As the January full moon rises we're pleased to present our first record of the decade which comes crafted by dreamworld mastermind Birds ov Paradise. 'Till Dig' consists of four paradisaical cuts which all offer a fair share of light to warm our hearts as we slowly start our ascend toward summer bliss. The music comes pressed on a black 180 gram twelve inch vinyl, sheathed inside our signature custom cut sleeves and a new artistic appearance that draws inspiration from the surrounding nature of our home in the forests of Bålsta, Sweden. It is made in collaboration between me (Michel) and my partner Gabriella who drew the sticker artworks. We are both looking forward to explore this new expression in conjunction with the music of our guild Now, please bathe yourselves in the lush sounds of Birds ov Paradise.
SRV005 T-Shirts also available here: hiddenmothers.bandcamp.com/merch
Years before James Blake was widely regarded as one of pop’s most inventive songwriters, the young Londoner was a virtuosic beatmaker, stretching and manipulating drum samples and vocal loops into meticulous, clubby abstractions. It wasn’t until earlier this year, after a stretch of conceptual projects and live arena tours, that he felt an itch to return to the DJ booth. There was only one problem: COVID-19 had shut nightlife down. “My timing was awful, but I was still yearning to make that kind of music,” he tells Apple Music. “Lockdown almost put me into overdrive. Finishing this EP was a response to how frustrated I was not to be able to go to clubs.” *Before* is a tight, uptempo taste of what Blake has been feeling lately—restless, reflective, blissfully in love—with flickers of the skittering, head-nodding flourishes that marked his early dance-floor-oriented work. Read on as the musician, who now lives in Los Angeles, talks us through each track. **I Keep Calling** “This is the song that got me thinking this would be an EP, because it tied in so many different influences—a little UK garage, a euphoric rise in the production that made sense with the song ‘Before,’ and so on. It was the very last track I made in the studio before lockdown, and the only track from this EP that I was able to make in that live, fun, collaborative environment. Those moments are the ones I miss the most.” **Before** “This is ultimately a love song, but it\'s also about the larger relevance of someone in your life. What it means for who you are, or who you *can* be. The lyrics are like, ‘I don’t have to keep receipts anymore/I don\'t have to stand by the door/Because you\'re my family.’ That sense of security can free you, whether it’s in a romantic relationship or in a community. And when you start thinking about community, therein lies the connection with dance music. Clubs make people feel a sense of belonging, of being surrounded by people who are all being moved by the same thing.” **Do You Ever** “I was looking to piece together something of a dance-floor nature and went back into some of my old beat ideas. I found this little piano loop with nothing around it—that\'s what you hear at the beginning of the song—and it just stayed with me. Nico Muhly contributed some string arrangements at the end. Every now and again I write these slightly desperate songs like ‘I\'ll Come Too,’ where I\'m just like, ‘Ah, I\'ll come anywhere, I\'ll follow you anywhere.’ And here, the lyric ‘Do you ever think about me?’ has that same sense of hoping someone still has you in their thoughts, and almost not believing that it might even be true, hence the ‘Really?’” **Summer of Now** “This is almost like the post-rave or the chill-out zone, with an indie side that keeps it from feeling too clubby. There’s also more of a post-punk influence, maybe a little bit of Suicide or Joy Division. The lyrics are fairly biographical and tell a story about this forlorn, lovesick reflection—recalling this time of waiting in the lobby for someone and them never seeming to come down. But it’s told with a bit of distance, from a new place, where you don’t just wait around forever for someone to love you. When I sing, ‘I\'m not the summer of 2015/But I can be the summer of now,’ it’s putting whatever romantic idea that you had of me to bed. I think I’ve had this experience many times in my life where I looked back on a relationship or a friendship and thought, ‘God, I wish that had happened now. I would have been so much better in some way.’”
The old aphorism goes that writing about music is like dancing about architecture, but trying to convey in words exactly what London duo Jockstrap sounds like might be even trickier than that. Georgia Ellery and Taylor Skye met while studying at London’s Guildhall School of Music & Drama (Ellery studying jazz violin and Skye electronic music) and formed after they noticed via Facebook that they’d both been to the same James Blake show. Their 2018 debut EP *Love Is the Key to the City* introduced their idiosyncratic approach to music, taking in classic, dreamy pop songwriting—echoing everyone from ’50s jazz singer Julie London to alt-pop including Broadcast or Stereolab—and obtuse beats from Skye that could easily have come from the PC Music stable. The EP won them a fan in Björk, who came to a 2018 show at Iceland Airwaves and eventually helped them sign to the iconic Warp label for this, their follow-up EP. “It’s a bit more of everything,” says Skye. “It’s funnier, it’s definitely a bit more ridiculous at some points, but it’s more serious too.” “I think it’s a lot more confident and we pushed ourselves creatively a lot further,” adds Ellery. “This is new to us and it’s really exciting.” Read their track-by-track guide below. **Robert** Taylor Skye: “All the tracks on the EP are in the order we made them, and this one went back and forth for ages as it just kind of felt like the dregs of the last EP. The idea to put a rap feature on it came almost immediately, but we had to spend ages finding the right person.” Georgia Ellery: “We used Groggs from \[Arizona hip-hop trio\] Injury Reserve. We met them at Iceland Airwaves a few years ago and then they invited us to support them on their UK tour. We got something from them and then Taylor really manipulated and distorted the vocals so it feels more like an instrument on the track or part of the mix than standing out as a rap on the track.” TS: “They already had the rap recorded, so it wasn’t made specifically for the song, which was quite nice. It felt right for the rap to not mean anything specific. I think you have to make a rap feature a little ridiculous, too.” GE: “The track’s inspired by the American photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. I got really obsessed with his work for a while.” **Acid** GE: “This song’s about my brother. We went through a period of not having much of a relationship, so I was just kind of figuring that out through song, I guess. When Taylor sent over a version which was quite close to this final version, I remember feeling like he was telling a different story through his production to the story I was telling, and it just sounded crazy and awesome and really helped shape the song.” **Yellow in Green** GE: “All the songs start with me writing a poem, and this was written on a train from Glasgow to London. I got an early train and it was really frosty and I sat and wrote this.” TS: “This track was a case of Georgia writing a song and then me producing it in a way that is right and not trying to make too much of a different statement from what it was in the first place. We got a friend to record the piano for it, and it really came together when we put a sub-bass note underneath the big piano chords. That was the big moment!” **The City** GE: “Usually with songs I’ll pick away at a progression and come back to it day after day, but ‘The City’ just kind of poured out of me, and it’s rare but amazing when that happens.” TS: “The first and second half of this song are quite different, and in some senses it falls into a bit of a trope of ‘girl does nice piano ballad and boy does big angry stompy thing’, but I actually did something much softer first, which Georgia didn’t like, and then came back with something harder, which she *did* like. It’s my job in Jockstrap to add a decent amount of production to it and do something that’s reasonably radical. Sometimes that can be something quite subtle and sometimes it’s quite big.” **City Hell** TS: “This almost feels like the whole EP in one song. There’s about ten specific people that influenced moments in this song, and we’re happy to admit that.” GE: “For example, the guitars at the beginning are influenced by a couple of tracks on the first Beyoncé album. I was like, ‘Taylor, can we have that sound?’ and he said, ‘Yeah, they’re reversed MIDI guitars.’ We were inspired by Roxy Music, too, with their glamorous marriage of synths and guitars on their early albums.” TS: “There’s a bit in there that really reminds me of Panic! At the Disco too. It was a really meaty piece to tackle and get the structure down. Mixing it was difficult as it was all these different elements, but the vocals helped tie it all together.”
On paper, it’s an unlikely pairing: Leon Bridges, classic soul revivalist and late-’50s throwback, cutting a record with Khruangbin, forward-leaning, genre-allergic instrumental trio. But before they’d ever met—at the first in a slew of tour dates they’d play together in late 2018—Bridges had been writing to the sound of Khruangbin’s breakthrough LP *Con Todo El Mundo*. “I really love their kind of minimalist approach to instrumentation, just like the style of it,” Bridges tells Apple Music. “It’s very soulful.” The attraction was mutual. As the tour unfolded, Khruangbin approached Bridges with new music that seemed to call out for a vocal—a recording they’d given the working title “Awesome Guitar Loop.” “We sent it to him and then literally the next day he came back with words on it,” bassist Laura Lee says. “That was the beginning.” All Texas natives—Bridges hails from Fort Worth and Khruangbin from Houston—they started meeting at a studio in Houston when their schedules allowed, experimenting with new and older material alike. The result is *Texas Sun*, a four-track EP and tribute to their home state that also speaks to its considerable diversity—in sound and sensibility. “It was,” Bridges says, “an inevitable collaboration.” Here, he and Lee detail the coming together of each song. **Texas Sun** Leon Bridges: “For this project, we set out to redefine the perception of Texas music, really blending our roots. I feel like this song is the perfect marriage of country, soul, and R&B. And historically, artists have incorporated elements of country music—like Bobby ‘Blue’ Bland and Joe Tex—so it was important to keep the spirit of that. This song really captures the mood of cruising Texas highways and taking it all in while the sun sets.” Laura Lee: “No matter where you are in Texas, it\'s big sky, big sun—that unifies the state. Khruangbin and Leon are both on tour all the time, so I think there was a relatable thing of just missing the feeling of home.” **Midnight** LB: “That\'s a story about young love, about this chick that I was crazy about in high school. My mother wasn\'t too keen on me hanging with this chick, so I had to kick it with her on the down-low. At the time I didn\'t have my own car, so I would have to borrow my mother\'s and drive from my side of town to where this girl lived in Polywood, which is kind of a rough area, so I was always sweating balls when I had to pick her up. It was a Honda Accord, and the lyric is \'Midnight black on the outside,\' but the car was actually green—midnight black just sounded cool. I would tell my mother I was going to open mics, and the song is essentially about making love in the backseat of her car. I never got caught. But I think she\'s going to find out now.” **C-Side** LL: “‘C-Side’ was actually a 40-minute jam that we edited down. There was a real energy that happened when all four of us just played. It\'s an interesting thing when you play off each other, because it\'s really what\'s naturally from you, as a group or collective. We would find a groove and then Leon would start singing over it. Sometimes it was just melodies, but Leon just has all these words stored in him.” LB: “The vibe and mood of it felt like a late-night rendezvous on the streets of New Orleans—and my lineage goes deep in New Orleans. My approach was to create that experience of just having a good time with someone you love, somewhere, in a second line.” **Conversion** LB: “The first song that I ever wrote. It’s pre-*Coming Home*, my first album. Honestly, I\'ve never really showed this song to anybody else. When I was a kid, I went to church because my parents went. But when I got older, I started to have a personal relationship with God, and this song reflects the first time I had that spiritual awakening. I think it\'s safe to say that being brought up in the church and faith is the common thread between all of us, me and Khruangbin.” LL: “One of the greatest moments happened during the recording session for that song. I grew up going to church, but I didn’t grow up going to a gospel church; \[drummer\] DJ \[Johnson\] has been playing in gospel churches his whole life and \[guitarist\] Mark \[Speer\] started as a teen, so they know all of the gospel standards. At the end of ‘Conversion,’ Leon somehow transitioned really beautifully into an old hymn called \'At the Cross.\' And when he played it, I saw DJ\'s face light up, because he\'d never heard it sung that way, and he immediately went to the piano. DJ is my brother, I\'ve seen him play gospel a million times, but to see him inspired by something really simple and really beautiful and something that meant so much to him was special. I love that song—it might be my favorite on the record.”
A quarantine collaboration between D. Tiffany, Vani-T & Roza Terenzi. recorded in the early days March 13-15, 2020 Transmissions recorded live @ Sophie's Cosmic Cafe in Reinekendorf, Germany 3 laptops, 0 regrets
