Night School

Amery

Continue As Amery

Night School

Continue As Amery is the debut album by Montreal-based artist Amery. Formerly recording under the moniker Alpen Glow, Continue As Amery sees the songwriter step out into a bold, colorful world full of pop hooks, snagging feelings of abandon and the mornings after. Amery Sandford began releasing as Alpen Glow in 2020 after years playing in punk groups in Newfoundland and as half of Montreal pop duo Born At Midnite (Arbutus). Recorded in Montreal by David Carriere (TOPS, Marci), Patrick Holland, and Kristian North, Continue As Amery is a blast of melodic joie de vivre. On her debut Sandford brings her punk and DIY credentials into sharp focus on 8 perfect pop odes to city living, making mistakes and figuring it out as you go along. Suffuse with powerful imagery and an almost uncanny talent at spinning out hooks brimming with humour and spirit, Amery’s soundworld is informed by friendship, experience and by her day job as a renowned illustrator and visual artist. Beginning Alpen Glow in a spirit of fun and now shedding the alias, Amery’s ready to hotwire the nite. Each song is rich with story. Mountain FM, named for the radio station in Sandford’s home town in the mountains of Alberta, launches into a tale of speeding, blasting the radio too loud, the giddy burning of rubber with no care in the world to slow you down. Featuring live band members Sarah Harris, Jack Bielli, and Frank Climenhage, the singer bristles to get out of her stifling...

J. McFarlane's Reality Guest

Whoopee

Night School

From out of nowhere—if nowhere is the febrile, warped and twilit imagination of Julia McFarlane —comes Whoopee, the second album by J.McFarlane’s Reality Guest. Whoopee is an esoteric, kaleidoscopic movie in music form directed by Julia McFarlane and co-conspirator Thomas Kernot. Full of life, breakbeats and smokey vignettes on the fragile nature of interpersonal relationships, Whoopee is a stylistic evolution from everything McFarlane has done before. Surreal, beautiful in parts and replete with the aching wisdom McFarlane’s songwriting has always promised, this Reality Guest pulls back the curtain on a whole scene of naked truth. Recorded in Melbourne in bursts since the release of 2019’s Ta Da, Whoopee features a new sound palette and band member in Kernot. The duo dive deep into electronic pop tropes, mining digital synths, samples, breakbeats and deep bass grooves, largely dispensing with live instrumentation. If Ta Da took twists and turns with your expectations, offering a Dada-ist, monochromatic take on pop music, Whoopee is McFarlane’s subterranean love-sick pinks, reds, greens, purples and blues. Becoming something of a tradition, the album starts with an instrumental intro pilfered from a 90s’ spy film or cinema intro music, puffing up the listener for the heart-squeezing bathos of "Full Stops." Over a bleary backdrop of walking bass lines, jazz-inflected keys and smoked-out atmosphere, McFarlane’s poetry narrates the fragile state of a relationship: “You put a full stop where I thought there’d be a comma, I want the story to continue even with all the drama.” Over a palpable...

Teresa Winter

Proserpine

Night School

Circular patterns morphing through time, loop and ritual form the fabric of Proserpine, the latest work by Leeds-based musician, Teresa Winter. Recorded from a summer to a winter through 2021 and 2022, Proserpine is Winter’s most cohesive, focused music to date: confidently revelling in space, fixating on isolated sounds and giving way to satisfying, swirling waves of vocal and electronic buzz. Proserpine is Teresa Winter’s debut recording for Glasgow-based label, Night School. On Proserpine, musical patterns revolve and intersect with each other, transmogrifying the music’s narrative. Over-arching themes emerge: continual change, elusiveness. Insubstantiality emerges into concrete reality in the form of recognisable field recordings: the purring of a pet cat, the hum of a live cable. The loops and patterns are sometimes just out of sight, the click and whirl on Child Of Nature is the backdrop to hymnal vocalisations by Winter, who intones spell-like text in conversation with herself. On opener Circles, Winter’s vocal is pre-linguistic, detached syllables falling into flowing streams, before Plume’s field recordings seem to juxtapose nocturnal and diurnal wildlife. "You said I was a Flower Of The Mountain" sings Winter, as James Joyce's Molly Bloom does but the carpe diem desire in Ulysses is dissipated here, spread out by gauzy, droning organs. Here desire is blown up and out, changed into something undefinable but no less powerful. Change is at the heart of the album. The Roman goddess Proserpine, herself a reimagined version of the earlier Greek goddess Persephone, is always between: between summer and...

Apostille

Prisoners Of Love And Hate

Night School

Prisoners Of Love And Hate is an offering to community, to desires that imprison and liberate, to people in all their divinity and ugliness. Apostille—aka Night School Records’ captain Michael Kasparis—presents his third album with a bang, a bursting ball of NRG, empathy and bristling living. Like its predecessor Choose Life, Prisoners... was recorded in Full Ashram Celestial Garden in Glasgow with Lewis Cook (Free Love) through 2022. A 9 song treatise on Pop music, trauma, ecstasy and the mundanities between the extremes, Kasparis takes on classic 80s Synth Pop, 90s House music, '00s Trance, wistful balladry, '70s Power Pop. The thread that runs through the album is a boundless energy, an openness to the moment, to living the pains and joys equally, open armed. This is a place of no judgement, of possibility, challenge and comfort. The nine songs on Prisoners... can be read as separate ruminations on the feelings and desires that imprison our experience. Through it all the narrator struggles against them, transported and fooled by love and longing, peering through the bars of anguish, flailing in a cell of emotions. Saturday Night, Still Breathing breaks the album open with an invigorating scream and pounds into the night with a nod to Whigfield, Kasparis’ Punk roots and House music. Over a thumping 909 kick and bassline, Kasparis pens a love letter to being with people, the collective energy of hearts in a room, thrumming together, making it through together. Written as private ritual magic, manifesting community during...

Marina Zispin

Life And Death - The Five Chandeliers Of The Funereal Exorcisms

Night School

Life And Death - The Five Chandeliers Of The Funereal Exorcisms pulls back the veil unto a nocturnal scene populated by shadows, embers burning coldly in the underworld. Marina Zispin is your guide, siren and protector both. Marina Zispin is the negative space between musicians Bianca Scout and Martyn Reid. Life And Death is the duo’s debut release, five chandeliers of melancholic, vibrant synth pop twinkling in the inky blackness. Both originally hailing from the North East of England and forming a musical partnership before lockdown, Bianca Scout and Martyn Reid initially worked remotely. Having relocated to South London and Newcastle respectively, Marina Zispin was born in earnest after the duo could begin writing and practising in the same space. Bianca Scout is a celebrated musician and dancer with a number of solo and collaborative works in her discographywhile Martyn Reid is a mainstay of the UK noise and power electronics scene, most recently with solo project Depletion. Marina Zispin largely eschews both Scout’s deconstructed approach to song and Reid’s focus on visceral, noise- based productions; the result is a new entity, the underground pop star that exists only in darkened dreams. Marina Zispin, then, is an avatar cajoled, nurtured and directed by Scout and Reid. Analogue electronics redolent of the early 80s Cold Wave and Synth Pop era form the base of the Zispin worldview, with Bianca Scout donning the Marina disguise, embodying the character over five songs of swooning drama, playful melodic interplays and tear-stained, doe-eyed sentiment. Flowers...

Helena Celle

If You Can't Handle You At Your Worst, Then I Don't Deserve Me At My Best

Night School

Dedicated 21st Century polymath Kay Logan continues to expand her soundworld in every direction at once with her Helena Celle alias. A maximalist internal landscape of broken Jungle patterns, distorted synths and heavily warped instrumentation bent out of cognisance, If You Can’t Handle You At Your Worst, Then I Don’t Deserve Me At My Best is Logan’s most danceable, most fun and most gloriously congealed record to date. Conceived in part as a response to her 2016 debut release If I Can’t Handle Me At My Best, You Don’t Deserve You At Your Worst, 2023’s update employs similar principles (degrading technology, the joy of chance, an outsider’s gaze onto the dance floor, an embracing of the occult) to delirious effect. If I Can’t Handle was lo-fi and fragile in its technoid recasting of dance music, here Logan’s confidence allows a frantic playfulness that retains the spontaneity of all her output. It’s the work of a creative spirit reveling in the possibilities of sound, rhythm, texture and pattern. Helena Celle’s music opens up psychic space in front of the listener and invites them in. In this world, sounds and tropes once recognisable are rendered fractal, spectral and continually melting in and out of recognition. Simply put, Helena Celle might be detouring Drum & Bass, Techno and Breakbeat with a prankster’s grin but the result is pure ecstasy crushed into a part of the listener’s consciousness hitherto untroubled.

Mede, Adela

Szabadsag

Night School

Slovak-Hungarian musician Adela Mede explores the interplay between voice and technology with field recordings. She sings in three languages (Slovak, Hungarian and English). Intimate ambient utterances with themes of spiritual growth accompanied by experimental electronics with a wide scope of influences; from minimalism to folklore. Initially released in early 2022 to universal acclaim on digital and cassette, Night School is extremely excited to share Szabadság on vinyl. Mastered by Rupert Clervaux for vinyl, the clearer format teases out new nuances in the music, revealing a physicality and permanence to Mede’s first masterwork. Szabadság is a navigation. "This debut by Adela Mede, recorded in her family home on the Slovakian border with Hungary, searches through the personal, familial, cultural, folkloric and geographic of her past and present. Examining both the vulnerability and determination of her voice—as it leaves the lips, raw, and in the ways it can be transformed with digital processing—the embodied memories of language, of utterance, are explored. Airy, open sound worlds and tentative strings of improvised naked vocal transform themselves into insistent repetition. Fizzing, sparkling electronics are set against the beautiful grainy depth of field recordings. The locations, these places, are found and lost - home is found and lost—in a dance of fragmented vocal harmonies. Three languages (English, Hungarian, Slovak) weave a song of spring, nature, forgiveness, togetherness and rebirth.”—Lisa Busby

Lady Neptune

Noz

Night School

Six face-melting gurners for the 21st Century’s, wilted and jilted generation. Glasgow’s Lady Neptune follows her New Gorbals Gabber cassette EP with her debut vinyl release NOZ. Over the course of 23 bloody fisted minutes, Lady Neptune’s—aka Moema—hyper destructed take on Gabber and Happy Hardcore breaks down the genre tropes before rebuilding them as a new pop music. If 2020’s New Gorbals Gabber showed an artist building their own language from fragments of different genres, 2022’s NOZ goes harder into the cyberpunk-ass future and takes no prisoners. Recorded and mixed at Glasgow’s legendary Green Door Studios and mastered by Rashad Becker, here Lady Neptune evolves into a monster. With the classic weapons of Dutch Gabber—distorted 909 kick drums, bursts of noise and world-eating Rave-O[1]Matic hoovering synth riffs, Lady Neptune’s 6 tracks constantly threaten to careen off the speaker into the sweatiest, most gibbering, messy corners of the club. The two years since her debut has seen Meade destroying festival dancefloors, training for the full assault that is NOZ. Live performances have seen foam guns, tequila pistols, neon stage dancers and a full, maxed-out orgy of fast-as-hell BPM, rave music burning up the cones. The experience reaps rewards from the outset on recorded form here.

Rose, Frankie

Seventeen Seconds

Night School

***Night School is proud and excited to team up with FRANKIE ROSE (VIVIAN GIRLS) to reissue her much loved 2017 interpretation of The Cure’s masterpiece Seventeen Seconds. Packaged with new, artist approved artwork, Frankie Rose’s Seventeen Seconds is the art of the cover album done right. "Since I already think it's a perfect record, I tried not to reinterpret too much and stick to similar sounds as the original, but with a twist.” Edition of 300 on exclusive clear vinyl. North America Only.

Nilsson, Molly

Extreme

Night School

Extreme is Molly Nilsson’s tenth studio album. Recorded in 2019 and throughout the 2020 global pandemic at home in Berlin, it is a departure for Nilsson, an explosion of angry love. It’s an album of anthems for the jilted generation, soaked with joy and offering solace, bristling with distorted, metal guitars and planet-sized choruses that bring light to the dark centre of the galaxy. It’s an album of the times, by the times and for the people. It’s a record about power. About how to fight it, how to take it and how to share it. Every song here is a gleaming gem in a pouch of jewels. Examples include “Kids Today,” where Nilsson is the voice of wisdom, archly commenting on the eternal struggle between youth and authority. “They Will Pay” brings big, distorted power chords in the form of a agit-punk, pop slammer. Of course, when Molly Nilsson does punk pop one gets the catchiest chorus this side of The Bangles or The Nerves. However, it’s on “Pompeii” that Nilsson delivers the album’s epic, emotional heartbreaker. Like “1995” on Nilsson’s album Zenith, or “Days Of Dust” on Twenty Twenty, the lyrics of “Pompeii” are heavy with a transcendent sadness, an aching poetry that cuts to the truth of the heart like the best Leonard Cohen lines. It contains the most personal moments of Extreme, a song lit by the dying embers of romance. Yet it’s here where the alchemy at the base of all Nilsson’s best work is found....

Nilsson, Molly

These Things Take Time

Night School

Night School announces a new pressing of the long sold-out debut album by Molly Nilsson, These Things Take Time, on galaxy vinyl, and for the first time on CD. As a significant cultural artifact of the underground pop movement that bubbled up in the early 21st century, it’s an important landmark. In Molly Nilsson’s herstory it remains one of her most adored works. It would be easy to say that Molly Nilsson needs no introduction, but These Things Take Time is an introduction. Originally self-released in 2008 on a limited CDR run with handfolded sleeve, Nilsson’s debut album has slowly taken over the hearts of many. In 2014 this modern classic of autonomous, DIY pop and punk-as-you-like attitude was released as a beautiful edition of double vinyl, featuring unreleased bonus tracks across two discs—it sold out within a month of release!

Nilsson, Molly

Hey Moon

Night School

“Hey Moon” remains one of Swedish singer Molly Nilsson’s most popular songs. Originally released on her debut album These Things Take Time, the song since took on new life being covered by other artists and Molly famously never plays it live. In act of reclamation, Molly Nilsson is releasing "Hey Moon" as a 7” single with all profits donated to Black Lives Matter worldwide. It comes backed with a rare early song, "Silver."

Orleans, Ela

(colored) Movies For Ears

Night School

REPRESSED ON NEW CLEAR VINYL!!! Movies For Ears is a retrospective collection of works by Polish-born, Glasgow-based artist Ela Orleans, which navigates almost two decades of songwriting in the heart of the global pop underground. This remastered collection casts an ear over what Orleans might call the “pop sensibility” within her back catalogue. Released previously on a number of small DIY labels, Orleans’ music coincided with the explosion of auto-didactic musicians finding their voice in the age of the blogosphere, artists emboldened by the democratisation of music-making afforded by the internet. From the outset, her childhood studying formal music mixed with cut-up techniques, sampling, sound-art and experimentation to create a distinctive signature cloaked in an innate melancholy and playfulness. Fully remastered by James Plotkin, featuring extensive sleeve-notes and rare photos from Orleans’ archive, Movies For Ears presents an appraisal of the musician’s work, painting a portrait of an artist with an uncanny ability to evoke emotions and ghosts of memories in the listener.  “With Ela’s music I feel emotional, engaged… I can’t help but feel she’s always looking for a sense of belonging and it seems to inform all the music that she makes. Glasgow must have more of that belonging feeling than most cities because she’s spent the most time here, an exotic bird in a rainy city she maybe finds a lttle bit of comfort in. It’s a pleasure to have her here, in this awful time to be living in Britain, her illuminations feel important and...

Fine Place

This New Heaven

Night School

Fine Place is a new duo comprising Frankie Rose (Vivian Girls, Crystal Stilts, Dum Dum Girls) and Matthew Hord (Running, Pop. 1280, Brandy). Based in Brooklyn, NYC, together they’ve crafted a crystalline full-length of nocturnal, electronic pop music that charts a way out the post-global, cyberpunk dystopian environment it was crafted in. Their debut album This New Heaven drenches minimalist song structures in post-industrial washes of sixstring delay and gothic post-punk synths. Presiding over it is the most evocative, emotive vocal performance Frankie Rose has committed to tape to date. Following Hord’s relocation from Chicago, the pair wanted to explore new avenues apart from their respective bands or solo projects. “The sound we were going for was an attempt to capture the dystopian feel of New York during a period of desertion by the wealthy. It was produced in a time-frame saturated in both uncertainty and serenity, and the soundscapes we created felt fitting and almost organic as a response to our surroundings. The title also reflects this in an arguably literal, maybe even satirical way.” Sonically, Fine Place references the pioneering mid-to-late ’80s pioneers of icy melodrama The Cure and Cocteau Twins, while reflecting both the individuals’; music trajectories thus far. Modular synthesis triggers rhythm boxes and fluttery arps chirp around clanging 808-patterning as Rose’s reverb-laden vocal layering envelops the remaining headroom. The result is massive; a towering, shadowy music that embraces darkness while offering Rose’s bright vocal as chinks of light in the cracks; the production filling the...

Nilsson, Molly

Europa

Night School

When Molly Nilsson began recording her second album Europa in 2009, the world seemed to be at a turning point and she along with it. In the aftermath of a global financial crash, at the dawn of a new decade, the Stockholm-born, Berlin-based singer was busy molding her songwriting into an idiosyncratic, personal mythology that would take her to every continent, speaking directly to hearts in every corner of the globe. The first album on her own Dark Skies Association imprint, the first recorded in her home studio The Lighthouse, Europa broke new ground for Nilsson at the time. But also it spoke earnestly to the world about an idealism, an openness and hope that has not dimmed in the eleven years since its release. Europa contains the songs of a young, idealistic songwriter coming to terms with her genius for cutting to the chase, saying it as it is and, most importantly, as it should be. Over ten years on the artist’s vim and urge for...more.

AMOR / LEMUR

AMOR/LEMUR

Night School

AMOR/LEMUR finds the Glasgow quartet AMOR in partnership with Norwegian improvising ensemble LEMUR to hopeful and ecstatic effect. Conceived before the onset of Covid 19 but finished during spring lockdown, their eponymous EP is the most loose, alive and elevated recording in AMOR’s catalog. AMOR/LEMUR takes the template of throbbing avant disco expanded upon on previous recordings for Night School and lifts it into new territories, with new tonalities and unexpected turns on the journey. More than anything, the expanded, near-cinematic expression of human connectivity feels like a lightning new energy to grasp in the dark. Following a revelatory concert in Glasgow in January 2020 wherein the two sets of musicians met and performed together for the first time, a recording session was arranged the following day, resulting in the most elevated permutation of AMOR’s art to date. Each track was built upon a rhythmic bedrock of percussion and drums performed by Paul Thomson and samples/synthesizer by Luke Fowler. Thomson used bamboo Javanese gamelan (most notably on For You) and scrap metal, as well as traditional percussion and drums while Fowler incorporated processed ambient field recordings recorded in enclosed acoustic spaces around Glasgow. Singer/pianist Richard Youngs contributes some of the most bright and mindful work of his career. Acoustic bass player Michael Francis Duch, whose lush playing as ever provides the elastic spine to each song, scored the string parts for LEMUR on piano at home in Norway. The addition of swelling strings and drones fills out the AMOR sound...

Space Lady

(Colored) The Space Lady's Greatest Hits

Night School

***REISSUED ON NEW SEAFOAM GREEN VINYL!!! The Space Lady began her odyssey on the streets of San Francisco in the late ‘70s, playing versions of contemporary pop music an accordion and dressed flamboyantly, transmitting messages of peace and harmony. Following the theft of her accordion, The Space Lady invested in a then-new Casio keyboard, birthing an otherworldly new dimension to popular song that has captured the imaginations of the underground and its lead exponents ever since, with the likes of John Maus, Erol Alkan and Kutmah being devotees. Of her early street sets, only one recording was made, self-released originally on cassette and then transferred to a home-made CD. The Space Lady’s Greatest Hits (LSSN021) features the best of these recordings—mostly covers but with some originals—pressed on vinyl for the first time and features archival photographs and liner notes from The Space Lady herself. Greatest Hits contains The Space Lady’s personal favorites; her haunting take on The Electric Prunes’ “I Had Too Much To Dream (Last Night),” a frantic “Ballroom Blitz” amidst other reconstructed pop music. Included are also four originals that easily match for the Pop canon. Old School "tip on" cover and fold out liners with poster for framing on one side and notes on the other.

Lady Neptune

New Gorbals Gabber

Night School

Lady Neptune is a state of euphoria. Lady Neptune isn’t real, Lady Neptune is a reality. Originally formulated in London as a performing alter-ego for nascent singer-songwriter and fashion student Moema Meade, Lady Neptune has been an ongoing work that has evolved from distorted guitar dirges, bass-heavy synth pop music into its current Hi NRG 4am experimental Gabber nadir. New Gorbals Gabber is monstrous and glorious. Informed by goblinzed cave dwelling nu metal aesthetics, cheap ‘n’ nasty instrumentation but above all, peeking like an elvin proboscis around the corner of your mind, is an unstoppable knack for hooks that elevates these compositions to channels for new planes of ecstasy. Mostly performed live using an Electribe sampler/sequencer with synths, New Gorbals Gabber feels like a live recording at the rave in the final circle of Dante’s Inferno. How much fun does that sound? We’re talking Lucifer’s Manumission, Hanger 666. Meade-as-Neptune is an impish presence, Jekyll and Hyding from dirt-eating goblin to glacial pop supernova Number 1 Angel. Revolution’s bass riff and obscure crowd samples build with a arpeggiated bass synth that swirls around the Hardcore beat, threatening a Bloody Fist-style production yet staying within a dub sound world, heavy delays fading out into the first Pop moment. Twizt introduces Lady Neptune’s vocal processing technique and an unashamed, massive trance synth riff that reeks of foam parties and festivals no one pays into. It falls into Number 1, which borrows from PC Music tropes for a breakneck treatise on self-confidence. It feels...

Otherworld

I Had Forgotten How Much Light There Was In The World Till You Gave It Back To Me

Night School

Otherworld is an alias of Glasgow musician Helena Celle, who since releasing her Night School debut If I Can't Handle Me At My Best, You Don't Deserve You At Your Worst has been developing her soundworld using more aleatory factors, diverse sample sources and live processing techniques, mostly evidenced on releases on her own Outlet Archival imprint. While her previous Night School release soundtracked the dilapidation of hardware, the breaking down of rigid techno systems and beats, with Otherworld the aesthetic is blown out and heady, with structures harder to pin down, the listener adrift in a preternatural netherworld of emotional states and fried sonics. For "I Had Forgotten..." Otherworld manifests 7 revolving, loop-based drone-adjascent pieces that operate as dips into the separate universes of each track. With extensive use of reverb and delay it would be easy to categorize the music as "ambient" but these are aids for deep listening. Taking the album title from Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea series, each piece glows with its own logic and resonance, with the temporal time span afforded here offering glimpses into streams of sound rather than conclusive, set pieces. Each track evolves slowly, crawling through the air on its own tread. Maledithewg breathes into life with a looping synthised noise overlayed with frayed pads, while on Delagmhiewt there's a heavily processed, low resonant instrument that resembles Coil playing fast and loose with a digi-didgeridoo. Some tracks seem to hold steady in stasis, threatening to burble over with low-end distortion, seemingly retiscent...

Cucina Povera

Tyyni

Night School

Tyyni is the third album by Finnish-born sound artist and musician Cucina Povera aka Maria Rossi. Tyyni feels like a slowly unfurling mediation on the clash between nature and mechanical living, a rumination on the complexities of modern life that begin to unveil more about the inner landscape of the artist as it progresses. A Finnish word referring to still, serene weather, the title belies a new note of turmoil in Cucina Povera’s soundworld. Tyyni represents a more detailed focus on the sculpting of sounds that curl around Rossi’s hymnal vocal performances. It’s a more adventurous work than Rossi’s previous output that goes further into noise elements and vocal abstraction while maintaining the balance and ecclesiastical ecstasy of her debut Hilja. While tension at the core of Cucina Povera is always prevalent, previously it was organic sounds that were used to counterpoint Rossi’s singing but on Tyyni these are often replaced with aggressive synths and distortion, profane clashes with the seemingly sacred hymns. Whether close mic’d and intoning in a loop or in full flight, Maria Rossi’s voice remains in the foreground, set here against a more synthetic backdrop. This development builds new worlds for Cucina Povera, a digital environment which brings in a sense of the alien for Rossi’s vocal to duel. The effect is often dazzling.  For an artist with such a singularly unique musical language, Cucina Povera is continually teasing new strands and emotive tones from an evolving palette. Most importantly, Tyyni appears to be pulling...

Nianio, Svitlana & Oleksandr Yurchenko

Znayesh Yak? Rozkazhy

Night School

Svitlana Nianio and Oleksandr Yurchenko are musicians with a long history in the still-mysterious Kiev Underground. Nianio’s first group Cukor Bela Smert [Sugar, The White Death] were active from the late 80’s through to the early 90’s, and following an intense period of touring, collaboration, experimentation and a string of mixtapes and self-published recordings, Nianio’s first offcial solo album ‘Kytytsi’ was released in 1999 by Poland’s Koka Records. Oleksandr Yurchenko, a longtime collaborator and a pivotal figure in the Kiev music scene, was instrumental in creating the Novaya Scena, a loose conglomerate of artists who encouraged each other to excavate both the sounds of the West and Ukrainian tradition. ‘Znayesh Yak? Rozkazhy’ (‘Know How? Tell Me’) is the duo’s most fully realised collaboration, an enchanting, complete world in which Yurchenko’s instrumentation and playfulness with form frames Nianio’s otherworldly soprano, recalling Liz Fraser steepedin contrapuntal melody and hymnal improvisation. Originally made available on a self-released cassette in 1996 (re-issued in 2017 by Ukraine’s Delta Shock label) where the album was twinned with ‘Lisova Kolekciya’ (re-issued on LP in 2017 by Skire) this is the debut release of ‘Znayesh Yak? Rozkazhy’ outside of Ukraine. Recorded in an abandoned park in Kiev during a fertile period for artists and musicians following the collapse of the Soviet Union, ‘Znayesh Yak? Rozkazhy’ sees Nianio and Yurchenko combine Casio keyboard, hammered dulcimer, percussion, and Nianio’s unmistakeable soprano vocalisations to create music sympathetic to the specific locations in which they chose to record. Yurchenko’s contributionis perhaps more...

R. Elizabeth

Every And All We Voyage On

Night School

R. Elizabeth is the recording name of London-based artist and academic Rachael Finney. Every And All We Voyage On is her solo recording project’s second full length and is a focused distillation of her practice in sound art and her knack for pop minimalism. It follows a long sold out release on Where To Now? Records and a prolonged period in which she concentrated on artist residencies exploring her interest in recorded sound and voice. Immediate and natural, Every And All We Voyage On manages to sound joyful while tackling complex themes, handling everything with an improvisatory touch. The songs are full of air and light; infectious, melodic and off-the-cuff. Recorded using a single '80s Casio keyboard, reel-to-reel tape manipulation, piano and vocal, Finney’s practice with R. Elizabeth belies a studious attention to detail. Her academic work is often focused on analyzing sounds—particularly voice and language—divorced from meaning.She challenges the listener with overtly emotional tropes, constantly playing with sound and song: a wonderland of perceived emotion, the listener’s perception of what they’re hearing constantly in flux, deceptively simple and deserving of repetitive listening

J. McFarlane's Reality Guest

Ta Da

Night School

Ta Da is the debut full length from J. McFarlane Reality Guest, the collective name for the trio headed by the eponymous Julia McFarlane. As a member of the group Twerps, McFarlane has traversed guitar-centric, melodic pop music for some years while honing a highly unique, personal musical language. This is the first recorded unveiling of her affecting, oblique songwriting panache, originally released in her native Australia on Hobbies Galore. Wheezing into view with a troubled reed instrument set against a series of whoozy synth lines, “Human Tissue Act” is a foggy curtain the listener is invited to peel back. The dissonant notes are left to dance entwined, with clarinet heralding a Harry Partch-esque mallet percussion interlude. It’s a mood. With no resolution in sight, an audience dragged closer into uncertainty is suddenly drenched with the light of inter-weaving wah wah synth and saxophone. “I Am A Toy” introduces us to McFarlane’s vocal, an effortless and matter-of-fact, accented statement that quietly takes the reins. While McFarlane’s previous work in Twerps might reference ’80s UK and antipodean guitar pop, Ta Da showcases different influences immersed in psychedelic music and synths. It’s a brilliant, deft concoction swimming in Young Marble Giants-type minimalism, washed with bare pop and harmony similar to Kevin Ayers making sense of a Melbourne suburb, full of faces half-recognised in the blanching sun.

Orleans, Ela

Movies For Ears

Night School

Movies For Ears is a retrospective collection of works by Polish-born, Glasgow-based artist Ela Orleans, which navigates almost two decades of songwriting in the heart of the global pop underground. This remastered collection casts an ear over what Orleans might call the “pop sensibility” within her back catalogue. Released previously on a number of small DIY labels, Orleans’ music coincided with the explosion of auto-didactic musicians finding their voice in the age of the blogosphere, artists emboldened by the democratisation of music-making afforded by the internet. From the outset, her childhood studying formal music mixed with cut-up techniques, sampling, sound-art and experimentation to create a distinctive signature cloaked in an innate melancholy and playfulness. Fully remastered by James Plotkin, featuring extensive sleeve-notes and rare photos from Orleans’ archive, Movies For Ears presents an appraisal of the musician’s work, painting a portrait of an artist with an uncanny ability to evoke emotions and ghosts of memories in the listener.  “With Ela’s music I feel emotional, engaged… I can’t help but feel she’s always looking for a sense of belonging and it seems to inform all the music that she makes. Glasgow must have more of that belonging feeling than most cities because she’s spent the most time here, an exotic bird in a rainy city she maybe finds a lttle bit of comfort in. It’s a pleasure to have her here, in this awful time to be living in Britain, her illuminations feel important and hopeful. A stubborn light; someone...

Nilsson, Molly

History

Night School

Long overdue reissue of this Molly Nilsson early release (her fourth), now repackaged and reissued via Night School / DSA.  By the time Molly Nilsson released History, she had already established a fledgling cult status built on homemade YouTube videos and home-burnt CDRs. Writing from a distance, it’s clear that this is the first classic album in her canon and arguably a classic of the 21st Century underground music panorama. While the methodology onit hadn’t changed from Nilsson’s previous 3 albums—it was recorded solo at The Lighthouse, Nilsson’s home studio based on a Berlin crossroads—on this record the songwriting reached a new peak and the emotional scythe cut deeper. Here, Nilsson managed to combine a cosmic, outward looking perspective with an intimate knowledge of the human condition and its place in these turbulent times. In truth, no other songwriter has excavated the modern psyche so clearly and perfectly.

Cucina Povera

Zoom

Night School

Zoom is a verité collection of situational recordings made by Cucina Povera - aka Finnish-born, Glasgow-based sound artist Maria Rossi - in intimate spaces full of acoustic or ideological intrigue, primarily using a capella voice. It is a document of different locations and moods that interested the recorder, a postcard look into the stream-of-consciousness processes of an artist developing her own language. Using little else other than a Tascam Zoom recorder and loop pedal these are highly personal recordings originally intended as notes for future compositions that ended up becoming the purest rendition of this first phase of Cucina Povera's music to date. Originally presented as WAV files named simply ZOOM---, these on-the-fly compositions are a perfect distillation of Rossi's practice. With no augmentation, not even a song-title, these bare, beautiful tracks become a materialist document of the wonder of the every-day. While Rossi's previous album, Hilja, was a sculpted whole that at times used post-production techniques and electronic instruments, Zoom presents acoustic sound as a source of joy and discovery largely without artifice. Rossi's voice is used a searchlight, shining into the crevices of a room's dark corners, or as on ZOOM0005, projected into a Coke bottle aperature, for an almost Shakuhachi texture. Voice dissapates into texture, with rhythms created by simple hissing sounds and the interweaving of loops. ZOOM0001 interlocks 4 different a capella melodies to create a chorus, an improvised solo hymn that seems to rise and rise. ZOOM0010 uses staccato vocal bursts, like Meridith Monk huffing...

Amor

Sinking Into A Miracle

Night School

Sinking Into A Miracle is the debut album by Glasgow’s AMOR, a quartet of musical travellers exploring the sonic open-ended-ness of dance music. Following two critically acclaimed 12-inches, this is a fully developed treatise on ecstasy and transcendence. Here, Richard Youngs, Michael Francis Duch, Paul Thomson and Luke Fowler are more honed, razor sharp in focus and timing, testing their instrumental prowess on condensed song structures and new, enlightened feelings of expansive hope and bliss. From the outset, it’s an ambitious yet ultimately inclusive journey. Recorded to 24-track tape at Chem 19 and mixed by Paul Savage and Richard McMaster (Golden Teacher), this full length retains the elastic grooves of Paradise and Higher Moment, the group’s previous singles, but relinquishes the classic Philadelphia International-tinged sound in favor of looser rhythmic patterns. There are new depths to the compositions: a more free-flowing approach to percussion and deft experiments in hybridity make for a full and rounded, emotionally tinged record. Indeed, there are times when AMOR sound like the lost house band from David Mancuso’s Loft parties: Richard Youngs’ uplifting, gospel-tinged lyrics talk about moving beyond, universal truths, sailing through the horizon. It’s a wide-eyed optimism Mancuso would perhaps have approved of and which is embroidered with spectral details that begs to be auditioned on large, tweaked out sound-systems.

Nilsson, Molly

Twenty Twenty

Night School

Twenty Twenty is Molly Nilsson’s eighth album: the latest opus of an artist in a constant state of development and strength. In 2018, with the climate changing, democracy crumbling, inequality and injustice erupting, this album examines the near future, seeking clarity, reflection, renewal and opportunity. It contains anthems so tall as to induce vertigo, leaving the taste of Euro-dance in the mouth, albeit without a four on the floor beat. Here, the pop auteur is haunted by the late Prince, channelling Courtney Love and Lou Reed, anger and love. Recorded as ever in her own Lighthouse Studios and co-released with her imprint Dark Skies Association, the record is consistent in strategy and approach to past releases, yet on this one Nilsson pushes the limits of the scope of a pop song even further. Despite working with used keyboard sounds that evoke memories of a distorted past, the sound is distinctly contemporary. The record drifts between playful punk methods and hi-fi ideas, strikingly clear through the fuzz of a surrounding world painted with reverb.

Sorrow

Under The Yew Possessed

Night School

"Sorrow is an English-based band that is the brain child of Rose McDowall, once known as one half of the '80s pop duo, Strawberry Switchblade. Rose's first band was called The Poem, an experimental three piece based in her hometown of Glasgow. While still with The Poems, Rose also joined with Jill Bryson as Strawberry Switchblade. The Poems released one EP entitled Achieving Unity, but they broke up shortly after its release, when Strawberry Switchblade began to gain popularity. Switchblade's top-five hit, "Since Yesterday," is featured on many '80s compilations, and still receives considerable club and radio play. Switchblade disbanded in 1986. Since 1985, Rose has worked with many other bands, including Current 93, Coil, Death In June, Felt, and Psychic TV. Through the years Rose has carried on working in a more experimental vein, and ultimately formed Sorrow, releasing their first LP, Under The Yew Possessed, in 1993. They have since produced: Sleep Now Forever (1999), Final Solstice (1999), and Let There Be Thorns (2001)."

Prostitutes

Aluminum Garage

Night School

Since his 2015 Night School debut E.P. Nouveauree, James Donadio—aka Prostitutes—has been traveling stages and rigs from Los Angeles to Berlin, from prestigious festival slots to slimy Glasgow basements, burning his own path through the modern techno and electronic scenes. On Aluminum Garage, Donadio is at his most playful, laying down unmistakably mid-tempo BPM early-electro jams indebted to early sampling before crashing the soundsystem with frantic, détourned Gabber. Unlike his previous LP for Spectrum Spools or indeed his Night School debut which rankled with austerity and minimalism, here Prostitutes is instinctive, multi-layered and unashamedly, brilliantly borrowing from myriad genres.

Young Guv

2 Sad 2 Funk

Night School

Nothing is ever as it seems with Young Guv, but it always feels good. At first glance cloaked in a bold,ready-made distance, 2 Sad 2 Funk reveals itself over time to be an emotional, perfectly crafted, détourned pop record. Young Guv is the creation of Toronto-based auteur Ben Cook (Fucked Up), an artist with over a decade playing guitar and singing in hardcore punk groups and a long discography of Young Governing. On 2 Sad 2 Funk, Guv pushes the power pop motif to its natural, 21st post-structuralist conclusion: it’s an album ridden with the cultural noise that bleeds through human interaction, distorting relationships and eroding that great Luv you thought you had. Audibly referencing everything from classic guitar pop The Toms or Dwight Twilley through Prince-ian ecstasies to a buried, trance-gressive House music, the attention deficit belies a modern age plagued by distraction and performance anxieties. These days, the heart can break in new ways.

Nilsson, Molly

The Travels

Night School

***NEW YELLOW VINYL PRESSING!!! The Travels represents a signpost in the continuing journey that is the songs of Berlin-based artist Molly Nilsson.  Starting out by hand-dubbing CDRs and forging a singular path in the global pop underground, Nilsson’s art has grown to the extent where hers is a precise songwriting devoid of unnecessary flourish. Her songs are perfect silhouettes of feelings everyone shares but that few can articulate with such heart-rending, icy pathos. Journeys offer change—the possibility of renewal—and on Tthis album, Nilsson’s resonant voice is found curling around a new sense of optimism and wide-eyed discovery that was only alluded to in her previous work. Songs like “Dear Life” might be spiked with a barbed sense of the dejected, but the presiding feeling is one of optimism, of being in love with life despite a shield of cynicism. “Dirty Fingers” brings a melancholy recognizable from previous work but with an incessant beat and ecstatic underpinning. In case the listener missed it, “The Power Ballad” brings an endearing sincerity to proceedings that also offers a tantalizing question: can you be skeptical about love but still be bewitched?  On this fifth long-player, Nilsson’s perspective is challenged and manipulated by changes in environment and psychological space: like any other traveller the protagonist brings their own set of values and emotional states to new places, coloring them with a wash of subjectivity. Based loosely on Marco Polo’s “Travels” and reading like a map of the protagonist’s geographical and inner journey, this album reveals new places...

Cucina Povera

Hilja

Night School

An ethereal, unresolved presence fading into the stereo field, Hilja breathes into life with a haunted synth line and self-sampling vocal hook that instantly creates an enchanted space. Hilja is the debut album by Glasgow-based musician Maria Rossi aka Cucina Povera. Named after a style of southern Italian traditional cooking associated with poverty and making-do, a philosophy of simplicity and stoicism that applies perfectly to the spare but beautiful music Rossi has been experimenting with for around 2 years. Hilja’s marriage of minimal synth, field recordings and the hymnal dexterity of Rossi’s vocal performances creates a new language, sometimes literally, to be spoken in some mythological Fourth World we’ve yet to create. Originally from the Fenno-Karelian region, Rossi brings an acute sense of space, surroundings, and practicality to her working practice, with each composition often relying on a limited sound palette to create deeply affecting messages which transcend language. Cucina Povera’s power is to communicate purely, often down to the solo-choir nature of Rossi’s multi-layered voice, an achingly beautiful instrument which has seems to have an innate spirituality in its grain. The tension between the means and the end is at the heart of Cucina Povera, the invocation of a kind of secular spirituality a times using nothing but Rossi’s voice. Indeed there’s an almost a Dogme-like purity to the arrangements: Elektra is a soothing song based around the lapping waves of Rossi’s wordless backing vocals and a simple field recording of stones knocked together. Kehoitus is completely a cappella,...

Amor

Higher Moment / Amnesia

Night School

Higher Moment / Amnesia is the follow up to Paradise / In Love An Arc, AMOR’s debut 12”, which surfaced in May 2017. Culled from the same sessions at Chem 19 and The Green Door in Glasgow, these two tracks elevate the ecstatic, transcendent aesthetic Richard Youngs, Luke Fowler, Michael Francis Duch and Paul Thomson introduced with their previous release. AMOR is collectivism in the servitude to trance, a master class in ensemble playing, an avant-disco one-mind. AMOR’s practice is simple. 4 musicians, in a room, together with the groove. Playing for hours on end, improvising and honing down each track to its bones to be fleshed out, AMOR fuses acoustic instrumentation with sharp, electronic precision. Central to each track is the elastic double bass playing of Michael Francis Duch, a backbone that breathes and allows drummer/percussionist Thomson to explore. This time around mixed by Paul Savage at Chem 19, Higher Moment on Side A, forsakes the 4/4 of the group’s previous 2 tracks for a loping ecstasy, a driving rhythm that forges forward around the bassline. Youngs’ vocal here is the focal point, teaming with an almost utopian positivity. For an artist who’s built a career obfuscating, sidestepping the straightforward, to hear a sentiment so pure is spine-tingling. In fact to imagine a Youngs brimming over with a higher love is almost the biggest curveball this artist has ever thrown at the listener. With the line “following fearless through clear boredom,” we imagine a path to a new world...

Patience

White Of An Eye / Blue Sparks

Night School

Patience – aka songwriter Roxanne Clifford – may have begun as a solo refuge from the Manchester-born, LA-Resident’s band duties but White Of An Eye, her 3rd single, is a fully formed, dancing-with-a tear-in-your-eye, confident Pop Moment. The attempt at shedding memories to embrace the present, an ode to the moment. Like her previous two singles The Church and The Pressure, Lewis Cook of Happy Meals engineers Clifford’s vision to Jacno-esque synth pop perfection. Blooming with a tentative synth cadence and nonchalant spoken word introduction, White Of An Eye soon erupts into perfect disco melancholy, with Clifford’s imagery perfectly nailing that nagging regret that haunts every new adventure. With the first appearance of a guitar hook in a Patience song, it’s a classic pop moment enunciated perfectly by Clifford’s instantly recognizable vocal.  “Melted skies, horizon lines are floating overhead” Blue Sparks Is a nocturne peppered with impressionistic imagery, romantic and doomed. Minimalist and affecting, here Patience is simply two synth lines and Clifford’s vocal. It’s Patience’s version of a Berntholer-style sadness, even evoking a Yazoo ballad. Like a Johnny Jewel production injected with passion, Patience captures the spark between two human hearts, the elusive, indefinable chemistry of sleepless, endless nights.

Stacian

Person L

Night School

Stacian is Person L—Oakland resident, solo artist and academic Dania Luck. Beginning in the American Midwest, she has been an ongoing Bay Area concern since 2008, deeply involved in the minimal wave and underground electronic music scene.  A dystopian vision of alienated humanity, broken communications and technoid mal-forms, this album is her most fully developed full length and a leap forward from 2012’s Songs For Cadets. Moving away from the primitive Cold Wave of previous work, it creates a bleak dystopia without relying on Ballardian cliché, though still invoking concrete prisons and urban disassociation—a throbbing, murky underworld that revels in imperfections; a submersive, digital swamp bleeding through the club.

The Modern Institute

The Modern Institute

Night School

For The Modern Institute’s self-titled first vinyl document, the practices of audio technicians Richard McMaster, Laurie Pitt and James Stephen Wright are brought into sharp focus, the initial analyses of a project which examines the rituals of performance, the signifiers of bourgeois culture and the absurdities inherent in the middle class art gaze. While undoubtedly disturbing in execution, it’s a succinct reminder of the tension between lazy, electronic music tropes and the essential, quizzical attitude frequently lacking in the technoid culture, yet abundant in Glasgow’s agent provocateurs. Seen through the frame of primary music generators McMaster and Pitt’s previous music projects—Golden Teacher, General Ludd—The Modern Institute’s recorded output is an oblique, strategic examination of rhythm and the spaces between.   Rhythm is often re-defined and re-formed through out The Modern Institute, with the easy 4/4, communally cohesive beats of the Teacher and the Ludd some way off. Opener Black Blood is a case in point, with a elusive pattern providing a warped, skeletal framework for Wright to smother. The atmosphere is austere, aggressive, clinical as a gallery wall after the exhibition has failed. The yawning, sub-bass of False Beards and Diamond Hooves hacks at the exhibition floor opening up punishingly alien chasms. The narrator’s deadpan poesy, battling against the brutalist backdrop, reminds the listener of early industrial pioneers Cabaret Voltaire, not least in the unmistakably northern accent. Side A closes out on the first attempt by The Modern Institute to break into a recognizable pattern, though rendered on Destroy...

Nilsson, Molly

Imaginations

Night School

***BACK IN STOCK!!!  That we live in a world changed is beyond question. Since 2015’s Zenith, Berlin-based songwriter Molly Nilsson has surrendered to the world, traveling from Mexico to Glasgow, observing the changing socio-political landscape and imagining something better. For an artist who has so successfully created her own environment and gradually let in others, her eighth studio album Imaginations directly engages with her surroundings, engendering change and allowing love in. This album dreams big, recasting storming, stadium-sized pop into the internal language of the solo auteur. It’s not escapism, it’s a kaleidoscope and an alternative view, an agent of change. Nilsson’s vision is perhaps more forceful than the emotionally fragile moments of her previous album, exemplified on “Memory Foam,” a bright, driving pop song that belies themes of nostalgia and the past, reminding us that Nilsson alone can make one feel so welcome in loneliness. If there’s overt anger in songs like “Money Never Sleeps,” an anthem for a post-capitalist utopia, seams of optimism are also sewn into the album’s genetic code. Any revolutionary will tell you that anger alone achieves nothing— Nilsson’s mission is to offer some alternatives we can hold close. For example, “Not Today Satan” is a song about accepting love as the agent of change: “Don’t be sad, but do get mad at all the small men who act so tall, in the end they always fall; there ain’t no sin in giving into love, that’s just how we’re winning the fight.”...

Mcdowall, Rose

Our Twisted Love

Night School

The Our Twisted Love E.P. constitutes the most contemporary recordings by Rose McDowall available, heralding her return to live performance and songwriting. Building on the groundwork laid by McDowall with her group Sorrow, and various collaborations with key figures in the post industrial landscape, it features a full band recording and long-form songwriting that draws heavily on both McDowall’s keen sense of pop melody and melancholy.  Breaking into a harmonium drone and Rose’s instantly recognisable, vocal, the epic title song unfurls at a glowing, glacial pace. Never hiding her love for the Velvet Underground, Our Twisted Love reminds the listener of 70s-era Nico, but McDowall’s fragile vocal has a spine-tingling fragility of its own. Guitarist Dru Moore provides shimmering chords that dress the melody, itself framed with multi instrumentalist Eilish McEvil’s plucked violin strings. Rose’s gorgeous twists with the vocal erupt into a full band jam, with bassist Clay Young, acclaimed cellist Jo Quail and drummer Lloyd James joining in for a neo-folk, dronist excursion that elevates the song into psychedelic territory.  This Calling sparkles with 12 string guitar and violin and would, given another production, easily fit into McDowall’s earlier material. A song that laments the songwriter’s battle with depression, taken in tandem with the title song, McDowall describes extreme mental states, a natural inclination to melancholy while creating something uplifting in the process. Make It Easy On Yourself is McDowall and band’s rendition of the Bacharach and David classic. Taken at a slower place, nocturnal in...

Amor

Paradise / In Love An Arc

Night School

Paradise / In Love An Arc is the debut recording by AMOR, a new quartet based largely in Glasgow, consisting of Richard Youngs, Luke Fowler, Michael Francis Duch and Paul Thomson. AMOR is a master-class in blissful, searching, avant-disco fuelled by telepathic ensemble playing and an untouchable, higher joy. Recorded at Chem 19 at Green Door in Glasgow, it was mixed with Golden Teacher/The Modern Institute-member Richard McMaster. Both tracks edge the 14 minute mark, slices of ecstasy seemingly hewn from a band deep in the Zone. Mastered by Matt Colton at Alchemy Studios, the balance between hefty, bass-thick kicks and crisp percussion, an elastic double bass that lends a bounce to proceedings and floating piano chords recalls a warped take on Philadelphia International Records, a version of This Heat decimating the disco charts of late 70s USA. Paradise begins with a proto-house kick drum and Paul Thomson’s inescapably funky percussion, inviting Duch’s bass into the mix. Fowler’s subtle electronic touches set up some of the most open-hearted, love-infected vocals Richard Youngs has ever set to tape. Guided through various drops and ecstatic highs by ceaselessly inventive rhythm composition, the listener is elevated to several plains, to different levels and spirits. In Love An Arc arguably goes deeper. Jane Sayer’s guest violin scrapes us in, with formless shapes polluting the stereo field until a plaintive piano chord pattern brings us into the groove. Sounding like a lost spirit looking through the glass darkly, Youngs’ vocal is melancholic and truthful. Fowler’s...