Ba Da Bing!

V/a

Flux Gourmet - Original Motion Picture Soundtrack

Ba Da Bing!

In Peter Strickland’s Flux Gourmet, a dysfunctional group of performance artists undertake a month-long residency at an institute devoted to culinary disciplines. Food is interrogated for its sonic potential as the group mic-up, amplify, distort and transform what they cook in front of an audience. The noise that the characters in the film itself make is driven by food blenders, overflowing cauldrons of gurgling soup and sizzling frying pans (courtesy of The Sonic Catering Band), yet the music that soundtracks the culinary capers is engorged with aching melodies and wordless, airy vocals. Contributors include Cavern Of Anti-Matter, Jeremy Barnes and Heather Trost of A Hawk And A Hacksaw and Trost’s band, Roj (formerly of Broadcast), and Nurse With Wound. Flux Gourmet is presented in a lush 2xLP package with an ornate, colorful design and Strickland’s detailed liner notes. Image, color, light and sound are integrated and heightened to delirious levels of hyperreality, much like Strickland’s past works, Berberian Sound Studio and In Fabric. Flux Gourmet very much alludes to his past as a member of The Sonic Catering Band, which he founded back in 1996. The band split on several occasions and got back together to create new pieces for the soundtrack, concocting strange sonic morsels and treating recipes as if they were scores. The lines between what is on the screen and what is on the soundtrack are blurred, with the band (mostly) using the exact same equipment (which they loaned to the production) and recipes as in...

MXLX

Kicking Away At The Decrepit Walls Til The Beautiful Sunshine Blisters Thru the Cracks

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Matt Loveridge is a prolific multi-instrumentalist condemned to Bristol, UK. He has over sixty solo records under various monikers, done before and after his time in Beak>, none of which appear on major streaming platforms, nor get much attention. His work as MXLX is a miasmatic fog, and he tosses the listener deep into it. Kicking Away At The Decrepit Walls Til The Beautiful Sunshine Blisters Thru The Cracks is his most celebrated release (if one counts hate mail), and it appears here for the first time both on vinyl and somewhere not on his own site. Songs swerve between ambient, electronic ambient noise, metal, and industrial. Vocal harmonies ride arpeggiated basslines and shimmering synth lines, ascending upwards before plummeting into distorted screams. And yet, Loveridge’s aggression does not overlook introspection. He faces one stripped of all pretense, creaking “I’ve got that dumb skull of yours locked in place,” apologizing, “I’m sorry for all that I’ve done in the name of myself” and laughing in one’s face, “Just kidding, I hope you rot in the ground.” Drawing from an obsession with literature, he’s converted a life stricken with bouts of depression and homelessness into febrile sonic turbulence. He channels the intensity of groups like Pharmakon and The Body, while embracing compositional noise like Colin Stetson. With droning organs, emotionless chanting, and fleeting walls of sound, his results have more to do with cosmic futility than petty score-settling. MXLX produces barren liturgies of raw emotion, like a fallen medieval monk given...

Manning, Barbara

Charm Of Yesterday…Convenience Of Tomorrow

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Maybe everything has been going to such shit lately because Barbara Manning has been hibernating. A Matador Records mainstay and pivotal indie-rock pioneer of the nineties, Manning has continually written material that matches the quality of the many songs she covers. Both as a performer and a listener, Barbara Manning is a passionate lifer. While her music is compact and succinct, it is steeped in multitudes of genre periods and styles. From SF Seals to her work with Stuart Moxham (Young Marble Giants) to The Go-Luckys, every collaboration carries her genius melodies and lyricism. In a four minute catchy song, Manning can communicate what others require novels to express. Her fans include Yo La Tengo, The Clean, Sonic Youth, Tall Dwarfs, Pavement, Calexico, The Replacements, and even Faust (don’t forget her prolific work as half of free-sound stalwarts Glands Of External Secretion.) With an upcoming tour joining Codeine, Manning felt the time was right for something new. Thus, Charm Of Yesterday…Convenience Of Tomorrow. It compiles a few different periods. Chico Daze is a song cycle that absorbed the dark times and experiences she had in Northern California through the 2010s. The Porch Series cover songs were Manning’s antidote to pandemic madness, and features the music of Elliott Smith, Edgar Winter, Richard & Linda Thompson, Galaxie 500, Bob Dylan and The Handsome Family. Now situated near Los Angeles, where she works as a drama teacher, Manning has been playing live again and recording, channeling her innate sense of theatricality and dynamics...

Meshlir, Delia

Bring Back The Light

Ba Da Bing!

Delia Meshlir presents her new album, Bring Back The Light, which is her second release on Ba Da Bing Records. On the Swiss artist’s new record, Meshlir expands her sound to skillful new levels, with woodwinds and synthesizer adding to her guitar playing. It was recorded in Switzerland’s Alps, as well as at the illustrious Figure 8 Studios in Brooklyn, NY. Grief can open a window to the past. Nostalgia whelms, and childhood memories surface. While making Bring Back The Light, Meshlir struggled with the loss of her grandmother and the severed ties she felt with her family. The phrase “bring back the light” served as a mantra, manifesting with a return to authenticity and a celebration of healing. For Light, Meshlir reunited with the piano, an instrument she’s played since she was eight. She explains, “It was on the piano that I learned to compose and create worlds that transcribed my emotions. I felt the need to return to what I did as a child, alone in my room.” Dissolving judgment and embracing desires, Meshlir sparked a needed light within her to create the record. Basic tracks done, Meslir expanded instrumentation; the final masters exploring a range of sounds, from ’70s psychedelic rock to ’80s inspired tracks heavy with sax and synth. “I wanted different textures of the instruments and effects I used to immerse you into each and every song,” she says. “I love when music is already saying what the lyrics are going to tell, when...

Secret Pyramid

A Vanishing Touch

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While possibly not the first ambient record to be inspired by J Dilla’s Donuts, Secret Pyramid’s A Vanishing Touch is in rarified company. The two seem antithetical—with Donuts a now classic collection of short beats compiled together and A Vanishing Touch being a forty-minute suite consisting of fourteen pieces. However, like any genre, ambient music has a lot more going on beneath the surface than might be initially gleaned. From the start, Amir Abbey dropped his usual songwriting process of long contemplation and careful sculpting. “I let the pieces live and breathe, and I spent a lot less time tweaking and editing. Doing this brought an energy and mystery to the music that was missing from what I’ve made in the past.” This allowed the record to come together quickly”, with Abbey working on it nightly after his work day had ended. “Each album is a snapshot of where I am at that point in time. With this album, I have been thinking about shifting memory, how a moment in time does not need to be thought of as endless, but rather part of a cycle. Every beginning is as important and salient as the ending that follows.” Working at home, as he always has, Abbey embeds synths, tape loops and processing, horns, ondes martenot, guitar, bass, and organ within the multi-tiered composition of A Vanishing Touch. Sounds morph, bleed, fade, and permeate with moments where a listener is able to make out what is being played at that moment....

Lady Lamb

In The Mammoth Nothing Of The Night

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A decade on from the release of Ripely Pine, Lady Lamb’s Aly Spaltro has created the definitive 5xLP box set to commemorate and expand upon her landmark debut. With the original songs remastered, Ten Years Of Ripely Pine also includes three LPs of newly recorded studio material, produced and arranged by Spaltro and mixed by original co-producer Nadim Issa. It captures the time, mood, art and ambition of Aly Spaltro in her early twenties, who had already accumulated years of playing and self-recording experience before laying down tracks for this giant of a debut record, and the sage wisdom of a decade’s experience.

Lady Lamb

Ripely Pine (Remastered)

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Remastered for its 10th Anniversary, the newly cut vinyl edition of Ripely Pine features the bonus track “Up In The Rafters,” long a live favorite that really should have been on the album in the first place. More than anything, Aly Spaltro has 20,000 second-hand DVDs to thank for her first album. Despite being recorded at a proper studio in her recently adopted home of Brooklyn, Ripely Pine showcases songs conceived during her tenure at Bart’s & Greg’s DVD Explosion in Brunswick, Maine. Little did customers know, the same store they’d drop off their Transformers movies was providing the ideal four-year cocoon for the development of a major musical talent. Spaltro worked the 3:00 PM to 11:00 PM shift. Each night, after locking up, she’d walk past Drama and Horror, pull out her music gear from behind a wall of movies, and write and record songs until morning broke. She did this every day, drawing strength from the monotony of her routine and testing out multiple techniques, approaches and instrumentation. Anger, confusion, love, happiness and sadness reigned, and the songs ran rampant, with little form or structure. Isolated for those many hours, Spaltro let melodies morph together, break apart and pair up. This is how she taught herself to write music and sing. Taking the name Lady Lamb the Beekeeper, Spaltro became one of the most beloved musicians in Portland. Her live shows were unhinged, as melodies followed an internal logic only apparent to Spaltro herself. She sang and played...

Dead C

Operation Of The Sonne

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The Dead C’s trio of albums in the middle of their harsh 90s reality served for many as entry points to the band. Operation Of The Sonne, The White House and Tusk received wider distribution than the band had ever seen before, and this was the first rays of them being considered amongst the most important rock bands of the 20th century. This trio of vinyl reissues capture their intensity and presence in a way that may even blow out the candle of the original pressings. Newly remastered by Lasse Marhaug, and with bonus tracks, these 2023 reissues have been cut carefully and loud, with the sonic wars heard on these now-classic tracks more blaring than ever. Coming after the monster that was Harsh 70s Reality, and its evil twin, Clyma Est Mort, this album has always confounded even soi-disant Dead C fans. Side one documents the discovery of the analogue synthesizer coupled with field recordings from the basement of Willowbank, Koputai’s “most stately” home. Side two emerged spontaneously to cassette on stage at the “fabled” Empire Tavern—and it still sounds like stripping the breathable atmosphere from an already-depleted biosphere.

Dead C

The White House

Ba Da Bing!

The Dead C’s trio of albums in the middle of their harsh 90s reality served for many as entry points to the band. Operation Of The Sonne, The White House and Tusk received wider distribution than the band had ever seen before, and this was the first rays of them being considered amongst the most important rock bands of the 20th century. This trio of vinyl reissues capture their intensity and presence in a way that may even blow out the candle of the original pressings. Newly remastered by Lasse Marhaug, and with bonus tracks, these 2023 reissues have been cut carefully and loud, with the sonic wars heard on these now-classic tracks more blaring than ever. The Dead C on The White House, now including bonus track “Breakdown/World”: “Recorded in the winter of 1994, sessions were accompanied by snow, an infrequent but always super-exciting event in downtown Dunedin. Mainly if not entirely recorded direct to REVOX B77, just like The Clean’s Oddities. Our version of Led Zepp IV with no ‘Stairway’, as recorded by the Meat Puppets in a K-hole. Originally M&D by Matador, this is as major label as we got. Mere pseud post-grunge sell-out moves-ah.”

Dead C

Tusk

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The Dead C’s trio of albums in the middle of their harsh 90s reality served for many as entry points to the band. Operation Of The Sonne, The White House and Tusk received wider distribution than the band had ever seen before, and this was the first rays of them being considered amongst the most important rock bands of the 20th century. This trio of vinyl reissues capture their intensity and presence in a way that may even blow out the candle of the original pressings. Newly remastered by Lasse Marhaug, and with bonus tracks, these 2023 reissues have been cut carefully and loud, with the sonic wars heard on these now-classic tracks more blaring than ever. How does one follow up one of the most immediately-revered noise rock releases of all time? Definitely not by spending ten times the money and time recording their next release and doing a bloated double album. Tusk (now including bonus track “There Is Something To Be Gained”), The Dead C record, is uncompromising and unrelenting. Here’s a band enjoying more attention than they ever got before, and they launch their new album with a long, ominous percussive rattle. Tusk digs into the thought bubble that formed via Operation Of The Sonne and The White House, sharpens the edges and reveals some of their greatest broken progressions and vicious feedback. The band is at their performative peak, staking their ground with an amp covered in dirt.

White, Asher

New Excellent Woman

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Asher White’s music is a complex and heartfelt reaction to the churn of the modern world. With tender intimacy and resounding anxiety, White takes a wide view through the lens of her own queer sexual politics and transgender identity; what does it mean to renew, to progress, to transform? What is lost, gained, or irreversibly altered? At 22 years old, White has developed a massive self-released discography: over a dozen albums since 2015, each one started the moment the last one was finished. New Excellent Woman is a distillation of these experiments and discoveries, a new achievement in songwriting that stands astride the cracks in the earth and lopsided ground. Songs jump between styles like a pubescent sex drive, all locked together by White’s ability to pull melody out of chaos. New Excellent Woman wanders a meticulous cut-and-pasted path paved by forebears like The Books and Animal Collective. It sounds like a live band, bursting with kinetic energy, but the album was constructed alone in her Providence, RI studio, where she arranged, performed, recorded, and mixed the record herself. The ingenuity of Dirty Projectors is laced with the catchiness and warmth of The Kinks, and maybe a dash of Elephant 6. It’s like an ADHD party and the listener is the first to arrive. New Excellent Woman is built from detritus, often quite literally: from the thrift store amplifiers and scavenged keyboards she uses to her penchant for discovering and sampling obscure YouTube videos into her songs. The thick fog...

Tiny Ruins

Ceremony

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Tiny Ruins, the project of New Zealand musician Hollie Fullbrook, are back with their fourth album, Ceremony, out on Ba Da Bing Records. The follow-up to 2019’s celebrated Olympic Girls, Ceremony goes deep into all the old and murky mysteries of what it means to be human—and sometimes it nearly goes under. Yet these songs also show how one can find the strength to swim from the shipwreck, push through the silt, surface into another new morning—another new chance. Ceremony washes in and takes one out like a strong tide, its songs “chapters” of a saga set on the shores of Tāmaki Makaurau’s (aka Auckland’s) Manukau Harbour. Known to locals as “Old Murky,” its western fringe of the Waitākere Ranges are home to Fullbrook. And while the harbour itself is a treacherous and oft-polluted body of water, move to one of its many peaceful inlets and it’s all tidal flats, shellfish and birdlife. “It’s beautiful but also muddy, dirty and neglected. It’s a real meeting of nature and humanity” says Hollie. The album’s songs took shape as she explored the turbulent landscape on foot with her two dogs. The things Fullbrook was struck by there are annotated across Ceremony (cover art by Christiane Shortal) as luminously as a naturalist’s scrapbook. After touring Olympic Girls both solo and with her long- term band line-up of Cass Basil (bass), Alex Freer (drums), and Tom Healy (electric guitar, producer) for eighteen months, Fullbrook returned home to the banks of Little Muddy Creek, exhausted...

Veils, The

Nux Vomica [Nick Launay Mixes]

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The rawness of The Veils’ Nux Vomica can be enjoyed to a degree never heard before, with Ba Da Bing’s limited edition pressing of the records with the original mixes by Nick Rainey left intact. Originally released in 2006, The Veils sophomore album Nux Vomica was praised for its “Herculean intensity” by The Guardian, and called “a heady blast of gothic psychodrama” by The Observer, while Pitchfork praised leader Finn Andrews’ “magnetic, outsized persona.” Long out of print, the vinyl version was resuscitated by Music On Vinyl in 2017 and quickly sold out. Now, The Veils present the definitive version of their most heralded album to date, which dusts off the original mixes by legendary producer Nick Launay (Public Image Limited, The Birthday Party, INXS and Midnight Oil) and offers them to fans here for the first time. Taken from the original two-inch analog tape reels, each song was carefully remastered by Alex Wharton at Abbey Road Studios in London. Nux Vomica was the first of many creative reinventions for Andrews, who at 22 had already released an album on Rough Trade, moved from New Zealand to London to form a band, then back to New Zealand where he once again started the band anew. The creative progression is clear in Andrews’ incisive lyricism and knack for hell-fire dramatics. All intentions to release this dark and raw set of recordings were dashed upon submission to Rough Trade for approval, who didn’t like the results. They hired mixing engineer Bill...

Veils, The

…And Out Of The Void Came Love

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It’s been seven strange years since The Veils’ last studio album Total Depravity, and Finn Andrews has a new double album to show for it. …And Out Of The Void Came Love is the result of this tumultuous period of injury, isolation and new life. Following the release of Total Depravity, Andrews released a solo album and began a worldwide tour. One night, while lashing out at a particularly intense moment on piano, he broke his wrist on stage. He played on and finished the rest of the tour, but it wasn’t until he got it examined much later that he realized what a bad move that was. The convalescence that followed meant a lengthy hiatus from touring, so he did what he does best and stayed at home and wrote songs. Just when his hand had healed sufficiently for him to play again, The Veils found themselves in need of a new record label, but Finn set about starting to make a new record regardless. Producer Tom Healy invited Finn to his small studio underneath the old Crystal Palace ballroom in Mount Eden, and they listened through the legions of songs he had amassed throughout the previous year. Following another two years of intermittent recording between lockdowns, Finn’s wife became pregnant, and yet more songs started coming. By the time the songs had been recorded, it was clear that arranging the album into two halves best suited such varied material—but the meaning of the songs as a whole still...

Habel, Juni

Carvings

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Push open the door of the old Norwegian school house in the rural hinterland Juni Habel shares with her close-knit family and climb the stairs and one will find oneslef in a former classroom—the home of her new album Carvings. Crafted seventeen years after guitar tuition would try to iron out the creases of her bohemian upbringing, it is a songbook of life’s lessons offering an expansive perspective as it navigates personal shadows between darkness and light. Just as her more featherweight debut album All Ears would attest, the timelessness of Habel’s music has evolved from her lived experiences. Growing up with six younger siblings alongside horses, hens, sheep and pigs on the family farm, she was a Forest School child. Today, little—and a lot—has changed since eschewing the city in favor of koselig-cohabiting with husband Emil, friend Isis, cat Lisa, dog Sajo. Living alongside them is Grandmother Inger, who gave Habel her first guitar aged ten and has always been a big influence on her life. This unyielding spirit of family and nature is etched into Carvings’ unschooled approach. With beauty in mock-simplicity and radiating humanity like the music of Tia Blake, Julie Byrne or Myriam Gendron, Habel’s songwriting unfolds on her own terms, and is the sound of facing whatever mother nature decides will find its way to the top of the list. Recorded between the classroom (‘big hall’), the hallway on the second floor, and her bedroom with simple gear and vocals laid down in a single...

Lisel

Patterns For Auto-tuned Voices And Delay

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Eliza Bagg leads a complex musical life: working as a classical opera singer, she has soloed with the New York Philharmonic, performed in Meredith Monk’s opera at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and toured Europe with the legendary John Zorn. While making her own music under the guise of art-pop solo act Lisel, she’s also collaborated as a vocalist with some of the most renowned experimental artists, including Ben Frost, Julianna Barwick, Daniel Wohl, and many others, all while playing indie rock venues and lovably dingy basements. One day, it’s Lincoln Center or The Kitchen, the next it’s an outdoor LA ambient series. She was always torn between her two worlds, and it wasn’t until she began work on Patterns For Auto-tuned Voices And Delay that she discovered a way to merge them together. Patterns comes out of Bagg’s experience as a vocalist singing Renaissance and Baroque music along with the work of modern-day minimalists like Steve Reich and Philip Glass. “I developed a vocal processing system that allowed me to change the idea of what my instrument is,” Bagg says of the album’s genesis, a system that combines her virtuosic singing with autotune and delay effects to create a melding of human and machine. Sure, she’ll admit it. “I’m a sci-fi nerd,” she says, with a laugh. “I’m a Blade Runner and Battlestar person. I love things that explore how society interacts with machines.” While making Patterns, she dove first into Renaissance polyphony and chant. The music of Hildegard von...

Nighttime

Keeper Is The Heart

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Eva Louise Goodman’s Nighttime project locates itself on a musical tree planted on the British Isles, perched atop the branch of folk leaning into ’60s rock. Her upstate New York environs don’t stray far from that image. With tempered percussion, floating mellotron, and singing that evokes Bleecker & MacDougal on a fervent Saturday afternoon, her new album Keeper Is The Heart reaches deep into the essence of musicians such as Vashti Bunyan, Sibylle Baier and Pentangle, breaking down the decades into a sound thoroughly and bizarrely modern. Through her years performing with Mutual Benefit, Goodman fell in love with life on the road and the collaborative energy of a band. In this third Nighttime album, she channels these experiences into her own music. The creative journey from writing to recording to mixing drove her deeper into a sense of self while expanding her sound. In the process, she put aside lo-fi origins and challenged herself to achieve the same intimacy with a bigger production. Like most paths of self-discovery, the journey started with displacement. In October 2019, Goodman set out to record the album on her own, while cat-sitting at a friend’s empty Brooklyn apartment. Rather than recording, she was drawn to the overgrown garden, where she spent her days listening to music and reading old journals. Charlie Megira, The Incredible String Band and Roy Montgomery invoked the spirit of the album, as she realized that a new, more collaborative approach would be necessary to bring the songs to life....

Trost, Heather

Desert Flowers

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As Heather Trost put together her new album Desert Flowers, she imagined herself sitting out on the mesa amidst the arid climate and sand. Even with such little water to survive, wildflowers bloom. This vision is an embellishment of Trost’s Albuquerque surroundings, an intersection of rural splendor and emptiness. She remains focused on those purple, yellow and orange flowers with faces beaming up to the sky, thriving on very little. “How does a flower grow in the desert?” she sings. Desert Flowers postulates the potential for new life. Using the messages from the unconscious during sleep, the record ultimately conceives a bridge to the world beyond one’s own. Written and recorded in her home studio, Trost began with harmonic frameworks, allowing the melodies to naturally take root. Introductory track “Frog And Toad Are Friends”—yes, named after the book—is like a surf song from a sci-fi movie. Trost sees it as a mindwipe, “a playful kind of romp to help shake off the cobwebs and get the bones moving.” The album ripens as it progresses, and “Sandcastles” best embodies the spirit of the record. Lush strings and bass are complimented by a slow guitar groove, as Trost soulfully fantasizes about Earth’s regeneration. “In time, the bullets and tanks, and all of humanity’s violent creations will melt back into mountains and the ocean,” she says. Integral to the record’s creation was Trost’s cohort in A Hawk & A Hacksaw and record label Living Music Duplication, Jeremy Barnes. “This album wouldn’t sound the...

Motte

Cold + Liquid

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Anita Clark’s new Motte album, Cold + Liquid, builds glacial atmospheres, frozen moods and isolated impressions. Portraying New Zealand through socio-geological sound, breathing in Christchurch cultures and locales, the album embodies an artistic simulation of the Kiwi environment. With this release, Clark aimed to make something colossal, and set about finding the right textures to add. A friend who works at Oamaru Freezing Works gave her field recordings of the temperature control room, a vast cold space of isolated machinery, where ice grows and dissolves in ever-evolving sculptures. Getting her hands on shortwave/longwave radios, she incorporated frequency sweeps. Another friend provided her with the mechanical drones underneath the deck of a cement cargo ship, as it lay docked in Lyttelton Harbor. Still more sources came from Sign of the Bellbird, an historic environmental site in South Christchurch, where Clark and Thomas Lambert recorded bellbirds, rolling boulders, snapping sticks, thrown dirt and the papery sound of the native harakeke plant. While violin dominates the first Motte album Strange Dreams (2017), Clark sought to expand instrumentation. She was gifted a handmade Pūrerehua puoro, a traditional Māori instrument that sounds similar to the whirling and hovering of a moth (which is “motte” in German). A reacquaintance to the guitar occurred after developing an alter-ego project entitled Sex Den, with sleazy noir-esque guitar riffs in response to a failed rumour from a local drug-addled dive bar. Guitar and synth allowed for a broader songwriting palette along with a sometimes Dadaist approach to lyric writing....

Jenkins, Cassandra

The Ramble (Morning & Night, 2021)

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***EXTREMELY LIMITED COPIES AVAILABLE!!! Cassandra Jenkins takes the opportunity to expand on a track from her An Overview On Phenomenal Nature LP and presents two side-long ambient pieces as an exclusive for Rough Trade. "The Ramble (Morning, May 2021)" and “The Ramble (Night, May 2021)” both prominently feature field recordings made in her native New York’s Central Park, and in the woods of upstate New York. Improvised piano, saxophone, and guitar interconnect and break apart over the sounds of birdsong, crickets, and a distant metropolis.

Fusilier

Treason

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Like any scientist would before coming to a conclusion, Fusilier’s new EP, Treason, asks only questions without ever making a statement. Treason locates its universe right after the Big Bang, where fragments join and create something entirely new. This liminal space in between is what occupies the mind of Atlanta-raised, Brooklyn-based multi-instrumentalist Blake Fusilier. Themes of violence, youth, alienation, and belonging undergird this collection, while its songs serve as individual love letters to the artists Fuslier was most inspired by, like Nine Inch Nails, Bill Withers, and Fela Kuti. It fits in today somewhere between TV On The Radio, Mitski, and Radiohead with its precise yet opaque lyrics, indie-rock guitar riffs, classical motifs and sometimes-soaring, sometimes-crooning melodies.

Meshlir, Delia

Calling The Unknown

Ba Da Bing!

Swiss musician Delia Meshlir didn’t realize what her voice could do when she started out playing music. Through such groups as the drudge-rock Cheyenne and experimental Primitive Trails, Meshlir let the music lead her singing along. It wasn’t until she began writing the songs for Calling The Unknown that she started allowing her vocals to preside. Unbounded by structure, Delia Meshlir’s first full-length under her name brings layers of beauty, intensity and strength, all coming to a head with her striking vocal delivery. Having acquired a stocking job at Irascible, a label based in Lausanne, Switzerland, dedicated to promoting local talent, Meshlir had the ideal launching point for her music. Now, in coordination with Irascible, Ba Da Bing will be releasing Calling The Unknown in North America. Meshlir lost her grandmother while preparing the album, and many of the tracks reflect seeking a path through grief with love. On “A River”, she explores where feelings can exist when they are for someone who has passed. She sings: “I’m calling the unknown / but no one remains.” As the first song on the album, it serves as a perfect introduction, with refined drumming, reverb-wrapped guitars and tasteful saxophone lines. At command of a full band, Meshlir never abuses the opportunity, often having members hold back in restraint and add mere touches of color to her songs. However, when more urgency is required, she adapts beautifully, as on the raw and driven track “Dirty Colors”. Ultimately, the album is an invitation to...

Aoba, Ichiko

Windswept Adan

Ba Da Bing!

Ichiko Aoba’s albums have only been available as expensive Japanese imports, until now. In November, Ba Da Bing will release Windswept Adan on 2xLP in North America, Europe and the United Kingdom, with deluxe packaging. After creating her label, hermine, last year to celebrate her tenth anniversary in music, Aoba released the most complex and rewarding work of her career, 2020’s Windswept Adan. While audiences in the west are only just learning she exists, her accomplishments are unquestionable; she contributed to the soundtrack for The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening, was cited by Owen Pallett as an inspiration (“I’ve never been so blindsided by a musician as I was by Ichiko Aoba”), and has collaborated with the likes of Haruomi Hosono, Cornelius (who met her only two years after she first picked up a guitar and was blown away), Ryuichi Sakamoto, and recently Mac DeMarco.  Ichiko Aoba’s iconic voice and classical guitar playing are immediately recognizable, timeless sounds. Windswept Adan, envisioned as a soundtrack for a fictional film, builds its own world with sweeping co-production and arrangements from Taro Umebayashi, which “recall the Wes Anderson scores of Mark Mothersbaugh or the cinematographic swells of American composer Jherek Bischoff” (Bandcamp). It’s the story of a young girl sent to the island of Adan, a place where there are no words.  While international listeners of Aoba may not understand the words she sings, and despite the central importance of lyrics in her writing, it’s a testament to the power Aoba wields that one...

Jenkins, Cassandra

(An Overview on) An Overview on Phenomenal Nature

Ba Da Bing!

Cassandra Jenkins’s An Overview on Phenomenal Nature emerged from the blue earlier this year. With pandemic unknowns and political upheaval leaving most at frayed ends, the New York-born musician’s assuring voice and expansive fresh take on songwriting created a much needed reflective space for listeners worldwide. As 2021 comes to a close, Jenkins revisits those flowing textures and refrains with (An Overview on) An Overview on Phenomenal Nature, a collection of previously unreleased sonic sketches, initial run-throughs, demos, and sound recordings from the cutting room floor that provided the scaffolding for what became one of this year’s most critically acclaimed albums.  When Jenkins visited Josh Kaufman’s studio this summer, they opened up their original sessions to uncover the ideas that were shed in the creative process. This new collection isn’t merely a retrospective; it acts as a clear-eyed addendum as well as a compelling origin story, coming to life as a subconscious companion to the original album. (An Overview on) An Overview on Phenomenal Nature bookends Cassandra Jenkins’s musical output this year with nuance, coloring in the corners, and giving the listener another window into her ever-expanding world of chance encounters, experiences, and sonic textures. They glimmer like the sun’s changing patterns on the wall as a new day gets going.

Hawthonn

Earth Mirror

Ba Da Bing!

An Earth Mirror is a magical device. Found in German occult literature, it is a clod of earth sandwiched between layers of glass. Gazing into the Earth Mirror is said to reveal the locations of hidden treasures. Magical visions and the revelation of mysteries in the landscape are two prominent features of Earth Mirror, the new album by Layla and Phil Legard alias Hawthonn, and their second for Ba Da Bing. Somewhere between moon musick and ethereal pop, the songs of Earth Mirror reflect the band’s transition from studio project to live performers in the wake of 2018’s Red Goddess (Of This Men Shall Know Nothing). The themes for the songs on this latest reflect the Legards’ experiences, magical and mundane, in the wake of Red Goddess and as the world then headed full-tilt into pandemic.  On Earth Mirror, Layla’s heavenly voice accompanies a sonic palette encompassing field recordings of ice cracking on an ancient Corpse Road, mysterious hymns sung in disused medieval chapels, spectrally processed horse shrieks, rumbling organ, crystalline electric piano, electronic textures, and modulated jaw harp. No guitars appear on this album. Nor do conventional song-structures: the compositions here organically developed from dreams (“Dream Cairn”), experiments with inducing magical visions (“Odo Galse”, “Vehiel”), ruminations on lunar beings (“Crowned Light”, “Circles Of Light”), and ecological anxiety (“Cat’s Cradle”). Their literary influences include English witch Andrew Chumbley, nihilist philosopher Emil Cioran, the Enochian language of John Dee and Edward Kelly, and even Kurt Vonnegut. As true practitioners of niche...

Quivers

Golden Doubt

Ba Da Bing!

Melbourne-via-Tasmanian four-piece Quivers first released their 2018 debut We’ll Go Riding On The Hearses as hand-made cassettes. The album dealt with singer Sam Nicholson’s loss of his brother in a freediving accident, and “trying to not think about that, and often coming back to ghosts, benders, water, and pissing in the snow.” When demand for the album grew, it received a vinyl release and led Quivers to tour the US, film a KEXP session, and be selected by NPR Music for both the Austin 100 SXSW preview and as a “Slingshot” artist to watch. Their life-damaged but hopeful jangle pop has only sharpened since then, and while 2021 follow-up Golden Doubt conjures up REM or The Clean, there is a lyrical directness that sets this record apart as always its own.  Golden Doubt is carried by shimmering guitars and the harmonizing vocals of members Holly Thomas and Bella Quinlan. Elevated by the production of Matthew Redlich (Holy Holy, Husky, Ainslie Wills), the record explores what comes after grief, and how one throws oneself back into love. As Nicholson explains, the album tries to bottle “the rush of feelings and fears when you give in to falling for someone. It’s also an album in love with other albums, and the other bands around us.” Before each take at Woodstock and The Aviary studios in Melbourne, Australia, the band would imagine a scene together (a waterhole for “Laughing Waters”, an overgrown carpark for “Videostores”) and then dive in to capture live group...

Crowley, Adrian

The Watchful Eye Of The Stars

Ba Da Bing!

One stormy night in Ireland, Adrian Crowley’s brother brought home a wounded crow.  After taking care of it for a time, the crow flew away on its own, leaving an impression behind: Crowley wrote a story, which would later become the aptly titled “Crow Song” on this, his brand new record and ninth studio album The Watchful Eye Of The Stars. Suffused with a hazy and surreal quality, Crowley describes Watchful Eye’s poignant narratives as those which insisted themselves upon him. After the fact, it seemed these songs came to him more or less fully formed. “It’s a beautiful and mysterious thing,” he says. Perhaps it is a tendency to hold onto memories that allows him to unleash them lyrically in completion. For Crowley, the creative process is an organic event rather than a practice he feels compelled to regulate or control. He approaches lyrics much like he does short story writing. In making the album, Crowley moved between studio and at home recording, while John Parish (Aldous Harding, PJ Harvey) produced. The pair worked from tracks made initially by Crowley on a charity shop 3/4 size nylon string guitar or Mellotron: “In this way, John wanted to keep some of the magic of that first take”, says Crowley. Contradictions and complexities are left intact, initial recordings were limited to one or two takes, and the songs feel more like a dream recounted upon waking. These raw beginnings were then fleshed out more in the studio with Parish and additional...

Van Etten, Sharon

Epic Ten

Ba Da Bing!

“epic represents a crossroads for me as an artist. Going from intern to artist at Ba Da Bing, from solo folk singer to playing with a band for the first time and beginning to play shows on tour where people showed up. I am in awe of the artists who wanted to participate in celebrating my anniversary and reissue, from young inspiring musicians, to artists who took me under their wing, who I met on tour, and to artists I’ve looked up to since I was a teenager. Each one of these artists continue to influence my writing and provide a sense of camaraderie during this new era of sharing music.” –Sharon Van Etten   Sharon Van Etten’s career since the release of her second album, 2010’s epic, is well-known; critically lauded albums, films, and television shows have continually displayed her expanding artistry. Upon its release, epic laid a romantic melancholy over the gravel and dirt of heartbreak without one honest thought or feeling spared. Her songs covered betrayal, obsession, egotism, and all the other emotions disliked in others and recognize in oneself. Van Etten’s grounded and clenched vocals conveyed a sense of hope—the notion that beauty can arise from the worst of circumstances. To celebrate the 10th anniversary of this special album’s release, and to acknowledge the convergence of Van Etten’s present and past work, she asked fellow artists she admired to participate in an expanded reissue, where each artist would cover one different song from epic in their...

Jenkins, Cassandra

An Overview On Phenomenal Nature

Ba Da Bing!

***BACK IN STOCK ON LIMITED MILKY WHITE VINYL!!! “Nothing ever really disappears,” Cassandra Jenkins says. “It just changes shape.” Over the past few years, she’s seen relationships altered, travelled three continents, wandered through museums and parks, and recorded free-associative guided tours of her New York haunts. Her observations capture the humanity and nature around her, as well as thought patterns, memories, and attempts to be present while dealing with pain and loss. With a singular voice, Jenkins siphons these ideas into the ambient folk of her new album. An Overview on Phenomenal Nature honors flux, detail, and moments of intimacy. Jenkins arrived at engineer Josh Kaufman’s studio with ideas rather than full songs—nevertheless, they finished the album in a week. Jenkins’ voice floats amid sensuous chamber pop arrangements and raw-edged drums, ferrying the listener through impressionistic portraits of friends and strangers. Her lyrics unfold magical worlds, introducing one to a cast of characters, like a local fisherman, a psychic at a birthday party, and a driving instructor of a spiritual bent. Jenkins’ last record, 2017’s Play Till You Win, confirmed the veteran artist’s talent. Evident of Jenkins’ experience growing up in a family band in New York City, the album showcased her meticulous songwriting and musicianship, earning her comparisons to George Harrison and Emmylou Harris. Jenkins has since played in the bands of Eleanor Friedberger, Craig Finn, and Lola Kirke, and rehearsed to tour with Purple Mountains last August before the tour’s cancellation. Her new record departs from...

Tullgren, Lina

Visiting

Ba Da Bing!

For the inaugural release of Ba Da Bing's new series where artists make music completely unlike anything they’ve previously released—Lina Tullgren’s Visiting. Tullgren’s main occupation as singer-songwriter—with two albums released on Captured Tracks—does not set proper expectations for this new release, which is comprised of violin-based drone best suited for Appalachian Deep Listening. The three longform improvised pieces on Visiting feature Tullgren on their first instrument, picked up at the age of seven, and besotted by tedious hours practicing performance in the rigorous style of classical music. “For a kid, learning violin is a real blow to your self-esteem, because it takes so long to get the instrument to sound good,” Tullgren says. At the age of 13, ,Tullgren’s teacher gave them a different kind of music to sight read, a fiddle tune. Their interest in the piece inspired Lina’s mother to send them where the young teen was fated to go: fiddle camp in rural Maine! For the first time, they felt the communal power of music. Their playing shifted from an attempt to achieve perfection to a “joyful and unrestrained” exploration of tone and timbre, how subtleties of differing approaches affected the entire mood of what they played. From their teens onward into their twenties, Tullgren’s tastes expanded, leading them to ultimately put down the violin in exchange for guitar. They released two albums on the label Captured Tracks, with songs featuring electric guitar and their wonderfully laconic voice. Meanwhile, Tullgren moved to New York, and started attending...

Eisenberg, Wendy

Auto

Ba Da Bing!

Drawing the connections between Wendy Eisenberg’s releases feels like undertaking a wide-ranging investigation. Albums of wildly inventive guitar, tempo-shifting avant rock and curiously leftfield pop fit together as offerings of Eisenberg’s curious mind. On Auto, their most innovative and inner-reaching album yet, Eisenberg explores emotional, subjective truth, and how it interacts with an objectivity no person alone can grasp. Inspired by the solo work of Mark Hollis (Talk Talk) and David Sylvian’s Blemish, with playing skills that have already seen them climbing Best Guitarist lists and an unvarnished vocal immediacy, Wendy Eisenberg has created an album of subtle display that resonates with maximal impact.  Auto has multiple meanings. First, automobile: “A lot of these songs were written about and mentally take place when I’m in the car on my way to gigs,“ says Eisenberg. Immediate melodies came to them on these trips, to which they’d later add complex guitar parts. And automata: “I make myself into a machine, which is why everything that’s played is precise.” Finally, they frame their work in the literary technique of auto-fiction, “the semi-fictionalized presentation of the self in a narrative form of growth,” as Eisenberg sees it.  The album served as a means toward working through emotional conflicts from adolescent trauma and PTSD, and dissects the dissolution and conflict that led towards the breakup of their former band. With much of it written while its events played out, Auto faces the grief of losing what one thinks is their future while experiencing...

Dead C

Unknowns

Ba Da Bing!

Some bands struggle to transcend their initial mythos, those stories that introduce them to the public eye. But The Dead C is a notable exception. They appeared in 1986 under a cloud of mystery, their unconventional location (South Island, New Zealand) helping to fuel their erratic sound. Name-dropped through the nineties by groups like Sonic Youth and Yo La Tengo, they gained influence and acclaim but never strayed from their original mainlined performing technique, which can sound like chaos to the casual listener.What kind of a world greets them and their new album Unknowns in 2020? New Zealand culture is better known throughout the world, not to mention a low-virus paradise. Yes, isolated as in the past, but this time for being a nation of efficacy in tackling a public health crisis. But what about the rest of the world? The music of Mssrs. Robbie Yates, Bruce Russell and Michael Morley endures, partially because their errant sounds, once so alienating, now feel like they’ve been made flesh in a large part of the modern day world.Continuing to delve inwards for inspiration with tin ears towards trends, styles and technique, The Dead C forge onward. Unpolished, dusty and gritty, these three have again taken two guitars and drums, a combo which has less to say than ever, and leave the listener stunned. Unknowns has Morley slurring over spiraling dissemblance, with tracks ricocheting from intense to assaultive to drained, yet consistently magnificent. As reliable as ever, The Dead C are firmly grounded...

Gavanski, Dana

Wind Songs

Ba Da Bing!

As fierce as the inclement weather itself, the ethereal tones of Serbian-Canadian musician Dana Gavanski can stir a breeze and destroy like a storm. With her new covers EP Wind Songs, Dana serendipitously teases her debut album from her new home in London across both sides of enforced isolation, to show an artist making the best of unfortunate circumstances and seeking comfort in the familiarity of her musical heroes. “Yesterday is Gone, my debut album, came into the world at a strange time,” says Dana, “I never expected to be unable to tour it until at least a year after its release but I’ve silently accepted it. I’m happy to hear of the ways it is reaching people. To read beautiful and thoughtful comments from friends and strangers. Also, in many ways, not being able to do so many things I was used to have shown me how excited I was about getting on the road and in turn, has helped me realize I should work on not taking things for granted.” With multiple festivals and shows across France, Germany, and North America on pause, Dana utilised solitude to form deeper connections with the artists who inspire her. With her Travis picking technique she has recorded her unique renditions of songs like a time capsule of her journey so far; from teenage years in Vancouver to kitchen table talk with her mother and grandma “baka” about love, life, sex, art, relationships, and psychology, and selling her records for a move...

Snowgoose

The Making Of You

Ba Da Bing!

Snowgoose are proud to present their new album, The Making Of You, on Ba Da Bing Records. The follow-up to their critically acclaimed debut, Harmony Springs, this record sees the songwriting duo of guitarist Jim McCulloch and singer Anna Sheard supported by a who’s who of Scottish pop music, including members of Belle And Sebastian and Teenage Fanclub. Tracing a line through ’60s West Coast psychedelia and early ’70s folk-rock, Snowgoose creates something timeless and unique, which transcends its influences to assert itself as modern and forward thinking. This album represents a new chapter in the Snowgoose story. While their 2012 debut was largely written by former Soup Dragons guitarist Jim McCulloch, the new songs see Sheard step forward as a lyricist and melodist. The result of this collaboration is a record of rare beauty and momentary intimacy, resulting in utter exuberance. McCulloch says, “When we made the first album, I brought the bulk of the material to the party, written and ready to go. This time round, we decided to write together and it soon became clear that not only is Anna a peerless singer, she is also a wonderful lyricist.” Sheard adds, “During the writing process, I was—as usual—listening to a swirling melting pot of artists, from Spanky And Our Gang, through Fleetwood Mac, to France Gall and Jobim.” Novelist Ian Rankin, who declared Snowgoose’s debut one of the best albums of 2012, says, “I was a huge fan of the first Snowgoose album and I’m equally excited...

Noveller

Arrow

Ba Da Bing!

Creating what Iggy Pop described to Jim Jarmusch as “symphonies for people that don’t have a lot of time,” Sarah Lipstate has emerged as an innovative and defining voice in the world of music under the name Noveller. Wielding a guitar as her main instrument, Lipstate has pioneered a transcendent approach to composition through her mastery and integration of effects pedals and technology. Forming unexpected sonic routes, her songs are vivid and cinematic, telling intricate tales with each tone and swell. Raised on a strict piano technique, the discovery of the guitar late in her teens allowed for an escape from formalism and unlocked the hidden realms of her creativity. Taking an anti-theoretical approach, suddenly music was no longer a series of notes, rests, and time signatures, but a means of intuitive expression. Her deepened interest in experimental music, fueled by the discovery of the bold noise of Sonic Youth, the epic scope of Glenn Branca, the delicate formularies of Brian Eno and the no wave discordance of Teenage Jesus & The Jerks, only furthered to inspire. A yearning to explore and feed that creativity took her from Louisiana to Austin, then Brooklyn to LA. Arrow is her first album since the move to the edge of the canyons of Los Angeles, and one can hear the destabilizing effect this had on her in the music. Out of her comfort zone in a new city, with a rolling expanse in front of her and an urban sprawl over her shoulder,...

Von Schleicher, Katie

Consummation

Ba Da Bing!

Katie Von Schleicher doesn’t hold back. Her music, drenched in layers of warmth and fuzz, mines depression, devotion, power, and anxiety without reserve. But if channeling weighty subject matter is a constant in Von Schleicher’s music, so too is transforming that material into sonic landscapes that defy expectations. On Von Schleicher’s second record, Consummation, she blasts past the lo-fi power ballads of her debut Shitty Hits (2017) with a severe expansion of her sonic palette; its thirteen shape-shifting songs depict a deeply personal exploration of trauma. The result is both potent and listenable; strange and familiar; intense and entertaining—and, perhaps most of all, teeming with life. Consummation is, in part, inspired by an alternate interpretation of Hitchcock’s Vertigo. In 2018, Von Schleicher rewatched the seminal film and was struck by its largely unanalyzed subtext of abuse. She knew immediately that this hidden narrative, which spoke to her personal experience, would be the basis of her next album.  While writing and engineering the record, she found sanctuary in the words of other women: namely, Carmen Maria Machado’s Her Body and Other Parties, Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy, and Rebecca Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost. The latter proved particularly influential: Soon after revisiting Vertigo, Von Schleicher stumbled upon Solnit’s lacerating take on the film. Solnit describes the “wandering, stalking, haunting” of romantic pursuit that it depicts as “consummation,” while “real communion”—understanding and mutual respect between two lovers—is, to the men in the film, “unimaginable.” The consequence is a fundamental failure...

Gavanski, Dana

Yesterday Is Gone

Ba Da Bing!

‘I’m learning how to say goodbye / to let you go and face the tide / to wrap my feelings in a song,’ sings Dana Gavanski on the title track of her debut album, Yesterday Is Gone. To wrap her feelings in a song: this is the task Gavanski has dedicated herself to with this record. By turns break-up album, project of curiosity, and, as Gavanski puts it, ‘a reckoning with myself’, Yesterday Is Gone is her attempt to ‘learn to say what I feel and feel what I say’: an album of longing and devotion to longing, and of the uncertainty that arises from learning about oneself, of pushing boundaries, falling hard, and getting back up. The record is a co-production between Gavanski, Toronto-based musician Sam Gleason, and Mike Lindsay of Tunng and LUMP. While Gleason helped Gavanski bring out the tunes, Lindsay’s input marked ‘the beginning of developing a sound that was closer to what I had in my head’. Though excited by the other elements of a song introduced during production, Gavanski and Lindsay were keen on ‘finding essential things, not overblowing, keeping things bare and letting the elements speak for themselves’. The album shapeshifted as it passed through the hands of Gavanski, Gleason, and Lindsay, taking on different tastes, feelings, and visions. When Gavanski performed the songs with a band, they found new form again. She was intrigued by performers like David Bowie and Aldous Harding, who inhabit different personalities on stage, physically tuning themselves to...

youbet

Compare & Despair

Ba Da Bing!

The thirteen songs on youbet’s debut hit like relentless bursts of color. Musically adventurous and lyrically intimate, writer Nick Llobet’s vocals lilt, hiss and command attention. His vision is fully formed on Compare & Despair, driven by equal parts humor and melancholy. Its bright, shocking cover art depicts a cast of psychotropic cartoon characters, each representing a different song.  Raised in Davie, Florida, by his Cuban immigrant father and first-generation Italian American mother who divorced, Llobet sensed chaos lurking around every corner. youbet’s sound captures that disorder, a backwards world where the adults act like children and kids are on their own to maintain any semblance of order. Compare & Despair sounds like returning to your hometown to rewrite the narrative of your youth with attitude and a confetti cannon. Recently arriving in New York, Llobet discovered music as a creative and therapeutic outlet. He began writing obsessively. “It’s my way of getting lost,” says Llobet. Depositing what he made on a Bandcamp page, the result was an assortment of disparate ingredients: the sound of his laugh tape-sped to surreality, a birthday song about carnitas for his step mother, fuzzed-out rockers that snuff out before they seem to begin. And then there were these beautiful, complete compositions that recalled the ingenious simplicity of Big Star or Elliott Smith. His page caught the attention of Ava Luna drummer and engineer Julian Fader (Frankie Cosmos, Mr. Twin Sister), who shared it with collaborator Katie Von Schleicher. Katie contacted Llobet, offering to...

Frances, Aoife Nessa

Land Of No Junction

Ba Da Bing!

***CHECK STOCK!!!  Received a 7.7 rating from Pitchfork.  On the eponymously titled final song of her debut album Land Of No Junction, Irish songwriter Aoife Nessa Frances sings “Take me to the land of no junction / Before it fades away / Where the roads can never cross / But go their own way.” This search, indeed the heart of the album, recalls journeys towards an ever shifting centre—a centre that cannot hold—with maps that are constantly being rewritten. She writes: “The album title is a result of a mishearing. Cian Nugent (Aoife’s musical collaborator and co-producer) was telling me about childhood trips he made to Llandudno in Wales, passing through a station called Llandudno Junction… Land Of No Junction later became a place in itself. A liminal space—a dark vast landscape to visit in dreams… A place of waiting where I could sit with uncertainty and accept it. Rejecting the distinct and welcoming the uncertain and the unknown.” The album is shot through with this sense of mystery—an ambiguity and disorientation that illuminates songs with smokey luminescence. Yet, through the haze, everything comes down to what, where and who one is. With Land Of No Junction, she has built a universe full of intimacy and depth, with lyrics written through a process of free thought writing. It lends the record fluidity, each song in dialogue with the next not only through language, but the way each musical choice complements or threads into another: “I would write...

Crook, Brian W/the Renderers

This World Just Eats Me Up Alive

Ba Da Bing!

While recording a group of songs that would end up being part of This World Just Eats Me Up Alive, Brian Crook took a break outside with his bandmates. A small girl nearby ran up to a woman saying “Mommy, mommy! There’s a vampire here!” The mother asked how the girl knew it was a vampire, and the girl said, “He talks like this,” and proceeded to do a growling impression of a New Zealand accent. At the time, Brian was in a dark suit and had super long hair, and was playing badminton….  Crook’s new solo album comprises eight years of recording, so perhaps his undead appearance is not surprising; it comprises a span of inspiration that seems almost vampiric, with themes suggested by Greek mythology, a favorite 1960s author, to the abstract electronics of Aphex Twin and Arca as influences. The album came together in parts, slowly assembled with various contributors and recording locations, the earliest trace having lyrical origins from 1991, and was done during during sessions for The Terminals, Crook’s other band (you can also add NZ legends Scorched Earth Policy and Flies Inside The Sun to that list). A near decade provides a lot of material for reflective songwriting. In Crook’s revelations about life in New Zealand and his tenebrous lyrical style there is more than a touch of comedy, albeit of a blackly humorous, “South Island New Zealand” nature. The lyrics and music come from a similar place as New Zealand painters Bill...