Kranky

Wiltzie, Adam

Eleven Fugues For Sodium Pentathol

Kranky

The latest suite by composer (and Stars Of The Lid co-founder) Adam Wiltzie took shape following a move north from Brussels into the Flemish countryside, although it was initially inspired by a recurring dream wherein “if someone listened to the music I created, then they would die.” The album uniquely evokes and evades the allure of oblivion, keening between beauty and ruin, forever unresolved. Wiltzie cites the barbiturate of the title as both muse and sacred escape: “When you are sitting face forward on the daily emotional meat grinder of life, I always wished I could have some, so I could just fall asleep automatically and the feeling would not be there anymore.” Recorded at Wilzie’s home studio, with strings added in Budapest at the old Hungarian National radio facility (Magyar Radio), the tracks feel simultaneously intimate and infinite, unfolding vistas glimpsed in an inner space. Robert Hampson of English drone rock icons Loop mixed the album, further lending the music a sense of cinematic expanse and oblique hypnosis. These are fugue states as much as fugues in a literal classical music sense—smeared epiphanies of uncertain memory and spatial dislocation, coaxed from the unconscious and set aloft.

Niecy Blues

Exit Simulation

Kranky

South Carolina singer and producer Niecy Blues describes her songwriting process like an undertow: “I feel a strange pull, and let it carry me, following swirling leaves… whole days roll by, forgetting about the body.” Their full-length debut, Exit Simulation, captures this sense of deep-rooted divination, cycling between simmering ballads, ghosted R&B, downtempo gospel, and looped vocal improvisations—often within the same track. The title is taken from a science fiction novel she read during the purgatory of the pandemic, alluding to a dimensional ideation of departure—“the permission to imagine leaving.” Recorded in her current home of Charleston, she characterizes the album’s mood in terms both reflective and raw: an exploration of things suppressed, foundations beginning to crack, “talking myself off a ledge.” The music of Niecy Blues transposes reverie and reckoning into emotive devotionals of keys, guitar, bass, synth, and bewitched voice, steeped in sacred atmospheres gleaned from a youth spent in a religious Oklahoma household: “My first experience with ambient music was church—slow songs of worship, with delay on the guitar… even if you don’t believe, you feel something.”

Walter, Justin

Destroyer

Kranky

The music of Justin Walter veers between nebulous and numinous, coaxed from the translucent tonalities of his signature instrument, the EVI (Electronic Valve Instrument). Destroyer, his latest, and third for Kranky, marks his most multifaceted work yet. Inspired by minimalistic urges (evading grandiosity, condensing scope, embracing spatial restraint) tempered with the drama of triptychs (becoming, destruction, aftermath), the album’s eleven tracks thread a keening suite of aching, opaque beauty, traced in absence and breath. First begun in the the no man’s land summer of 2020, Walter gradually amassed nearly two hours of demos, drafts, and ideas, then steadily whittled them to their essence. Destroyer enlists the sounds of a recently restored pump organ, adding pulses and quaking texture, but otherwise the album is a shimmering showcase of the EVI: miasmic, melodic, intuitive, infinite. It’s music of fraught devotion and uneasy peace, questing yet languorous, forever rapt and untethered.

Bowery Electric

s/t

Kranky

The debut album from New York City’s Bowery Electric was released by Kranky in late summer 1995 after they came to the label’s attention via their self-released 2x7-inch Drop EP from the year previous. The first in a trio of albums released by the core duo of Lawrence Chandler and Martha Schwendener finds them in their most raw form. This new double LP version restores the track “Deep Sky Objects” to the original running order of the album as it was left off of the original single LP version due to side length restraints. This is the first time this album has been available on vinyl in almost two decades, and the first time the Drop EP has been available in any format since original release in 1994. At the same time, Kranky is making the CD version available once again for the first time in many years, with the Drop EP tracks also included. “The perfect realization of their aesthetic, each word and chord tuned and focused for maximum impact.” —Pitchfork “Genuinely hypnotic.” —The Wire 1. Sounds In Motion2. Next To Nothing3. Long Way Down4. Another Road5. Over And Over6. Deep Sky Objects7. Slow Thrills8. Out Of Phase 9. Drift Away10. Drop11. Let Me Down12. Head On Fire13. Only Sometimes

Bowery Electric

Beat

Kranky

***BACK IN STOCK!!! The second album from New York City's Bowery Electric was released in late 1996, less than 15 months after their self-titled debut, but it found them having traveled light years musically in the interim, the group having seemingly decided to see how far they could take the guitar/ bass / drums / vocal setup into the atmosphere. Every aspect of their approach had been refined and focused: squalling, distorted guitars had been transformed into hazy, sensual sheets; the live drums transmuted to sampled rhythms more in debt to the blossoming downtempo sound of the day; bass lines reduced to their most basic diagrams; vocals submerged to become one with the narcotized fog of the instruments; even the lyrics were reduced to a few minimal lines used sparingly so as not to overshadow the dynamic. Beat is a lush and dense mantra of shadowy percussion, barely-there vocals and immersive drones that envelops the listener in an opiated blanket of sound. Includes the bonus track "Low Density," not featured on the original U.S. release.

Low

Christmas

Kranky

***BACK IN STOCK!!! First time vinyl release for this classic LOW holiday recording. We would suggest that few bands from an ostensibly "indie rock" background should release Christmas music, if not out of respect for the holiday or material then at least out of a sense of self-esteem. Low, however, were made for this. Their attention to musical detail combined with the heavenly vocal harmonies of ALAN SPARHAWK and MIMI PARKER are perfectly attuned to both traditional carols like “Silent Night” and more contemporary tunes such as “Blue Christmas.” Christmas contains a selection of seasonal songs, including four originals by the band, mostly recorded at Lowʼs 20º Below studio in Duluth, MN. “If You Were Born Today” and “Blue Christmas” were released as a 7-inch single in 1997 on the English Wurlitzer Jukebox label, while “Taking Down The Tree” is taken from a 1998 compilation of live recordings issue by the Dutch VPRO radio station.

Saloli

Canyon

Kranky

Portland pianist Mary Sutton second’s full-length for Kranky delves deeper into her roots as a Cherokee Nation citizen (Saloli, pronounced like “slowly,” is the Cherokee word for “squirrel”). The album is intended to evoke “a day in the life of a bear in a canyon in the Smoky Mountains,” with each track channeling a different emotion or experience in its daily explorations. As with her 2018 debut, The Deep End, the entirety of Canyon was composed and performed live on a Sequential Circuits MultiTrak synthesizer—but this time routed through a delay pedal. This refraction adds a lyrical spatial quality, as though “echoing off canyon walls.” It’s music both gentle and adventurous, curiously rooting through soils and streams, in a sustained state of discovery. In Cherokee teachings, humans and animals are considered to have no essential difference—originally, all the creatures of the earth lived together in harmony. Canyon captures shades of this Edenic notion across eight elegant pieces, alternately meandering, pensive, playful, and pure. Sutton’s playing, as always, is dexterous and dimensional, mirroring the dazzled senses of its muse. Her father, the Cherokee painter and flute-maker Jerry Sutton, created the artwork. Its yellow lettering is from the Cherokee Syllabary and spells “Yona”, meaning “bear.”

Hecker, Tim

No Highs

Kranky

The latest by Canadian composer Tim Hecker serves as a beacon of unease against the deluge of false positive corporate ambient currently in vogue. Whether taken as warning or promise, No Highs delivers—this is music of austerity and ambiguity, purgatorial and seasick. A jagged anti-relaxant for our medicated age, rough-hewn and undefined. Morse code pulse programming flickers like distress signals while a gathering storm of strings, noise, and low-end looms in the distance. Processed electronics shiver and shudder against pitch-shifting assemblages of crackling voltage, mantric horns (including exquisite modal sax by Colin Stetson), and cathedral keys. Throughout, the pieces both accrue and avoid drama, more attuned to undertow than crescendo. Hecker mentions “negation” as a muse of sorts—the sense of tumult without bombast, tethered ecstasies, an escape from escapism. His is an antagonism both brusque and beguiling, devoid of resolution, beckoning the listener ever deeper into its greyscale alchemies of magisterial disquiet.

Loscil // Lawrence English

Colours Of Air

Kranky

***NOW AVAILABLE ON VINYL!!! The union of composers Lawrence English and loscil aka Scott Morgan is seamless, sublime, and long overdue. Born of a conversation centered on the notion of “rich sources” as a forge for electronic music, Colours Of Air is a collection of recordings of a century old pipe organ housed at the historic Old Museum in Brisbane, Australia, which were then processed, transformed, and elevated into eight majestic electro-acoustic threshold devotionals. The timbre of the instrument and spatial fluctuations of room tone infuse the music with a subdued, sacred feel, like vaulted light in a nave of stained glass. They describe the album as “an iterative project, a reduction and eventual expansion,” sifting the swells and drones of the organ for every shivering shade of radiance. The tracks are named for the hue each piece suggests—from the gauzy levitational miasma of “Yellow” to the pulsing melancholic mirage of “Violet” to the seething twilit sandstorm of “Magenta.” Morgan and English are both adept at conjuring moods of muted grandeur, like landscapes veiled in dusk, still looming and luminous. Here their combined powers open pathways to heightened realms of deep listening and bewitching restraint, finding flickering infinities in ancient configurations of wind, brass, stone, and dust.

Low

Songs For A Dead Pilot

Kranky

***BACK IN STOCK!!! The first Kranky collaboration with LOW was released in the fall of 1997. The vinyl format for this has been out of print the longest of any of the band’s Kranky releases, and is finally available again for the analog purists.

Vantzou, Christina

No5

Kranky

While on the island of Syros in the Aegean Sea for a film festival performance, Christina Vantzou experienced what she characterized as “a moment of focus”—a specific vision for the sprawl of raw recordings she’d been amassing for her fifth album. Upon relocating to the Cycladic island of Ano Koufonisi, she situated herself outside at a patio table with a laptop and headphones, taking brief breaks to swim, and began the “reductive process” of shaving and shaping the source material into uneasy but lyrical movements, alternately austere and adorned with strange inflections: glottal groaning, cavernous water, glittering eddies of modular synth, languorous silences. Mixing the pieces herself without outsourcing to an engineer compounded the intimacy and autobiographical dimension of the music; she refers to Nº5 as “almost like a first album.” Drawing on sessions staged in February 2020, Vantzou’s editing instincts emphasize process and isolation, spotlighting resonance and restraint, liquidity and long tails. Fleeting configurations of piano, wind, strings, synthetics, and field recordings, these are spaces as much as compositions, surreal grottos of shifting light, suffused with a sense of invisible divinity. Although seventeen musicians appear on the record, the proceedings feel minimalist and malleable, sculpted from interstitial moments and oblique synchronicities. The definition of a composer as “one who joins things” is here both plumbed and proven; Vantzou describes Nº5 as “a letting go,” a place of “soft borders,” unfixed and undefinable.

Earthen Sea

Ghost Poems

Kranky

Jacob Long’s third Earthen Sea outing for Kranky, Ghost Poems, further refines his fragile, fractured palette into fluttering arrythmias of dust, percussion, and yearning. Composed during the first wave of lockdowns in New York, the pieces took shape patiently from samples of piano, texture, and domestic sounds (sink splashing, room tone, clinking objects), filtered through live FX to imbue them with an intuitive, immaterial feel. Wisps of melody splinter, shimmer, and refract, like light on water; pulses accrue and dissipate, as if mapping shifting sands. Throughout, there’s a sense of matter made animate, of absences felt. Long cites notions of “the studio as a dub instrument” and the melancholy of “7th chords on a fake Rhodes patch” as central elements in his process, transforming raw materials into rare thresholds of symbiosis and hypnosis. This is music for night skies in hollowed-out cities, for views across rivers towards unknown shores: restless, placeless, and profound.

Pan American

The Patience Fader

Kranky

The glacial distillation of Pan•American aka Mark Nelson’s “romantic minimalism” achieves unique fruition on his latest Kranky collection, The Patience Fader. A suite of solo guitar instrumentals accented with lap steel, harmonica, and twilit atmospherics, the strings smear and sparkle in elegant, windswept swells, a guitar mode once described by Brian Eno as “Duane Eddy playing Erik Satie.” These are elegies as much as songs, lulling and lilting in private currents of beauty and bereavement. Nelson speaks of the notion of “lighthouse music,” radiance cast from a stable vantage point, sending “a signal to help others through rocks and dangerous currents.” Composed during the highly isolated summer of 2020, the pieces took shape as meditations on “roots and mourning, trying to connect with those deep hidden rivers that lead to a greater communality.” There’s something ageless, scarred, and American about this music, both displaced and devotional, the ghost of rust belts and dust bowls looming in a horizon of deepening dusk.

Grouper

Shade

Kranky

The 12th full-length by Pacific Northwest artist Liz Harris aka Grouper is a collection of songs spanning fifteen years. She characterizes Shade as an album about respite, and the coast, poetically and literally. How one frames themselves in a landscape, how in turn it frames themselves; memories and experiences carried forward mapping a connection to place—“an ode to blue / what lives in shade.”  Songs touch on loss, flaws, hiding places, love. Deep connections to the Bay Area, and the North Coast, with its unique moods of solitude, beauty, and isolation—a place described and transformed by the chaos and power of river-mouth, wild maritime storms, columns of mist that rise up unexpectedly on the road at night. Portions were recorded on Mount Tamalpais during a self-made residency years back, other pieces made longer ago in Portland, while the rest were tracked during more recent sessions in Astoria. Throughout, Harris threads a hidden radiant language of voice, disquiet, and guitar, framed by open space and the sense of being far away—“Echoing a lighthouse, burying the faults of being human / Into things that we project upon the sky at night.”

Loscil

Clara

Kranky

The latest collection by Cascadian resident loscil aka Scott Morgan is a stunning meditation on light, shade, and decay, sourced from a single three-minute composition performed by a 22-piece string orchestra in Budapest. The subsequent recording was lathe-cut on to a 7-inch, then “scratched and abused to add texture and color,” from which the entirety of Clara was sampled, shape-shifted, and sculpted. Despite their limited palette, the compositions summon a sense of the infinite, swelling and swimming through luminous depths. Certain tracks percolate over narcoleptic metronomes while others slowdive in shimmering shadowplay, sounding at times like some noir music of the spheres. Although Morgan’s compositional premise for Clara was quite defined, the resultant work is wonderfully opaque and spatial, equal parts lush and lurking, traced in fine-grained gradients and radiant silences. The album’s title comes from the Latin for ‘bright’: a fitting muse for this masterpiece of celestial electric currents and interstitial ether, where “shadows are amplified and bright spots dimmed.”

Roxanne, Ana

Because Of A Flower

Kranky

The sublime songs comprising Los Angeles-based musician Ana Roxanne’s second record, Because Of A Flower, germinated gradually across five years, inspired by interwoven notions of gender identity, beauty, and cruelty. She describes her process as beginning with “a drone element and a mood,” then intuiting melody, syllables, and lyrics incrementally, like sacred shapes materializing from mist. The experience of identifying as intersex informs the album on levels both sonic and thematic, from spoken word texts borrowed from tonal harmony textbooks to cinematic dialogue samples and castrati aria allusions. It’s an appropriately interstitial vision of ambient songcraft, a chemistry of wisps and whispers, sanctuary and sorrow, conjured through a fragile balance of voice, bass, space, and texture. Despite a background studying at the prestigious Mills College in Oakland, Roxanne’s music rarely feels conceptual, instead radiating an immediate and emotive aura, rooted in the present tense of her personal journey. She speaks of the flower in the title as a body, singular and sunlit, as many petals as thorns, an enigma beholden only to itself. But whether taken as surface or subtext, Because Of A Flower is a transfixing document of a rare artist in the spring of their ascension.

Loscil

Coast/ Range/ Arc//

Kranky

Named after the geographic formations of the seismically volatile Cascadian coastal mountains, loscil’s coast/range/arc// reissue features new artwork and an additional track. Remastered by James Plotkin and available on vinyl for the first time. “coast/range/arc// represents a solid and compelling expansion of loscil’s sound.” —Dusted  “Vancouver-based sound sculptor Scott Morgan doesn’t make bad albums.” —Exclaim!  “This is ambient music in the classic sense.” — Boomkat  “It’s not hard to hear a parallel between the slow-motion developments within Morgan’s pieces and the shifts that occur imperceptibly in natural phenomena.” —Texture

Aix Em Klemm

S/t

Kranky

Aix Em Klemm is the moniker of the ambient music project consisting of Adam Wiltzie (Stars Of The Lid / A Winged Victory For The Sullen) and Robert Donne (Labradford / Anjou). As Wiltzie told Sadness Is In The Sky fanzine, his collaboration with Donne began when “we all met during a Texas swing of a Labradford tour that Stars Of The Lid opened for back in 1996. They stayed at my house for a few days and we became close.” A year later Wiltzie was asked to join Labradford for their Mi Media Naranja European tour of 1997 as the sound technician. This tour also included Bruce Gilbert of the legendary band Wire who was the opening act and joined them in the van for the entire tour. With Gilbert’s nightly improvisations of minidisk field recording explosions running through a Sherman Filterbank, it left a profound effect on Wiltzie and Donne, and led to inspiring internal philosophical discussions on the importance of improvisation. After concluding six weeks in the van, the idea of creating a unique collaboration separate from their other projects was realized. The duo exchanged tapes over the course of a year and then Donne ventured to Austin, TX for a week to record at Wiltzie’s home studio in 1999. The in-person collaboration moved much more quickly than the exchange of tracks by mail. One track on the Aix Em Klemm album, “Sparkwood And Twenty-One”, was written and recorded in one day. The duo took the mysterious...

MJ Guider

Sour Cherry Bell

Kranky

Melissa Guion’s second offering for Kranky retains the glassy gauze of her debut, 2016’s Precious Systems, but shaded starker and darker, framed by mechanical rhythms and humid industrial moods. She speaks of Sour Cherry Bell as something of a reckoning with her tools of creation: “I was curious to see how far I could go with them, even if that meant reaching the ends of their capacity to do what I wanted. But I never exhausted them and they never exhausted me.” Utilizing her trusted combination of instrumentation, Guion tracked the record between her New Orleans home and rehearsal space, capturing chemistries both intimate and expansive. The songs sway between twilit shoegaze, downer ballads, and gothic pop, mapping a delicate palette of electric melancholies, though in retrospect she cites as her primary muse the notion of power: “lost and found, corporeal and cerebral, harnessed and exploited, of one and many, in this reality and the next.” Sour Cherry Bell reverberates beyond the here and now into scenes unseen, worlds unheard.

Less Bells

Mourning Jewelry

Kranky

The sophomore offering by Julie Carpenter’s textural orchestral entity Less Bells takes its title from a storied strain of decorative objects worn in remembrance of lost loved ones: Mourning Jewelry. The album shares a similar mood of devotional pageantry, stirring ornamental laments born from a need to “create beauty out of grief.” Utilizing an amalgam of strings, synthesizers, and choirs, the pieces ascend and descend in grand, glimmering arcs, ebbing from passages of “baroque complexity” to expanses of haunting emptiness. Certain songs also skew more overtly western than ever before, deeply reverbed plucks of banjo refracted against glowing horizons of sunrise drone: Americana gone ambient. Furthering the music’s mystic intentionality, the track titles comprise “the major arcana of a tarot deck from an alternate universe,” lorded over by the “Queen Of Crickets,” ruler of “The Gates,” “The Fault,” and “The Fang.” Even so, the record requires no psychic divination to glean its fragile majesty, its muted tumult of mirage and melody. The beauty it possesses is too blatant, and bountiful.

Windy & Carl

Allegiance And Conviction

Kranky

Legendary Dearborn duo Windy & Carl have been crafting inner space electric guitar and bass vistas for nearly three decades now, but their latest feels as vital and vaporous as any peak opus in their vast catalog. Written and recorded across six years, the songs swirl between shoegaze minimalism and stargaze drift, over which Windy Weber whispers veiled poetic narratives of transformation, isolation, and escape. Allegiance And Conviction is their first album since 2012’s We Will Always Be. The six compositions are something of outlier in their catalog, shorter in nature than most on their previous releases. All of the tracks are saturated with Carl Hultgren’s signature guitar work, intimate constructions of murmurs, drones and his trademark layered filigree, gently amassed into alternately lighter and heavier than air atmospheres. Despite being their first full-length in more than half a decade, the album fully belongs to the bewitching galaxy of sound Windy & Carl innovated and within which they remain the sole occupants: music of thresholds and peripheries and eternities. Allegiance And Conviction is the multifaceted, contemporary take on their sound.

Pan American

A Son

Kranky

Legacy Chicago craftsman Mark Nelson’s latest offering as Pan•American is less a distillation or divergence than it is a return to his musical and spiritual beginnings. Spare, subdued, and largely acoustic, A Son unfurls like late summer dusk on the edge of town, expansive but intimate. Motivated by notions of “moving backward” and tracing roots—as well as a couple years of hammered dulcimer lessons—the album’s nine songs were written and recorded in his home in Evanston, Illinois, and honed during a recent solo tour in Europe. The emphasis on uncluttered arrangements and the centrality of the guitar and vocals reveal these songs as the most direct and emotional statement of his career. Nelson cites everything from June Tabor, The Carter Family, Suicide and Jimmy Reed as oblique inspirations, though his truest muse was creative self-inquiry: “What does music do, Where does music start? How simple can it be? How honest can it be?” After decades of mining post-rock pathways and latticework electronics in Labradford and early Pan•American, A Son strips away ornament and distraction in favor of a direct gaze into the heart of what is.

Grouper

Aia: Alien Observer

Kranky

“This sound / synapse transposition is as haunting as it is beautiful—surely Grouper’s best.”—Tiny Mix Tapes “If past Grouper releases have inhabited abyssal trenches and damp backwoods, here Harris takes us journeying across constellations and stars. Two of the most beguiling albums of the year, exquisitely realized and singularly evocative.”  —The Quietus  “This music feels both spacey and expansive and also oddly intimate and grounded, the work of someone who has mastered her tools and knows how to get the most out of them.”—Pitchfork “Harris finds a way to dive deeper in simple and unassuming ways.”—NPR

Grouper

Aia: Dream Loss

Kranky

“This sound / synapse transposition is as haunting as it is beautiful—surely Grouper’s best.”—Tiny Mix Tapes “If past Grouper releases have inhabited abyssal trenches and damp backwoods, here Harris takes us journeying across constellations and stars. Two of the most beguiling albums of the year, exquisitely realized and singularly evocative.”  —The Quietus  “This music feels both spacey and expansive and also oddly intimate and grounded, the work of someone who has mastered her tools and knows how to get the most out of them.”—Pitchfork “Harris finds a way to dive deeper in simple and unassuming ways.”—NPR

Loscil

Equivalents

Kranky

CHECK STOCK!!!  Received a 7.0 rating from Pitchfork.  Canadian composer Scott Morgan’s 12th long-player as loscil takes its title from an influential series of early 20th century photographs by Alfred Stieglitz, abstracting clouds into miasmic, painterly canvases of smoke and shadowplay. It’s a deeply fitting analog for Morgan’s own musical process across the past two decades, fraying forms and tones into widescreen mirages of opaque texture and negative space. The name Equivalents referred to Stieglitz’s notion of the photographs as being equivalent to his “philosophical or emotional states of mind;” the same could be said of these eight weighty, shivering chiaroscuros of sound. Each piece unfolds and evolves enigmatically, adrift in low oxygen atmospheres, shifting dramatically from pockets of density to dissipated streaks of moonlit vapor. The entirety of the record was created specifically for the album with the exception of “Equivalent 7,” which began as a dance score for frequent collaborator Vanessa Goodman. The album version of this track was reworked with Vancouver musician Amir Abbey aka Secret Pyramid. Cloud photographs taken by Scott Morgan at various locations throughout Cascadia in 2018.

Earthen Sea

Grass And Trees

Kranky

***CHECK STOCK!!! Received a 7.1 rating from Pitchfork. Jacob Long’s reductionist rhythmic ambient vessel, Earthen Sea, ebbs towards a more purely elemental state on his second excursion for Kranky, Grass And Trees. He describes the creative process as one of “simplifying things as much as possible,” designing uncluttered spaces traced in nothing but breath, field recordings, and “sounds that could be played by hand but weren’t.” The results feel decentralized but dynamic, low-lit evocations of ambiguous nocturnal environments—dub techno disassembled into stray pulses and spare parts. It’s a music both interior and infinite, languorous yet transformative, made in the outer boroughs of a metropolis but existing in its own liminal wilderness. Long’s vision is a grounding one, rooted in the physical body but attuned to larger currents: “In response to living in a fairly hectic city, and at a very hectic time for the world at large, creating something more drawn back and restrained felt appropriate.”

Hecker, Tim

Anoyo

Kranky

***CHECK STOCK!!! Received an 8.5 Best New Music rating from Pitchfork. Anoyo (“the world over there”) draws from the same sessions which led to the 2018 work Konoyo but rendered starker, solemn, and stripped back, with more of a naturalist tint. Tim Hecker’s processing here moves in veiled ways, soft refractions and whispered shrouds woven within improvisational sessions of traditional gagaku interplay, evoking a sense of vaulted space, temples at dawn, shredded silk fluttering in the rafters. This is boldly barren music, skeletal and sculptural, shaped from wood, wind, strings, and mist. Modern yet ancient, delicate and desolate, Anoyo inverts its predecessor to compellingly conjure a parallel world of illusion, solitude, and eternal return.

Mirrorring

Foreign Body

Kranky

***BACK IN PRINT ON VINYL!!! MIRRORRING is JESY FORTINO, who has recorded under the TINY VIPERS moniker, and LIZ HARRIS, better known as GROUPER. The recordings on this album came about through a songwriting session in Portland, Oregon. The resulting sounds are contemplative, reflective, and introspective, creating a feeling as much as a song, a mood as much as a tune. One could try to assess what part of the album each artist was responsible for, but that would prevent one from seeing the proverbial forest for the trees. Foreign Body was recorded and produced in 2011. Unavailable since 2014. Received a 7.9 rating from Pitchfork upon its initial release.

Saloli

The Deep End

Kranky

Portland, Oregon resident Mary Sutton’s solo debut materialized in the wake of a performance she gave at a clothing-optional soaking-pool sauna: “I had never composed for synth before but wanted to make something people sitting motionless and naked in hot bubbly water would want to hear.” It was while in this headspace that she reconnected with Satie’s entrancing cyclical motifs, particularly the way “he subtly spins melodic fragments, and pivots harmonies and phrases so the repetitions feel new and surprising yet soothingly familiar, as if casting a spell.” The nine intuitive instrumentals comprising The Deep End accomplish exactly that, threading complementary shades of soft-hued hypnosis, dazed modal introspection, icy amusement park reverie, and lunar lullaby into a prismatic suite of contemplative melody and synthetic communion. Sutton’s songs are active rather than ambient yet their structure is more suggestive than scripted, full of lulls, asymmetries, and daydreams. Each track was written specifically to be played live on an analog synthesizer, with no overdubs or post-production wizardry. The sound of Saloli is one of warm-blooded wiring, turned on and tapped into, emotive and electric, storied machines speaking through all too human hands.

Hecker, Tim

Konoyo

Kranky

***CHECK STOCK!!!  Received an 8.5 Best New Music rating from Pitchfork.  Experiential composer Tim Hecker’s ninth official full-length, Konoyo (“the world over here”) was largely recorded during several trips to Japan where he collaborated with members of the gagaku ensemble Tokyo Gakuso, in a temple on the outskirts of Tokyo. Inspired by conversations with a recently deceased friend about negative space and a sense of music’s increasingly banal density, Hecker found himself drawn towards restraint and elegance, while making music both collectively and alone. As with the Icelandic choir he arranged on 2016’s Love Streams, the heights of Hecker’s talent emerge in his manipulation of source material, bending and burnishing it into fantastical new forms. Keening strings are stretched into surreal, pixelated mirages; woodwinds warble and dissipate as fractal whispers of spatial haze; sparse gestures of percussion are chopped, isolated, and eroded, like disembodied signals from the afterlife. Both in texture and intent, Konoyo conjures a somber, ceremonial mood, suffused with ritual and regret. Visions flutter and fade; dreams gleam and decay. Hecker will stage a series of special performances in tandem with the album’s release, featuring members of the gagaku ensemble on shō, ryuteki and hichiriki, accompanied by Kara-Lis Coverdale.

Less Bells

Solifuge

Kranky

The full-length debut by Julie Carpenter’s Joshua Tree, California, ambient orchestral project Less Bells emerged from the drama and desolation of its high desert origins. She cites certain compositions as being “specifically inspired by August monsoons rolling in over the mountains, others by clear, starry nights.” Utilizing an array of electronic and acoustic instruments, including cello, Optigan, violin, voice, and modular synth, Solifuge conflates not only the solitude and refuge of its title but also intimacy and grandeur, fragility and force, “building from austerity to wild overgrowth.” She speaks of a creative process involving cut-ups and rearranging, mapping a melody for strings only to transpose it to synth, or refashioning a rigid classical piece as stream of consciousness soundscape. Carpenter’s versatility and embrace of flux fills these songs with a living, breathing quality, restrained but responsive, adapting to shifting conditions and emotions beneath the surface.

Forma

Semblance

Kranky

Brooklyn trio Forma’s latest album continues their mission to “broaden the idea of what an electronic music ensemble can sound like.” Semblance emerged from exploratory sessions at The Schoolhouse, the Bushwick loft where members Mark Dwinell and John Also Bennett live, then was tracked at Gary’s Electric studios, where their previous album Physicalist was also recorded. Inspired by polyrhythmic composition, the human voice, and conceptual improvisation strategies, the songs are striking in their textural detail and emotional nuance, alternately synthetic and sentient, futuristic and intuitive. Incorporating flute, piano, guitar, saxophone, acoustic drums and cymbals alongside an array of synthesizers, the record persuasively demonstrates the group’s unique playing abilities and fluid chemistry—attributes they credit to “techniques we’ve developed to trick our electronic machines into mimicking the spontaneous character of live instruments.” Members George Bennett and John Also Bennett also cite as an influence their recent stint in minimalist composer Jon Gibson’s ensemble, performing his 1973 proto-ambient masterwork Visitations. The long-form modal piece requires restraint and deep listening to execute, qualities especially apparent in the more muted moments of this album, such as “Rebreather” and “New City.” The group states the intent of the new album as “to be more direct and exacting”, which it is. Over half a decade spent writing and recording together has distilled the band’s hybrid electro-acoustic interplay into an attuned and astounding language, capable of articulating impossible symmetries and reflective states. The stunning visuals of the artwork are by frequent collaborator Peter Burr.

Hecker, Tim

Mirages

Kranky

In conjunction with the reissues of Tim Hecker’s Haunt Me, Haunt Me Do it Again and Radio Amor albums on both vinyl and CD, kranky is also reissuing this classic 2004 album on the CD format for the first time.  “As a follow-up to the sublime Radio Amor, Mirages is an even more majestic album, striding with a confident heaviness further out into the wilderness, deep into the night.” —Boomkat   “...the keyboard parts on Mirages are prettier, and the overall mood is more contemplative, but there’s a deep pit of melancholy at the center of the record, a mood with a strongly cumulative effect.”  —Pitchfork   “The opener, ‘Acephale,’ first erupts into a teeth-gnashing guitar solo before nodding off into an absinthe stupor, while the highlights, ‘Neither More or Less’ and ‘Celestina’ are both brooding stroboscope soundtracks.” —XLR8R   “The follow-up to 2003’s critically acclaimed Radio Amor, Mirages further erodes the vapid predispositions of electronic music, uncovering a terrain where dissonance and melody coincide in a near-bohemian unison.” —Amazon

Hecker, Tim

Haunt Me, Haunt Me Do It Again

Kranky

This is the first reissue of Tim Hecker’s classic 2001 debut full length release. The original recordings were remixed by Tim Hecker and mastered by Matt Colton at Alchemy Mastering.  “Haunt Me is alien, amorphous and occasionally noisy, but always welcoming.” —Pitchfork  “Haunt Me Haunt Me, Do It Again is a brilliant album of subtle, evocative mood music.” —AllMusic  “Hecker was already on a different wavelength with Haunt Me, clearly seeking something that would trigger ASMR-induced enlightenment, and he ran with it.” —Stereogum

Hecker, Tim

Radio Amor

Kranky

This is the first reissue for Tim Hecker’s classic 2003 album. The original recordings were remixed by Tim Hecker and mastered by Matt Colton at Alchemy Mastering.  “Hecker at his most painterly and evocative.” —Pitchfork   “Radio Amor has a simultaneous tangible / intangible quality that is both miraculous and enigmatic.” —Tiny Mix Tapes   “Tim Hecker may be the finest sonic photographer around, the re-release of Radio Amor being further evidence for this claim.”  — Brainwashed   “Hecker’s 2003 standout is a stirringly emotional narrative, without the slightest aid of a single voice.” —Treble   “A slow-shifting mix of steely headrush and protracted morse code dispatches from the bottom of the ocean.” —Dusted

Grouper

Grid Of Points

Kranky

***CHECK STOCK!!! Received a 7.8 rating from Pitchfork. Not long after recording her tenth album Ruins, Liz Harris traveled to Wyoming to work on art and record music. She found herself drawn towards the pairing of skeletal piano phrasing with spare, rich bursts of vocal harmony. A series of stark songs emerged, minimal and vulnerable, woven with emotive silences. Inspired by “the idea that something is missing or cold,” the pieces float and fade like vignettes, implying as much as they reveal. She describes them as “small texts hanging in space,” impressions of mortality, melody, and the unseen—fleeting beauty, interrupted. Grid Of Points stands as a concise and potently poetic addition to the Grouper catalog.  “Grid Of Points is a set of songs for piano and voice. I wrote these songs over a week and a half; they stopped abruptly when I was interrupted by a high fever. Though brief, it is complete. The intimacy and abbreviation of this music allude to an essence that the songs lyrics speak more directly of. The space left after matter has departed, a stage after the characters have gone, the hollow of some central column, missing.” —Liz Harris

Vantzou, Christina

No4

Kranky

Belgium-based composer Christina Vantzou’s fourth full-length for Kranky ventures further into the uniquely elusive and evocative mode of ambient classical minimalism which has become her signature: a fragile synthesis of contemplative drift, heady silences, and muted dissonance. In regards to the new album she speaks of focusing particular attention on the effects of the recordings on the body, and of “directing sound perception into an inner space.” No. 4 took shape across roughly two years, incorporating a diverse array of musical and conceptual collaborators, including fellow Kranky artists Steve Hauschildt and John Also Bennett (of Forma) as well as Angel Deradoorian (ex-Dirty Projectors), Clarice Jensen, Beatrijs De Klerck, and members of Belgium’s Echo Collective. During the creation process Vantzou wanted to “blur lines of hierarchy,” and thus allowed all ensemble members and technical assistants to add or delete elements. Despite such a spectrum of input the eleven tracks feel distinctly cohesive, weaving elegant textures and resonant open spaces within a twilit landscape of eclectic instrumentation: piano, harp, vibraphone, voice, strings, marimba, synthesizers, gong, and bells. A mindset of premeditated exploration informs the album’s emotive textural intuition, with hushed drones and delicate gestures eliding in the periphery of the mix. Vantzou cites sleep and “the loosening of time” as two formative practices in her private and professional life, which manifests in the quietly hallucinatory properties of her music. No. 4 feels both endless and ephemeral, immersive and immaterial. It’s a music of horizon lines and half-light, mapped with feeling and foresight.

Stars Of The Lid

Gravitational Pull Vs. The Desire For An Aquatic Life

Kranky

***Received a 7.7 rating from Pitchfork. The release of Music For Nitrous Oxide, the 1995 debut by Stars Of The Lid, heralded a new strain of the American underground music scene, one born of the heat and humidity, boredom, and the insular, constipated, rock-ist music scene of Austin, Texas, home of the duo of Brian McBride and Adam Wiltzie. It was a muffled lashing out against surrounding musical conventions, a small middle finger to the local dominant “Americana” scene, but one that nobody could see outside the shack of a house in which they recorded or at their occasional sparsely populated live performances. It was as punk a move as anyone could make at that place and in that time. But, in a surprise to the two members of SOTL, people took notice, as related rumblings and grumblings were taking place simultaneously in other parts of the American landscape. Coming quickly on the heels of their debut was Gravitational Pull vs. The Desire For An Aquatic Life, released one year later. This is a transitional release that travels from the scruffiness of the debut’s ambiance to more extended and subtle undulating tides of assembled sound, yet still dominated by processed guitars as the primary sound source. It also serves as an omen to the mini-orchestral works to come, beginning with the Avec Laudenum album a few years later. This is a small masterpiece.

Dedekind Cut

Tahoe

Kranky

***CHECK STOCK!!!  Received a 7.2 rating from Pitchfork.  Northern California electronic producer Fred Welton Warmsley III’s solo work as Dedekind Cut (pronounced “dead-da-ken cut”) has evolved from fractured industrial design into increasingly subdued and sublime ambient meditations across two years of dedicated activity. His second full-length collection, Tahoe—so named after the mountain lake town he now calls home—swells with widescreen grandeur, evoking vistas both inner and outer. There are echoes of his earlier, more tempestuous mode in tracks like “MMXIX” and “Spiral” but overall the album skews panoramic and pensive, muted synthetic mists contoured with choral melody, field recordings, and radiant drone. His compositional instincts feel alternately classical, contemporary, and conflicted, befitting an artist whose discography spans labels as divergent as Hospital Productions, Ninja Tune, and NON.  Warmsley characterizes Tahoe as a “time peace,” sifting through “the past, the present, future, and fantasy.” Recorded primarily in New York, with additional sessions sourced from Berlin, Cambridge, and Placer County, California.

Demen

Nektyr

Kranky

A few years ago Kranky received an anonymous email with a link to three tracks and a simple message: “Hi, maybe you would be interested in this music.” The songs were instantly striking: extraordinarily slow, somber, and spacious, each vaulted cathedral chord reverberating poetically into the distance, the melodies rolling out like fog across a cemetery. Captivated, Kranky requested more, receiving a single word in response: “Yes.” Then, nothing. Eventually, three months later, another email with slightly more information was received: a name (Irma Orm), a location (Stockholm), and a bit of context (she worked alone, and progress on music was slow but steady ). Fast-forward to mid-2016: the album is complete: Nektyr, by Demen, and it is breathtaking. Hermetic gothicswan songs conjured from funereal piano, twilit ambience, minimalist percussion, and spellbinding vocals. The mood is lulling and lush but lost in sorrow, stark grey structures looming in the night. Majestic open spaces between notes heighten the melancholic grandeur of Orm’s arrangements, blurring the line between lament and lullaby. The songs don’t end so much as ebb away, succumbing to their own downcast beauty.