***SIM HUTCHINS, a producer and video artist from North West Essex UK, releases his debut album I Enjoy To Sweep A Room. Though it stylistically references techno, IDM and ambient-drone, the album could be said to be genre-blind, avoiding any easy classification. It takes an outsider approach to composition, channelling the uncompromising visionistic electronics of Actress, the disintegrating drones of William Basinksi, the cosmic synthwork of Hieroglyphic Being and Jandek's propensity for atonal experimentalism. I Enjoy To Sweep A Room is firmly the work of an artist operating on the peripheries of the medium. The result is nothing difficult or introverted however, but instead an optimistic and romantic album, a rare example of content, form and concept perfectly complementing each other.
LP $19.85
02/26/2016
CD $16.00
02/26/2016
***THROWING SHADE is a rising London-based producer, DJ and NTS Radio presenter, who Dazed and Confused magazine have hailed her as “London’s new alt-pop hope”, received a 9/10 review from Mixmag for her debut EP 9/10, and charted in The Wire’s top 10 electronic releases of 2014. Her second EP Fate Xclusive effortlessly covers ground between seductive downbeat pop (lead single ’Honeytrap’, vocalled by EMILY BEE), pulsing club (‘4eva Fate’) and contemporary leftfield electronic music (‘Mirror’). All bear the rainbow fingerprints of her signature kaleidoscopic production style. The EP release sees her poised to build on a busy last 18 months and reach a wider audience. October 2013 saw her debut release—Mystic Places—on Kassem Mosse’s Ominira imprint. In May 2014 she released the 19 Jewels EP on No Pain In Pop, and followed up with the Chancer / Blanx 12” on the dancefloor label Happy Skull. She was commissioned by the Tate Britain gallery in November 2014 to composer a piece of music for the Turner Prize. Her productions are often described as “cosmic R&B' and “digital soul”. Drawing in iridescent strains of popular music—from African and Asian modes, to the grime-y axis of London’s contemporary sound narrative—Throwing Shade creates a diverse and abstract sound patchwork, intangibly borne in the here-and-now. Throwing Shade also presents a bi-weekly show on NTS Radio, a painstakingly researched showcase of weird and wonderful music from across the globe.
12" $19.25
07/28/2015
***ECHO LAKE's debut album Wild Peace was released in June 2012, after the then five piece had surfaced 18 months prior to a flurry of blog attention. The record is a near-perfect encapsulation of their early sound, with critics calling it “dazzling, hypnotic and deliriously seductive” and “truly magnificent”. However loud the acclaim, the release was inevitably overshadowed by the shock death of drummer PETER HAYES a few days before release. The band recovered in private. The songwriting pair of guitarist THOM HILL and vocalist LINDA JARVIS would spend two years working on the tracks which would form Era in East London’s Holy Mountain Studio, the first time the band had spent in a professional studio. The album is a result of this experience; far more mature, denser and considered than the band’s home recorded debut. Points recall the textures and expansive ambition of Spaceman 3, Neu! and Deerhunter yet the album is never stylistically referential to any particular period or style.
LP $19.85
05/19/2015
CD $16.00
05/19/2015
***HALLS—the solo project of 23 year old South London musician SAM HOWARD—released a debut album, Ark, in November 2012. A long twelve months later—after rapt reviews and a stint modelling for Hedi Slimane in Paris—Howard’s second album is here, and the changes are marked. “This is an album about opening up. Ark is the cold album, closed-off, obscure and confusing. I obscured lyrics and hid behind reverb and mumbling. For this album I wanted to reach out more. In some ways it is darker than Ark. I feel that I struggle to connect with a lot of people and I want to connect somehow. Love to Give is about opening up and becoming more of a human being.” In his new work, Howard has replaced apprehension and doubt with a muted hope, and just as the sentiment has shifted, as too the compositions and arrangements have moved into the real world. Ark’s electronic templates have ceded to - as Howard says - “embrace the sound of human beings”, and the instrumental palate has widened: brass, tuned percussion, woodwinds, and organs now flesh out the tracks, with digital percussion only used for texture rather than structure. Much was recorded in a theatre in London’s Woolwich, with Howard’s vocals recorded naturally in the large main hall, and passing traffic and street noise can be heard faintly throughout the album. Opening track ‘Love To Give’ builds from hymnal acoustic reverie to a wall-of-noise breakdown, before ending on a military brass finale; the seven...
LP $20.25
03/18/2014
CD $13.00
03/18/2014
***Ukkonen is a Finnish “artic-house” producer. Debut album The Isolated Rhythms Of.. was released on Uncharted Audio in 2012, and was met with considerable underground acclaim. Despite a self-declared “zero interest in dance music”, The Wire magazine called his work “a solution to the problem of dance music”. Second LP The Ancient Tonalities of… is a marked progression for an already prophetic talent. The record is built on two central themes: adulation and respect for influence and tradition, and a pressing desire to contribute something “new” to music. The record is in no way difficult; in its simplest form it’s a striking, purely structured collection of ambient techno and leftfield electronica. Yet after repeated listens the intensity and breadth of the creative vision is gripping; it’s an oceanic, enveloping work worthy of infinite relistens and contemplation. It is no co-incidence influence is both drawn from beyond the predictable, and from within it: composers Bartok, Messiaen, Einojuhani Rautavaara, Takemitsu are acknowledged alongside electronic totems Squarepusher and Aphex Twin; early vocal music and the Ars Nova period (Machaut, Perotin, de Vitry) beside household contemporary minimalist and modernist composers and rock classicists Pink Floyd and Jimi Hendrix. This catch-all extends to musical theory. Melodies are instant, yet among the techniques used are "mensuration canons" (one melody simultaneously played at different speeds by different voices to create it's own accompaniment); “isorhythms” (a fixed series of pitches run through a fixed rhythm at odds with the time signature); and “simultaneous tempos” (tracks utilising...
LP $20.25
03/18/2014
CD $13.00
03/18/2014
***HALLS is the solo project of 21 year old South London musician SAM HOWARD. Ark—his brooding debut album—draws from a palette of crystalline melodies, intense production and panoramic instrumentation to create a deeply personal, constructivist work of art. Evocative in sound and yet isolationist in sentiment, the album is an intense, dramatic and emotive study of loss and modern anxiety set to a strained electronic soundtrack. Howard's centrepiece tenor voice and his glitchy, scattered rhythms present Thom Yorke's The Eraser as an easy reference point, alongside other exponents of recent mutations in London's unique urban sound narrative such as The XX, Burial or Mount Kimbie. Ark, however, also hints at another world beyond this. One of loop innovator Jan Jelinek's cut-and-paste percussion; the abstracted, intricate instrumentation of Efterklang; the deep choral swells of Justin Vernon's Bon Iver; haunting ambient composers Tim Hecker or Thomas Köner; and cerebral, minimal modern classicist Nils Frahm. Openers 'I' and 'White Chalk' set the album's tone perfectly; Howard's piano chords and depth-charge kick and snare engulfed by mournful choir harmonies cloaked in cathedral-sized reverb. 'I'm Not There' and 'Roses For The Dead' pair devastating symphonic arrangements and heart-on-the-rocks strings with classic pop structure and melody, before short piano piece 'Ark' beautifully recalls 'White Chalks' spellbinding motif. From there, 'Funeral' channels the lost airwaves of early 2000s 2-step under a silhouetted, eerie vocal; album centrepiece 'Shadow Of The Colossus' masterly juxtaposes digital and analogue drums with punctuative negative space; and 'Reverie' pierces the album's overarching impressionism...
LP $15.50
11/06/2012
CD $13.50
11/06/2012
***A GRAVE WITH NO NAME is the recording moniker of Londoner ALEXANDER SHIELDS plus friends. This is the band's first new material since 2010's acclaimed Mountain Debris debut. Recorded without the meticulous production work which characterized Mountain Debris the focus of this single has shifted to the vulnerability and honesty of Shields' songwriting. Limited to 300 copies. Artwork by NEILL KIDGELL. This is a real keeper...proper dazed pop scree. Killer.
7" $9.25
05/17/2011
***A collection of weird dance music. Solitude need not be a destination. What you’ll find here is the work of six acts who use isolation as an escape hatch into vaster internal realms, zones for transmitting untethered from the mores and strictures of music scene etiquette. The tracks here are not ‘done things’—instead, in bedroom retreat, working feet from where they sleep each night, PATTEN and PROTECT-U, PARIAH and BATCHCRONES, DUNIAN and D’EON are free to conjure impressions of the club’s invisible parts. Those that loiter between its sweating walls, ceilings and pillars. Some hear purity, some hear slime. Some of The Bedroom Club sounds written in the dark hours beyond shut bars, while other moments seem to anticipate the club’s unifying noise and ooze with the wide-eyes found bursting most often from the desirous, waiting skulls of the underage. All of them, by inference, honour the value of the most private portal, where the digital air snares strike into can hold still-quivering cuts of ecstatic rib-meat as easily as they can harbour the chrome heart of some colossal jet. It's the idea that counts—here are intimate ones, for you. Windows to auteured territories for you to prise. UK import.
LP $17.25
05/17/2011