100% Silk   Page 1

Shine Grooves

Watching The Breeze

100% Silk

Yekaterinburg musician Andrey Kurokhtin operates in intertwined capacities – producer, engineer, synth and drum machine technician, label boss (of hand-stamped “non-commercial music” imprint Hanagasumi), electronica shopkeeper – but his passions collide in the microcosmic reveries of Shine Grooves. Watching The Breeze collects 13 cuts composed across a decade of activity for an expansive portrait of the project’s signature chemistry of minimalist rhythms and whispered emotion. Woozy, windswept, and flecked with grit, the tracks zoom in and out of delicate flux, triangulating liquid acid, deprivation chamber house, and the outer reaches of dub techno. Hints of Kompakt, Basic Channel, and glitched radio transmissions flicker in its ether, but ultimately WTB maps a groove shinier and more scattered, lost blossoms from a life behind the lights, attuned to the invisible.

Foans

Extended Classics

100% Silk

Essential expansion pack to the Selected Classics LP, Extended Classics delivers on its name, re-sequencing 19 more liquid minimalist gems from Andrew Dahabrah’s 345-minute 2018 FOANS odyssey, Classics. It’s a headspace both troubled and transportive, deftly mapped midnight systems of bass, haze, rhythm, and breath. Crafted in the wake of 2016’s Frontier, these tracks capture FOANS’ signature sound at its most streamlined, slinky, and smeared, dance transmissions for cold starlit nights, shaded in doubt and dreams.

Foans

Selected Classics

100% Silk

Selected Classics presents a crucially curated cross section of Colorado producer Andrew Dahabrah aka FOANS’ finest work, sourced from a nearly six-hour self-released vault of tracks posted to his Bandcamp in 2018. Simply called Classics, the sprawling 100-song digital collection was intended as the project’s final offering – a comprehensive culling of the hard drive, after which there’d be “no looking back.” Fortunately, minds have changed, and FOANS remains extant, but an air of finality and desperation still haunts these tracks, born of bruised emotions and the burnout of working seven days a week “in the middle of nowhere” as an electrician in isolated oil fields. It’s music of hidden hours and private survival, slipstreaming through sleek cybernetic house, gauzy matrix ambience, low-slung dusty jack, and woozy fractal techno. Placeless and weightless, heady and kinetic, Selected Classics distills Dahabrah’s sidewinding inner vision to its swooning fiber optic essence.

Pleasure Model

Multiplicative Gain

100% Silk

Bristol cyber-brutalist Pleasure Model presents their 4th SILK set of blueprints for business techno technocracy: Multiplicative Gain. Recorded in the wake of a recent relocation to the eastern seaboard, the album leans deeper into the project’s cracked corporate ethos of stock synths, mechanized rhythm, and boardroom acid, buying low and selling high. BPMs trace the pulse of the markets, named for generative AI slogans not yet unveiled. Driving, delirious, devoid, decadent – it’s music as offshore shell account, housing subtexts and sleights of hand just out of reach, like fluctuating futures scrolling across a skyscraper in a city of dreams.

Akasha System

Ancient Path Complete

100% Silk

Originally self-released as a digital-only EP in the summer of 2021, Ancient Path Complete folds four additional tracks into its sidewinding saga of hidden mesa house and aerodynamic electronics, delivering on its creator’s lofty vision of music “for looking inward, to the center of being.” These are songs of spiraling tides, spirit guides, and shadowy forward motion, drawn towards some shared beacon beaming like a low moon across the desert. Akasha System (aka Hunter P. Thompson) speaks of the album as born during a time of “personal darkness, confusion, and uncertainty,” but its exorcism produced the opposite – assured, expansive, and illuminated. It’s the sound of growth and change being sought and found, new trails taking shape, forking towards fresh horizons. Windswept, wistful, and blazed by an inner light, APC “continues the path onward into your pure, creative core… into healing.”

Cport Cistema

Say It

100% Silk

Lithuanian producer Simonas Činga debuts as Cport Cistema with a 7-track slate of low-slung steppers, melancholic jack, and baggy breaks, born of the struggle “to say whatever comes, to speak up – to say it.” Recorded across the past two years largely in Kaunas, the songs swell and swirl with kinetic dreams from city streets in uncertain times. Crisp rhythms cut through cold air, laced in bass, breath, and samples both vocal and cinematic. It’s music of atmosphere and anticipation, attuned to heady heights just beyond the horizon. The spirit of Činga’s heroes (Vynehall, BoC, Djrum) echoes through these mixes but ultimately their motion and emotion maps a world unto itself – elevated, liberated, forever freshly coming into focus.

Akasha System

Phytopia

100% Silk

From the forests of Cascadia to the rippling tropics of the Gulf Coast, Hunter P. Thompson’s music as Akasha System both reflects and refracts the environment of its origin – equal parts mirror, mixing desk, and meditation chamber. His latest, Phytopia, skews even loftier, a private portal into a primordial world of mist and mystery, framed by crystalline rivers, rainbow canopies, and hanging gardens. He describes its wavelength as “a waking vision,” teeming with “life, chaos, and magic.” Crafted across the past three years in his recently departed Portland, Oregon basement haven, Green House, the album’s nine tracks unfold with a shimmering, cellular symmetry – prehistoric and preordained, lush ecosystems in hidden harmony. A composite of synths, software, and spatial finesse, this is Akasha System at its most attuned and eternal, a forever expanding universe of percolating rhythm and fragrant air.

Dj Panthr

Jade District

100% Silk

The inaugural vinyl debut by Hunter Thompson aka Akasha System’s shadow self, DJ Panthr, is an 8-track technoid night ride inspired by the fern-shrouded neon streets of South Tabor, Portland, where the album was conceived and created: enter the Jade District. Simmering and serpentine, the songs slipstream from lithe to liquid to narcotic, traced in acid, dub, and deep house fog. It’s dance music as both reverie and nocturne, overcast and underground, the perpetual motion of mossy neighborhoods passing in the dark, streetlights smeared by rain. Thompson speaks of the “desolate peace” of sleepless dawn walks through Southeast Portland, tall trees silhouetted against glowing strip malls. The synthetic and natural worlds fused in greenery and concrete. Jade District feels both immediate and introspective, club tracks for midnight minds, born of distance, dreams, and things unsaid.

Indopan

Yupana

100% Silk

Named for a banned 60’s psychoactive stimulant, Indopan is the splinter entity of Irish producer Andrew Morrison, aka “tape throb” godfather The Cyclist. Its sound runs distinct but parallel, a fusion of blasted house and ghosted soul, smeared with dub, breaks, and redline grit. Yupana collects nine new tracks for a 50-minute trip through outer limits and altered states, cutting keys at the doors of perception. Smoky horns, snaky bass, smeared organ, and deep torch laments spiral through kinetic, kaleidoscopic strains of dizzy swing, dusty jack, and jittery acid. Alternately weightless and weary, tense and unhinged, Morrison’s mastery of mood, rhythm, and restraint hits a supreme peak here. This is music of liquid nights, chemical bloodstreams, and ancient sorrows, ebbing and flowing from lost roots to fractured futures, unbowed and unknowable.

Claus, Michael

Lavender Palace

100% Silk

Lavender Palace is a portrait of a process more than a place – the result of a creative headspace San Francisco producer (and Silva Electronics boss) Michael Claus describes as “dropping out of the world and entering a flow state.” That heightened sense of spatial focus, dilated and dialed in, colors the collection in subtle shades of dream house, dub techno, and liquid downtempo. Recorded before and during the strangest days of peak lockdown, Claus found himself drawn to sci-fi notions of fantastical cities and mythic landscapes, hazy realms in the horizon of the mind’s eye. Further inspired by a new and improved studio arrangement in the city, the sessions unspooled in long, low-slung voyages of texture and pulse, restlessness and reverie, “yearning for a better tomorrow.” It’s music of empty streets and guarded hope, percolating at the precipice of futures too real to recognize.

Malasso

Good, You're Here, It's Time

100% Silk

Rogue romantic Maltese producer Salvatore Munzone describes his debut in terms both scenic and star-crossed: “Love songs and heartaches conceived under the year-round Mediterranean sun, to be heard in a beach parking lot, sitting in the car watching the movement of the sea while the music pumps from JBL speakers.” Good, You’re Here, It’s Time collects 10 tracks of mood system house, proto-techno, and refracted poetics recorded and mixed in fits and starts across the past three years, accruing complexities and contradictions along the way. Lean rhythms trace sunset coasts of club bass, seagull synths, and twilit pads, laced with vocal samples of rapture, doubt, and the need to dance. Munzone cites UK revisionists from Actress to Swayzak to Burial as oblique touchstones but his own sound inhabits a woozy world all its own, attuned to asymmetries, subcurrents, and the sand in the hourglass slipping softly past: “All good things come to an end.”

Staghorns

Eating Feelings

100% Silk

The latest by Tel Aviv producer Shlomi Zvi aka Staghorns is an eight-track emotional response of moodswing techno and sidewinder house, equal parts anxiety trip and rhythm therapy: Eating Feelings. Recorded across last winter in his city studio, the songs began as bass lines then flowered outward into nuanced dimensions of tension and release, outsider acid and active listening – facing down demons on dance floors and beyond. Prior collections for Teel and Infinity.Trax (a collaboration with L.A.’s Choopsie) hinted at his gift for low-slung, liberated kinetics but here he cruises through a deeper house of mirrors, from jittery jack and dusty disco to piano stab dubs and endorphin electronica. It’s club music as coping mechanism, alternately spiraling and centered, escapist and psychodynamic. Sound as sonar, leading us back to our truest selves.

Precipitation

Glass Horizon

100% Silk

The first full-length vinyl collection by Tokyo-based producer Zefan Sramek aka Precipitation crystallizes his evolving synthesis of new age ambience, tape hiss, and house music into a riveting suite of motion and mirage: Glass Horizon. Conceived and recorded between two formative trips to Sado Island in the spring and late summer of 2020, the album feels both insular and infinite, threading paths through wet grass, along isolated coasts. Field recordings of tidepools, birds, and cicadas crossfade into fluid mandalas of bass, keys, and drum machinery, while synths glide and glisten, rising like heat off sand. Sramek speaks of themes of escape and estrangement, solace and desolation, visions of azure waters lapping empty shores. Weeks spent sleeping in a hammock attuned him to the extrasensory; melodies and memories materialized from the foliage, suffused with ocean air and placeless melancholy. All seven tracks swoop and swirl with patience and precision, grid-mapped golden dawns and gradient sunsets mixed live and captured on cassette. This is dance music as portal and pilgrimage, spiral environments for a refracted age.

Archer, Nate

Wild Tigers I Have Known: Original Soundtrack Recording

100% Silk

Nate Archer’s new score to his brother Cam’s celebrated 2006 feature film Wild Tigers I Have Known was conceived as radio transmissions coloring the emotional landscape of the confused adolescent protagonist, Logan. A mix of glittering synths, sampled voice, stark rhythm, and surreal moods, the tracks conjure a sense of “slight menace, or a slowly lifting veil,” as Logan wanders Santa Cruz suburbia, at the threshold of the wilderness of adulthood.Archer’s background in basement psychedelia (Rahdunes) and leftfield tribal electronics (Leisure Connection) bleed through in the soundtrack’s disorienting diversity, alternately ominous and innocent, hedonistic and hallucinatory. These are less songs than wavelengths, as much internal as external, pulsing with the promise and pain of desires still unnamed, futures yet unknown.

Parc

Wave Iridescence

100% Silk

Vancouver producer Jeremy Rawkins aka PARC’s 2nd collection further finesses his signature fusion of dexterous rhythm dynamics, liquid field recordings, and digital synth ambience into an immersive, aerodynamic domain: Wave Iridescence. Embracing the limitations and tonal saturation of 80’s and 90’s digital synths and converters, the tracks gleam and slipstream with a sleek, weightless futurism, conjuring visions of fiber optic clouds and lost biodome terrariums. Rawkins cites notions of organic electronics, randomized beauty, and the peripheries of dance music as inspiration, but ultimately the sound he maps is too fluid and prismatic for effective categorization. It’s music of heights and breaks, precision and vertigo, loops and radiance – vivid cybernetic heavens forever in flux.

Foans

Gateway

100% Silk

Re-sequenced and lightly abridged physical edition of Denver producer Andrew Dahabrah’s latest melancholic house masterpiece, Gateway. 14 vivid vignettes of rhythm, hypnosis, and heartache, dreaming of better times and other worlds. Crafted in the aftermath of a family tragedy, the music took shape as both anchor and escape hatch, solace from and for the sudden storms of life. Dusty downtempo and loops of lo-fi longing slipstream into night sky techno, galactic jack, and parallel shades of inner space motion. A deepening portal between pain and possibility, glittering like a sea of stars above icy peaks: “What better way to spread love and healing than through music.”

Glo Phase

Early Moments

100% Silk

Pittsburgher-turned-Angeleno Joseph Rusnak aka Glo Phase spent an extended recovery from double jaw surgery last year finessing his freshest slate of fluid synthesis rhythm systems to date: Early Moments. Sleek, serene, and elevated, the tracks traverse states of bliss and blue light, a swirl of setting suns above hazy horizons. Incorporating an array of analog and software techniques, it’s music of morning glides and shared glances, romantic but restless, reflective reveries for innerspace dance floors and shape-shifting private depths.

Takeda, Shoshi

Floating Mountains

100% Silk

Tokyo visionist Soshi Takeda’s second album took shape across eight months of the winter and spring, inspired by an iconic mid-80’s photography book of Chinese landscapes. Scenes of lantern-lit fishing boats on misty mountain lakes seeded a mood of hidden paradise, ancient waterways snaking secret paths into the past.  Recorded at his home studio using exclusively hardware synths and samplers from the 1990’s, the six songs of Floating Mountains (plus digital-only bonus cut, “Deep Breath,” from the recent 2nd Life Silk compilation) evoke shrouded cinematic vistas of liquid skies and shining lakes, like some Li River twist on Balearic half-light house. Shades of cosmic drift and crystalline electronica ebb and flow within the nocturnal pulse, pagodas and pearls reflecting the waning moon: “I hope you can feel the cool and exotic atmosphere.”

V/a

2nd Life Silk

100% Silk

Ten years into the fold and still 100%. 2nd Life Silk celebrates the label's decade anniversary in the spirit in which it started: inclusive, interwoven, and independent. All 11 artists (or aliases) are new to the roster, stationed from Saint Leonards to San Francisco, Portland to Pittsburgh, spanning deserts, everglades, and intercoastal urban jungles. The sounds are sidewinding and singular but share a mood of hypnotic movement, homemade and low slung, slow strobe dance transmissions from back rooms and basements. Across 69 minutes the compilation surfs memory disco, snake-charmer jack, eco-techno, spiral tribalism, diamond downtempo, breatharian house, skyscraper smooth groove, and mystic new wave fusion, riding different waves of the same sea. Rhythm isn't strict and gates don't need keepers. From one life to the 2nd, music will outlast it all.

Dubharp

Spiral Heights

100% Silk

Denver DIY lifer Luke Thinnes launched Dubharp in 2018 as a cathartic experiment in fusing contradictory energies: propulsive but meditative, acoustic yet metallic, heaven vs the terrestrial. Spiral Heights, his sophomore collection, vividly captures this vision of “future Balearic” environments, with synthetic wind, strings, and mallets embedded in restlessly elastic 4th world rhythms. The title itself is “a gesture of gratitude” to the ecstatic refractions of dub echo and its “Ouroboros of infinite delay,” stretching time and opening pathways of mystical ascent. Though born of improvisation, the album's eight tracks unspool with precision and finesse, percolating syncopations of percussion, bass, bird sounds, glitch, and gleaming circuitry. Devotional zitherist Laraaji and dub renegade Lee “Scratch” Perry make memorable cameo appearances but otherwise Spiral Heights is a solo endeavor, voyaging and vibrational, multi-directional manifestations of spatial electronics bridging sky and soil, ether and earth. Dedicated to Harry J. Stephens and Colin R.F. Ward

Etari

Rainbow Eucalyptus

100% Silk

First physical format offering from Los Angeleno hypno-house producer and DJ Lexi Andre aka Etari is a tie-dyed hybrid of eco-tech dreaming and aerated rave energies, eight churning chill-out tent anthems, as suited for rainforests as rooftops. Recorded during long, loose 1 AM sessions at her home studio, Rainbow Eucalyptus exudes a mood of wonder and freefall, swirling strands of liquid synth, broken beats, and hypercolor smoke into emotive electric motion fantasias. A self-taught DJ since the age of 16, Andre is a key figure in the Brazil-based label network Yellow Island, which issued her 2019 debut EP, Healing Herself, as well as hosting her exploratory monthly radio show, State Of Mind. The sound of Etari has honed by degrees, inspired by rare trees, cool air, and spiraling rhythm, equal parts expansion and embrace.

Auscultation

III

100% Silk

A term for listening to sounds within the body as a method of diagnosis is a poignantly perfect moniker for Portland producer Joel Shanahan’s most elusive and emotive electronic aura-reading solo alias: Auscultation. III arrives a full four years after its SILK predecessor, L’étreinte Imaginaire, delayed by tragedies too expansive to enumerate. Throughout, these shadowy psychic rhythms percolated at the periphery, as both escape and exorcism. The songs share a smeared mood of longing and lament, foggy melodies gliding through low-lit spaces, dissipated dance floor ether spiraling like smoke under a streetlight. It’s a music of faces in the night and things unsaid, swaying at the threshold. What could have been and what will always be. Mastered by Eric Hanson. Design by Britt Brown.

Cyclist, The

Weather Underground

100% Silk

2020's tense, tectonic unrest is a fitting foreground for Andrew Morrison's freshest slab of bruised and blasted Cyclist productions, Weather Underground. Like their ravaged revolutionary group namesake, these tracks exude a mood of strife, shadows, and smoke, simmering protest transmissions from the grim north. The songs smear shades of industrial hypnosis, basement dub, and soul lament within his signature saturated “tape throb” palette like tagged concrete stained by tear gas. Rhythms of release and resistance, bodies in motion on the edge of the storm, coiled to strike for futures too unthinkable to lose.

Jupiter Jax

No Such Thing

100% Silk

The music of Maltese producer Rudi Agius aka Jupiter Jax has always felt as much defined by mood as movement, guided by the “specific melancholy” of specific melodies. His latest long-player skews even more cinematic, conjuring twilit gardens and crooked city streets, windswept and warped by memory: No Such Thing. Inspired by notions of escape and the unknown, and threaded with dexterous live instrumentation, the album treads vibrant hybrids of moonrise electronica, downtempo dream house, and Balearic breakbeat, brooding but breezy, a Mediterranean midnight of the mind.  Agius speaks of his songs in terms of intuition and inevitability, how and where they transport the listener. These twelve tracks slip between senses and spheres, interplanetary but placeless, noir glimpses of ghostly coastlines and reflective reveries. Flutes, trumpets, voices, and percussion contour his club designs with a tactile fluidity, jazz accents reflecting off rain-slicked marble harbors, the wakening dawn still worlds away.

Minerva, Maria

Soft Power

100% Silk

***BACK IN STOCK!!!  Tallinn’s top leftfield pop export breaks her half-decade solo hiatus with a choice collection of daydream discotheque classics: Soft Power. Recorded between Hollywood and Calabasas over the last few years, and co-produced by Dzang studio pro Adam Gunther, the album is pure Minerva: high and low, heady and hedonistic, deadpan diva designs for neon nights and mirage dance floors. She starts off seductive (“hey pretty baby it’s been a while / haven’t seen your lovely face for a long time”), then sways through an array of bedroom bangers and crushed crystalline ballads, crooning and swooning, autobiographical electronica spanning Detroit to New York, London to L.A. Songs of intimacy and illusion, impatience and introspection, of cutting loose and being cut off, left wanting more: “Taste this love till the morning sun.” Mastered by Matt Tammariello.

Pleasure Model

C.M.T.I.E. Manual

100% Silk

The don of data bank hijack house returns with his sleekest and bleakest technoid tunnel rat opus: C.M.T.I.E. Manual. Explicating a dystopian corporation’s psychonaut expansionist agenda (“Corporate Macrodosing for Technological Innovation and Efficiency”), the tracks trace a policy of liminal lysergics, automated motion, and sequential circuitry, lit by the iridescence of laser face scans. Pleasure Model 3.0 operates optimally but its grids flicker with strange sentience and opaque moods, conflicted systems in friction with their directives. Programming is brainwashing; no intelligence is artificial.

Jupiter Jax

Dee-life Mix

100% Silk

Maltese falcon Rudi Agius aka Jupiter Jax’s latest collection is stoned, cold, classic, and conceptual: a 40-minute ode to and odyssey of smoky basement jack and melancholic warehouse anthems crafted from the psychic crates of short-lived, lost-to-time house imprint Dee-Life Records.  Credited to a cast of forgotten label staples – LifeLess, Hush Hush, Brad K, and beyond – the tracks weave from magic hour to midnight, Chicago moods and Detroit mirages, heady and hypnotized. Deep cuts dug from a dusty DJ bag found behind fog machines in a long-shuttered club, the disco sleeves shredded, the vinyl thrashed, peeling center labels scrawled with BPMs. Dee-Life Mix serves as both portal and party, parallel universe vintage club gems transported to the here and now. All tracks produced by Jupiter Jax.

Lunate

Médula

100% Silk

Bogotá body-music builder Manuel Cortes returns with a sophomore slate of politicized dancefloor schematics inspired by recent South American civil unrest, shattered bones, and the multi-tiered ruins of progress. Médula shares an eclecticism with Lunate’s 2014 debut, Far Shores, but sprawls longer and more limber, wiry workouts of dubby synth-step and coiled energies, alternately delirious, decadent, and downtempo. Some selections skew 80’s or broody but elsewhere Cortes carves up classic glitterball house, surveillance state ambient, opium den dirge, and activist jack, threading a state of the nation panorama through rhythm and sensuous sound. Mastered by Matt Tammariello.

Well Being

Pleasure Garden

100% Silk

The first physical media manifestation by Portland producer Dan Kirschner aka Well Being blurs the boundary between warehouse and wilderness, future and nature, free-flowing frameworks of deep house, relaxed acid, and dewdrop electronics: Pleasure Garden. From the sparkling windswept hang-glide of “Deep Sea Exploration” to the slinky forest path jack of “Moon Valley,” the EP encapsulates a spectrum of contemporary Cascadia eco-techno modes and moves: club cuts tricked with crickets, cloud bank pads above damp earth bass, rainforest rave rhythms filtered through studio skylights. Sequenced palindromically, side one is all originals, side two alternate mixes — including an elusive aerial “rebuild” by Pac Northwest peer Akasha System. Step off of the street; stray into the Garden. Mastered by Hunter Thompson.

Akasha System

Echo Earth

100% Silk

***CHECK STOCK!!!  Received an 8.0 rating from Pitchfork.  Long-dawning long-player by Pacific Northwest producer Hunter P. Thompson aka Akasha System spins a suite of remote outpost rhythms and old-growth electronics variously inspired by “days and nights spent in the forests,” “long stretches of back road trails,” and “sitting alone under moss-covered trees.” It’s club music for misty mornings, towering redwood canopies, and overcast skies above uninhabited terrain: Echo Earth.   Recorded across the fall of 2018 at Thompson’s lava-lit Portland home studio, the album’s eight tracks trace cyclical arcs and seasonal tides, churning and yearning, meditative motion patterns flickering like holographs projected in the rain. Following key appearances on Elestial Sound, Neo Violence, and New Information, Echo Earth embodies all Akasha’s most evocative and elusive sonic strategies in a nuanced naturalist landscape of rust and radar, information and isolation, wires woven like roots beneath ferns.

Akasha System

Echo Lost

100% Silk

Twin moon transmission to Akasha System’s vinyl monument Echo Earth, Echo Lost side-winds a parallel meridian of nocturnal wilderness, fogged coastline, and fiber optic electronics, broadcast from the wooded outskirts of Cascadia. The EP’s six songs sway, swoon, and slide, club sonar refracted by space and solitude, waveforms for wandering stars and distant satellites seen between branches. Concise, crystalline, but covert: echo as emotion, lost in life’s spiral.

Cammi

Look At The World

100% Silk

Fresh, fried, and freewheeling debut by Owosso/Lansing, Michigander Cameron Weede aka Cammi checks every SILK box in the book: teen MPC experiments, thrifted hardware jack, tape noise dumpster dub, longform luxury house, department store boogie, standup comedy groove, etc. Tracked in fits and starts over the past eight years, Look At The World runs on immediacy and intuition, man/machine symbiosis at its loosest and most liquidated. Early years spent jamming improv trombone with free jazz hillbillies eventually led to a love of classic house and cheap gear, with a special fondness for “ugly 90’s FM/romplers and digital synths because it’s all I can afford.”   But limited means don’t mean limited ends: across 54 minutes Cammi cuts a sweaty swath of raw rhythm, busted bass, and plastic passion, from outer rings to inner circles. Take a Look: “I just do whatever’s in my head, it’s all subconscious. I’m def not a purist – about anything, really.”

Force Placement

Vibe Repair

100% Silk

Black Lodge mainstay Jason James explains his freshest Force Placement track pack as “a hazy late night vibe… songs you play on your way home from the rave: bottom heavy enough to stay awake but kind of heady and tripped out.” Sculpted from sketches conceived during early morning post-party sessions, Vibe Repair snakes, slinks, and slides through various fogged comedown rhythms, from noir house to dusty breaks to empty alley jack.   James cites “classic jazz, funk, hip-hop & ambient” as his recent listening cross-section, which slip in and out of focus on these 10 smoky sleepwalker steppers, channeling the bleary bump of a sound system in a busted building down the block on an unlit street. The night’s late but not lost – repair the vibe.

La Vampires Does Cologne

10 Outta 10

100% Silk

Angeleno escape artist LA Vampires returns from retirement with her first set of hot ‘n’ cold heartwave hymns since 2012, this time in collaboration with bicoastal-tronica duo Cologne. A 7-sided dice of pleasuredome pop, synthetic seduction, and emotional fantasy, 10 Outta 10 spins a sensual web of liminal lovesickness and decadent dance, amorous holograms for today’s Age Of Mirage.  From diva-house strut (“HOWUKISS”) to diamond-life lament (“STRANGERS2ME”), the vocal/production design feels sparkling and psychic, a gallery of glamorous masks: romance, rapture, regret. To feel is to feel unreal; to be moved is to be moved away.   “Can you read minds? Can you read mine?”   Recorded on the boulevard of broken dreams, summer 2019.

Mateis E. Aqir

Chrome Upon Guayota

100% Silk

Barcelona-based Russian rhythm reconstructivist Mateis e. aqir’s latest EP emerged during and after a formative sojourn to the Spanish isle of Tenerife in summer 2017, where he slept on the sand, stargazed, and rode scooters along serpentine roads through remote villages. Deeply inspired by the landscape, people, and “new emotions” he experienced, a series of subtle, spiraling, percussion-powered pieces began flowering in flashes and sketches, which were further articulated back in Barcelona. Echo-flexed guitar and circular bass interweave with staggered patterns of bongo and drum machine, alternately evoking a sense of levitation, hypnosis, and vertigo, which approximates his own surreal and revelatory perspective of the trip: “Time exists in us – not us in time. The island’s vibrations made this music play in my head.”

Robotalco

Callisto

100% Silk

Milanese melting potter Sebastiano Urciuoli got his start making hip-hop/house mix tapes as a teen in the 90’s before catching the disco bug and crowning himself Club Silencio, issuing a slew of singles and edits for a spectrum of western dancefloor divisions. In the later aughts he fashioned Robotalco to pursue more eclectic crate-digger fixations like “liquid vibes, 80’s French industrial, futuristic house, and the intangible crossroads of Kingston and Detroit” – which pretty accurately pinpoints the palette of Callisto.   Recorded intermittently between summer 2016 and 2018, the collection cruises an enticing coastline of Mediterranean moods, from soft-focus suntan séance to breezy broken beats to dusk dreamer new wave to dada tropical dub and beyond. Totaling nearly an hour, it’s a vast and varied voyage of rhythm, impulse, and color, a trunk of trinkets gripped at sun-bleached harbor kiosks, showcased on leopard-print slip-mats. Indulge the myth and the moon: Callisto.

Bludwork

Portal Of Hope

100% Silk

Slippery 6-track expansion pack to AFK & Bludwork’s banging wax debut, Loyalty N Service, finds the pair flexing further spheres of smokescreen house, busted bounce, and dream sequence R&B, both together and solo. Portal Of Hope captures the casual cold flow of drum machine synergy, afterhours bass, rooftop reverie, heads in a cloud, pathfinding the dance floor. Two tracks showcase Blud’s recent forays into cloaked vocal modes but the rest are instrumentals: stripped back, funked forward, and zoned to the speaker cone. Hope springs eternal. Mastered by Matt Tammariello.

AFK & Bludwork

Loyalty N Service

100% Silk

South Cali classmates AFK and Bludwork come from oceans apart – South Korea and Georgia, respectively – but their intertwined friendship and singular musical chemistry are proof that true vibe unions transcend geography. The pair initially bonded over teacher pranks and 420 habits before rendezvousing off campus to link rigs and jam live electronics, eventually culminating in the six smog-smeared low-key bangers comprising their vinyl debut, Loyalty N Service.  Alternately coastal and concrete, the songs slide between smoky sunset house (“Akina Memory,” “That Pain”) and funked up warehouse bass (“No Equal,” “Searchin”), tag-teaming melody, MIDI, and drum machinery into compelling composites of Pacific motion and emotion. Blud is blunt about their bond: “AFK is one of my most cherished friends; I’d do anything for this guy.” This is music from the heart and for the heads, pensive and propulsive, loose and liquid, raw and rising. “One of our biggest inspirations is the Rush Hour films. We’re the best Black and Asian duo since those guys.” Mastered by Eric Hanson. Sleeve design by Britt Brown.

Body San

Midnight

100% Silk

Reigning vibe-wave don of the City of Roses returns to the SILK chalet bearing four fresh afterhours anthems ripe for repeat rinsing. Midnight takes its name from Body San’s special-ordered strain of Nag Champa, and exudes a similar air of nocturnal promise, streetlights reflected in glass brick fountains and condominium windows. Brandon Knocke’s knack for Memphis design funk and skymall fusion hits an apex here, flexing a full spectrum of rhythmic reveries: fluid, jazzy, joyous, sensous.  Song to song and side to side Midnight flaunts a panoramic rooftop view of leather interiors, fern-accented foyers, and supreme motion software. Midnight is 12 AM, 12 inches of bump ‘n’ bounce ‘n’ body euphoria, music for low lit silhouettes unified in emotional response. Somewhere a clock strikes, a ball drops, and day turns to dawn.  Recorded and mixed by Brandon Knocke in Portland, Oregon. Mastered by Eric Hanson in Los Angeles, California. Design by Britt Brown.

Cherushii & Maria Minerva

S/t

100% Silk

***CHECK STOCK!!!  Received a 7.7 rating from Pitchfork.  In the fall of 2013 Maria Minerva mapped an eight show United States trek up the west coast and across to Chicago but, being newly emigrated and without car or driver’s license, needed a traveling companion who did. Given the grueling itinerary only one road warrior / joie de vivrist came to mind: dear friend, penpal, and SILK sister Chelsea Faith aka Cherushii. The two covered over 3,000 miles together, performing in bars and towns not known for leftfield electronic patronage. In subsequent years the pair shared bills, traded tracks, and remained close—even playing live together a few times—yet the dream of a proper collaboration always loomed. The tragic Oakland fire of December 2016 cut short such plans but not before they’d written, recorded, and mixed the better part of six songs. With the devoted assistance of David Last, Adam Gunther, and Brian Foote these recordings were posthumously polished and finalized. Drawing on Minerva and Faith’s most vibrant Venn diagram overlap, the tracks evoke mirror-lined music video sets, downtempo night drives, rainbow eyeshadow, glittering skylines, and sweaty discotheques, flowing from lush to lavish, highly finessed and full of feeling. It’s the sound of true union, Faith’s divine dancefloor DNA threaded through Minerva’s chic pop hooks, rhythmic and revelatory, the best of both beautiful worlds. The collection closes with a swooning ambient edit by Glassell Park hardware-whisperer Leech, Minerva’s voice dubbed into a gauze of otherworldly emotion: “I’m going astray.”