Ba Da Bing!

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...

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 BLACK 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 her previous work in...

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 a dramatic...

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...

Cross Record

Cross Record

Ba Da Bing!

“What is your wish? What do you expect?” Cross Record’s self-titled third album begins with Emily Cross’s disembodied voice intoning from an otherworldly vacuum. In the three years since her last album, Cross has divorced, quit drinking, become a death doula, started the observational podcast What I’m Looking At, and toured and recorded with Sub Pop’s Loma, the trio she formed with Dan Duszynski on drums and Jonathan Meiburg (Shearwater) on guitar / vocals. On Cross Record, she guides the listener like a sonic Virgil, delivering a textured soundscape of meditative curiosity, akin to Low’s Double Negative, Broadcast’s The Noise Made By People and Radiohead’s Kid A. The record’s themes of departure and separation were inspired by changes Cross made in her career. After years of work as a nanny and in customer service, she recently embarked on studies to become a death doula. Similar to the services provided by birth doulas, a death doula helps clients navigate decisions and hardships at the end of life. In her new role, she created a three hour ceremony called a Living Funeral, which guides participants through the rituals of their own deaths. Her work in helping others face their greatest fears inhabits the same space as her art, which has always explored the metaphysical in the everyday. The eerie experience of listening to this record and the unsettling sense of songs slipping from coherent grasp share these same sensibilities. The oddness of these songs is nonetheless honest and truthful, and to understand...

Arc Iris

Friends & Lovers

Ba Da Bing!

Coming off tour dates for their 2018 release, Icon of Ego, Arc Iris present a good-natured sampling of what Summer exactly means to them. Like many, the band approach it as a time for the lovably familiar. Friends and Lovers takes some well-trodden classics and displays them like never before. These cubist reimaginings of songs by Led Zeppelin, Leonard Cohen and Elton "Rocketman" John will both comfort your sense of familiarity while simultaneously plunging you down the rabbit hole. While Foggy Lullaby, their tribute to Joni Mitchell's Blue, worshipped at the feet of the songwriter, these tracks embrace the spontaneity of fun that is like putting on a familiar outfit as a Halloween costume. Always one conceptual step ahead, the band offers an original song on Friends and Lovers as well, a track conceived to live amongst these familiar songs cast askew, pulled from existence to act like it's just another track we'd find playing on the radio between the legends. Let the sun shine!

She Keeps Bees

Kinship

Ba Da Bing!

A meditative and endlessly turning clutch of songs, She Keeps Bees’ Kinship reasserts the band’s elegant power in a stream of loss and regeneration. Death, birth, both personal and in reflection of Earth itself emerge through Jessica Larrabee’s focused, empowered voice. With Larrabee and Andy LaPlant’s first album in four years, She Keeps Bees peels away their distorted guitars and fills the void with hypnotic organ, keyboards, strings, a tight bed of drum grooves, and a direct lyricism full of with wisdom and intention. This is an album that radiates its messages with deft knowledge and immeasurable strength. Since 2014’s acclaimed Eight Houses, Larrabee cared for and lost her father before moving upstate with LaPlant to a New York cottage with a plan to start their own family. In this new, solitary and natural environment, they wrote and recorded this album over five months, joined by friends Kevin Sullivan (Last Good Tooth) on bass, Penn Sultan (Last Good Tooth) for guitar, and Eric Maltz, who lent strings, synthesizers and piano. Kinship addresses chaos by pointing beyond it, to the order that exists outside one’s reach. As the duo settle upstate and begin planting roots for their future life together, She Keeps Bees have taken the long view and written odes to the irrevocable primacy of Nature.

Kilgour, Hamish

Franklestein

Ba Da Bing!

The Finklestein Universe expands! Upon releasing Finklestein last year, a theme album about a fictitious kingdom, Hamish Kilgour simultaneously put out Funklestein which saw two side-long tracks that delved deeper into Kilgour’s fairytale world. Now, the fairytale grows even more nuaced, as Ba Da Bing presents Franklestein—a series of radical remixes which use the Finklestein sessions as a starting point but, being “frank,” are new compositions. Each track is an orchestra in a teacup, sounding like the best Velvet Underground boots suffused with dance beats, allowing unexpected room for autoharp, vibraphone and glockenspiel.

Kilgour, Hamish

Funk/fink R'mxs

Ba Da Bing!

A companion release to Franklestein, Hamish Kilgour’s ten-inch single is ready to bust onto damaged dance floors around the world! Two tracks originally conceived during the Finklestein sessions get their full due, with vibraphone, wistful saxophone and a driving beat that colors the fairytale setting Kilgour originally conceived for his 2018 release, Finklestein. “M’Open” sets a groove and rides it like a evening on the town, while “M’Close” reveals the dark underbellies said evening on the town could reveal.

Lady Lamb

Even in the Tremor

Ba Da Bing!

***CHECK STOCK!!!  Received a 7.1 rating from Pitchfork.  Even in the Tremor marks Aly Spaltro aka Lady Lamb’s latest full-length album following 2015’s After and it’s a remarkable achievement because, among other things, it’s the first time in her career that Spaltro is singing explicitly about herself. “I’ve never let myself be this exposed before,” she says, “but this whole album is about facing who you are and fighting your way toward self-acceptance.” Between confessing a tantrum in a batting cage (“Little Flaws”), telling the story of her parent’s kiddie-pool baptism (“Young Disciple”) and singing openly about untangling her girlfriend’s wet hair (“Deep Love”), this album is deeply rooted in the people and places, extraordinary and mundane, that have shaped Spaltro into the self-determining artist she is today. It took Spaltro almost a year to find the right co-producer. She initially attempted to make the record with an esteemed producer as she’d been advised but after being told that her arrangements needed rewriting by various veterans in the industry, Spaltro bravely changed direction and found a champion of her vision in Erin Tonkon, a less established producer whose six years working with Tony Visconti and later, David Bowie on his Grammy-winning Blackstar, made her more than qualified for the role.  Benjamin Lazar Davis (Cuddle Magic, Kimbra, Okkervil River) played bass and piano and synthesizer. Jeremy Gustin (David Byrne, Albert Hammond Jr., Rubble Bucket) played drums. The group recorded at Figure 8 Studios in Brooklyn, New York. “It’s taken...

Tiny Ruins

Olympic Girls

Ba Da Bing!

***CHECK STOCK!!!  Received a 7.4 rating from Pitchfork.  A rare blend of eloquent lyrical craft and explorative musicianship, the songs of Tiny Ruins are etched into the memories of crowds and critics worldwide. Traversing influences that cross genre and era, the artistry of Hollie Fullbrook and her band spans delicate folk, lustrous dream pop and ebullient psychedelia. Building on the sparse arrangements and “a novelist’s eye for detail” (Uncut) cultivated over the past several years, the group’s greatly anticipated third album Olympic Girls is replete with vital lyricism and galvanizing rhythms. Sparkling electric guitar jangles pull against the unique thrum of Fullbrook’s acoustic as the cryptic poetry she is known for rings out.Hollie Fullbrook is no stranger to acclaim. Debut album Some Were Meant For Sea (2011) saw her name on billboards, playlists and blogs worldwide. The album’s clutch of “gorgeous vignettes” (BBC) put the artist on the map. Second album Brightly Painted One earned more accolades, championed by The New York Times, NPR and David Lynch, and winning Best Alternative Album at the New Zealand Music Awards in 2014. “An album of quiet, devastating beauty,” wrote Pop Matters. The album saw Fullbrook join forces with producer Tom Healy, whom, alongside long-time tour-mate bassist Cass Basil and drummer Alex Freer, Fullbrook has worked and toured with ever since. While spanning continents, the band won fans in critics, crowds and became a sought after collaborator. A New York recording session culminated in the EP Hurtling Through (2015) with...

Dead C

Rare Ravers

Ba Da Bing!

Disguised as the meandering outpourings of vacant thought and activity dialed simultaneously from zero and ten. Formed in the cauldron of a fevered mistake resolute. Surrounded by ignorance, dis-interest, and the attention of the carefully self-selected. Recorded and burned through a thousand galaxies of dust and doubt and endless infinite wonder, transforming both time and space. Forever exiled to the very bottom of the world to reflect on the struggling desperate pile above. Recognizing any contribution as miniscule and insignificant when placed within the greatness of the other, the dominant insolent preening satisfied, continually shouting the pre-eminence of the first world order. The latest by The Dead C—Rare Ravers: it’s a long player.

Tiny Hazard

The Long Way

Ba Da Bing!

Tiny Hazard return with The Long Way, the first release since their 2017 debut LP, Greyland. That album, assembled over an extended period during which they refined their maximalist pop, was an ambitious, nuanced affair that critics described as “a gift that keeps on giving,” lauding the band for having “pulled off the feat of bottling chaos.” For The Long Way, Tiny Hazard reaches a clearing. After completing a tour, the band retreated to a barn in Vermont's Green Mountains for a week of recording. There they found the ideal setting in which to capture singer/composer Alena Spanger’s songs, which had sprung from a renewed focus on subtlety and space. Surrounded by wooded trails and meadows, the band absorbed their environment. Lush arrangements of blanketing keyboards and intricate guitar lines circle and support Spanger’s voice. The vocals on “Don’t Worry” were recorded as a spontaneous stream-of-consciousness at 3am during what Spanger describes as an “insomnia experiment.” Her tracks weren’t meant to be final, but the band opted to keep them; the dreamy, lethargic quality evokes the disoriented daze of the song's ambivalent reassurances. This open-minded spirit was also key to the writing process: though untrained on guitar, Spanger followed her intuition, writing “I’m Not Scared” with the instrument. Back in New York, that spontaneity gave way to a meticulous attention to detail; guitarist Ryan Weiner mixed the EP, carefully sculpting the sounds and finding an alchemy between their earthy origins and ethereal intimations. Employing a change of pace and a...

Porras, Jon

Voices Of The Air

Ba Da Bing!

One of the most incisive comments on how best to appreciate art came from the Indian musician Gita Sarabhai. In a recorded conversation with John Cage, Sarabhai described art’s effect as serving “to sober and quiet the mind, thus rendering it susceptible to divine influences.” Some of the best exploratory music incorporates this approach, and Jon Porras adopted it as a conceptual foundation for his new album, Voices Of The Air. The sounds Porras creates intend to provoke contemplativeness beyond expressing a concrete idea. As half of the duo Barn Owl, Porras composed intricate dual guitar improvisations that would shift and shimmer through multiple mutations within any singular piece. At the same time, his voyages into minimalism were served by Elm, his solo act. His focus has now shifted from guitar to synthesizer, narrowing in on the intersections between sound and neurology. Taking the Yamaha DX7 as his main instrument for this solo work, Porras read and incorporated John Chowning’s frequency modulation synthesis, the result being a nuanced and multidimensional sound with endless possibilties. Porras stacked, arranged and adjusted these sounds through digital synthesis and effects. “The process felt like mixing paint to get the right color and texture, then laying down a brushstroke, each day returning to the canvas to build on something I left there from the day before,” says Porras. Voices Of The Air broadcasts these intricate balances of sounds that slowly set together, creating an album of delicacy and power.

Arc Iris

Icon Of Ego

Ba Da Bing!

This fall, Arc Iris releases Icon Of Ego, its third groundbreaking album, as a trio that packs the heft of a far bigger band with fully realized sonic and visual intensity. On this latest album, vocalist / guitarist Jocie Adams, keyboardist / sample artist Zach Tenorio-Miller and drummer Ray Belli have crafted a vividly expressionistic new album that reflects both the group’s protean talents as well as its journey of survival. After its self-named 2014 debut on the ANTI- label, Arc Iris achieved critical acclaim, along with tours with St. Vincent and Jeff Tweedy and festivals like Bonnaroo followed. Within two years, the band self-released Moon Saloon in the US while British independent record label Bella Union released the album in Europe. Tours supporting Kimbra, Gene Ween, and a complete re-imagination of Joni Mitchell’s Blue performed at Washington’s Kennedy Center followed, which added to a growing, international fan base that has remained dedicated throughout. Icon of Ego finds a stronger, more experienced band. Recording at Providence’s Columbus Theater, home to silent movies and vaudeville during the ’20s, the band has evolved into a concentrated pop-prog explosion, mixing styles with disparate elements that captivate and surprise. With heavy synthesizer work by Tenorio and Adams, and seemingly impossible transitions executed effortlessly by Belli, the songs here carry a thick, analog electronic sound that harks back to the ’70s. Presiding over these are Adams’ powerful vocals that house the energy under pop forms.

Davachi, Sarah

Gave In Rest

Ba Da Bing!

***BACK IN STOCK ON LP!!!  Received a 7.7 rating from Pitchfork.  Sarah Davachi has quickly risen in prominence since her first release five years ago, and Gave In Rest represents her highest artistic achievement. By infusing her compositional style within a predilection for medieval and Renaissance music, Davachi unearths a new realm of musical reverence, creating works both contemplative and beatific, eerie yet essentially human. Gave In Rest is a modern reading of early music, reforming sacred and secular sentiments to fit her purview and provide an exciting new way to hear the sounds that exist around us.  Between January and September of 2017, Sarah Davachi lived in flux; storing her belongings in Vancouver, she spent the summer in Europe, occasionally performing in churches and lapidariums and seeking respite from her transitional state while surrounded by such storied history. This latest album echoes that emotional state of solitude and ephemerality, reaching towards familiar musical landscapes but from oblique perspectives. “I named each track after a particular time of day as a way of expressing my experiencing different moments of quietude, how morning and night are both independent and interconnected entities in this regard,” she says. Her titles evoke canonical phrases referring to morning or evening prayers, as well as Latin and German phrasings for metaphors about the time of day. “From my perspective, there is a lot of loneliness on this record, and I think it is as much about beginnings as endings,” she continues. “In a way,...

Kilgour, Hamish

Finklestein

Ba Da Bing!

The Clean member Hamish Kilgour’s second-ever solo album, Finklestein, flips the singer / guitarist / drummer’s path taken on All Of It And Nothing. Having previously gone for intimate, minimalistic performances, this album displays a chock-full production quality akin to a fairytale. It’s a fitting change, seeing as the songs are based around a children’s story Kilgour conceived for his son about a kingdom that invents a way of dealing with their depleting gold resources. The songs include organ, saxophone, pedal steel, piano, vibraphone, harmonica, even footsteps (Kilgour is renowned for his stepping), most of it performed by him and his producer / collaborator Gary Olsen at Olsen’s studio, Marlborough Farms, in Brooklyn. Originally conceived as being a children’s book as well as album, it rides roughshod through this fairytale world with grace. Finklestein took a year to record, as Kilgour’s involvement with a large part of the Brooklyn music scene, as well as dates with recent New Zealand Music Hall of Fame inductees The Clean, split his time. His songs benefit from this elongated recording period, as each track creates its own space within the album’s world, mixing instruments and melodies in a rainbow of ways. Yet it’s Kilgour’s songwriting sensibilities that hold the album together, his charismatic and loose arrangements within a congenial environment of musical play.

ANMLPLNET

Fall Asleep

Ba Da Bing!

Nobody is more surprised about having created a full ANMLPLNET album than the group itself: Slothrust leader Leah Wellbaum and drummer / singer Mickey Vershbow. The two met while they were both immersed in the Boston music scene, and then went on to pursue separate musical careers on opposite coasts. Their debut album Fall Asleep truly displays their magnetic musical bond, even while withstanding physical distance and hectic schedules. The band was formed originally on a number of rules, including writing lyrics that are antonymic translations (meaning nouns, adjectives and verbs were replaced with their antonyms) and playing songs straight through as one giant piece, no breaks. The band seeks to create dream-like soundscapes, both epochal in scope and melodic. Their goal is to explore the space between songwriting and improvisation, and the result is an uncontrived melding of their personal styles and technical mastery of their instruments. Wellbaum and Vershbow basically plan, dig, then embark on a fresh road towards rock brilliance.

Hawthonn

Red Goddess (Of This Men Shall Know Nothing)

Ba Da Bing!

The music of Hawthonn is dense and atmospheric, but not inaccessible. Experimental electronic techniques fuse with doom-laden organ riffs, crystalline piano, elemental drones and haunting vocals. Largely guided by their own unconscious muse, the band’s chief inspirations lie outside of music, in Romantic poetry, dreams and reveries, esoteric symbolism, the history of magic and witchcraft, folklore and the English landscape.  Hawthonn is Leeds-based duo Layla Legard and Phil Legard. Having previously collaborated in music, as well as text and photography, they officially formed in 2014 to deepen their uniquely imaginative approach to music-making. Often developing from obsessive explorations of a particular theme, their work precipitates dreams and imaginative journeys, which inform the direction of their music. Their earliest music explored the afterlife mythos of Coil’s Jhonn Balance through the image of the Hawthorn tree and Cumbrian landscape where his ashes were scattered. Their approach draws lyricism from the psychoacoustic phenomena of “phantom words”—sonic textures translated from geographical space into droning sound spectra, and verbalized dream imagery.  The prime symbol of Red Goddess (Of This Men Shall Know Nothing), is mugwort. An herb associated with dreaming, travel and menstruation, mugwort particularly favors edgelands: those abandoned, untended places, part man-made, part rural, where nature begins to reclaim what humanity has left behind. The music here unfolds a mandala of symbolism from these liminal spaces, drawn from a web of fascinations which unfolded during the recording process.

Von Schleicher, Katie

Glad To Be Here

Ba Da Bing!

Katie Von Schleicher follows up her 2017 album Shitty Hits with Glad To Be Here, available digitally and as a 7" on May 4th just in time for her upcoming US and European tours. Produced & engineered by Von Schleicher, Glad To Be Here incorporates the warmth and saturation of Bleaksploitation and Shitty Hits, while nodding towards what's next.  "On a break from touring this winter I went back to my childhood home in Maryland. I built a fire, set up my gold drum kit, saw a ton of stars and felt  smushed by silence. It was lonely, so I made these songs. 'Glad to Be Here' is where I find myself right now. 'Party Dawn' is tied to Maryland, to a dear friend and our adolescence," says Von Schleicher. Bringing the songs back to New York, she finalized them with collaborator Adam Brisbin (Sam Evian, Jolie Holland, Buck Meek) and mixed them with Julian Fader (Ava Luna, Frankie Cosmos, Nadine, Palehound). UK import. Limited to 20 US copies.

Wooing

Daydream Time Machine Ep

Ba Da Bing!

Fresh NYC trio Wooing present their debut EP, Daydream Time Machine. Fronted by multi-instrumentalist Rachel Trachtenburg—a performer in the New York music scene since she was nine years old—Wooing offer hauntingly beautiful vocals backed by echoing guitars. The lead single, “In Colour", displays the vintage influences that come into play: the urgency of underground 90s rock (i.e. Sonic Youth, Helium, Breeders) meets the psychedelic Syd Barrett sounds of the 60s.   Trachtenburg started at age six playing as the drummer in her family’s Seattle-born group, The Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players, who played Conan and drew the attention of Rolling Stone, NPR and Spin. Trachtenburg went on to perform in Supercute! and The Prettiots. Wooing, comprised of Trachtenburg (vocals), JR Thomason (guitar) and Rosie Slater (drums), have existed for just over a year. Trachtenburg and Thomason met while performing with disaster master R. Stevie Moore, while Trachtenburg and Slater had previously toured together in Supercute!.   On their three-song EP Daydream Time Machine, produced by Bryce Goggin (Pavement, The Apples In Stereo), Wooing cover a wide scope of material. Inspired by a documentary on LSD experiments performed on housewives in the 1950s, Trachtenburg wrote the lead single, “In Colour”, in which she beautifully croons a direct quote from the film: “I wish I could talk in technicolor.” The video, directed by John Zhao, encompasses the vintage aesthetics of the track accompanied by gorgeous, dream-like visuals. The band’s reveries, however, aren’t always sweet; “Tear World” comments on our species’ abusive...

Deep Frosty

Blues Band

Ba Da Bing!

Deep Frosty bandleader Steve Ruecker is a legend to some, a much loved participant in the California rock scene who often hosts barnburning jams at his house in Encinitas. Enlisting Ben Flashman from Los Angeles and Utrillo Kushner from Oakland (Noel Von Harmonson and Ben Chasny guest) of Comets on Fire, Blues Band could be 2017's great rock record. Guitar progressions undergo a classic Quicksilver treatment, as Ruecker's sincere, Roky-esque vocals make testament to the plight of the indigenous, the horror of modern times, and the hopeless beauty of heartbreak. The band’s pure enthusiasm coupled with a distaste for complacency seeps through like blood on fabric, making Blues Band a raw and rocking joy to hear.

Baird, Laura

I Wish I Were A Sparrow

Ba Da Bing!

With a musical timeline dating back to her early childhood, Laura Baird is an exceptionally talented multi-instrumentalist and singer-songwriter, best known for her projects with her sister, Meg, as The Baird Sisters, and guitarist Glenn Jones. Baird’s own sound stems from the Appalachian folk tradition, and she connects to it via family lineage—her great-great uncle I.G. Greer’s folk recordings for the Library of Congress are a large influence. Also woven in are classical composers like Bach and Satie, and modern day musicians such as Opal and Yo La Tengo. With this debut solo album, I Wish I Were A Sparrow, Baird plays odes to the traditions from which she learned, combining Appalachian balladry and the roughness of old field recordings, but there is also a dose of dreaminess and solitude that captures sleepy central New Jersey. This is where she departs from tradition, leaving the communal origins of folk music to capture the singular self. The lyrics also present an amalgam of old and new, with half of the songs, including “Dreadful Wind and Rain” and “Pretty Polly,” being passed down from the folk tradition, and the other half, including “Wind Wind “and “Love Song From The Earth To The Moon,” coming from Baird’s own hand. While the most salient part of her previous Baird Sisters project was the melding of familial voices and various instruments, Baird’s solo effort is centered around the combination of her virtuosic banjo playing and prominent but airy vocals.

Secret Pyramid

Two Shadows Collide

Ba Da Bing!

Amir Abbey follows up Secret Pyramid’s previous album, Movements of Night, with Two Shadows Collide, an even deeper exploration of the sounds between consciousness and transcendence. Carefully built and fluidly performed, the record expands Abbey’s relationship with modern composition and abstract songcraft. Cosmic awe fuels exploratory immensity, basking in a dreamlike presence. These works move slowly, like shifting and morphing monoliths. Ligeti’s string works, combined with field recordings, inspire “Possession,” while the Badalamenti-esque “In Wind” pays cinematic homage to the Pacific Northwest. The singular ondes Martenot floats and glides through several tracks, including the hazy and beautiful title track. Each song’s main inspiration comes from the notion behind the album title, the intersection and attraction of forces and worlds, clashing of sounds, and the dualities within our lives. Such a meditative release built upon conflict is ironic, but therein lies the perfect way to listen.

Von Schleicher, Katie

Shitty Hits

Ba Da Bing!

***CHECK STOCK!!!  Received a 7.1 rating from Pitchfork.  Katie Von Schleicher’s Bleaksploitation was an accident, years in the making. While interning at Ba Da Bing Records, owner Ben Goldberg offered to release a cassette of anything of hers, demos or a live performance, but she took it a bit more seriously than Goldberg intended. The result was her first self-produced and engineered effort, a strange, hazy, pop-laden tape. Doing her own press under a pseudonym and referring to it as an “album,” it garnered enough attention for it to be released on vinyl in Spring 2016. On her debut full-length, Von Schleicher strikes again on the magic that comes from her warped and uncompromising sound. Shitty Hits channels the bright, sunny radio burners of the 1970s, songs you drive to, carefree, and songs you can cry to. From start to finish, this album confronts isolation and powerlessness—it doesn’t tackle grandiosity, but mediocrity: the struggle of being deeply flawed and unmistakably human.

Nance, David

Negative Boogie

Ba Da Bing!

David Nance, Omaha veteran of warble and hiss, returns with Negative Boogie, his new concoction of chug, throb and greasy swagger. On this album, Nance trades in his beaten up Tascam 488 for the bullet-proof, glass walls of A.R.C. Studios. What exactly is the negative boogie? Well, it’s a bit like Canned Heat but with Pere Ubu’s queasy rhythms and someone playing five finger fillet with Swell Maps. Ensconced in his ivory tower and soundproof rooms, Nance reached for unlikely weapons to tear down his own lofty experiment. He had his pick of rare guitars, cowbells, steel drums, vintage amps, Crazy Horse microphones, mellotron, and the restless but indefatigable rhythm section of Kevin Donahue and Tom May. They started at sunrise and recorded fifteen songs by midnight. Maybe it’s his Midwestern work ethic, maybe he’s a sonic cheapskate. Maybe it’s just the sound of negative boogie. These songs stab and flow into one other like a perfectly orchestrated classic. They are drenched with Nance’s most biting and comic lyrics to date, peaking on “D.L.A.T.U.M.F. Blues (Don’t Look At This Ugly Mother Fucker Blues)”. And ripping through the entire thing is the cracked power he yanks out of the guitar, a veritable The Good, The Bad And The Ugly of riffage. This is a departure for Nance. It’s bigger and grander but it’s far from easy music. It’s his Plastic Ono Band, his For Your Pleasure, his fever dream of Rocket from the Tombs. But this of course is only a...