Prisoners Of Love And Hate is an offering to community, to desires that imprison and liberate, to people in all their divinity and ugliness. Apostille—aka Night School Records’ captain Michael Kasparis—presents his third album with a bang, a bursting ball of NRG, empathy and bristling living. Like its predecessor Choose Life, Prisoners... was recorded in Full Ashram Celestial Garden in Glasgow with Lewis Cook (Free Love) through 2022. A 9 song treatise on Pop music, trauma, ecstasy and the mundanities between the extremes, Kasparis takes on classic 80s Synth Pop, 90s House music, '00s Trance, wistful balladry, '70s Power Pop. The thread that runs through the album is a boundless energy, an openness to the moment, to living the pains and joys equally, open armed. This is a place of no judgement, of possibility, challenge and comfort. The nine songs on Prisoners... can be read as separate ruminations on the feelings and desires that imprison our experience. Through it all the narrator struggles against them, transported and fooled by love and longing, peering through the bars of anguish, flailing in a cell of emotions. Saturday Night, Still Breathing breaks the album open with an invigorating scream and pounds into the night with a nod to Whigfield, Kasparis’ Punk roots and House music. Over a thumping 909 kick and bassline, Kasparis pens a love letter to being with people, the collective energy of hearts in a room, thrumming together, making it through together. Written as private ritual magic, manifesting community during...
LP $24.00
11/10/2023
MP3 $7.99
11/10/2023
FLAC $8.99
11/10/2023
Apostille is the solo musical guise of Glaswegian DIY protagonist Michael Kasparis. Initially a creative harbour from his groups Please and The Lowest Form, Apostille has grown into an explosive synth-punk project unafraid of both physicality and emotional leakage. Powerless is Kasparis’ first album proper, following exploratory works on Goaty Tapes and Clan Destine, and is Apostille’s first release on his own Night School Records. Fiercely independent in practice and execution, Apostille’s stated purpose is to bridge the gap between audience and performer, to connect through the fog of power structures and post-modernism; to ferment a direct pop music unconcerned with control. Powerless explodes with Life - a rage of brilliance that acts as a communal outlet of shared frustration and confusion at the world. At moments haiku-like mantras lament over a damaged industrial de-composition as in The Collector, at other times there’s a Depeche Modish fragility as in Side 2 opener Deserter. In warped, subterranean ballad Olivia’s Eyes an almost decapitated duet details criminal instincts, while live favourite Slurry demolishes proceedings with a Suicide-like take on Chicago house; a mammoth journey into the psyche of a ‘Falling Down’ prototype, lost in a world of perpetual motion, speeding up and uncaring. Touchstones of early Mute artists like Fad Gadget can be found in Apostille’s overwhelmingly physical live performances but like Tovey’s best work, or perhaps that of Crash Course in Science, there’s a depth on record that paints in more complex colours. Apostille is pop music from the outside looking in.
LP $20.25
05/26/2015
MP3 $8.91
04/27/2015
FLAC $9.90
04/27/2015
Debut vinyl release from Apostille - aka Night School's Michael Kasparis' fractured pop utterances. Kaleidoscopic instrumentation and cracked synths frame two bona fide degraded pop songs centred around a lurking sense of misanthropy, albeit a misanthropy tempered with ecstatic tendencies. 'Wrong' is the mid paced groover for self-erasing western consciousness, possessing a chorus hook so insidious and fun it diverts from the content. 'The Road To War' takes a sisters of mercy in hypnagogia approach to anthems and produces a sing-a-long both unintelligible and seductively drenched in fervour and sweat.
MP3 $1.98
11/19/2012