Featured
-
Light In The Attic
Various – Somewhere Between: Mutant Pop, Electronic Minimalism & Shadow Sounds Of Japan 1980-1988
$60.00
vLight In The Attic
Various – Somewhere Between: Mutant Pop, Electronic Minimalism & Shadow Sounds Of Japan 1980-1988
$60.00
Visit product page →Somewhere Between: Mutant Pop, Electronic Minimalism & Shadow Sounds of Japan 1980–1988 hovers vibe–wise between two distinct poles within Light In The Attic’s acclaimed Japan Archival Series—Kankyō Ongaku: Japanese Ambient, Environmental & New Age Music 1980–1990 and Pacific Breeze: Japanese City Pop, AOR & Boogie 1976–1986. All three albums showcase recordings produced during Japan’s soaring bubble economy of the 1980s, an era in which aesthetic visions and consumerism merged. Music echoed the nation’s prosperity and with financial abundance came the luxury to dream.
Sonically, Somewhere Between mines the midpoint between Kankyō Ongaku’s sparkling atmospherics and Pacific Breeze’s metropolitan boogie. The compilation encompasses ambient pop, underground electronics, liminal minimalism and shadow sounds—all descriptors emphasizing the hazy nature of the nebula. Out–of–focus rhythms wear ethereal accoutrements, ballads are shrouded in static, and angular drums snake skyward on transcendent tones. From the Avant–minimalism of Mkwaju Ensemble and Yoshio Ojima, to the leftfield techno-pop of Mishio Ogawa and Noriko Miyamoto (featuring members of YMO), and highlights from the groundbreaking Osaka underground label Vanity Records, these are blurry constellations defying collective categorization.
These tracks also exist in a space of transition when the major label grip on the Japanese recording market began to give way to the escalation of independents. Thanks to the idyllic economic climate and innovations in domestically–manufactured music gear, creators on the edges were empowered to focus on satisfying their artistic visions in the open headspace of home studios. While labels like Warner Music and Nippon Columbia explored new sounds through traditional channels, it was possible for Vanity, Balcony and other indie labels, not to mention self–released artists like Ojima and Naoki Asai, to publish their work via affordable media such as cassettes, 7" vinyl, and flexi–discs.
Expertly curated by Yosuke Kitazawa and Mark “Frosty” McNeill (dublab), Somewhere Between is a collection of music, much of it released for the first time outside Japan, that is bound more by energetic vibration than shared history, genre or scene. They are the sounds of transition and searching—a celebration of the freedom found in floating. - Light In The AtticLabel: Light In The Attic – LITA 183
Format: 2 × Vinyl, LP, 45 RPM, Compilation
Country: US
Released: 22 Jan 2021
Genre: Electronic
Style: Ambient, Minimal, Dark Ambient
-
Proibito Records
Huerco S. – For Those Of You Who Have Never (And Also Those Who Have)
$39.00
Visit product page →For Those of You Who Have Never (And Also Those Who Have) is ambient music through and through—though it’s informed by a memory of club music, which hangs over it like a ringing in the ears.
There are no drums or percussion on any of the album’s nine tracks, just soft tendrils of synthesizer, submerged pulses, and tape hiss smeared on in thick, buttery swirls. The album opens with a soft, rose-tinted chord and it never gets much more abrasive than that. Many of the tracks on his last album felt like sketches—the kernel of an idea, abandoned quickly. The same sensibility holds here, but even the simplest idea is stretched across a much bigger frame, to six or seven or even eight minutes. That’s important; you need the time to sink into these things. After a spell, you can’t say whether you've been listening to a given piece for two or 20 minutes. - Pitchfork
Label: Proibito – PRB018
Format: 2 × Vinyl, LP
Country: US
Released: 20 Jun 2016
Genre: Electronic
Style: Ambient, Experimental
-
Midnight Shift Records
Umwelt – Superior Life Forms
$39.00
Visit product page →Umwelt allies with Midnight Shift for the release of the mini LP Superior Life Forms, featuring six devastating tracks on the vinyl release and an exclusive number seven for the digital release.
Known for his take no prisoners approach to searing hardware-based broken electro with the spirit of 90s French rave parties where he participated in, Umwelt himself is founder of labels such as Fundata, New Flesh Records and Rave or Die, and a diehard scene activist, pushing the resistance for the past twenty years and more.
A dark, sci-fi bleak horror theme runs through his prolific cosmos of productions and Superior Life Forms continues the narrative. It’s a tri-invasion attack between man, machine and foreign sentient beings. From the snarling Shadow Entity creeping from the sidelines to the ominous sound of the day of reckoning depicted on title track, Superior Life Forms, Umwelt has full control of the genre – telling a story with tightly programmed sounds, deadly textural atmospherics and an uneasy, foreboding tension of a world signalling its end. - Bandcamp
Label: Midnight Shift Records – MNSXLP0001
Format: Vinyl, LP, Mini-Album, Limited Edition, Grey Marbled
Country: Singapore
Released: 18 Oct 2019
Genre: Electronic
Style: Dark Ambient, Electro, Industrial, Techno
-
Weyrd Son Records
Marie Davidson – Perte D'Identité
$48.00
Visit product page →Perte d'identité, which translates to “loss of identity,” is the debut LP by composer, singer and poet Marie Davidson, one of the finest artists rising from the electronic dark-synth scene in Montreal. Her voice is a stark half-spoken monotone which will tell you stories from which you can’t escape unchanged. With this release, she refines her storytelling with suffocating tales that are both intimate and melancholic. Meanwhile, her miraculously human electronic rhythms are as frantic and hypnotic as an intense stare. In her premier full length album, she invites you to take a look in the peephole, revealing a fascinating cinematic picture. What you will be shown are the parts of yourself which you're scared and ashamed of, but also the ones that reveal a haunting and glamorous sensuality. Not only will she spin you a tale, but her music will immerse your soul in images of sweet anxiety. "This album is about romance and a quest for meaning." - Bandcamp
Label: Weyrd Son Records – WyS-005
Format: Vinyl, LP, Limited Edition, Reissue
Country: Belgium
Released: 04 Apr 2017
Genre: Electronic
Style: Minimal, Dark Ambient, Electro
-
Planet Mu
Asher Levitas – Lit Harness
$45.00
Visit product page →Asher Levitas is perhaps best known as part of Old Apparatus, the acclaimed and enigmatic London experimental outfit. Over the last few years he has featured on releases for labels including Deep Medi, Houndstooth and Left Blank as ‘Saa’ with the singer Linn Carin Dirdal.
Lit Harness’, his first solo album, started forming as a project in 2015 alongside the artist and writer Michael Crowe who worked on the live A/V show while Asher created the music with vocalist Marina Elderton (from the Ethereal Psych band Kull) who features on the tracks.
The record follows personal themes in a time of extreme emotion: anxiety and madness but also serenity and acceptance, hence the term ‘Lit Harness’, which is a Harness that holds you in a calm place while chaos happens all around. Asher also wanted to describe the experience of the sleep paralysis, which he has had most of his life, into a musical sound world. That’s not to say the album is totally dark, but there’s intensity and transcendence here as well as an otherworldly beauty.
The music on ‘Lit Harness’ plays out in a shadowy hallucinogenic dream-like state where it’s not clear what’s meant to reflect reality or pure fantasy. Part of this process was the way the audio and visuals developed in tandem with each other, Michael passing Asher images and video, which Asher used to inject drama into the tracks and finish them.
‘Lit Harness’ could be described as ambient, but every track is filled with detail and a strange clanking drama, the hammering noises of ‘Withdrawn’ and the cold fever of ‘In The Eyes’ playing out like a dream. ‘Sheathe’ turns the record around with clouds of swirling choirs and ‘Waiting By An Open Door’ plays a hazy piano, with wind rushing through the soundfield. ‘Strongest Bonds’ has held descending chords with watery drum hits; ethereal vocals building in the background into a haze of noise. ‘Blessed Mother’s’ repeating vocals and rising chords ripple with a transcendent, gentle hopefulness, which gives way to the flatline drone and otherworldly voices of ‘Premature Exit’. ‘Anticipating Violence’ finishes the album with a sad, angry surrender, punctuated with rushes of cold hammering and reversed breaking glass. - BandcampLabel: Planet Mu – ZIQ379
Format: Vinyl, LP, Album, Stereo
Country: UK
Released: 10 Jun 2016
Genre: Electronic
Style: Dark Ambient, Experimental, Industrial, Noise
