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viewing 1 To 25 of 335 items
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LP
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KRANK 244LP
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"Jacob Long's fourth full-length for Kranky began as a notion to reimagine Earthen Sea as a 'piano trio,' inspired by a year-long immersion in the ECM label catalog, but the compositions soon grew more complex. Elements were chopped and resampled, then layered with bass, drums, percussion, and additional keys. The result is a fusion of live band acoustics and downtempo loops, sculpted into nine smoke-and-mirror dubs of fractured jazz, soft-focus noir, and trip-hop dust: Recollection. Like the title implies, Long's playing and production share a mood of pensive movement, shuffling and rippling like uncertain memories at strange hours. From looming fog ('Present Day,' 'Neon Ruins') and shadowy breaks ('Another Space,' 'Cloudy Vagueness') to rosy glows ('Clear Photograph') and smeared reverie ('White Sky'), Recollection deftly wields its palette of gradient color and subdued states of beauty. His is a music of reduction and reflection, kinetic but oblique, attuned to the silhouettes of sound."
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KRANK 243CD
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"The full-length debut by Detroit duo Giovanna Lenski and Christian Molik aka Clinic Stars both refines and redefines their pitch-perfect fusion of downer-pop balladry and featherweight shoegaze: Only Hinting. Recorded and produced at the band's home studio, the album was crafted across 2022 and 2023, patiently layering FX and spatial depths to give each song a swirling, subconscious undertow. From the strummed whirlpool of 'I Am The Dancer' to the gated reverb of 'Remain' to the greyscale guitar reverie of 'Isn't It,' the record aches as much as moves, daydreaming of escape and transcendence. The group cite a desire to leave their 'industrial environment' as muse, although the songs also revel in the romance of longing itself, in the beauty of hearts grown distant. The duo's previous EPs, 10,000 Dreams (2021) and April's Past (2022), captured a similarly swooning slowcore palette, but Only Hinting hits different. Here haze is as much instrument as texture, gauze and melody married as one, traced in elegant arcs across cities streaked in shadow."
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KRANK 243LP
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LP version. "The full-length debut by Detroit duo Giovanna Lenski and Christian Molik aka Clinic Stars both refines and redefines their pitch-perfect fusion of downer-pop balladry and featherweight shoegaze: Only Hinting. Recorded and produced at the band's home studio, the album was crafted across 2022 and 2023, patiently layering FX and spatial depths to give each song a swirling, subconscious undertow. From the strummed whirlpool of 'I Am The Dancer' to the gated reverb of 'Remain' to the greyscale guitar reverie of 'Isn't It,' the record aches as much as moves, daydreaming of escape and transcendence. The group cite a desire to leave their 'industrial environment' as muse, although the songs also revel in the romance of longing itself, in the beauty of hearts grown distant. The duo's previous EPs, 10,000 Dreams (2021) and April's Past (2022), captured a similarly swooning slowcore palette, but Only Hinting hits different. Here haze is as much instrument as texture, gauze and melody married as one, traced in elegant arcs across cities streaked in shadow."
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KRANK 242CD
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"Realistic IX, the third full-length by the duo of Michael Jones and Turk Dietrich aka Belong, is both an expansion and excavation of their signature acid-washed songcraft. Bleached guitars, metronomic drums, and buried voices rev, swirl, and seethe across shifting gradients of haze and hypnosis, alternately driving and diffuse. Melodies surge closer to the surface, flexing their form before resubmerging into quickening currents of feedback. Elsewhere the elements dissipate into a dusk of murk and microtonalities, electricity liberated back into infinite night. Although it's been thirteen years since Belong's prior Kranky offering, Common Era, none of the duo's rare synergy has decayed in the interim. Jones and Dietrich's commitment to oblique states of motorik drone and liminal emotion continues to evolve and unfold, increasingly tactile and unreal, an alluring glow glimpsed through fogged windows at witching hours."
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KRANK 242LP
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LP version. "Realistic IX, the third full-length by the duo of Michael Jones and Turk Dietrich aka Belong, is both an expansion and excavation of their signature acid-washed songcraft. Bleached guitars, metronomic drums, and buried voices rev, swirl, and seethe across shifting gradients of haze and hypnosis, alternately driving and diffuse. Melodies surge closer to the surface, flexing their form before resubmerging into quickening currents of feedback. Elsewhere the elements dissipate into a dusk of murk and microtonalities, electricity liberated back into infinite night. Although it's been thirteen years since Belong's prior Kranky offering, Common Era, none of the duo's rare synergy has decayed in the interim. Jones and Dietrich's commitment to oblique states of motorik drone and liminal emotion continues to evolve and unfold, increasingly tactile and unreal, an alluring glow glimpsed through fogged windows at witching hours."
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2LP
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KRANK 049LP
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"Completing Kranky's chronologically reverse reissue program of the earlier Loscil albums on vinyl, the 2001 debut album is issued on the format for the first time with the addition of three bonus tracks from the same sessions that produced the original release."
"Pay no mind to the label and pay no mind to the producer's locale (Vancouver isn't Cologne or Detroit); Triple Point is one of the finest -- and most varied -- ambient techno releases of 2001." --AllMusic
"Finding itself nestled halfway between the endlessly spacious mechanoid constructions of Berlin's Basic Channel and the drifting expanses of Labradford, Scott Morgan's work as Loscil never ceases to impress with its deft use of technology and percussion." --Boomkat
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KRANK 045LP
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2024 repress. "For the first time in almost 20 years, Windy & Carl's second album for Kranky is available on vinyl format once again. The fourth album from Michigan's premier space duo, again delivers their shimmering trademark wall of sound, beautiful vocalization, and delicate songcraft. Six sweet and easy new tracks recorded in their home studio in Dearborn, that drift and dream with layered guitars, keyboards, bass and a love-arsenal of delicious effects and distortion."
"These two won't be happy until they find a combination of sounds that encompasses all feeling, at which point they will then stretch that chord to the vanishing point." --Pitchfork
"Perhaps it's a prayer, perhaps a blessing, perhaps a poem full of questions?it hardly matters. Humble, moving, and brilliant." --All Music
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KRANK 241CD
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"The latest suite by composer (and Stars Of The Lid co-founder) Adam Wiltzie took shape following a move north from Brussels into the Flemish countryside, although it was initially inspired by a recurring dream wherein 'if someone listened to the music I created, then they would die.' The album uniquely evokes and evades the allure of oblivion, keening between beauty and ruin, forever unresolved. Wiltzie cites the barbiturate of the title as both muse and sacred escape: 'When you are sitting face forward on the daily emotional meat grinder of life, I always wished I could have some, so I could just fall asleep automatically and the feeling would not be there anymore.' Recorded at Wilzie's home studio, with strings added in Budapest at the old Hungarian National radio facility (Magyar Radio), the tracks feel simultaneously intimate and infinite, unfolding vistas glimpsed in an inner space. Robert Hampson of English drone rock icons Loop mixed the album, further lending the music a sense of cinematic expanse and oblique hypnosis. These are fugue states as much as fugues in a literal classical music sense -- smeared epiphanies of uncertain memory and spatial dislocation, coaxed from the unconscious and set aloft."
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KRANK 241LP
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LP version. "The latest suite by composer (and Stars Of The Lid co-founder) Adam Wiltzie took shape following a move north from Brussels into the Flemish countryside, although it was initially inspired by a recurring dream wherein 'if someone listened to the music I created, then they would die.' The album uniquely evokes and evades the allure of oblivion, keening between beauty and ruin, forever unresolved. Wiltzie cites the barbiturate of the title as both muse and sacred escape: 'When you are sitting face forward on the daily emotional meat grinder of life, I always wished I could have some, so I could just fall asleep automatically and the feeling would not be there anymore.' Recorded at Wilzie's home studio, with strings added in Budapest at the old Hungarian National radio facility (Magyar Radio), the tracks feel simultaneously intimate and infinite, unfolding vistas glimpsed in an inner space. Robert Hampson of English drone rock icons Loop mixed the album, further lending the music a sense of cinematic expanse and oblique hypnosis. These are fugue states as much as fugues in a literal classical music sense -- smeared epiphanies of uncertain memory and spatial dislocation, coaxed from the unconscious and set aloft."
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2LP
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KRANK 009LP
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Restocked. "This is the first vinyl issue of Temple IV, arguably Roy Montgomery's finest solo album, originally released in 1996 on CD. The original album has been enhanced with two newer tracks that constitute side four of the album. Montgomery states: 'The two new tracks recorded in 2018 were about asking the question 'Can you step into the same river twice?' Heraclitus said you cannot. I say you can.' From the original press release: Few recording artists have aligned the quantity and quality of their releases as well as New Zealand singer/guitarist Roy Montgomery has in 1995. Beginning with Kranky's release of the soundtrack for an imaginary film That That Is... Is(Not) by Montgomery's duo Dissolve early in the year, a series of superb albums and singles have been issued by a variety of labels across the world. Each one of them is a must have. Most recently, the Drunken Fish label released a collection of pastoral drones entitled Scenes From The South Island, singles have appeared on the Roof Bolt and gyttja labels, and further singles are scheduled with Ajax, Siltbreeze, and others. Temple IV is the first solo recording by Roy Montgomery on Kranky. The album was recorded by Montgomery on a four-track tape deck and then thickened up with monophonic moog. The tracks on the album are thick with interwoven guitar lines and moog drone, inspired by the Guatemalan rain forests and the mysterious ruins of the temple and ruins Montgomery visited there."
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KRANK 236LP
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"The union of composers Lawrence English and Loscil aka Scott Morgan is seamless, sublime, and long overdue. Born of a conversation centered on the notion of 'rich sources' as a forge for electronic music, Colours Of Air is a collection of recordings of a century old pipe organ housed at the historic Old Museum in Brisbane, Australia, which were then processed, transformed, and elevated into eight majestic electro-acoustic threshold devotionals. The timbre of the instrument and spatial fluctuations of room tone infuse the music with a subdued, sacred feel, like vaulted light in a nave of stained glass. They describe the album as 'an iterative project, a reduction and eventual expansion,' sifting the swells and drones of the organ for every shivering shade of radiance. The tracks are named for the hue each piece suggests -- from the gauzy levitational miasma of 'Yellow' to the pulsing melancholic mirage of 'Violet' to the seething twilit sandstorm of 'Magenta.' Morgan and English are both adept at conjuring moods of muted grandeur, like landscapes veiled in dusk, still looming and luminous. Here their combined powers open pathways to heightened realms of deep listening and bewitching restraint, finding flickering infinities in ancient configurations of wind, brass, stone, and dust."
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KRANK 219CD
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2024 restock. "Received an 8.5 Best New Music rating from Pitchfork. Experiential composer Tim Hecker's ninth official full-length, Konoyo ('the world over here') was largely recorded during several trips to Japan where he collaborated with members of the gagaku ensemble Tokyo Gakuso, in a temple on the outskirts of Tokyo. Inspired by conversations with a recently deceased friend about negative space and a sense of music's increasingly banal density, Hecker found himself drawn towards restraint and elegance, while making music both collectively and alone. As with the Icelandic choir he arranged on 2016's Love Streams, the heights of Hecker's talent emerge in his manipulation of source material, bending and burnishing it into fantastical new forms. Keening strings are stretched into surreal, pixelated mirages; woodwinds warble and dissipate as fractal whispers of spatial haze; sparse gestures of percussion are chopped, isolated, and eroded, like disembodied signals from the afterlife. Both in texture and intent, Konoyo conjures a somber, ceremonial mood, suffused with ritual and regret. Visions flutter and fade; dreams gleam and decay."
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KRANK 240CD
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"South Carolina singer and producer Niecy Blues describes her songwriting process like an undertow: 'I feel a strange pull, and let it carry me, following swirling leaves... whole days roll by, forgetting about the body.' Their full-length debut, Exit Simulation, captures this sense of deep-rooted divination, cycling between simmering ballads, ghosted R&B, downtempo gospel, and looped vocal improvisations -- often within the same track. The title is taken from a science fiction novel she read during the purgatory of the pandemic, alluding to a dimensional ideation of departure -- 'the permission to imagine leaving.' Recorded in her current home of Charleston, she characterizes the album's mood in terms both reflective and raw: an exploration of things suppressed, foundations beginning to crack, 'talking myself off a ledge.' The music of Niecy Blues transposes reverie and reckoning into emotive devotionals of keys, guitar, bass, synth, and bewitched voice, steeped in sacred atmospheres gleaned from a youth spent in a religious Oklahoma household: 'My first experience with ambient music was church -- slow songs of worship, with delay on the guitar... even if you don't believe, you feel something.'"
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KRANK 240LP
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2024 repress; LP version. "South Carolina singer and producer Niecy Blues describes her songwriting process like an undertow: 'I feel a strange pull, and let it carry me, following swirling leaves... whole days roll by, forgetting about the body.' Their full-length debut, Exit Simulation, captures this sense of deep-rooted divination, cycling between simmering ballads, ghosted R&B, downtempo gospel, and looped vocal improvisations -- often within the same track. The title is taken from a science fiction novel she read during the purgatory of the pandemic, alluding to a dimensional ideation of departure -- 'the permission to imagine leaving.' Recorded in her current home of Charleston, she characterizes the album's mood in terms both reflective and raw: an exploration of things suppressed, foundations beginning to crack, 'talking myself off a ledge.' The music of Niecy Blues transposes reverie and reckoning into emotive devotionals of keys, guitar, bass, synth, and bewitched voice, steeped in sacred atmospheres gleaned from a youth spent in a religious Oklahoma household: 'My first experience with ambient music was church -- slow songs of worship, with delay on the guitar... even if you don't believe, you feel something.'"
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KRANK 210LP
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2017 release. "Michigan trumpeter Justin Walter's solo work centers on evocative, intuitive explorations of the EVI (Electronic Valve Instrument), a rare wind-controlled analog synthesizer from the 1970s. Its unique, smeared tonality allows for an expressive range of glassy, jazz-like textures, which Walter loops and layers with hushed electronics and twilit trumpet, painting opaque landscapes of resonant beauty. Walter's 2013 debut, Lullabies & Nightmares, included a handful of collaborations with percussionist Quin Kirchner, but Unseen Forces finds him fully solo, refining the project to its essence: shape-shifting watercolors of pastel haze, lit by the soft synthetic glow of electric breath. It's a sound both modern and timeless, fusing emotion and technology, gauze and melody, force and fragility."
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KRANK 237LP
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"The music of Justin Walter veers between nebulous and numinous, coaxed from the translucent tonalities of his signature instrument, the EVI (Electronic Valve Instrument). Destroyer, his latest, and third for Kranky, marks his most multifaceted work yet. Inspired by minimalistic urges (evading grandiosity, condensing scope, embracing spatial restraint) tempered with the drama of triptychs (becoming, destruction, aftermath), the album's eleven tracks thread a keening suite of aching, opaque beauty, traced in absence and breath. First begun in the the no man's land summer of 2020, Walter gradually amassed nearly two hours of demos, drafts, and ideas, then steadily whittled them to their essence. Destroyer enlists the sounds of a recently restored pump organ, adding pulses and quaking texture, but otherwise the album is a shimmering showcase of the EVI: miasmic, melodic, intuitive, infinite. It's music of fraught devotion and uneasy peace, questing yet languorous, forever rapt and untethered."
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2LP
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KRANK 007LP
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2024 restock; double LP version. "The debut album from New York City's Bowery Electric was released by Kranky in late summer 1995 after they came to the label's attention via their self-released 2x7-inch Drop EP from the year previous. The first in a trio of albums released by the core duo of Lawrence Chandler and Martha Schwendener finds them in their most raw form. This new double LP version restores the track 'Deep Sky Objects' to the original running order of the album as it was left off of the original single LP version due to side length restraints. This is the first time this album has been available on vinyl in almost two decades, and the first time the Drop EP has been available in any format since original release in 1994."
"The perfect realization of their aesthetic, each word and chord tuned and focused for maximum impact." --Pitchfork "Genuinely hypnotic." --The Wire
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KRANK 007CD
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2023 reprint. "The debut album from New York City's Bowery Electric was released by Kranky in late summer 1995 after they came to the label's attention via their self-released 2x7-inch Drop EP from the year previous. The first in a trio of albums released by the core duo of Lawrence Chandler and Martha Schwendener finds them in their most raw form. This new double LP version restores the track 'Deep Sky Objects' to the original running order of the album as it was left off of the original single LP version due to side length restraints. This is the first time this album has been available on vinyl in almost two decades, and the first time the Drop EP has been available in any format since original release in 1994. At the same time, Kranky is making the CD version available once again for the first time in many years, with the Drop EP tracks also included."
"The perfect realization of their aesthetic, each word and chord tuned and focused for maximum impact." --Pitchfork "Genuinely hypnotic." --The Wire
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KRANK 238LP
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"Portland pianist Mary Sutton second's full-length for Kranky delves deeper into her roots as a Cherokee Nation citizen (Saloli, pronounced like 'slowly,' is the Cherokee word for 'squirrel'). The album is intended to evoke 'a day in the life of a bear in a canyon in the Smoky Mountains,' with each track channeling a different emotion or experience in its daily explorations. As with her 2018 debut, The Deep End, the entirety of Canyon was composed and performed live on a Sequential Circuits MultiTrak synthesizer -- but this time routed through a delay pedal. This refraction adds a lyrical spatial quality, as though 'echoing off canyon walls.' It's music both gentle and adventurous, curiously rooting through soils and streams, in a sustained state of discovery. In Cherokee teachings, humans and animals are considered to have no essential difference -- originally, all the creatures of the earth lived together in harmony. Canyon captures shades of this Edenic notion across eight elegant pieces, alternately meandering, pensive, playful, and pure. Sutton's playing, as always, is dexterous and dimensional, mirroring the dazzled senses of its muse. Her father, the Cherokee painter and flute-maker Jerry Sutton, created the artwork. Its yellow lettering is from the Cherokee Syllabary and spells 'Yona', meaning 'bear.'"
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2LP
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KRANK 239LP
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Repressed; double LP version. "The latest by Canadian composer Tim Hecker serves as a beacon of unease against the deluge of false positive corporate ambient currently in vogue. Whether taken as warning or promise, No Highs delivers -- this is music of austerity and ambiguity, purgatorial and seasick. A jagged anti-relaxant for our medicated age, rough-hewn and undefined. Morse code pulse programming flickers like distress signals while a gathering storm of strings, noise, and low-end looms in the distance. Processed electronics shiver and shudder against pitch-shifting assemblages of crackling voltage, mantric horns (including exquisite modal sax by Colin Stetson), and cathedral keys. Throughout, the pieces both accrue and avoid drama, more attuned to undertow than crescendo. Hecker mentions 'negation' as a muse of sorts -- the sense of tumult without bombast, tethered ecstasies, an escape from escapism. His is an antagonism both brusque and beguiling, devoid of resolution, beckoning the listener ever deeper into its greyscale alchemies of magisterial disquiet."
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KRANK 239CD
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"The latest by Canadian composer Tim Hecker serves as a beacon of unease against the deluge of false positive corporate ambient currently in vogue. Whether taken as warning or promise, No Highs delivers -- this is music of austerity and ambiguity, purgatorial and seasick. A jagged anti-relaxant for our medicated age, rough-hewn and undefined. Morse code pulse programming flickers like distress signals while a gathering storm of strings, noise, and low-end looms in the distance. Processed electronics shiver and shudder against pitch-shifting assemblages of crackling voltage, mantric horns (including exquisite modal sax by Colin Stetson), and cathedral keys. Throughout, the pieces both accrue and avoid drama, more attuned to undertow than crescendo. Hecker mentions 'negation' as a muse of sorts -- the sense of tumult without bombast, tethered ecstasies, an escape from escapism. His is an antagonism both brusque and beguiling, devoid of resolution, beckoning the listener ever deeper into its greyscale alchemies of magisterial disquiet."
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KRANK 236CD
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"The union of composers Lawrence English and loscil aka Scott Morgan is seamless, sublime, and long overdue. Born of a conversation centered on the notion of "rich sources" as a forge for electronic music, Colours Of Air is a collection of recordings of a century old pipe organ housed at the historic Old Museum in Brisbane, Australia, which were then processed, transformed, and elevated into eight majestic electro-acoustic threshold devotionals. The timbre of the instrument and spatial fluctuations of room tone infuse the music with a subdued, sacred feel, like vaulted light in a nave of stained glass. They describe the album as 'an iterative project, a reduction and eventual expansion,' sifting the swells and drones of the organ for every shivering shade of radiance. The tracks are named for the hue each piece suggests -- from the gauzy levitational miasma of 'Yellow' to the pulsing melancholic mirage of 'Violet' to the seething twilit sandstorm of 'Magenta.' Morgan and English are both adept at conjuring moods of muted grandeur, like landscapes veiled in dusk, still looming and luminous. Here their combined powers open pathways to heightened realms of deep listening and bewitching restraint, finding flickering infinities in ancient configurations of wind, brass, stone, and dust."
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KRANK 235CD
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"While on the island of Syros in the Aegean Sea for a film festival performance, Christina Vantzou experienced what she characterized as 'a moment of focus' -- a specific vision for the sprawl of raw recordings she'd been amassing for her fifth album. Upon relocating to the Cycladic island of Ano Koufonisi, she situated herself outside at a patio table with a laptop and headphones, taking brief breaks to swim, and began the 'reductive process' of shaving and shaping the source material into uneasy but lyrical movements, alternately austere and adorned with strange inflections: glottal groaning, cavernous water, glittering eddies of modular synth, languorous silences. Mixing the pieces herself without outsourcing to an engineer compounded the intimacy and autobiographical dimension of the music; she refers to Nº5 as 'almost like a first album.' Drawing on sessions staged in February 2020, Vantzou's editing instincts emphasize process and isolation, spotlighting resonance and restraint, liquidity and long tails. Fleeting configurations of piano, wind, strings, synthetics, and field recordings, these are spaces as much as compositions, surreal grottos of shifting light, suffused with a sense of invisible divinity. Although seventeen musicians appear on the record, the proceedings feel minimalist and malleable, sculpted from interstitial moments and oblique synchronicities. The definition of a composer as 'one who joins things' is here both plumbed and proven; Vantzou describes Nº5 as 'a letting go,' a place of 'soft borders,' unfixed and undefinable."
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KRANK 235LP
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LP version. "While on the island of Syros in the Aegean Sea for a film festival performance, Christina Vantzou experienced what she characterized as 'a moment of focus' -- a specific vision for the sprawl of raw recordings she'd been amassing for her fifth album. Upon relocating to the Cycladic island of Ano Koufonisi, she situated herself outside at a patio table with a laptop and headphones, taking brief breaks to swim, and began the 'reductive process' of shaving and shaping the source material into uneasy but lyrical movements, alternately austere and adorned with strange inflections: glottal groaning, cavernous water, glittering eddies of modular synth, languorous silences. Mixing the pieces herself without outsourcing to an engineer compounded the intimacy and autobiographical dimension of the music; she refers to Nº5 as 'almost like a first album.' Drawing on sessions staged in February 2020, Vantzou's editing instincts emphasize process and isolation, spotlighting resonance and restraint, liquidity and long tails. Fleeting configurations of piano, wind, strings, synthetics, and field recordings, these are spaces as much as compositions, surreal grottos of shifting light, suffused with a sense of invisible divinity. Although seventeen musicians appear on the record, the proceedings feel minimalist and malleable, sculpted from interstitial moments and oblique synchronicities. The definition of a composer as 'one who joins things' is here both plumbed and proven; Vantzou describes Nº5 as 'a letting go,' a place of 'soft borders,' unfixed and undefinable."
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KRANK 072LP
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2022 repress on vinyl. "This is the first vinyl issue of the sole The Dead Texan album originally released in May of 2004." "Stars Of The Lid's Adam Wiltzie presents a collection of drone compositions that he considered too aggressive for his parent band -- which means they range somewhere between a whisper and a shout. The sense of cathedral-like reverence is balanced with extreme intimacy." --Pitchfork "This is quite possibly the best music available for slowly drifting into dreamland. Equal parts intrigue and sedative, The Dead Texan is an elegantly hypnotic album that manages to freeze time in addition to passing it." --Tinymixtapes "The Dead Texan remains a remarkably subtle and tranquil work. Disarmingly lovely..." --Textura
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