushed vividly with colors that illuminate the fear of being honest and doing that much needed personal work. Bofale's earnest and bravery is a snapshot of black mental health and the nuance it carries. Being real isn’t easy, but it’s crucial in cultivating spaces for healthy discussion and giving other black women like Bofale a platform to do the same. www.instagram.com/christellebofale/ twitter.com/bofalebill www.facebook.com/christellebofale

LIMITED EDITION CASSETTE VERSION AT RATSKIN RECORDS ratskinrecords.bandcamp.com/album/dig-a-pit Dig a Pit is an autobiography based on a personal experience of intimate partner violence. It focuses on the psychologically damaging impact of narcissistic abuse, an elusive form of emotional abuse rooted in manipulation, control, well-concealed cruelty, and humiliation. Each song examines different stages of recovery, including the process of healing from gaslighting, trauma bonding, and victimization to practices of self-protection and honoring anger.

Cleveland's PLEASURE LEFTISTS return with "The Gate", a new ten song album of cathartic, riveting post-punk excellence. The long-running group, comprised of veteran players in the Clevo scene, have turned in what is arguably their best recorded output - and the first since 2015's "The Woods of Heaven". For "The Gate", PL ventured out to Portland, OR in March 2019 to record on tape with Stan Wright (Arctic Flowers) - and the results are massive. Those familiar with previous PL material will immediately feel reacquainted with the group's masterful arrangements and cool, confident execution - a style that draws from the early British post-punk classics on labels like 4AD and Factory Records, but retains an organic, original sound that few contemporary acts harness. While "The Gate" undoubtedly benefits from the best studio sound of any PL release to date, the musicianship is what makes this album feel like an absolutely classic piece of work. The tones are perfect - almost as though Greg Sage dialed them in for a Wipers record. You'll immediately be taken by Haley Morris's vocal range and projection, which shines across the entire album and is absolute next level work. The sheer artistic quality of the songwriting is propelled along in perfect rhythm, as the guitar and bass play off of each other wonderfully, beginning the album with "In Dreams", which sets the tense and urgent nature of the tracks that follow. "The Return" dials the pace back slightly, allowing room for one of Morris's most memorable vocal patterns. As "Phenomenon" emerges from cold drone to begin the second half of the album, it quickly becomes apparent that PL have crafted a master work here. "Dancing in the Dark" could be a lost Homostupids track adapted to PL's sensibilities, followed along by the charging title track, and the gripping closer, "The Sign". Pleasure Leftists leave us with a phenomenal batch of tracks on "The Gate" - a gleaming, timeless piece of work. First pressing of 400 Black LPs, 100 Opaque dark purple LPs, and 100 CDs.

Buy our cassette from Den Tapes! dentapes.bandcamp.com/album/off-my-mind All songs written by Bailey Melton Bailey Melton - Guitar / vox Kell Jacobson - Lead Guitar Chris Hansche - Bass Chris Glaser - Drums

Jonathan Lethem: Let us just suppose, for a moment, that you are a person with a day job of some kind, let’s say one like mine – I write books and am a university professor – or one like yours, whatever it might be. Butcher, baker, social worker, tire-regroover – or let us say you work in a bank, or robbing banks. Perhaps you even work in a church; maybe you’re the janitor, or perhaps even the pastor of a church. It doesn’t matter. What if one day you woke up with a message burning through you, like a piece of mental lightning, one that went beyond the brain, to electrify your senses, and pulse in your limbs. Perhaps it felt as though this electrical message ran straight from your ears and your throat, so that you found yourself humming with it, subvocalizing. As though this electrified message wanted to come out of you and find its way into the world. And now let us pretend you know where there is a recording studio. And you - or maybe the person who runs the recording studio, – happens to know a relaxed local musician with a really funky, laid-back guitar sound, a person who likes to sit in and might even help arrange this message of yours into a song. Maybe this guitarist is a ‘ringer’ who played in a real soul band once upon a time before turning into a guy who repairs cars, or sits on his porch and yells at passing cars that drive too fast. Or maybe it is the soundboard operator who is the ringer. He makes innumerable tiny suggestions, perhaps helps you shorten a line of your lyric, which you scribbled on a paper placemat down at the burger joint last night because suddenly the thinking was just flowing out of you. And your teenage cousins, they harmonize on the sidewalk together on all kinds of songs they hear on the radio – why not bring them in to sing backup? Whatever the circumstances, you find yourself there, and the time is right and you just sing your ever-loving heart out, even with the band faltering or blowing clams. Then, on the third or the fifteenth take the band really hears what it all means and they light up and play like they’re part of your electrical system, like they’re the band you heard in your brain the day this message first announced itself to you… and then they even surprise you and catch you up in the groove, double-timing it on the fade-out, getting a little funky… …and for that one day, in that studio, you make a tiny piece of immortality, for anyone who might be bothered to notice. Music as permanently strong and meaningful of this doesn’t come from nowhere – it comes from the opposite of nowhere. It comes from individual inspiration, yes, but individual inspiration fired and forged and upheld by community, tradition, and context. Some of these songs are made by mysterious persons who remain hidden from view; some by working musicians who moved from occasion to occasion and circumstance to circumstance. In either case, the creators in question left behind the particular piece of amazement collected here as a testament of one moment of synchronicity. Nobody just opens up their talent and bathes the listener in beauty such as this without, at some level, a lifetime’s preparation. The music on this compilation didn’t come from nowhere, and now, it has refused to be accept nowhere as its destination – it has arrived on this compilation to claim its place in your awareness, to change the world at last, or again. These songs are resplendent with love and yet are not love songs, not in the sense of man-addressing-woman, or woman-addressing-man. The material here speaks of life and death, care and disrepair, exultation and release, sorrow and pain, and exhort the listener to hold on, seek peace, let light shine, know joy, recognize the love in one’s fellows – nearly every ecstasy excluding the erotic variants is on offer here. All this music fits naturally into a context of people trying to speak to other people about the condition of being alive, and the fact that the emotions are universal and collective ones doesn’t make them any less intimate, passionate or devastating. —Jonathan A. Lethem Robert Darden At the end of gospel music’s Golden Age (post-World War II to the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968), gospel’s major labels, Savoy, Gotham, Specialty, Peacock and a handful of others, were stacked with groups that had begun in the 1940s, their sounds firmly rooted in gospel’s past. Things changed (somewhat) when one of gospel’s biggest groups—the Staple Singers—signed with Stax Records and released a remarkable series of hit singles: “Heavy Makes You Happy” (early 1971), “Respect Yourself” (late 1971) and “I’ll Take You There” (1972). The songs featured a full and funky band, gospel harmonies and lyrics that were less about Jesus and more about justice. But funk and soul music are defined primarily by the beat, whereas gospel music is most easily defined by its evangelical lyrics. Gospel artists wanting to feature not only the beat but the words as well and the words often had trouble finding record deals with the traditionally conservative gospel labels. It was OK for soul artists to sing that we all needed to learn how to get along. For gospel artists, not so much. Modeled after Andrae Crouch and the Disciples, the Staples, the Mighty Clouds of Joy and, yes, Sly and the Family Stone, a new wave of gospel soloists, quartets and small choirs pounded out a rhythmic brand of gospel music, much of interested in peace, brotherhood and understanding. New or unknown gospel artists (like most of these on this set), were often forced to record for “vanity” or tiny one-off, invariably under-capitalized labels with great names: Du-Vern, Sen-oj, Impel, Lovie D, Su-Ann, Arc-Bel-Kno and others. Some flared brightly for a few brief seconds; others never really flamed at all. It’s on these often-obscure labels that gospel’s funkiest, wildest, more innovative music first appeared … and usually disappeared shortly thereafter. Some gospel artists self-recorded because they struggled to find a major label. The Triumphs had recorded a single LP for Vee-Jay but when the label, which was already in financial trouble, didn’t pick up the contract, the Rev. Joe Peay released “We Don’t Love Enough” on his own Black Artists label. “I always tell people that Vee-Jay missed out on two big artists,” Peay told me, “the other was the Beatles.” Albert Floyd said that The Floyd Family initially pitched “That’s a Sign of the Times” to Savoy, which turned it down. (Though they later recorded for Savoy, the song never made it on the Savoy release, perhaps because it was too “topical.”) Likewise, after the Gospel IQs left Su-Ann, they were forced to release “Peace in the Land” on the even smaller Impel label. But a lack of major label backing wasn’t necessarily a problem in a day when live music still dominated gospel music. The Triumphs toured widely, were a regular with Operation Breadbasket’s Los Angeles affiliate and even sang at the inauguration of L.A. major Tom Bradly. From Charlotte, the Gospel IQs toured throughout the Southeast and made occasional forays into New York, sometimes opening for acts like the Mighty Clouds of Joy or the Brooklyn All-Stars. The Floyd Family, dubbed “Gospel’s Jackson 5” by one DJ, also crisscrossed the country and once opened for the Rev. James Cleveland in Madison Square Garden. The Floyds – six brothers and sisters – also regularly sold out of their 45s and autographed pictures. In fact, many of these artists featured multiple family members. The Religious Souls were another name for the multi-talented Kingcannon Family, under the watchful eye of Bishop Reggie Kincannon. The sharply dressed Kingcannons, three females and four males, probably would have had a hit with “Condition the World is In” had the 45 received better distribution and production. The Fantastic Shadows included several members of the Davis family of Miami, led by lead singer Althea. Their bass-driven “Time for Peace” will remind you of Undisputed Truth. The fourth major iteration of the Soul Stirrers (represented here by “Don’t You Worry”) included, at different times, Arthur, Leroy, Dillard and Rufus Crume. And the Gospel IQs included Bobby, Billy, John and Gene Houze. The Staple Junior Singers were a family band in the early ‘60s who loved the music of Pops Staples’ emerging gospel powerhouse. So much so, they actually named themselves after them and inspired Annie Caldwell to write and record “We Got a Race to Run,” which absolutely nails Mavis’ burnished hoarse-throated burr. The Staple Junior Singers eventually split into the Caldwell Singers, featuring Annie and her family, and Brown Singers, featuring her brothers Edward and R.C. And both groups still perform Staples-influenced gospel throughout Mississippi today. Sometimes the years of touring paid off. In addition to the Soul Stirrers, the Floyd Family Singers cut an album with Savoy and, besides the Vee-Jay LP, Peay said Gospel IQs recorded for OKeh Records. (and o One of their songs, “This Generation, was even” recorded by the Friends of Distinction.. Other equally worthy artists didn’t fare as well. The Mighty Revelairs, despite the whole Wilson Pickett-styled stone soul of “Sunshine After Every Rain,” didn’t leave much of a vinyl footprint. The William Singers’ “Don’t Give Up” is polished, savvy and funky, a worthy heir to “Poppa Was a Rolling Stone.,” but However, repeated Google searches don’t turn up much at all (in part because there are several better-known gospel Williams Brothers out there). And more’s the pity. James Bynum’s slow-burn soul release “We Are in Need” for the obscure E.B.C. label probably could chart today. The Rev. Harvey Gates (represented here with two incredibly soulful tracks, “Price of Love” and “It’s Hard to Live in This Old World”) is an undiscovered genius. While copies of the otherwise unknown Willie Dale’s extraordinary “Let Your Light Shine” on Lovie D Records from Bakersfield has rabid fans a’plenty – one of the few known copies of the 45 recently fetched $10,000 on eBay. As for the other artists and their songs, some have found new life on YouTube, including portions of Houze and the Gospel IQs joyous 50th anniversary concert. Houze, who said he has been pastor of New Hope Missionary Baptist Church in Charlotte for more than quarter of a century, still sings every Sunday. “I sing a lot,” he said, “and I have one good thing with me – our organist for the Gospel IQs plays for my church as well. He knows all of my songs, so that’s a plus for me.” Floyd said the Floyd Family Singers toured for 20 years. “We could have made a career out of it,” he said, “but when I was out there, I saw so much stuff that I didn’t want my children to ever become involved with it, so I just kind of pulled back from it.” The family has occasional reunion concerts when the children (now with a host of grandchildren) return to Charlotte. One recent such concert drew 1,200 people. Floyd himself is retired, content to tour local fairs with Tiger the Counting Horse (check out Albert and Tiger on YouTube), the horse who knows a $100 bill from a $1. Peay, the longtime pastor of the Praise Sanctuary in the Westmont neighborhood in Los Angeles, says he didn’t sing much anymore, but stays in touch with the surviving members of the Triumphs, including Benny Goodman, Charles and Leonard Whittiker. He recently performed a funeral for a friend in Pittsburgh, one of the cities where the group had had a loyal fan base. “And honest to God, there were about seven to eight of these young people who used to attend our concerts there,” Peay said, “and they all began to sing, ‘We Don’t Love Enough’ right then! It brought tears to my eyes. They didn’t miss a word! I couldn’t sing the entire song right now if you paid me $100.” It may be that some of the others in this collection – the Rev. Harvey Gates, Willie Scott, James Bynum, the Might Revelairs – are still out on the gospel highway, still performing in small churches somewhere. They’re all worth seeking out. And if you hear Willie Dale is singing, be sure and ask him if he has any spare copies of “Let Your Light Shine” lying around … Robert F. Darden is the author of People Get Ready! A New History of Black Gospel Music (Continuum/Bloomsbury, 2005), Nothing But Love in God’s Water, Volume I: Black Sacred Music from the Civil War to the Civil Rights Movement (Penn State University Press, 2014) and Nothing But Love in God’s Water, Volume II: Black Sacred Music from Sit-Ins to Resurrection City (Penn State University Press, 2016). He is a former gospel music editor for Billboard Magazine and the founder of the Black Gospel Music Restoration Project at Baylor University. The Time For Peace Is Now - (what I call “Barbershop Gospel”) —Dr. Keith L. Whitney When I first came to Detroit from Jackson, Mississippi in 1968, Gospel was not my native musical language—I grew up in a church that did Negro Spirituals, hymns, and classical songs. Detroit broadened my musical understanding of what church music could be. Gospel was the music of the day—church choirs, community Choraleers, quartets and the like were the musical movers and shakers of the city. My family and I spent many Sunday afternoons attending Gospel concerts at our church and in concert halls throughout Detroit. The radio was inundated with Gospel. Black owned religious stations played the latest records by revered Gospel artists, and quartet concerts and choir contests were often announced. Detroit was—and is—the Gospel music capital of the world. The late great Aretha Franklin was a Gospel fixture in the city, despite also performing secular music. Mattie Moss Clark and her daughters, The Clark Sisters, were royalty. The Winans family, who made their mark on the Gospel world, were in the process of becoming the face of Gospel music in Detroit. Popular music did not escape the power of Gospel, and Gospel did not escape the power of secular music. The Gospel bands heard on The Time For Peace Is Now! were comprised of musicians who played both church and secular music. The church borrowed—or rather commandeered—the guitar, bass, drums, and other instruments used to backup Motown, Stax, and other popular labels—to give power to the songs they supported. Musicians who sang at ‘the club’ on Saturday night were often leading solos or singing in the choir on Sunday mornings. Saturday night and Sunday morning music began to interweave, which was especially felt when the church choirs sang Gospel. It was Gospel’s influence that made Aretha Franklin, Sam Cooke, and many others the voice of the 1960s and 1970s. Gospel was the soul of America. This album is reflective of the dichotomy of the sacred and the secular. The music here is in some sense the same as the music of the club. “Keep Your Faith to the Sky” could have you singing “Keep Your Head to the Sky” by Earth, Wind and Fire. Listening to “It’s Hard To Live In This Old World” and “That’s A Sign of the Times” imbues the pessimistic/realistic sense of what was (and still is) happening. Like many Blues songs, the problem must first be named before it can be solved. At the end of The Time For Peace Is Now!, hope is still present. The problem is named in the beginning and a possible solution is presented. [ED NOTE: Can we cut this last sentence?] One of the rights of passage in the Black Community, especially for males, is one’s regular session at the barbershop. My barbershop is Whitlow’s Barber Lounge, found on the west side of Detroit. Vonnie Whitlow has been there for over fifty years, and was mentored by Raymond Parks, the husband of Rosa Parks. He has been the mentor to thousands of young men and women. He has allowed his place to become a sanctuary for the community—therefore It is not just a place to get a haircut, it is a place where the ideas of manhood are instilled. Heated discussions arise about women, sports, politics (both local and national) and to be sure, church. As one who is a part of the church, I have the chance to engage in conversations especially about religion. The community theologian who has not darkened the door of a church in a while spends his time educating those who will listen to what he thinks the church ought to do. Brothers who are perhaps deacons, trustees, ushers, or some other office in the local church respond, sometimes with passionate retorts. No matter the position, whether from within or outside of the church, there are moral lessons taught in the barbershop that are instilled even in the hearts of the brothers on the other side of the law. When I heard this album, I thought of the barbershop. No, not all Gospel will fit in Sunday worship services, but what I call the secular Gospel is preached anyway.The music of The Time For Peace Is Now! is what I call “Barbershop Gospel”. This is the Gospel that is accessible to the ‘ain’ts’ and the ‘saints’. The themes here embrace the realities of life as well as hope for the future. Songs such as “It’s Hard to Live in this Old World”, “That’s A Sign Of The Times” and “Condition The World Is In” question the realities of life, poverty, disease, income inequality and the like. The historic pull of the Black Church is present in these songs—name the problem, seek a solution and keep hope at the forefront. “Peace In The Land” challenges each of us to take personal responsibility to make a change, with the question, “What are you doing to bring peace in the land?” “We Got a Race to Run”, “Don’t You Worry” [ED NOTE: this song got cut right?] and “Don’t Give Up” propose a solution to our problems. Listening to these songs forty years after the fact reminds us that there is nothing new under the sun. Although “Barbershop Gospel” is the predominating music of The Time For Peace Is Now!, one cannot escape the reality of the church, and the Black Church in particular. These songs become like the “morality plays” of the middle ages—they teach Biblical truth to the Biblically and religiously illiterate. Mini sermons are preached, words of encouragement given and a benediction of “Don’t Give Up” dismisses the congregation. Although this is a classic album, its words are as powerful today as they were when first sung.

Give me a minute or three to extol the virtues of The Gotobeds, the modern rock and roll sensation that has always sounded like they love to play. Never maligned by having the world’s weight on their backs, The Gotobeds - Cary, TFP, Eli and Gavin - return to the fray with their third full lengther, 'Debt Begins at 30'. The esprit de corps and anxiety-free joy that permeates their other LPs and EPs remains intact. The octane is high-test, the engine still has knocks and pings and the battery is overcharged. The Gotobeds - as Pittsburgh as it gets, the folk music of the Steel City - have more tar for us to swallow. Debt Begins at 30 is an old-fashioned blast furnace and the liquid iron flows. Debt Begins at 30 is not "pub sop" in any way or shape. Though I never considered The Gotobeds a band that needed assistance from their peers, Debt Begins at 30 features outside contributors on every track. The album's first single, "Calquer The Hound," includes local buddy Evan Richards, and Rob Henry of Kim Phuc. "Calquer The Hound" has euphony, a sly bridge, plenty of trademark bash, and a spacey outro. It's a sanguine album opener, more Al Oliver than Starling Marte. On "Twin Cities," the lads tap Tracy Wilson, formerly of Dahlia Seed and currently of Positive NO!, to share the vox, and the result is an exuberant pop song proving The Gotobeds benefit from women ruling the scene. "Twin Cities" is more Dakota Staton than Don Caballero. "Debt Begins at 30," the title trackular, includes the wizardry of Mike Seamans and legend Bob Weston. It's a brooding romp with tribal beats and slash-and-burn guitar, more Rocky Bleier than Le'Veon Bell. Unsurprisingly, The Gotobeds called partners-in-rock-crime Protomartyr a coupla times, with Joe Casey bolstering "Slang Words" and hook-fiend Greg Ahee shredding on "On Loan." "Slang Words" is a savory wrecking ball with a crunching bite, more of a soft shell crab sandwich from Wholey's Market than a 4am slop feast at Primanti Brothers. "On Loan" is an anthemic jangle-fest with high-arcing fret work, more Karl Hendricks (rest his soul) than "Weird Paul" Petroskey. Silkworm guitarist Tim Midyett is tapped on "Parallel," a grand song that enters a world of whimsy, melodic and uncomplicated, more Jaromir Jagr than Sidney Crosby. The likes of 12XU label boss Gerard Cosloy, Tre Orsi's Matt Barnhart, the wonderful Victoria Ruiz of Downtown Boys, Pittsburgh wordsmiths Jason Baldinger and Scott MacIntyre, and yours truly strut stuff on other tracks. In my case, I just scream “dross” on "Dross" several times. Good judgment on the part of The Gotobeds to know that's the best I can do, more Max Moroff than Andrew McCutchen. Anyways, The Gotobeds have quickly reached the veteran stage, but, based upon Debt Begins at 30, their best days are ahead of them. It's a pleasure to be associated with such an excellent band. --Bob Nastanovich, 1/13/2019, Des Moines