Night School   Page 2

Nilsson, Molly

Follow The Light

Night School

***BACK IN STOCK!!!  The beginning moments of Molly Nilsson’s second album Follow The Light now seem like the start of a personal mythology that was to reach further than she could have imagined. Few contemporary artists have seeped into the underground pop psyche more thoroughly than the Stockholm-born songwriter. After releasing her debut These Things Take Time on hand-made CDrs, Nilsson’s follow up was a leap in scope and ambition. Of course, the personal takes on a tumultuous life in Berlin and the journeys to and from it inform the songs, as before, but a growing maturity in the songwriting is in evidence. From the diary pages of her first album to a growing stature as a songwriter in touch with the universal, this album contains many of Nilsson’s now firm fan-favourites. Follow The Light is the second installment of an ongoing Molly Nilsson reissue campaign and the first time the album has been available on vinyl.

Strawberry Switchblade

1982 4 Piece Demo

Night School

New pressing of 500 copies on black vinyl. “1982 4-Piece Demo” is the first official, fully-licensed and unreleased material to be released under the name Strawberry Switchblade in 30 years. Since disbanding amid major record label acrimony and personal differences in 1986, the already-cult band have since grown in stature and legend. Trailblazers in many ways, the band’s mythology justifiably centers around the charismatic duo of Jill Bryson and Rose McDowall, but that isn’t a complete picture. Bryson and McDowall’s growing friendship, having met some years earlier on the punk scene, became a creative partnership: Bryson’s art school background and McDowall’s history in avant-punk group The Poets meant Strawberry Switchblade was a band pitted against many established norms. The band’s very first incarnation, an all-female 4 piece, recorded one demo at Glasgow’s Hellfire Club and played a handful of gigs. Friends Janice Goodlett and Carole McGowan completed the line up on bass and drums respectively. Strawberry Switchblade would eventually pair down to a duo and go on to chart success but it’s in these raw, passionate recordings that the songwriting and vocal elements were being hammered out and explored in real time.  “Spanish Song” is a previously unreleased song. With Rose McDowall’s instantly recognizable lead vocal dovetailing with Bryson’s harmonies and lead guitar, it’s the first glimpse at an alternative history of Strawberry Switchblade. This incarnation could easily have been featured on a Nuggets compilation or a precursor to the indie-pop revolution that would take over...

Cc Dust

Shinkansen No. 1 / New Ways

Night School

Shinkansen No.1 / New Ways is the second release from CC DUST, a new duo from Olympia, Washington featuring Maryjane Dunphe and David Jaques.Shinkansen No.1 introduces the record with a more industrial, harder edge than much of the group’s debut 12” (CC DUST – S/T), a fast paced, urgent song powered by by fast kick drums and Jaques’ bassline acrobatics. CC Dust opened every show on their recent European tour with this salvo, a dark energy that spirals upwards, with Dunphe’s vocal giving the production space to build into a crescendo. New Ways on the other hand, is perhaps Dunphe’s finest moment yet set to disc. Dunphe is a performer who battles restraint, her every vocal performance a tour de force and New Ways is one of the most emotional and transcendent performances imaginable. With a terse restraint in the verses, the chorus here erupts into an anthem for doomed youth, with every crack in Dunphe’s voice hitting the listener square in the chest.A light that casts shadow, CC Dust is doomed, romantic music anchored by Jaques’ live bass and the powerful performance values Dunphe has honed both in her punk group Vexx and in various film and performance projects. Musically, CC Dust’s precedents might be considered the European synth pop originators of the early 80s, there’s also an abundance of low-end hooks played on baritone and bass guitars that teases the ear like early New Order productions, but in Dunphe’s passionate vocal performances there’s a close-to-the- bone reality that...

Orleans, Ela

Circles Of Upper And Lower Hell

Night School

Circles of Upper and Lower Hell is the grandest, deepest work to date by Polish-born, Glasgow-based sound artist and composer Ela Orleans. From her beginnings inaugurating a lo-fi, homespun style that has since developed fully into a language uniquely her own, from tentative live outings featuring multiple instruments to a now-masterly command of sound, Orleans has become one of the most consistently surprising musicians of the global underground. The seventh album under her own name, this expansive vision, loosely based on Dante’s Inferno but infused with deep personal experience, incorporates sound art, orchestral textures, synth pop and electronic music to construct a world equally peppered with loss and inspiration. It pulls all the strands of Orleans’ previous work together into an epic depiction of turmoil wide in scope but reveling in detail. The album documents a far more personal approach to conventional songwriting. Previously, the artist’s sonic textures have relied on samples cleaved out of context, buried songs beneath warped aural gauze, but Circles blows every element of Orleans’s art upwards and further apart. It begins with a masterful, sparse composition, “The Gate,” before melting into “You Go Through Me” (featuring Stephen McRobbie and Katrina Mitchell from The Pastels), one of its most direct, aching pop moments. “Ghost and Whispers” is a hit from another universe, a sparkling propulsion light of touch and almost unbearably, ghostly human.  Circles of Upper and Lower Hell is an honest portrayal of a descent—be it personal or metaphorical—and there are times, like on...

Patience

The Pressure

Night School

With a bittersweet stream of melancholy trickling through the half speed drum machine, Patience – aka Roxanne Clifford’s - plaintive appraisal of life’s turmoil, a period spent changing, aches across the ages. With The Pressure, Clifford’s songwriting continues to soar into new territories and textures, here providing irresistible Italo-disco hooks with a classic cry/dance backbone. The Pressure takes Patience’s crystalline synth-pop further into the dry-iced corners of a club in 1983.. though here Clifford has managed to marry a cold production, aided as before by Happy Meals’ Lewis Cook’s engineering, with the inherent sweetness in her vocal. The Pressure never relents, with pulsating waves of harmony and crisp snare cracks building like the greatest early Mute Records 7” they never released, an ode to relationships and the craziness they inflict on us. On the flip, Wait For You is the make up after the pressure of the fall out. Following on from her sister-band Veronica Falls’ penchant for covering Roky Erickson, Patience’s quietly dramatic take on his sweet love song is enhanced by Clifford’s Mancunian lilt and the drone-pop synthesizers humming sweetly. Dressed in Clifford’s harmonies, the song’s sweetness brings a soothing counter-balance to the A-side. The Pressure / (Wait) For You follows Patience’s debut 7” The Church, released in June 2016.

Flexibles, The

Pink Everything

Night School

***THE FLEXIBLES are a Punk Rock Band. The Flexibles bend space and time, flex your head, space your Punk, a jarring lightning bolt of truth to the heart of the matter. Comprised of RICHARD YOUNGS, his young son SORLEY YOUNGS and family friend ANDREW PAINE, they operate within Glasgow city limits, outsiders in an outsider culture. Swirling around the wild, searing guitar playing and cosmically infused songwriting of Sorley, The Flexibles' Pink Everything is a concept album of sorts, on the surface a narrative about space travel, the state of the human race in the modern Acopalyx. While vicious in its take down of humanity's own death-drive, the subtext of Pink Everything describes a world where anything is possible.  Over both sides, The Flexibles depict a realm where fantasy and reality are inexplicably fused together… Sorley’s lyrical flourishes touch on the stream-of-conciousness imagery that seems to be swimming in the Youngs genepool, but there are dashes of real life. As a power trio, The Flexibles blow apart pre-conceptions, burn down barriers and paint them pink. The Flexibles believe anything can be possible and embody an ultimate creative freedom, unencumbered by age barriers, limits. Anything can be Pink.

Helena Celle

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

Night School

HELENA CELLE is the synth work and multi-dimensional audio practise of Glasgow-based musician Kay Logan. A 21st century polymath, Logan’s interests lie in the power relationships inherent in technology, how to harness aleatoric practise in a discipline that is often rigid and in exploring the interface between computer science (Logan is also a computer programmer) and sound. Originally recorded in 2014, "If I Can't Handle.." is the first step on the wander, a deliriously sun-burnt foray into abstract techno and a very personal take on an electronic music language that remains obscure to outsiders but here rendered a unique form of emotional communication.While Logan’s interests are powered by academic exploration, what’s most striking about Helena Celle’s approach to electronic music is how effortlessly she deconstructs it, makes it personal: the results are emotive without being explicit, raw and engaging, a true outsider music. The taking apart of norms can be heard on the squelched solo on "I'm Done With 666", governed by the love of noise, the wave is eviscerated, smothering the track in a glorious disregard for convention. The crashing, ultra-compressed chords that flatten opener "Streaming Music for Biometrics" re-wire the listener to appreciate chance, to break the loop. Recorded exclusively using a faltering MC303, live in a room straight to consumer dictaphones, the breadth of texture and depth of ideas on these tracks is truly astonishing. "Miming Swinging Baseball Bat" manages to submerge a bass-line straight into the tape heads, grounding a celestial synth arpeggio that flutters overhead.Informed...

Liberation

S/t

Night School

Liberation is the latest evolution by David West, a dedicated underground dweller and traveler with his groups Rat Columns and Rank / Xerox who has also been spotted in Lace Curtain and Total Control. Familiar elements of West’s songwriting creep out from the speakers this time around, albeit in a more adventurous and personal manner—swathed in analog and FM synths, pinned down by near-funk drum machines, and with a vision expanded into the past and future.  In previous incarnations, West’s alienated and fragile vocals have battled with jangling guitars and distortion, but Liberation sets free his woes and ruminations into space. Taking inspiration from the heyday of Mute Records and electronic dance music’s early experiments with sampling, Liberation’s debut LP is ten songs of the road, about the nameless ghosts on the highway, accidental lovers, the alienation of the stranger in a strange land, the unbearable weight of freedom. Esteemed engineer Mikey Young’s (Total Control / Eddy Current Suppression Ring) production prowess makes for a distilled yet inviting loneliness.

Happy Meals

Fruit Juice

Night School

Fruit Juice is the first new recorded material from Glasgow-based electronic avant pop duo Happy Meals since the intense aftermath of Apéro, their debut album which garnered a place in the Scottish Album Of The Year final 10. Shorter in scale but sharpened and expanded, Fruit Juice takes the tender experimental beginnings and unabashed pop moments of ther first LP into undiscovered countries glowing with possibility. Since Apéro’s release at the end of 2014, Suzanne Rodden and Lewis Cook have toured the globe, from Moscow to Bangalore via various European festivals, and have honed their dynamics live, in the moment, improvising and twisting the beat into new forms. As their live show has become more visceral and cinematic, Fruit Juice documents the duo’s new confidence. Run Around opens the E.P., with a sun-soaked tropicalia as conceived by the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, Rodden’s vocals warped into wordless peons to the rising sun. Lá Lá-bas reaquaints the listener to Rodden’s Franco-Gallic tendancies, but this time Happy Meals reveal a sparse melancholy, with spacious percussion and synth fragments giving way to one of the group’s most immediate moments to date. If You Want Me Now is pop music, pure and from the source. Alternating between French and English, Rodden recreates the live persona that has emerged since the group’s beginnings; an unrestrained performer bringing the innate sensuality beneath Happy Meals’ surface exploding into the light. Cook’s production work here sounds fresh and classic simultaneously, a glorious Jacno tribute enthralled to House music and...

Patience

The Church / My Own Invention

Night School

The patience of a tear reflecting the disco-ball, the pleasure/pain principle of losing someone close, the longing earned on a deserted pier. Patience is an alias of Roxanne Clifford, a songwriter of repute most recently fronting Veronica Falls. With Patience, Clifford has broken the band-shackles, jettisoned other voices and mainlines a sweetened melodic nous recognisable from her other work, though this time over an impeccable synth pop production. These recordings were waxed with the assistance of Lewis Cook of Glasgow band Happy Meals at Full Ashram Celestial Gardens, Glasgow and Sam Pillay of Virginia Wing at VW House. From the onset the listener is plunged into dry ice, a sweeping synth and drum opening beamed in from a club in mid-80s Italy. Clifford's voice cuts straight to the heart, a tale of late nights, the dance of guilt and ecstasy. Lyrically, we're rooted at the spot where the church once stood but the Patient heart waits elsewhere, in the dry mists of dreams. B-side My Own Invention is nominally a ballad, a minimal composition that with the sampled vocal harmonies references Laurie Anderson but with a heart-warming melodic line. It's a simple, nursery-rhyme mini-drama that is effortlessly breezy and a wonderfully sweet partner to dancing with tears in your eyes A-side. Wait for Patience, there will be more.

Billy Bao

Lagos Sessions

Night School

“Experimental; conceptual? That’s what these sort of things are usually called, when references are anything but immediate: in the feeling, hearing and seeing, especially by many…. I think the most charitable review of this live electronic exploration will suggest the four sections bordering on insanity. How else? Even when not a few self-styled patriots were booking their flights out of the country, with an election looming to signal the end of a nation, and a band of modern day faith-heads detonating grenades in every other street corner, two dreamers swim against the currents and sneak through the lagoon into the country collecting inputs of derelict art; of garbage can noise; of hooting; honking horns on screeching brakes squelching tar; rackety generator booms? For an imagined program….  “How to find a centre here? The output? The hum-drum of the street’s daily accent compels the sense of the immediate, the terrestrial; and then those primitive, primeval-seeming echoes of the earliest beginnings of the big bang and its wave-sound simultaneously releasing Sun Ra’s reverb sensation of end time! This should not be danceable but these guys are suggesting the possibility of rhythm in the inchoate. Believe me, you can’t miss the Lagos Faaji, Sakara flow, Awurebe, Afrobeat slices; its jazz, highlife / Euro-Afro funk / rock / rap and seedy night echoes, too. But in their otherworldly dimension. No matter the accolades, I will encourage a therapy of some sorts to the creators of this production.” —Sola Olorunyomi

Nilsson, Molly

Zenith

Night School

***A sweeping, cinematic, emotional change is in the air. Molly Nilsson’s sixth studio album Zenith begins with clear, wide eyes open to Earth as we would love it to be but seldom is. Recorded in her home of Berlin and whilst touring and, as ever, conceived, produced, written and recorded in solitude, Zenith is Nilsson’s big statement and consequently her most affecting work to date. It sees her reveling in big arrangements, sweeping synth strings, bigger choruses and emotions. Like the rest of us she looks within and to endless sunsets in wonder and puzzlement.  That Molly Nilsson is a DIY cult figure is beyond question; she has always written directly and with wit straight down the line between the universal and the personal. The difference with Zenith, and you can hear it in the opening chords of opener The Only Planet, is that her scope is now much wider and her heart heavier than ever before: over a post-ecstatic dusk, Nilsson serenades the globe in a loving embrace. Following on, 1995 is, arguably, one of Nilsson’s finest songs to date. It’s one of those songs to learn the lyrics to, to listen to on repeat, a reason to wear the grooves down to the bone, it’s why pop music can be one of the greatest art forms we have. It’s an example of how, on this album, Molly draws the listener closer to her heart than ever before.  Over the 13 tracks here we get the impression...

Liberez

All Tense Now Lax

Night School

Hermetically sealed and reveling in tumult, All Tense Now Lax is the most significant and developed work yet forged by Liberez. Based in main orchestrator John Hannon’s remote studio No Recordings in Rayleigh, England, Liberez have expanded their palette from previous outings on Alter to produce a perfectly engineered machine that consumes the beholder.   A tense, gut-wrenching listen wrought with carefully considered space, the range of techniques and the depth of atmosphere is staggering. All Tense Now Lax never settles on a simple depiction of dread, foreboding or anxiety but layers textures upon rhythms to produce towering minarets of conflicting emotion. _Захвална породица (translated “Grateful Family”) is a case in point: Hannon’s wailing violin is torn across collaborator Nina Bosnic’s lyric, while a loping beat is crushed with distortion. Indeed, a more pronounced focus on rhythm and movement on Liberez’ 3rd album is perhaps what sets it apart from previous work. Centerpiece Grease The Axles showcases Hannon’s technique of detourning from other cultures to dramatically altered effect. A lopsided rhythm and scraped violin are torn to breaking point: what starts off as a Moondog-esque tap at a train station ends with the train in flames. Liberez’ brutality is not as literal as this all the time: on How Much For Your Brother an aggressively over-driven vocal loop is hammered into the stereo field by primitive percussion courtesy of drummer Pete Wilkins, but the overall effect is one of movement and hypnosis. A Rebetika melting into night-terror. The title track,...

Dige, Sally

Hard To Please

Night School

Consolidating 2 years of solo work, “Hard To Please” is the debut album by Canadian polymath Sally Dige. First coming to prominence in the synth-wave scene with an elusive, meta-persona in a blur of homemade costumes, Dige’s world has grown to encompass visual art, theatre and design elements. Most surprising on her long-awaited debut however is the occasional removal of the various masks and characters Dige has played to date, revealing something more tangible and fragile underneath. “Hard To Please” still revels in a darkly thrilling, Italo-disco pop music, awash with dry ice and hidden in shadow, most personified on the instant classic Immaculate Deception. However, on the long, nocturnal walk home Dige begins to sing of loneliness, being lost, the transience of our relationships. Attention to detail is paramount. On the title-track the crisp early-80s, swooning bass line duets with Dige’s desperate plea to a lover fading into the distance, a presence lamented with even more pathos on the towering, early-4AD-esque, slow-burner Your Girl. It’s a new fragility that effortlessly manages to convey a luxurious, inescapable sensuality at the same time. Indeed, Hard To Please portrays a clear narrative, with electronic body movers like Doppelganger portraying an out-of control, self-obsessed persona at the beginning of the record. Breaking down into the foggy murk, the more hopelessly romantic album closers “A Certain Beauty” and “Dance Of Delusion” burn a ghostly image into the listener’s mind, as Dige, or someone like her, over Cure-like swooning reverberations entreaties the powers that be...

Paper Dollhouse

Aeonflower

Night School

***An exploration of warped, dream-like atmosphere and taught, noise-ingrained electronics, PAPER DOLLHOUSE has evolved from the solo work of ASTRUD STEEHOUDER into an expansive, cinematic project now involving visual artist NINA BOSNIC. Recorded with a stronger focus on electronic processes and with a deeper, light-starved aesthetic, Aeonflower’s emboldened use of crushed-noise dynamics takes the London-based group’s debut A Box Painted Black (2011, Bird/Finders Keepers) frame into darker, murkier and more thrilling territory. Aeonflower is the slow decent of a newly-discorporated spirit into a fogged, neon-lagoon, a drowned world still-lit. If the first LP was a box of raw secrets with hints of obscured folk roots, Aeonflower is the endless rain of expression, experience and change. On this outing both artists’ vocals are expressive, forgoing complex lyrical concerns for minimal text invested with emotive power.   Opener "Oracle" bleeds into Stand, the first of Steehouder’s haunted vocals, a fragile minimalism augmented with barren guitar. "Helios" sees a drum-machine kick + ride cymbal pin down an dark, enveloping vocal duet until "Psyche" obliterates it all with billowing noise, a thrilling shock to the system. The swirling synths and suppressed emotion of "Your Heart" peak in the centerpiece "Diane," a shadowy piece highlighting Steehouder’s minimalist approach. Side 2 acts as a mini-suite, with Diamanda Galas-inspired vocal abstractions and walls of sound coming down with stand out ambient track "Black Flowers." Dark and light interplay beautifully on album closer "Siren," a turbulent if ambiguous build-up of harmony and noise. A cinematic portrayal of...

Apostille

Powerless

Night School

Apostille is the solo musical guise of Glaswegian DIY protagonist Michael Kasparis. Initially a creative harbour from his groups Please and The Lowest Form, Apostille has grown into an explosive synth-punk project unafraid of both physicality and emotional leakage. Powerless is Kasparis’ first album proper, following exploratory works on Goaty Tapes and Clan Destine, and is Apostille’s first release on his own Night School Records. Fiercely independent in practice and execution, Apostille’s stated purpose is to bridge the gap between audience and performer, to connect through the fog of power structures and post-modernism; to ferment a direct pop music unconcerned with control. Powerless explodes with Life - a rage of brilliance that acts as a communal outlet of shared frustration and confusion at the world. At moments haiku-like mantras lament over a damaged industrial de-composition as in The Collector, at other times there’s a Depeche Modish fragility as in Side 2 opener Deserter. In warped, subterranean ballad Olivia’s Eyes an almost decapitated duet details criminal instincts, while live favourite Slurry demolishes proceedings with a Suicide-like take on Chicago house; a mammoth journey into the psyche of a ‘Falling Down’ prototype, lost in a world of perpetual motion, speeding up and uncaring. Touchstones of early Mute artists like Fad Gadget can be found in Apostille’s overwhelmingly physical live performances but like Tovey’s best work, or perhaps that of Crash Course in Science, there’s a depth on record that paints in more complex colours. Apostille is pop music from the outside looking...

Mcdowall, Rose

Don’t Fear The Reaper

Night School

Rose McDowall’s trajectory from punk provocateur to chart-subverting pop star to underground neo-folk legend has been fraught with strain and adventure. In 2015, Night School Records will attempt to tell the story of this wayward daughter of Glasgow through a schedule of reissues and unreleased material. Record Store Day 2015 sees the first fruit of this collaboration, an official release of the unapproved 12-inch single of “Don’t Fear the Reaper,” originally waxed by McDowall in 1988. “Don’t Fear the Reaper” has been remastered and re-edited by legendary engineer and selector Sean Pennycook for 2015. McDowall’s clear-as-crystal vocal performance sails above a latin-flavored disco beat with the original’s doomy chord changes revitalized into a shiny, gloriously hedonistic brew. Accompanying is the original “Crystal Days,” a track that featured on McDowall’s self-released Cut With the Cake Knife demos—a set lost, until now, to history. On the flip, Sean P cuts up the original “Reaper” into an Italo-ized disco re-edit before the instrumental plays out.  McDowall’s treatment of “Don’t Fear The Reaper” speaks volumes to where her head was at in 1988. It was the singer’s first solo release after the breakup of Strawberry Switchblade and even then it was unapproved. Rush-released by a collaborator and without her consent, “Reaper” quickly vanished and has become the stuff of legend for pop, disco and Strawberry Switchblade fanatics alike. Now fully approved and with new, minimal artwork by Russell Elder, McDowall invites us to take her hand.

Happy Meals

Apéro

Night School

Happy Meals is the Glasgow-based duo of Suzanne Rodden and Lewis Cook, life-partners since high school finding expression in cosmic form. Originally from the Scottish borders, Rodden and Cook (also of The Cosmic Dead) began Happy Meals in a flurry of experimentation at Glasgow’s creative hub The Green Door Studio. Initially the result of a free music production course, Apéro sees the pair embark on a blissful voyage into a love-fuelled, outward-looking hedonism. Both artists operate machines and sing but it’s the dominating Franco-Scottish lingua-franca of Suzanne Rodden that imbues a sense of seductive fun to the album. Their first recorded statement, Apéro is an instant rush of Kosmiche-disco, utterly addictive and inviting. The epic Crystal Salutation welcomes the listener in with analogue synths delayed into the horizon before Electronic Disco ushers in distorted drum machines and Rodden’s disco-at- sunset vocal. Album stand-out Altered Images is a pop-masterpiece, mixing French / Italo disco, acid basslines and a sense of Scottish optimism. Age Of Love is unabashedly the feeling of being up until day-break, with layered synths climaxing all-around. Retro-futuristic visions abound on the beat-less Visions Of Utopia before closer Le Voyage reprises back the cosmopolitan disco, playing out the perfect club night in ecstatic fashion. It’s an enchanting, inclusive vision; everyone is invited, the future is bright. Just say yes.

Prostitutes

Nouveauree

Night School

Prostitutes – aka Cleveland, Ohio marauder James Donadio - flexes a whole new set of muscles on Nouveauree, his first work for Night School. Sticking to an all-analogue machine-based strategy, Donadio has warped and stripped his palette to create a juddering force majeure across 5 tracks and 28 minutes of power play. With previous work on labels such as Mira and Spectrum Spools, Prostitutes has deconstructed Techno forms and re-invigorated 4/4 structures to delirious, often psychedelic effect. Nouveauree can be viewed as a purge, a palette cleanser, a slab of re-formed white-noise, bass-heavy kick drums and searing, improbable sampling. Mastered by James Plotkin and cut by Matt Colton, each sound and bar is perfectly placed for maximum stereo-field contamination. Opening stomper “Late To Take It Light” merges echoing, obfuscated sound with a doom-laden kick before collapsing into an analogue, almost-improvised climax. “Hate’s In The City” ups the tempo with masterful, bass-heavy rhythm and faded static bursts before “Punk In The Street” jumps in, quite possibly the most audacious track of Prostitutes’ career. A definite highlight, the track is infected with a deeply offensive horn sample that does battle with a rumbling, deafening drum machine, a battle that is decided with one of the most extreme 15 seconds waxed this year. Side 2 allows Donadio some breathing space, with “Dragged It Home To Bed” reveling in a more rolling rhythm punctuated with lush frequencies and expert filtering. “So Goddamn Gaunt” rounds off Nouveauree, a harking back to the classic Prostitutes sound, claustrophobic samples...

Charcoal Owls

Tin Roof

Night School

Charcoal Owls is the ever-evolving collaboration between musician Tom James Scott and poet/vocalist Russell Walker (Pheromoans, The Bomber Jackets). Their debut LP "Tin Roof" sees Scott draw on disparate forms - Satiesque minimalism, field recording, abstracted pop and improvisation to converse with the peculiar lyricism that Walker has perfected over his various activities. The result is a warm, absurdist meditation on suburban insecurity and the tragi-comic. Tin Roof follows two sold out cassette releases on OneC Records and Night People. Opening with a lilting instrumental piece embedded with field recordings, Russell Walker’s narrative begins on 2nd track “Artificial Eyes.” Soon the listener is drawn into the curious worldview the writer has been expanding on for years, his wonderfully pathetic characters lightning conductors for provincial crisis and every-day profundities. Through out Tin Roof the listener’s ear is drawn by the juxtaposition of Scott’s minimal melodic lines and Walker’s often downright hilarious verse; “Anxious under tin again, one un-emptied wheelie bin.” There’s a real depth to mine – tracks like “Clapham Monster,” a one minute diary entry which will make any listener spit out their porridge in laughter, rub up against stark, downright beautiful pieces like “I Just Can’t Say When.” At another point “Grace Period” (featuring Rose Keeler on vocals) brings a soothing drone cadence after the acerbic, commuter-angst of “Twickenham Slags.” The dichotomies at work on Tin Roof make it a truly unique world. Both sad and funny, minimal and busy, poetic and every-day. Once immersed it’ll be difficult to...

Yong Yong

Greatest It's

Night School

Since seeping out from the Lisbon underground in 2012 with some clandestine internet musics and supplemented by a debut LP - “Love” which garnered universal admiration and confusion - Yong Yong have since relocated and reconvened at the other end of Europe.  The duo have re-assessed their sound, experimenting with near-dancefloor-bothering beat making, warped samples on degrading loops and a much deeper exploration of the frayed atmospherics that they only hinted at previously. On Greatest It’s Yong Yong have further embraced the ethical rectitude of the mistake, further opened the crack in the mirror that popular culture perpetually presents to the consumer. Making a virtue of their limitations, Greatest It’s was recorded on decaying machinery and obsolete software but with an enhanced sense of electronic dynamics than previous work: still glorifying in the skewed and broken, but now with new depths and emotional response. Tracks like Sesamstrrat seem to pour radioactive fog into a R’n’B pop hit, resulting in a mutated form of unique electronic pop music, Macu Lu-Lu present a broken beat that dredges the outer limits of a mid-90s Warp experimentation and the epic Oeiras drags a wobbly beat through the melancholic wringer. Currently residing in the culturally-rich, former industrial superpower of Glasgow, Yong Yong’s excavations of the recent past point ever more pertinently to music of the future. A resolutely imperfect future built on erring, yet beautiful foundations.

Love Cult

Know EP

Night School

Beginning with tape experimentation, noise excursions and long-form drift and drone musics, Love Cult have steadily built up a discography based on decomposing and deconstructing. “Know” EP is the first vinyl statement that sees the Russian duo dive headlong into beat-forms and movement music. Following their fog-covered debut LP on Public Information, Anya Kuts and Ivan Zoloto have swerved the spread-out spaciousness and primitive rhythm debris and reached for crucial, crude dub and techno templates. Ghostly remnants still pervade Know – Kuts’ heavily-processed vocals are still in evidence – but with the adoption of distorted kick drums, off-kilter sub-basslines and compressed melodic strands, this Love Cult is more vital, more transformative. Recently the Karelian duo have coined the apt term «no tech», which stands for «northern technology».Terrifying opener Mise En Abyme is the bridge between older Love Cult and the new forms – massive, trawling chords barely contained by a rolling beat and cut-up vocals, like Sunn O))) lost in a lightless nightclub. My Boy breaks into an alternate-universe Garage rhythm, perverting the groove with ecclesiastical reverb drones and stabbing bass. The push and pull of Lust Undone, like a possessed drum machine transmitting the death rattle of the recently deceased, gives way to the closing, epic It’s True. Perhaps the most straight-forward offering and undoubtedly one of Love Cult’s strongest moments, It’s True uses bass-bin shattering tones, quick-fire high hats and end-of-the-world noise injections to truly shatter the perceptions of the listener.  “Know” EP operates between the dreamy and the...

Space Lady

The Space Lady's Greatest Hits

Night School

***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 favourites; 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. Following the release of this archive, The Space Lady will be issuing new material and travelling the world to present her message outside the United States for the first time.   In the mid ‘90s The Space Lady packed away her Casio synth and silenced her distinctive voice, retiring from the streets of San Francisco. Now, more than 30 years after her initial forays on Haight Ashbury,...

Space Lady

Major Tom / Radar Love

Night School

The Space Lady began her odyssey on the streets of Boston in the late 70s, then San Francisco ten years later, playing versions of contemporary pop music with an accordion and dressed flamboyantly, transmitting messages of peace and harmony. Following the theft and destruction of her accordion , The Space Lady invested in a then-new Casio keyboard, complete with a phase shifter and headset mic, birthing an otherworldly new dimension to popular song that has captured the imaginations of the underground and its leading exponents ever since. The legend of The Space Lady has continued to grow in the 21st century. Originally featured on Irwin Chusid’s landmark 'outsider' compilation Songs In The Key Of Z, then on mixes by Erol Alkan and John Maus, this music has transcended genre, style and fashion, opening up hearts and minds along the way. 14 years ago The Space Lady packed away her Casio synth and silenced her distinctive voice, retiring from the streets of San Francisco. Now, more than 30 years after her initial forays on Haight-Ashbury Harvard Square and Haight Ashbury, she has surfaced with the first ever official release of her timeless, startling, haunting music and, even more remarkably, has re-started her live career. Now in Colorado, The Space Lady continues to spread her message of peace, harmony and love.

Dige, Sally

Forget Me / Losing You

Night School

Statuesque Vancouverite Sally Dige is emblematic of a restless spirit flitting in and out of view, an apparition just out of reach. On "Forget Me" the idea of self is brought into focus then blurred as Dige intones a dark hymn to self-erasing. Over an emotionally wrought 4 mins, post-punk bass lines and moody synth-leads edge the author into willed obscurity from view. On the edges of the song are hints at a fractured, fragile character: "I'd rather go alone / and not be missed by anyone." Is it auto-biographical? Or a character impeccably acted? On the other side "Losing You" proves that Sally Dige never gives too much away. Here she wears the mask of a jaded lover watching the physical and moral collapse of someone once loved, confronted with something unrecognisable. Melding an Italo Disco skeleton with dark analogue synths, in many ways the music is similarly an eroded form once recognised, now perverted into a propulsive, strange new language. This is pop music approached from an enchanted angle.  Progressing from early synth-punk beginnings to fully-fledged DIY autonomy, Dige presents a vision out of sync with time and place yet in tune with a deep disconnect that is felt in the pit of the stomach. Sally Dige emerged in 2012 with a now sold-out 7" on Fabrika Records and a portfolio of videos that expanded her artistic narrative. Now relocated to Berlin, Dige is currently working on her debut album.

Terror Bird

All This Time

Night School

***TERROR BIRD is the songs of Vancouver artist NIKKI NEVER. Beginning with naive but affecting songs hammered into primitive recording apparatus and released on handdubbed cassette releases, Terror Bird soon attracted the attention of intrepid independent labels such as Night People, La Station Radar and Adagio830. Each release has documented a growing maturity in songwriting and emotional scope. All This Time is Terror Bird’s third full length and is by far the most personal, emotionally affecting and musically developed. Recorded at home over a period of 3 months, the 10 songs on All This Time document a period of intense emotional upheaval, a period wherein Never underwent major shifts in her personal life, rediscovered the solo recording process (previous albums having used live drumming and studio production) and married a raw, personal music with a straighttotape aesthetic most intone with her early recording experiences. The difference this time is that Never’s unique voice at turns operatic and fragile, untutored and wearing its heart on its sleeve serves as the perfect conduit for the emotional turmoil in the songs. Never’s voice has grown into a formidable instrument, a towering, unabashed vocal whose resonance curls around the synth and drum machine production, at times duetting with itself, at times scaling the vocal register to reach new dramatic heights. Brought up on the music of the ‘80s “studio” The Smiths, Siousxie, The Cure Never’s music exists beyond modern zeitgeists or considerations, subverting “big production” music into a personal DIY aesthetic. It’s a pure...

Apostille

Wrong / The Road To War

Night School

Debut vinyl release from Apostille - aka Night School's Michael Kasparis' fractured pop utterances. Kaleidoscopic instrumentation and cracked synths frame two bona fide degraded pop songs centred around a lurking sense of misanthropy, albeit a misanthropy tempered with ecstatic tendencies. 'Wrong' is the mid paced groover for self-erasing western consciousness, possessing a chorus hook so insidious and fun it diverts from the content. 'The Road To War' takes a sisters of mercy in hypnagogia approach to anthems and produces a sing-a-long both unintelligible and seductively drenched in fervour and sweat.

Divorce

S/t

Night School

***Night School is proud to present the debut full-length by DIVORCE—a culmination of four years of uncompromising sonic brutality channeled into a miasma of hate and power. Since their formation in 2008, the Glasgow band has evolved from no wave dirge practitioners into a unique cult that blurs the boundaries of punk, noise rock and metal. Slippery in definition but relentlessly focused, they’ve set their own standard with a brace of 7-inches, EPs and split singles, released on a plethora of renowned labels like Optimo Music, Merok, Milk, Winning Sperm Party and Gravy—as well as extensively touring the UK and Europe. Recorded by ALI WALKER at Glasgow’s Arc Studio & Devil’s Own Studio, Divorce finds the band pushing their furious sound further than ever before, unleashing a torrent of pummeling rhythms; serrated, overdriven riffs; extended freak-outs and ecstatic, push-and-pull dynamics. They also continue to explore their experimental tendencies, incorporating power-electronics, white noise and, on the track “Stabby (Stabby) Stab,” free-jazz saxophone (courtesy of guest musician JAMES SWINBURNE). All this, combined with an over-arching determination to take their music to new limits structurally and sonically, makes Divorce a unified audio experience. UK import.

Group Rhoda

Out Of Time - Out Of Touch

Night School

***NOW AVAILABLE ON VINYL!!! GROUP RHODA is a solo project based in San Francisco. The fruits of a five year journey into self-discipline and personal discovery, MARA BARENBAUM’s Group Rhoda uses stark musical practices and analog electronics to evoke imagery and rhythms both atavistic and futuristic. Using the tools of musical simplification—synthesizers, analog effects and drum machines—Group Rhoda's aim is to build a pop music that reaches freedom through discipline. All instrumentation, whether in the studio or on stage, is played live and with no sampling; a completely organic language formed from the roots of synthesis. Out Of Time, Out of Touch is Group Rhoda's debut recording. It is the culmination of a process which began with a self-taught keyboard technique and a desire to learn about the machinations of the tools of pop music and, in turn, the environment in which it is produced. While many of GR's choices are implicitly political—from a strict methodology to a strong commitment to DIY ethics and community—the outcome is also easily approachable as sublime pop music in the best sense. With a grounding in minimal wave and the post-industrial landscape, GR takes surprising detours into tropical rhythm patterns, dubbed-out bass throbs, hypnotic Wurlitzer flourishes and, above all, GR's distinctive, plaintive vocal. The alluring contradiction at the heart of Out Of Time, Out Of Touch is the push of the psychedelic, the hyper-real, the overtly physical and the pull of the artificial, the synthesized, the stark. This contradiction is brought to light continually...

Sea Lions / Golden Grrrls

Tour Split

Night School

***Slumberland group SEA LIONS travelled to the UK for the first time in July 2012 to play Indietracks and tour with UK group GOLDEN GRRRLS. To commemorate the occasion, they put together a limited 7-inch which now sees worldwide release. Both bands contribute an original song and a cover version. Alongside “On and Off”—as close to an anthem as they’ve written yet—Sea Lions take apart “Nervous Breakdown” by Black Flag, turning it into a shamble-core nugget of shrill guitar marked by ADRIAN PILLADO’s laconic vocal delivery. Golden Grrrls tackle “I Don’t Want You Anyway” by Kiwi group Look Blue Go Purple, remaining fairly faithful to the original with some added punk energy, while their original is a garage pop bullet in the form of “Billy,” one which RUARI MACLEAN takes lead vocal to counter the female backing.

Bomber Jackets

Centurion Travel

Night School

Bomber Jackets' debut 7" follows astounding releases on Night People and Sex is Disgusting records and represents a leap in focus. While previous releases have seen the group obfuscated by tape hiss and bedroom recording fidelity, 'Centurion Travel' sees their sound crystalized into a sparkled evocation. The result is a sharp synthesis that recalls pop and dance musics eroded by time and intent, drum machines and consumer electronics helmed by Walker's incisive and increasingly droll text. Highly evocative of a collective mass memory, both music and voice suggest forms that the listener may be familiar with but re-arranged into a jagged version of the recollection. Most importantly, Bomber Jackets retain a celebratory enthusiasm for pop music and its possibilities.

Yong Yong

Love

Night School

Yong Yong are a duo from Lisbon, Portugal comprising Rodolfo Brito & Francisco Silva. 'Love' is their debut release, an hour long cassette which drifts in and out of inner ear consciousness using a multi-technique language which Yong Yong can definitively say is their own. Beginning their recorded career with abstract drone music, Yong Yong have since widened their scope; communicating a slanted perspective of a whole slew of contemporary musics. Samples and degraded electronics, the aesthetics of crumbling form, and pop music turned in on itself are mixed into a vortex which still manages to be underpinned by a melancholic sense of melody. Both experimental and populist, 'Love' is the result of high and low culture smelted down into a miasmic, evocative mercury.

Golden Grrrls

New Pop / The Red Sea

Night School

Divorce

Love Attack / Meating

Night School

Terror Bird

Outside / When I Woke Up

Night School

Golden Grrrls

Beaches / Date It

Night School