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£25.49 £14.99
£25.49 £14.99
Few copies in stock with minor wear on sleeves, pictures can be sent upon request.
Limited Coke Bottle Clear Vinyl.
Six years since his last album, Love If Possible, Shintaro Sakamoto has completed his fourth solo album, Like A Fable. The album's ten songs describe everyday life in a world undergoing dramatic changes in the midst of a pandemic.
Sakamoto continually updates his sound, and with Like A Fable, he has made his best pop album yet.
Like his previous albums, Like A Fable was recorded with the longtime members of the Shintaro Sakamoto Band: Yuta Suganuma on drums, AYA (OOIOO) on bass and backing vocals, and Toru Nishiuchi on saxophone and flute.
KEN KEN (Ken2d Special, Urban Volcano Sounds) guested on trombone on two tracks.
Tracklisting:
Side A
1. That Was Illegal
2. You Still OK?
3. Like A Fable
4. You Have Time But I Don't
5. Sad Errand
Side B
6. Star
7. Floating Weeds
8. Thickness Of Love
9. One Day
10. The Whereabouts Of Romance
Few copies in stock with minor wear on sleeves, pictures can be sent upon request.
Waking the Dreaming Body is the follow-up to Tucson artist Karima Walker's 2017 standout album Hands In Our Names, which garnered praise from Pitchfork, MOJO, and Bandcamp. The album includes dense harmonic arrangements of synthesizer, guitar, piano, percussion, field recordings, tape loops and Karima's dulcet singing voice.
The final result is a 40-minute dream-narrative of her conscious and subconscious minds that oscillates between the rich textures of her ambient work and the melody and poetry of her melancholic, Americana-tinged songwriting, their ebb and flow recalling liminal states of half-sleep where images and emotions are recalled and forecasted from the previous night's dreams. Night falls in regular intervals throughout the album, forming a natural dialogue between waking and dreaming. Landscape has always played a huge role in her work.
Throughout Waking the Dreaming Body, Walker's uncanny sound design evokes the delicacy, grandeur and terrifying enormity of the American Southwest. Close your eyes while listening to "Horizon, Harbor Resonance," the thirteen-minute instrumental at the album's center, and watch the shifting desert landscape in your mind's eye; from the babble of flash flood runoff to the slow parade of cumulus cloud shadows across the red earth, cactus and creosote, and then, moving backwards in time, the thunderous eruptions of ancient volcanoes that pushed the Tucson Mountains skyward. As indicated by the video for 'Reconstellated', Waking the Dreaming Body holds a deep connection to the environs in which it was created, the delicacy, grandeur and terrifying enormity of the American Southwest.
The mountains, rivers and starry skies of Walker’s desert home are referenced in nearly every song she sings on the album, simultaneously grounding the action and imbuing it with a sense of otherworldliness.
"A perfect balance of beauty and abstraction" Mojo 'Rising'
"Exquisitely crafted" GoldFlakePaint
"Hands in Our Names illustrates what she does best as a composer: She looks at the familiar from different angles, and stares intently at everything until it feels new again" 7.4 Pitchfork
Tracklisting:
1. Reconstellated
2. Softer
3. Interlude
4. Window I
5. Window II
6. Horizon, Harbor Resonance
7. Waking the Dreaming Body
8. For Heddi
9. Uncovering
Few copies in stock with minor wear on sleeves, pictures can be sent upon request.
“Everyone’s hoping that nobody sees/all our little efforts at dignity” This last line of the title track from Cindy’s fourth LP Why Not Now? works as a slogan for Karina Gill's evolving musical vision.
Her music is simple out of necessity and introverted in delivery, but the songs contain vivid worlds and are quietly ambitious. With this latest batch, Gill pulled the process of making Cindy music even more inward. “Some of these songs were first recorded as demos alone in my basement. I think that process set the tone for the record…Maybe it set up a kind of starkness,” she says.
Moving on from the fixed quartet that performed the first three albums, Gill worked alongside original keyboardist Aaron Diko to develop the songs and they enlisted players from the ever-blossoming SF pop scene to realise her minimalist vision -- members of Flowertown, Telephone Numbers, April Magazine, Famous Mammals, and Sad Eyed Beatniks to name a few.
The collective sounds fill out the record perfectly with John Cale-esque viola on ‘August’, lo-fi fairground organs, and a tasteful full-band sound that crops up throughout. ‘A Trumpet on a Hillside’ is the most triumphant Cindy has ever sounded, all ascending chords and a wedding march melody tumbling out of an old synth. Still, some of the best moments are Gill alone, as on ‘Playboy’, just naked guitar and voice, and when the forlorn whistling solo kicks in, it feels like the loneliest star is imploding in a distant galaxy.
While the dream-pop tag is probably still relevant, this isn’t algorithm-fed genre ambience. Gill’s vocal/lyrical presence can be as gently momentous as Leonard Cohen or as intellectually potent as any ’79-’80 Rough Trade post-punk. “In writing a song”, Gill says, ”all the disparate parts of being me momentarily correspond, like car alarms and party music momentarily matching beats.” Cindy’s Why Not Now? is that muffled street symphony inside a passing daydream.
Tracklisting:
1. Why Not Now
2. Standard Candle #3
3. Earthly Belonging
4. August
5. Wednesday
6. A Trumpet On The Hillside
7. The Price Is Right
8. Playboy
9. Et Surtout
10. Standard Candle #4
Few copies in stock with minor wear on sleeves, pictures can be sent upon request.
Over the course of her career, spanning three-plus decades, Laetitia Sadier has never shied away from the hard topics, or stopped advocating for the possibility of self determination and emancipation in the face of the powers that be, conscious or unconscious.
This is an essential part of the foundation she co-built with Stereolab, showcasing her spiritual, scientific and sociopolitical inquiries. She’s continued this process with Monade and under her own name and as a writer/singer/and musician whose every album acts as a report on her journey of the self through time, space and the collective.
On Rooting For Love, the report is set alight by the heat of a turbulent world, collapsing institutions and Laetitia’s fully engaged process of expression as well as orchestration. The opening number, “Who + What” elucidates the central issue of the album: a call for a collective striving for Gnosis – an inquisitive outlook that will lend clues to the traumatized civilizations of Earth, allowing us to evolve away from millennia of alienation and suffering and towards the achievability of healing.
The musical arrangements help to embody the layers of the issue, as with “Who + What”’s combination of organ, synths, guitar, bass, trombone, drum programming, vibraphone and zither, all working along intricate paths of chord and tempo changes. Leading from the inside is the implacable presence of Laetitia Sadier, herself interacting with a vocal assembly of men and women billed as The Choir.
The regular reappearance of The Choir throughout Rooting For Love is a reminder of this music being one of a people in critical mass, in addition to an evolution that continues to deepen the rich harmonic fields in which Laetitia plays. Past wounds are addressed again and again in the libretto, as the music provides a transformational balm to aid the healing process.
The melodic funk of bassist Xavi Muñoz leads a Chic-adjacent slink to the occasional dance floor vibes and no-wave rockouts, while Hannes Plattemier and Emma Mario take turns in mixing the tracks and informing the far reaches of the material, with vibes, additional drum programming and synths alongside a talented cast of players and singers from Laetita’s Source Ensemble and beyond. Whether drawing inspiration from Zen Shiastu training, or the lyrics of Véronique Vincent, (lyricist and singer for Aksak Maboul, and once upon a time, lead singer of the Honeymoon Killers), Laetitia faces the truth without flinching.
The shadows, whatever stuff they are made of - individual and collective, present and ancestral - need to be recognized and acknowledged, because the more we heal within ourselves, the more undivided we become in the face of looming Neo-fascist/Neoliberal narratives polluting the inner and outer landscapes. As with the cover image of the winter tree mirrored by the word patterns of Rooting For Love, Laetitia maintains that how we heal the world that’s coming, and what we make of it, will be a co-creation.
The quality of our imagination, the orientation we give our thoughts and the capacity to bring love to ourselves and the world are a first step. Alongside of her collaboration with Modern Cosmology, last year’s incredible What Will You Grow Now?, as well as her continued tours with a reformed Stereolab, Rooting For Love finds Laetitia back in the world, once again urging all our grounded inner alignment and heart power to make us better equipped for creating what’s to come.
Tracklisting:
1. Who + What
2. Proteiformunite
3. Une Autre Attente
4. The Dash
5. Don’t Forget You’re Mine
6. Panser L’inacceptable
7. The Inner Smile
8. La Nageuse Nue
9. New Moon
10. Cloud 6
Few copies in stock with minor wear on sleeves, pictures can be sent upon request.
What do we hold on to from our past? What must we let go of to truly move forward? Waxahatchee’s Katie Crutchfield spent much of 2018 reckoning with these questions and revisiting her roots for answers.
The result is Saint Cloud, an intimate journey through the places she’s been, filled with the people she’s loved. Written immediately in the period following her decision to get sober, the album is an unflinching self-examination. This raw, exposed narrative terrain is aided by a shift in sonic arrangements as well. While her last two records featured the kind of big guitars, well-honed noise, and battering sounds that characterized her Philadelphia scene and strongly influenced a burgeoning new class of singer-songwriters, Saint Cloud strips back those layers to create space for Crutchfield’s voice and lyrics.
The result is a classic Americana sound with modern touches befitting an artist who has emerged as one of the signature storytellers of her time. Many of the narratives on Saint Cloud concern addiction and the havoc it wreaks on ourselves and our loved ones, as Crutchfield comes to a deeper understanding of love not only for those around her but for herself.
This coalesces most clearly on “Fire,” which she says was literally written in transit, during a drive over the Mississippi River into West Memphis, and serves as a love song to herself, a paean to moving past shame into a place of unconditional self-acceptance.
Over the course of Saint Cloud, which was recorded the summer of 2019 and produced by Brad Cook (Bon Iver), Crutchfield peels back the distortion of electric guitars to create a wider sonic palette than on any previous Waxahatchee album. It is a record filled with nods to classic country, folk-inspired tones, and distinctly modern touches.
To bolster her vision, Crutchfield enlisted Bobby Colombo and Bill Lennox, both of the Detroit band Bonny Doon, to serve as backing band on the record, along with Josh Kaufman (Hiss Golden Messenger, Bon Iver) on guitar and keyboards and Nick Kinsey (Kevin Morby) on drums and percussion.
Saint Cloud marks the beginning of a journey for Crutchfield, one that sees her leaving behind past vices and the comfortable environs of her Philadelphia scene to head south in search of something new. If on her previous work Crutchfield was out in the storm, she’s now firmly in the eye of it, taking stock of her past with a clear perspective and gathering the strength to carry onward.
Tracklisting:
Side A
1. Oxbow
2. Can’t Do Much
3. Fire
4. Lilacs
5. The Eye
6. Hell..
Side B
7. Witches
8. War
9. Arkadelphia
10. Ruby Falls
11. St. Cloud