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Top Sellers - Vinyl

  • Dalhous 'Visibility Is A Trap' - Cargo Records UK

    Blackest Ever Black

    Dalhous 'Visibility Is A Trap' Vinyl LP

    £8.99

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    Blackest Ever Black

    Dalhous 'Visibility Is A Trap' Vinyl LP

    £8.99

    Visibility Is A Trap is the new EP by Dalhous, comprised of four originals together with a masterfully understated Regis remix of He Was Human And Belonged With Humans'. The EP heralds the arrival of the Edinburgh-based project's sophomore album, Will To Be Well, due out on Blackest Ever Black in early Summer 2014.

    Dalhous first announced its existence in 2012 with the Mitchell Heisman 10', and last year released its debut full-length: An Ambassador For Laing.

    Both Visibility Is A Trap and the upcoming Will To Be Well LP reflect writer-producer Marc Dall's continued interest in the language and imagery of self-help, R.D. Laing and the anti-psychiatry movement. Though recorded after Will To Be Well, the tracks on Visibility Is A Trap at first appear to have more in common with the blue ethereal drift of Ambassador.

    While Information Is Forever'and A Change Of Attitude'are firmly in the ambient mode, Active Discovering'fizzes with arpeggiated energy, and a battery of percussion disrupts the calm surface of Sight Of Hirta'. Something is up. All is not as it seems.

    The Regis remix of Ambassador highlight He Was A Human And Belonged With Humans'finds Karl O'Connor in unusually pensive mood. In fact this near-beatless, dubwise version is unlike anything he has put his name to before.

    Discarding the rhythmic skeleton of Dalhous's original, he gives their weeping saxophone more space to roam and resonate, adding off-beat, sleep-deprived keys, murmured vocal fragments and swells of sub-bass pressure.


    It could be construed as a love letter to his former home in West Berlin; certainly it evokes and effortlessly updates the drugsick grandeur of later Neubauten or Low side 2.

    Tracklisting:
    1. Active Discovering
    2. Information Is Forever
    3. Sight Of Hirta
    4. A Change Of Attitude
    5. He Was Human And Belonged With Humans (Regis Version)

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  • Dalhous 'Will To Be Well' - Cargo Records UK

    Blackest Ever Black

    Dalhous 'Will To Be Well'

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    Blackest Ever Black

    Dalhous 'Will To Be Well'

    £11.99

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    Will To Be Well is the new studio album by Dalhous, their second for Blackest Ever Black. This double-LP reflects writer-producer Marc Dall's continued interest in the life and arcana of R.D. Laing, but also alludes to more universal and enduring mysteries: the relationships between body and mind, illness and wellness, the physical and the metaphysical.

    The fifteen tracks assembled here also showcase the maturation of a uniquely gifted and expressive composer: Dall's stirring, efflorescent melodies and stately harmonic architectures, with their grievously honed simplicity, are a delight: lucid, lyrical, immediate.

    For all the modernity of Dalhous's approach, the album recalls a bygone era in synthesized and sample-based music, a time when its practitioners were not just set-designers but storytellers too. Will To Be Well arrives just one year on from the Edinburgh-based project's tenebrous debut, An Ambassador For Laing, which was released to widespread acclaim in Spring 2013: The Wire praised "a frequently beautiful music, whose often calm surface belies the powerful currents moving beneath it", while FACT called the LP a 'wonderfully compelling head-scratcher - ¦opaque, elusive - and fascinating.'

    Nonetheless, a notable shift in tone has occurred in the fourteen months that have elapsed. If Ambassador was a tussle between darkness and light that ended in stalemate, with Will To Be Will it seems the light might just be winning. Pieces like Transference'and Her Mind Was A Blank'project a rapturous psychedelic intensity; To Be Universal You Must Be Specific'and Entertain The Idea'adopt the serene ambient register of recent Dalhous EP Visibility Is A Trap; while Sensitised To This Area'goes about its business with an almost Balearic swagger.

    But light too can be oppressive: the sun that gives life can also burn, and bleach, and blind. And even amid the endorphin rush of the album's most ebullient passages, there is the sense of a greater melancholy, an intractable doubt, lurking beneath the surface.

    Dalhous's music is suitably paradoxical, managing to sound at once futuristic and folkloric, both technologically advanced and avowedly pastoral. The elegiac repetitions of A Communion With These People'and the pagan drones of Lovers Of The Highlands'speak of Dall and his studio partner Alex Ander's deep connection to the rugged contours of their native Scottish landscape, while on Four Daughters By Four Women'and Thoughts Out Of Season'convulsive post-rave rhythms are employed to evoke ancient natural cycles.

    Though Will To Be Well is a less obviously eerie album than its predecessor, Dalhous's nose for the uncanny remains. A defining album from a major young artist.jT

    Tracklisting:
    1. First Page From Justine
    2. A Communion With These People
    3. Function Curve
    4. Sensitised To This Area
    5. Lovers Of The Highlands
    6. Four Daughters By Four Women
    7. Her Mind Was A Blank
    8. Transference
    9. To Be Universal You Must Be Specific
    10. Someone Secure
    11. Entertain The Idea
    12. Abyssal Plane
    13. Thoughts Out Of Season
    14. DSM-III
    15. Masquerading As Love
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  • Dalhous 'The Composite Moods Collection Vol.1: House Number 44' - Cargo Records UK

    Blackest Ever Black

    Dalhous 'The Composite Moods Collection Vol.1: House Number 44' Vinyl 2xLP

    £15.99

    House Number 44 is the first volume of The Composite Moods Collection, a new cycle of Dalhous recordings that examines the relationship between two individuals co-habiting in the same confined space - their interactions, their sense of self and of each other, and the pregnant space between.

    The title of The Composite Moods Collection nods to the world of film and library cues, riffing on the utilitarian idea of music 'to suit the mood' and the appealing if archaic notion that a 'mood' can be a discrete or fixed thing, a unit of feeling.

    Longtime followers of Dalhous will observe that House Number 44 contains some of their sparsest, most malevolent-sounding electronic music to date (see especially the brooding synthesizer throb of Response To Stimuli'and End Of Each Analysis') but some of their most disarmingly beautiful too, with indelible melodies and atmospheres as deep as thought: Methods of ðlan', On A Level', the elegiac Lines To Border'.

    Marc Dall's enduring affection for neo-noir film scores of the 80s and early 90s, with their gleaming electronics and submerged existential torment, is more palpable here than ever, and you may hear echoes too of Klaus Schulze, Pete Namlook, or Eno's The Shutov Assembly - but Dalhous continue to plot their own course, obsessively and meticulously, oblivious to contemporary trends and unconstrained by historical influence; driven, indeed, by their own demons.
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