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LOVE 119LP
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Double LP version. It's been a decade since Andy Stott released Passed Me By (2011), a radical re-imagining of dance music as an expression of "physical and spiritual exhaustion" (Pitchfork). What followed was a process of rapid remodeling: We Stay Together (2011) -- slow and fucked, for the club, Luxury Problems (2012) -- greyscale romance, Faith In Strangers (2014) -- destroyed love songs, Too Many Voices (2016) -- 4th world Triton shimmers, and It Should Be Us (2019) -- the club, collapsed, a run of releases that gradually untangled complex ideas into a singular, chaotic body of work somewhere between sound-art, techno and pop. In early 2020 - with a new album almost done and an offer to produce for a completely mainstream artist on the table -- personal upheaval brought everything to a sudden standstill. Months of withdrawal eventually triggered renewed curiosity, a different approach. Stott began to record hours of raw material; slow horns, sibilance, delayed drums, wondering flutes -- whatever, whenever. And although software made it possible to iron out every kink and knot, Stott tirelessly looked for them -- in pursuit of a sound that was human in all its awkward asymmetry. With vocals recorded by Alison Skidmore, the album was finally completed late in the year -- taking on a completely different shape. Its songs were desolate, melancholy, defiant, beautiful -- often all at once. The sounds echoed music around Stott during those months: Prince, Gavin Bryars, A.R. Kane, Bohren & der Club of Gore, Robert Turman, Cindy Lee, Leila, Catherine Christer Hennix, Junior Boys, László Hortobágyi, NÃdia, Prefab Sprout -- the unusual, the familiar. And echoing that mix of new and old, each of the songs on Never The Right Time seem woven from the same thread despite following different trajectories; from the lovelorn shimmer of opener "Away Not gone", to the clattering linndrum pop of "The Beginning", through "Answers" angular club haze, and the city-at-night end-credits "Hard To Tell". These are songs fueled by nostalgia and soul searching, but all hold true to a vision of music making as a form of renewal and reinvention. A ten-year cycle, complete. Mastered by Rashad Becker.
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LOVE 119CD
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It's been a decade since Andy Stott released Passed Me By (2011), a radical re-imagining of dance music as an expression of "physical and spiritual exhaustion" (Pitchfork). What followed was a process of rapid remodeling: We Stay Together (2011) -- slow and fucked, for the club, Luxury Problems (2012) -- greyscale romance, Faith In Strangers (2014) -- destroyed love songs, Too Many Voices (2016) -- 4th world Triton shimmers, and It Should Be Us (2019) -- the club, collapsed, a run of releases that gradually untangled complex ideas into a singular, chaotic body of work somewhere between sound-art, techno and pop. In early 2020 - with a new album almost done and an offer to produce for a completely mainstream artist on the table -- personal upheaval brought everything to a sudden standstill. Months of withdrawal eventually triggered renewed curiosity, a different approach. Stott began to record hours of raw material; slow horns, sibilance, delayed drums, wondering flutes -- whatever, whenever. And although software made it possible to iron out every kink and knot, Stott tirelessly looked for them -- in pursuit of a sound that was human in all its awkward asymmetry. With vocals recorded by Alison Skidmore, the album was finally completed late in the year -- taking on a completely different shape. Its songs were desolate, melancholy, defiant, beautiful -- often all at once. The sounds echoed music around Stott during those months: Prince, Gavin Bryars, A.R. Kane, Bohren & der Club of Gore, Robert Turman, Cindy Lee, Leila, Catherine Christer Hennix, Junior Boys, László Hortobágyi, NÃdia, Prefab Sprout -- the unusual, the familiar. And echoing that mix of new and old, each of the songs on Never The Right Time seem woven from the same thread despite following different trajectories; from the lovelorn shimmer of opener "Away Not gone", to the clattering linndrum pop of "The Beginning", through "Answers" angular club haze, and the city-at-night end-credits "Hard To Tell". These are songs fueled by nostalgia and soul searching, but all hold true to a vision of music making as a form of renewal and reinvention. A ten-year cycle, complete. Mastered by Rashad Becker.
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LOVE 118CD
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When you make a record that doesn't conform, expect to divide opinion. Like Weather was released in 1998, on Rephlex -- run by Grant Wilson Claridge and Richard D James -- an often great label that had a following largely made up of Aphex-logo wearing fanboys who couldn't quite deal with electronic music made by a girl -- let alone one that used vocals. Everything those lads couldn't fathom about Like Weather is essentially what makes it untouchable; one of the greatest, most effortlessly esoteric pop albums ever made, not in the lineage of IDM or trip-hop, genres it has so often been awkwardly lumped in with, but something else that can't quite be categorized -- even 22 years later. Like Weather echoes the world-building energy of Prince's Sign "O" The Times (1987) -- every track is a self-contained universe all its own, there are no rules or conventions -- it's full of hooks, but also insular as fuck, the production is all over the place and it still sounds like nothing else (although if you're into the Mica Levi-produced Tirzah album (2018), know that this here is the aesthetic, spiritual blueprint). It feels analog, then digital -- it's R&B, but also baroque music box, drone pop, experimental, electronic, junglist -- attempting to define it is like trying to cup mercury in the palm of your hands; it'll just find something else to slide into. Newly remastered by Rashad Becker; cut by Lupo.
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LOVE 118LP
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LP version. Includes 7". When you make a record that doesn't conform, expect to divide opinion. Like Weather was released in 1998, on Rephlex -- run by Grant Wilson Claridge and Richard D James -- an often great label that had a following largely made up of Aphex-logo wearing fanboys who couldn't quite deal with electronic music made by a girl -- let alone one that used vocals. Everything those lads couldn't fathom about Like Weather is essentially what makes it untouchable; one of the greatest, most effortlessly esoteric pop albums ever made, not in the lineage of IDM or trip-hop, genres it has so often been awkwardly lumped in with, but something else that can't quite be categorized -- even 22 years later. Like Weather echoes the world-building energy of Prince's Sign "O" The Times (1987) -- every track is a self-contained universe all its own, there are no rules or conventions -- it's full of hooks, but also insular as fuck, the production is all over the place and it still sounds like nothing else (although if you're into the Mica Levi-produced Tirzah album (2018), know that this here is the aesthetic, spiritual blueprint). It feels analog, then digital -- it's R&B, but also baroque music box, drone pop, experimental, electronic, junglist -- attempting to define it is like trying to cup mercury in the palm of your hands; it'll just find something else to slide into. Newly remastered by Rashad Becker; cut by Lupo.
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LOVE 114LP
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2020 black vinyl repress. Andy Stott's first release since 2016 and first EP since 2011, It Should Be Us is a double EP of slow and raw productions for the club, recorded in 2019 and following a series of EPs that started with Passed Me By (LOVE 069LP) and We Stay Together (LOVE 072LP) early this decade. Recorded fast and loose over the summer, these eight tracks harness a pure and bare-boned energy, melodies subsumed by drum machines and synths; slow, rugged hedonism. It's all about rhythmic heat and disorientation, pure dance and DJ specials rendered at an unsteady pace, from percolated house and percussive rituals to moody tripped-out burners. There'll be a new Andy Stott album in 2020, but in the meantime... this one's for dancing. Mastered and cut at Dubplates & Mastering, Berlin.
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2LP
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LOVE 112LP
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After a five-year pause for breath, last releasing in 2014, Rainer Veil return with their debut full-length for Modern Love; an immersive, kinematic tumble through electronic forms from hyper trance to tape dub experiments and loose polyrhythms -- a summoning of 'ardcore spirits in flux. A hypnotic sound world tempered by weighty bass and angular construction, Vanity marks a breaking away from the binds of overthinking, an embrace of imperfection. It's a brighter set of tracks then anything we've heard from Rainer Veil before, discarding the foggy filters and guitar pedals that were the signature of their first two EPs in pursuit of a more loose-limbed and swung ideal. Opening on the skeletal trance vapor-trail "Sim Screen" and the agitated "Repatterning", you head into a ferociously asymmetric warehouse swerve "In Gold Mills" conjuring an uncanny, nighttime vision of suburban bass riddled with tension and bliss. "Shallows" retreats through isolation dub, echoing "Change Is Never Easy", a re-worked house template fractured to its bare percussive core, while "FM2" entwines a double helix of DX7 patches with a heart wrench, and "Gauze" dismantles a mosaic of Kwaito patterns, buried under a haze of smoke. Tracing rapidly mutating electronic forms, from ringtone hooks to latinate rhythms and Razor synth edits, Vanity explores an instinctive swell of ideas and influences in perpetual and unstoppable forward motion, a sequence of flash frames captured and distilled for posterity. RIYL: Photek, Caterina Barbieri, SND, Lee Gamble, Gábor Lázár. Mastered and Cut at Dubplates & Mastering, Berlin. Edition of 500.
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LOVE 111LP
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Since the release of their album Wonderland (LOVE 105JC-CD/105LP, 2016), Demdike Stare have been recording material for this new double album Passion; an asymmetric re-imagining of UK club styles taking in frenzied drum trax, shortwave jungle, pinging dancehall and clipped, post-punk riddims. During this time they've been busy curating their DDS label (releases from Shinichi Atobe, Mica Levi, Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe, and Equiknoxx, among others) and have been commissioned by both the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM) and the surviving members of Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza to mine and rework their archives. Enlisting visual artist Michael England (Autechre, Gescom, Leila), they've created a cinematic accompaniment for their collaborative live shows, resulting in the image which adorns this cover - a hybrid/composite portrait exploring/questioning the current use of software in creating hyper reality and the manipulation of the self. The accompanying film includes documentary footage filmed at a Voguing event in NYC, a Blackpool promenade and a Newark, New Jersey roller rink, the end result smudging the lines between live performance, documentary and sonic cinema. It's an idea that's echoed on Passion, continuing a process Demdike began on their Testpressing series of dismantling lines between analog and digital realms, between urban realism and fantasy, between experimental, pop and soundsystem cultures. An outlandish configuration of avant-garde and ultimately functional club weapons designed and honed for the weightiest bassbins, it's also their most direct and fucked up record to date -- a raucous, joyful 9-track smash that comes off like a night on a glamorous, neon-lit bender. Mastered by Matt Colton. RIYL: Errorsmith, PrÃncipe, Dem 2, Jon E Cash, Wiley, Joy Division, DJ Scud, Equiknoxx, Anthony 'Shake' Shakir, Bernard Parmegiani. High-gloss varnish sleeve.
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LOVE 109LP
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For Mary Jane Leach's Flute Songs, Modern Love is honored to bring together four pieces composed for flute and voice, spanning a period of over 30 years and triggered by a fascination with sound and performance. As Leach explains, "In the late 1970s I was practicing playing and singing with tapes that I had made of myself performing long sustained tones. It had started out as an exercise in intonation, and ended up with a fascination for sound phenomena: difference, combination, and interference tones. The first piece I wrote for an instrument that I couldn't play was Trio For Duo (1985), for live and taped alto flute and voice. I had noticed that my voice matched the sound of the bottom fifth of the alto flute, and so the voice in this piece is sung to sound as much like an alto flute as possible. By using glissandos, more 'extra-notated' sounds are created than appear on the page. Bruckstück (1989) was originally written for eight sopranos, but is played on flutes on this recording, using the same pitches, but sounding very different. The piece is polyphonic, with a lot of closely resolving intervals; primarily major and minor seconds. I initially wrote Dowland's Tears (2011) for nine flutes, thinking of it as a recording project and not a concert piece (it now has a 'solo' tenth part added), while Semper Dolens (2018) is for solo and six taped flutes, with sustained harmony and dissonance in mind". These four recordings feature noted Roman flutist Manuel Zurria, who has worked with some of the most important composers around the world. In 1990 he founded Alter Ego, a leading group for contemporary music in Italy. Numerous composers have written pieces for him, and he has expanded the repertoire even further by re-orchestrating compositions into pieces for multiple flutes, as heard on almost forty albums. Mary Jane Leach has played an instrumental role in NYC's pioneering Downtown avant-garde community since the 1970s, working alongside peers including Arthur Russell, Ellen Fullman, Peter Zummo, Philip Corner, and Arnold Dreyblatt, as well as devoting years to the preservation of Julius Eastman's legacy since his death in 1990. Her vinyl debut Pipe Dreams was issued via the Blume imprint (BLUME 011LP, 2017). Mastered and cut by Matt Colton.
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LOVE 108LP
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2019 repress. Lucy Railton is a prolific performer who has appeared on countless recordings and collaborations with many important figures in contemporary music over the last few years. Paradise 94 is, remarkably, her solo debut -- featuring archival, location, and studio recordings which serve as a time capsule of all the myriad disciplines and influences that have brought her to this point in time. It both plays up to and shatters expectations of her music, which harnesses a duality of energies -- acoustic/electronic, real/imagined, iconic/iconoclastic, pissed-off/romantic; out of place and androgynous -- resulting in a visceral emotional insight and rare narrative grasp. Variegated, asymmetric, and located somewhere between her usual fields of exploration, Paradise 94 gives free reign to aspects of her creativity that have previously been subsumed into collaborative processes and interpretations of other composers' work. Here, she's free to probe, sculpt, and layer her sounds through a much broader range of techniques and strategies, placing particular focus on non-linear structural arrangements and exploring the way her cello becomes perceptibly synthetic through collaging, rather than FX. At every turn Paradise 94 is bewilderingly unique. The A-side unfolds an oneiric, inception-like sequence traversing temporalities, timbres, and tones from what sounds like a spectral ensemble playing on a traffic island in "Pinnevik", to bursts of rabbit-in-headlights trance arps emerging from meticulously dissected musique concrète in "The Critical Rush", and a collision of masked vocals, string eruptions, and a deeply moving, light-headed Bach rendition in "For J.R." On the other hand, "Fortified Up" on side B tests out a far rawer approach, sampling herself playing the same glissandi over and again, which she layers into a sort of perpetual, sickly motion, the Shepard tone riffing on the listener's psychoacoustic perceptions before calving off into a cathartic dissonant folk coda in its final throes. In the most classic sense, you can only properly begin to fuck with something from the inside once you truly know it. Railton's dedicated years of service have more than equipped her with the nous and skill to do just that, gifting us with what will no doubt be looked back on as a raw, exposed and important solo debut in years to come. RIYL: Mark Leckey, Alvin Lucier, Beatrice Dillon, Nate Young, Valerio Tricoli, Popol Vuh.
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LOVE 107LP
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After nearly a decade in the making, Zomby finally dispatches Mercury's Rainbow, his astonishing and uniquely formulated dedication to Wiley's series of Eskibeat releases, aka the cornerstone of grime. Originally recorded over an intense couple of weeks while suffering from circadian dysrhythmia, Mercury's Rainbow documents Zomby riffing on intricately hand-programmed arpeggios, using theories of color and its relation to the sonic chromatic spectrum -- the circle of fifths -- to place an expressively avant spin on the Wiley Kat's sliding Triton squares and frozen, post-garage drum patterns. Rather than simply imitating Wiley's foundational unit of grime currency, Zomby innovates with a structure of bewildering, modal styles, refracting 16 diamond-cut permutations according to a color-sound spectrum of tonalities. In the process he effectively loosens up and liquefies the Eski riddim, rendering its bones and sinew in varying states of reactive, physical deliquescence or GIF-like micro-organisms. For dancers and DJs, the fluid contours and viscous, displaced rhythmic anticipation of Mercury's Rainbow suggests myriad geometries for movement in-the-mix, and serves to single-handedly put to sleep a whole genre of also-ran, prosaic "future grime" through its methodical, inventively ground-up construction. While it's difficult to say with certainty, if Mercury's Rainbow was issued at the same time it was created, it may have arguably altered the course of UK grime instrumentals in much the same way Wiley's original template coined a whole new genre, essentially making it the last word in grime futurism, proper. Master and lacquer cut by Matt Colton at Alchemy; Limited edition vinyl.
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LOVE 106CD
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Philippe Hallais returns to Modern Love with An American Hero, the first album under his own name. It follows his label debut as Low Jack with Lighthouse Stories in early 2016 (LOVE 102LP). An American Hero is by some distance his most important work to date, setting aside the squashed dancefloor productions of his Low Jack alias for an album of emotive, indefinable ambient pieces. After working through different subcultural musical languages as Low Jack, with An American Hero, Philippe takes inspiration from the TV biopics of high-performance athletes for an album of exceptional emotive impact; somewhere between pastiche, tragedy, and electronic futurism. Fascinated by the sports documentaries mass-produced by the US TV channel ESPN, Hallais transcribed and amplified its dramatic recipes. These form the material of tearful soap operas which develop the same narrative ad nauseam; the rise to the top, the betrayal, decline, salvation, comeback, and ultimately, nostalgia and regret. The TV formatting reduces the life of these high-level athletes to a generic tale, transforming them into impersonators of their own lives through extreme use of editing, slow motion, and musical themes. Acting as a Greek tragedy, An American Hero delves into the dislocations of the mythology of sports and its achievement in mass entertainment; whereby the hero becomes a dispensable and mimetic body. Hallais delves into this unusual portrayal of triviality and disaster, naivety and cynicism that make the real life and ordeals of the hero indistinguishable from their scripted form on TV. This obsession with storytelling and the creation of bigger-than-life characters forms the narrative of An American Hero, a parable for our times. RIYL: James Ferraro, Yves Tumor, Hype Williams, My Bloody Valentine, Leyland Kirby. Artwork and photography by Ethan Assouline; Mastered and cut by Matt Colton.
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LOVE 106LP
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Double LP version. Philippe Hallais returns to Modern Love with An American Hero, the first album under his own name. It follows his label debut as Low Jack with Lighthouse Stories in early 2016 (LOVE 102LP). An American Hero is by some distance his most important work to date, setting aside the squashed dancefloor productions of his Low Jack alias for an album of emotive, indefinable ambient pieces. After working through different subcultural musical languages as Low Jack, with An American Hero, Philippe takes inspiration from the TV biopics of high-performance athletes for an album of exceptional emotive impact; somewhere between pastiche, tragedy, and electronic futurism. Fascinated by the sports documentaries mass-produced by the US TV channel ESPN, Hallais transcribed and amplified its dramatic recipes. These form the material of tearful soap operas which develop the same narrative ad nauseam; the rise to the top, the betrayal, decline, salvation, comeback, and ultimately, nostalgia and regret. The TV formatting reduces the life of these high-level athletes to a generic tale, transforming them into impersonators of their own lives through extreme use of editing, slow motion, and musical themes. Acting as a Greek tragedy, An American Hero delves into the dislocations of the mythology of sports and its achievement in mass entertainment; whereby the hero becomes a dispensable and mimetic body. Hallais delves into this unusual portrayal of triviality and disaster, naivety and cynicism that make the real life and ordeals of the hero indistinguishable from their scripted form on TV. This obsession with storytelling and the creation of bigger-than-life characters forms the narrative of An American Hero, a parable for our times. RIYL: James Ferraro, Yves Tumor, Hype Williams, My Bloody Valentine, Leyland Kirby. Artwork and photography by Ethan Assouline; Mastered and cut by Matt Colton.
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LOVE 104LP
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Outta the shadows and into the strobe-light, Alex Lewis, aka Turinn, debuts on Modern Love with a debut double-pack of sawn-off bruk-beats and anxious, nerve-riding grooves brewed in the ravines of North Manchester. Turinn emerges from a new generation of producers in the city that include longtime spar Willow, and upcoming producer Croww. Crooked and rugged, but tempered by an acute emotive sensitivity, 18 1/2 Minute Gaps renders a bleedin' cross-section of mongrel, hybrid style 'n pattern in a breathless, deceptively freehand fashion that comes riddled with an electric blue energy all of its own. Committing ten tracks of fractious, mutant funk and sore feels, 18 1/2 Minute Gaps serves to cap Turinn's formative phase of production like a lead lid on a nuclear rave implosion; trapping original 'ardcore 'nuum, Detroit booty and dank post-punk elements in a perpetual flux of in-the-pocket grooves which ravenously attempt to split at the seams, alternately pushing into Muslimgauze-like buffer zones of distortion or resoundingly wide ambient dimensions, and often both at once. This ambiguous dichotomy is epitomized between the rare surge of quick/slow torque in "Ovum", which almost sounds like Chris Carter sparring with Burial Hex, and then in his nod to the Italian new wave with "Elba", which seems to find the square root between Lorenzo Senni and some skudgy as heck Kassem Mosse grind, whereas the bittersweet soul of "1625" finds compatible links with his close peer, Workshop's Willow as well as Japan's Shinichi Atobe and scene enabler Move D, while "Parratactico" swaggers into quantum dancehall meters. The album title track runs at a next level Detroit momentum like DJ Stingray flipping Derrick May and Carl Craig's "Kao-tic Harmonies", before "ESO" cuts in like a super cranky El-B wearing itchy Primark underwear, and the bone-rattling hardcore jungle of "Spawn" soon enough gives way to the sweet lad couplet of "Petrichor" and "Ondine", where his elusive, distressed melodic touch really shines thru. Mastered and cut by Matt Colton at Alchemy; Pressed at Pallas.
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LOVE 105JC-CD
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A project that came to life fueled by collector's obsession and a life-long willingness to dive head-first into unknown musical wormholes, Miles Whittaker and Sean Canty have never been defined by a singular musical trajectory. Their opening salvo of releases dabbled with the aesthetic of the occult and provided an alternate, parallax view of the Italian Library records with which they were both obsessed at the time, but as their long running mixtape series and brilliantly curated DDS label attest, their interests extend far outside the crevices of early electronic music and into dance music, dancehall, roots, jungle, techno, industrial, noise and beyond. While 2013's Testpressing series provided an outlet for mostly club-based productions shot from the hip, Wonderland, their first album since 2012's Elemental, has been constructed with a narrative in mind. From the clipped hard-style of the opening "Curzon", through the jaunty dancehall mutations of "Animal Style" and "FullEdge", exotica/house refractions on "Hardnoise", the frankly ridiculous, bass-bin destroying jungle ructions on "Sourcer", or the extended tease of "Overstaying", it's probably the most enjoyable and loose-limbed hour of music in their catalog, or that you'll likely hear in these weird, angst-ridden times. Mastered and cut by Matt Colton. Comes in a jewel case.
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LOVE 105LP
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Limited repress; Double LP version. Gatefold sleeve. A project that came to life fueled by collector's obsession and a life-long willingness to dive head-first into unknown musical wormholes, Miles Whittaker and Sean Canty have never been defined by a singular musical trajectory. Their opening salvo of releases dabbled with the aesthetic of the occult and provided an alternate, parallax view of the Italian Library records with which they were both obsessed at the time, but as their long running mixtape series and brilliantly curated DDS label attest, their interests extend far outside the crevices of early electronic music and into dance music, dancehall, roots, jungle, techno, industrial, noise and beyond. While 2013's Testpressing series provided an outlet for mostly club-based productions shot from the hip, Wonderland, their first album since 2012's Elemental, has been constructed with a narrative in mind. From the clipped hard-style of the opening "Curzon", through the jaunty dancehall mutations of "Animal Style" and "FullEdge", exotica/house refractions on "Hardnoise", the frankly ridiculous, bass-bin destroying jungle ructions on "Sourcer", or the extended tease of "Overstaying", it's probably the most enjoyable and loose-limbed hour of music in their catalog, or that you'll likely hear in these weird, angst-ridden times. Mastered and cut by Matt Colton.
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LOVE 103LP
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From the disputed border somewhere between Lancashire and Yorkshire, G.H. (Gary Howell) claims a no man's land where he is free to decimate distinctions between black metal and concrète techno by drawing upon an elusive, metaphysical force that's exclusively common to music rooted in that region; from Muslimgauze and Autechre thru Shackleton and Demdike Stare. The inarguably mongrel Housebound Demigod is G.H.'s debut solo album, following the Ground EP (2011) and his involvement with the hexed Pendle Coven project and HATE, alongside Miles Whittaker and Andy Stott, respectively, between 2003-2009. It sounds like nothing out there; the result of countless hours at the grindstone, using sound as tonal therapy and a purely expressive sculptural material to best render the feel of his bleak but extraordinarily beautiful surroundings, with all the rugged texture and captivating aesthetic of some ancient cave graffiti. The album unfolds as a treacherous topography of boggy drones, entrenched sub-bass and deforested, windswept feedback, strewn with the charred remains of black metal in opener "Screaming Demon Pickups" and the hollow-eyed stare down of "Angels And Doormen", or prone to bury the senses with unpredictable slow techno mudslides in "Mickey Cosmos" or the subsidence of "Packhorse". He often underlines that physicality with a drily ambiguous wit; check the bitterly clipped narrative on "Yorkshire Fog", or, equally, when he puts all his weight behind the stylus-troubling, bestial shudder of "Devils Bit Scabious", and you can't shake the feeling that he's gurning like an evil loon behind the rotten torque of the album's titular parting shot. While ostensibly monotone and overcast, the devil is found in the album's subtleties of timing and mixing detail; riddled with phantasms that lurk and lash out from the crevices of its granite slabs and pitch black ravines, all placed at oblique angles in his surreally folded, labyrinthine and unheimlich sound-field. Recorded with a DR550, a battered Charvel guitar and assorted guitar pedals. Mastered and cut by Matt Colton at Alchemy, pressed at Pallas. RIYL: Nurse With Wound, Stephen O'Malley, Autechre, David Lynch, Shackleton.
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LOVE 101LP
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Repressed. Double LP version. Too Many Voices is the fourth album from Andy Stott, a follow-up to 2014's Faith in Strangers (LOVE 098CD). It was recorded from 2014-2016 and sees a diverse spectrum of influences bleed into nine tracks that are as searching as they are memorable. The album draws inspiration from the fourth-world pop of Japan's Yellow Magic Orchestra as much as it does Triton-fueled grime made 25 years later. Somewhere between these two points there's an oddly aligned vision of the future that seeps through the pores of each of the tracks. It's a vision of the future as it was once imagined; artificial, strange, and immaculate. Full of possibilities. The album opens with the harmonized, deteriorating pads of "Waiting For You" and arcs through to the synthetic chamber pop of the closing title-track, referencing Sylvian and Sakamoto's "Bamboo Houses" (1982) as much as it does the ethereal landscapes of This Mortal Coil and Dead Can Dance. In between, the climate and palette constantly shift, taking in the midnight pop of "Butterflies"; the humid, breathless house of "First Night"; and the endlessly cascading "Forgotten." Longtime vocal contributor Alison Skidmore features on half the tracks, sometimes augmented by the same simulated materials as on the dystopian breakdown of "Selfish," and at others surrounded by beautiful synth washes, such as on the mercurial "Over" or the dreamy, neon-lit "New Romantic." It's all far removed from the digital synthesis and the abstracted intricacies that define much of the current electronic landscape. The same cybernetic palette is here implanted into more human form; sometimes cold, but more often thrumming with life. Mastered by Matt Colton at Alchemy.
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LOVE 101CD
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Too Many Voices is the fourth album from Andy Stott, a follow-up to 2014's Faith in Strangers (LOVE 098CD). It was recorded from 2014-2016 and sees a diverse spectrum of influences bleed into nine tracks that are as searching as they are memorable. The album draws inspiration from the fourth-world pop of Japan's Yellow Magic Orchestra as much as it does Triton-fueled grime made 25 years later. Somewhere between these two points there's an oddly aligned vision of the future that seeps through the pores of each of the tracks. It's a vision of the future as it was once imagined; artificial, strange, and immaculate. Full of possibilities. The album opens with the harmonized, deteriorating pads of "Waiting For You" and arcs through to the synthetic chamber pop of the closing title-track, referencing Sylvian and Sakamoto's "Bamboo Houses" (1982) as much as it does the ethereal landscapes of This Mortal Coil and Dead Can Dance. In between, the climate and palette constantly shift, taking in the midnight pop of "Butterflies"; the humid, breathless house of "First Night"; and the endlessly cascading "Forgotten." Longtime vocal contributor Alison Skidmore features on half the tracks, sometimes augmented by the same simulated materials as on the dystopian breakdown of "Selfish," and at others surrounded by beautiful synth washes, such as on the mercurial "Over" or the dreamy, neon-lit "New Romantic." It's all far removed from the digital synthesis and the abstracted intricacies that define much of the current electronic landscape. The same cybernetic palette is here implanted into more human form; sometimes cold, but more often thrumming with life. Mastered by Matt Colton at Alchemy.
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LP
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LOVE 102LP
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Modern Love very rarely reaches out to artists outside of its immediate surroundings; it's happened just a couple of times since the label's inception in 2002. But there's something about Philippe Hallais that compelled the label to ask him if he wanted to do something together. Hallais has released music on a bunch of cool labels (L.I.E.S., The Trilogy Tapes, Delsin, In Paradisum), but upon hearing the first tracks recorded for Lighthouse Stories, it was obvious that he was hitting on something new -- a kinda weird slow/fast dance music that sounded like a footwork variant sewn up with an exotic production style impossible to pin down. These tracks eventually splintered off into different directions, held together by a strong sense of narrative and motion harking back to a teenage obsession with turntablism, Detroit electro, and ghetto house, and eventually juke and grime. Although Hallais had previously been focusing on more industrial dancefloor variants, for Lighthouse Stories he turned to these foundational influences, as well as his love of mixtapes and sound collages full of unfinished ideas, skits, and experiments -- all things that inform the flow of this album. Lighthouse Stories captures a sense of nostalgia well, but is also a futuristic vision full of that exploratory, vibrant spirit that's so hard to find in electronic music these days. Frames of reference are hard, but in places it reminds one of the dusted swagger of Anthony Shake Shakir, the aquatic Drexciyan movements of Ultradyne, a loose-limbed take on shangaan, and Actress at his most submerged. But ultimately, it's an album made by a producer looking to his personal history while breaking new ground, pushing ahead with little regard to convention and ultimately ending up with something completely unique: a kind of intimate journal rendered in bright colors and odd shapes. Mastered and cut by Matt Colton. Pressed at Pallas. Cover artwork and insert designed by Will Bankhead.
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3CD
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LOVE 100CD
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Repressed, now in jewel case packaging. Death Is Unity With God finds Dominick Fernow returning to the kind of feral, burned-out productions that dominated 2012's Ornamented Walls (LOVE 080LP). This triple CD includes all the material included on the original 2014 limited six-cassette release of Death Is Unity With God, following Modern Love's double-LP edition containing 12 of the tracks (LOVE 100LP). Nodding to classic Muslimgauze, but also inspired by the parallels between religious fundamentalism at home in the USA and abroad, the oppressive atmospheres and destroyed rhythms isolate the gutted toil and drone in "It's to Come," while "FBI God" reduces the drums to scorched blasts against some harrowing, darkside chords. The quasi-speed torment of "Manufactured Silencers Under Direct Orders" flows into the haunting chorales and chiming percussions of "Living On and Off At the Shadows Motel" and the scything techno roil of "Small Explosives and Blasting Caps Inside the Pages of a Phonebook," before a particularly effective chamber-like meditation, "McVeigh Figure," draws aesthetic lines between ambient black metal, Coil, and early Autechre. "Waco Postmortem (Murrah)" ends the set operating nearly out of earshot with those incredible, sashaying synth motifs persisting in their struggle against the patina of hiss and exasperated rhythms blurred around the edges. Mastered by Miles.
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2LP
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LOVE 098LP
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2015 limited vinyl repress. Double LP version. Making use of on an array of instruments, field recordings, found sounds and vocal treatments, it's a largely analog variant of hi-tech production styles arcing from the dissonant to the sublime.
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CD
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LOVE 098CD
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Faith in Strangers was written and recorded between January 2013 and June 2014, and was edited and sequenced in late July of 2014. Making use of on an array of instruments, field recordings, found sounds and vocal treatments, it's a largely analog variant of hi-tech production styles arcing from the dissonant to the sublime. The first two tracks recorded during these early sessions bookend the release, the opener "Time Away" featuring euphonium played by Kim Holly Thorpe and last track "Missing," a contribution by Stott's occasional vocal collaborator Alison Skidmore, who also appeared on 2012's Luxury Problems. Between these two points Faith in Strangers heads off from the sparse and infected "Violence" to the broken, downcast pop of "On Oath" and the motorik, driving melancholy of "Science & Industry" -- three vocal tracks built around that angular production style that imbues proceedings with both a pioneering spirit and a resonating sense of familiarity. Things take a sharp turn with "No Surrender"-- a sparkling analog jam making way for a tough, smudged rhythmic assault, while "How It Was" refracts sweaty warehouse signatures and "Damage" finds the sweet spot between RZA's classic "Ghost Dog" and Terror Danjah at his most brutal. "Faith in Strangers" is next and offers perhaps the most beautiful and open track here, its vocal hook and chiming melody bound to the rest of the album via the almost inaudible hum of Stott's mixing desk. It provides a haze of warmth and nostalgia that ties the nine loose joints that make up the LP into the most memorable and oddly cohesive of Stott's career to date, built and rendered in the spirit of those rare albums that straddle innovation and tradition through darkness and light, lingering on in the mind like nothing else. CD comes packaged in a 6-panel digifile.
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CD
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LOVE 1094CD
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2014 jewel case repress, replacing the original gatefold/6-page digifile edition. Millie & Andrea are Miles Whittaker and Andy Stott, fellow label-mates at Modern Love who collaborated on an occasional series of 12" releases between 2008 and 2010. They now return with Drop the Vowels, their debut album. Produced fast and loose through late 2013/early 2014, it's an album that recalls the strict and stripped funk of Anthony Shakir as much as it does Leila's incredible debut Like Weather, eschewing the dark aesthetic both producers are best known for in favor of something much more visceral. It's an album borne from a love of both pop and club music, made to evoke an adrenalized, hedonistic, as well as an emotional response. Opener "GIF RIFF" brings to life a gamelan edit stripped bare before the over-compressed "Stay Ugly" breaks out with a tumbling, broken arrangement situated somewhere between Richard D. James and Jai Paul. "Temper Tantrum" and "Spectral Source" follow, versions of tracks originally released on the second and third Daphne EPs respectively, the former a rugged rave anthem tempered by blue strings, the latter a proper dancefloor destroyer recalling Shake's mighty "Madmen." "Corrosive" flits between a fibrillating, arpeggiated steppers' rhythm and a brutal jungle breakdown, while "Drop the Vowels" further explores and strips bare bass & drums before the slow but jacking warehouse killer "Back Down" provides pure percussive abandon. "Quay" ends the set with something quieter, a sublime coda made entirely from field recordings. Mastered and cut by Matt Colton.
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CD
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LOVE 094CD
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Millie & Andrea are Miles Whittaker and Andy Stott, fellow label-mates at Modern Love who collaborated on an occasional series of 12" releases between 2008 and 2010. They now return with Drop the Vowels, their debut album. Produced fast and loose through late 2013/early 2014, it's an album that recalls the strict and stripped funk of Anthony Shakir as much as it does Leila's incredible debut Like Weather, eschewing the dark aesthetic both producers are best known for in favor of something much more visceral. It's an album borne from a love of both pop and club music, made to evoke an adrenalized, hedonistic, as well as an emotional response. Opener "GIF RIFF" brings to life a gamelan edit stripped bare before the over-compressed "Stay Ugly" breaks out with a tumbling, broken arrangement situated somewhere between Richard D. James and Jai Paul. "Temper Tantrum" and "Spectral Source" follow, versions of tracks originally released on the second and third Daphne EPs respectively, the former a rugged rave anthem tempered by blue strings, the latter a proper dancefloor destroyer recalling Shake's mighty "Madmen." "Corrosive" flits between a fibrillating, arpeggiated steppers' rhythm and a brutal jungle breakdown, while "Drop the Vowels" further explores and strips bare bass & drums before the slow but jacking warehouse killer "Back Down" provides pure percussive abandon. "Quay" ends the set with something quieter, a sublime coda made entirely from field recordings. Mastered and cut by Matt Colton. CD edition housed in a deluxe oversized 6-panel digifile -- limited remaining stock of this version...
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2LP+CD
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LOVE 094LP
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*Special Edition includes a bonus 10-track, hour-long CD featuring all the Millie & Andrea singles released between 2008-2010, the first time they have ever been available on CD format.* Millie & Andrea are Miles Whittaker and Andy Stott, fellow label-mates at Modern Love who collaborated on an occasional series of 12" releases between 2008 and 2010. They now return with Drop the Vowels, their debut album. Produced fast and loose through late 2013/early 2014, it's an album that recalls the strict and stripped funk of Anthony Shakir as much as it does Leila's incredible debut Like Weather, eschewing the dark aesthetic both producers are best known for in favor of something much more visceral. It's an album borne from a love of both pop and club music, made to evoke an adrenalized, hedonistic, as well as an emotional response. Opener "GIF RIFF" brings to life a gamelan edit stripped bare before the over-compressed "Stay Ugly" breaks out with a tumbling, broken arrangement situated somewhere between Richard D. James and Jai Paul. "Temper Tantrum" and "Spectral Source" follow, versions of tracks originally released on the second and third Daphne EPs respectively, the former a rugged rave anthem tempered by blue strings, the latter a proper dancefloor destroyer recalling Shake's mighty "Madmen." "Corrosive" flits between a fibrillating, arpeggiated steppers' rhythm and a brutal jungle breakdown, while "Drop the Vowels" further explores and strips bare bass & drums before the slow but jacking warehouse killer "Back Down" provides pure percussive abandon. "Quay" ends the set with something quieter, a sublime coda made entirely from field recordings. Mastered and cut by Matt Colton.
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