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viewing 1 To 8 of 8 items
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SLP 054LP
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Following their acclaimed opera-in-suspension about Fugazi, NYC's Object Collection imagine a delirium of transhuman thought and progressive politics on their return to the inimitable Slip label. You Are Under Our Space Control sees the duo of Kara Feely (text) and Travis Just (music) refocus their "operatic" sensibilities into a typically confounding "space-opera" that somehow ties up references as wide reaching as John Cage's piano solo Music Of Changes (1951), with Cy Roth's sci-fi Fire Maidens From Outer Space from the same year, as well as texts inspired by Sun Ra and the Russian Cosmists' poetics and philosophies, and interviews from real (and imagined) space travelers and astronomers. Aye, it's a proper headful of ideas, and understandably chaotic with it, but OC makes a virtue of somehow maintaining a coherence though their sharply chopped arrangements, which start out tightly puckered, but gradually loosen up into sprawling, psychedelic designs as the album proceeds. What happens in its 18 parts is comparable to a sort of home-brewed sci-fi soundtrack imagined by a teenaged dream-team of Todd Dockstader, Bruce Haack, and Sonny Blount; a sound full of mercurial wormholes, with an animist capacity to rouse arcane spirits, and a magnetic pull to the most restlessly searching listeners of the weird and wonderful. Most crucially, for an album rooted in '50s sci-fi and avant-garde, the results prize that era's modernist promise without coming off as retrogressive or corny.
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SLP 053LP
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Pleasure Island is British composer Tim Parkinson's disquieting and joyous Slip debut: play time in end times. Titled after the Disney adaptation of Paese dei balocchi (or the "Land of Toys") in Carlo Collodi's The Adventures of Pinocchio (1883), Pleasure Island is a metaphysical playground of organic and digital cohabitation, its inhabitants pacified by toys and comforts. Alongside Dawn Bothwell, Suze Whaites, Laurie Tompkins, and Francesca Fargion, Parkinson exerts an uncannily emotional pull from an unlikely but potent alliance of ultra-minimal aesthetics, dead-beat drums, junk electronics, and mechanized mantras. Voices are hemmed in by electronic sound. People buffeted around by machines. Words surrounded by garlands of digital interference. Time repackaged as countdown. Tim's trash-opera "Time With People" continues to be performed around the world, past champions of which include Object Collection, a.pe.ri.od.ic, Edges, and NEC, and he is a co-curator of London's longstanding "Music We'd Like To Hear" series. Despite decades of fiercely independent production, this is his only piece conceived of first and foremost as an album.
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SLP 047LP
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Joyrobix is Brummy-abroad Joe Snape's flooring return to Slip: a songbook of nimble, aching pop that wrings raggedy solace from dejection and displacement. Begun as a danceable re-fix of pieces for chamber ensemble toured the last three years, production on Joyrobix stalled sharply in 2016. Instead of a self-confident exercise in documentation, the record twisted into a darker, more lyrical original: a period portrait of dislocation and burnout following Snape's move to the US in 2015. There's still plenty of fun to be had. Between the adult contemporary guitars, gospel grooves, and Broadway melisma, the tropes of a musical America are present, correct, and indefatigably up-tempo. But even at his most playful, Snape sounds like a musical mind running on fumes, the optimistic experimentalism of 2015's Brittle Love audible only through a weary cloud, and the black dog never altogether quieted. Nor could it be: Joyrobix sounds like a working-out -- here manic, there taciturn -- of a new world dream gone sideways. Features Jesse Chevan on drums, Will Gardner on saxophone, Suze Whaites on oboe, J. Louise Snape on cornet, Owen Roberts on bass clarinet, Weston Olencki on trombone, plus Laurie Tompkins and Suze Whaites on vocals. Artwork by Suze Whaites. Mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi. RIYL: Kim Hiorthoy, Tunng, Múm. Edition of 300.
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SLP 046LP
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Brace, Brace is Julia Reidy's spellbinding return to Slip, rendering a shimmering, introspective solo dialog on 12-string guitar laced with soaring but unsettling vocal processes and spectral electronics. With an uncanny, even unsettling ability to hold her listener's ear-gaze, Julia's follow-up to 2017's Dawning On finds the Berlin-based Aussie continuing to recontextualize her instrument with elegant precision to yield a sublime tension between her heavy-lidded vocals and iridescent strings. In Julia's remarkable opener "Of Neither", strings fluidly cascade from her fingertips into an amniotic soundsphere of field recordings and gently fleeting synth figures. When combined with the deep dreaming AI texture of her autotuned vocals and wind-blown harmonica, the effect recalls a sort of midnight Tuareg blues half-remembered from a fevered sleep. It's deeply beautiful stuff, periodically fading into and out of the light, only to return with more intense inflection and density, yet ever-more spaced out, leading to the internal pocket of "Lament" and its achingly coaxed secrets. With recipients suitably defocused and in pliable state, Julia takes the whole other side to play on that line between organic and processed material, slipping from noirish, filmic intrigue into the middle distance where her rustic coruscations twirl in a set dance with their spectral reflections. RIYL: John Fahey, Hope Sandoval, Talk Talk, Yoshi Wada, Jim O'Rourke. Edition of 300.
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SLP 036LP
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Mica Levi returns to Slip with six piano pieces played by Eliza McCarthy on Slow Dark Green Murky Waterfall. The album is a crepuscular suite riddled with Mica's inquisitive, conversational phrasing and smartly expanding upon their 7" track, "Riding Through Drinking Harpo Dine", a new recording of which also appears in this set. The culmination of three years of work between Mica and Eliza -- winner of the 2013 British Contemporary Piano Competition -- Slow Dark Green Murky Waterfall follows up their collaboration on the Oscar-nominated score for Pablo Larrain's Jackie (2016) with a finer-shaded, patient space for low-lit, smoky expression that's so intimate and personal it almost feels like eavesdropping a private recording. Ineffably bound by a sense of unreal poise, Eliza's interpretations are subtly, dynamically rendered in-the-mix by Mica to present the pieces as though in flux, like poignant, unresolved statements that occur in the flow of quiet, intent dialogue and linger in the air. It's testament to the pair's well-honed intuition that the results connote this feeling so naturally. And it's maybe our familiarity with Mica's work, from her earliest chopped 'n screwed orchestrations, to her Under The Skin (2014) score and her mutant pop pieces, that we keep expecting hers or Tirzah's voice to match her melodies with wordless vocals or harmonious limns throughout the six pieces. That's probably simply down to the fact that Mica writes with such a pop-wise appeal and soulful sensitivity that it prompts sub-vocalization in every listener; the hook of these instrumentals will be floating in one's head for days, weeks, or a lifetime after they're imbibed. Mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi, artwork by Mica Levi and Eliza McCarthy. Edition of 500.
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SLP 038LP
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Shits are not given by Laurie Tompkins and Oliver Coates on Ample Profanity; a let-it-all-out session of deviant, punkish avant-classical composition hallucinated and expectorated by two prodigious talents. An ideally off-center and brazenly wigged-out follow-up to aces from Chaines (SLP 037LP), Yeah You, and Ashley Paul (SLP 044LP) already released by Slip -- the label Laurie runs with friends between London and Newcastle. Laurie supposes and composes on keys, tapes, and samples, and Oliver does his part on cello and FX. They both sing, if your definition stretches that far. What is agreeable, though, is that Ample Profanity is a steaming pile of madness quite unlike anything else in circulation right now. Still feral from his cultishly acclaimed Heat, War, Sweat, Law album (2016), Laurie is matched by a usually more collected Coates, who, while often hardly distinguishable from the maelstrom, certainly doesn't impede the lunacy, and seems to encourage it, grasping the opportunity to freak out properly adjunct to his solo work and collaborations with Mica Levi. Kicking off with "Sniffin' Samgh", a possessed study in primal vocals and lurching, yelpy strings, the session turns variously thru quieter, asymmetric ideas in "Peejayargh" to cough up its spicy noise guts in RP Beal, before they settle into a call-and-response of quizzical sighs and plucks on "Lime Rugis" and set about hacking up a wickedly dissonant tussle between no wave guitars, intercepted phone calls, and edge-of-sanity blasts into the void with "Charterhouse Vinci". It's maybe not what you might expect from a former winner of the Royal Philharmonic Society's Young Artist Award 2011, and a graduate of the RNCM, or maybe it is. Either way, Ample Profanity is beautiful, funny, and fucked up in equally satisfying measures. RIYL: Jandek, Mica Levi, Yeah You.
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SLP 037LP
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The King is a remarkably absorbing collection of abstract torch songs by Cee Haines, aka Chaines, a Manchester-based artist in possession of a starkly singular sonic language, who has collaborated extensively with the London Contemporary Orchestra and had their work performed at The Roundhouse, Union Chapel, Printworks, and Tate Modern. Leading a thematic expansion of Chaines's OST (2015), their second solo release yields a phantasmic and richly evocative soundtrack-esque series of works written over the past three years, including exclusive versions of their commissions by the London Contemporary Orchestra and Union Chapel, all serving to frame an intimate yet beautifully elusive portrait of a unique artist coming into their own. In eight parts, Chaines draws a mercurial line that connects the almost bestial intimacy of purring strings and whispered vocals in "For Your Own Good" to something like Scott Walker-invoking-Fantasia in "Eraserhead", conjuring a mutably surreal and mystic atmosphere that keeps listeners teetering between knife-edge suspense and sublime relief as they scale from delectably detailed avant-garde psychedelia in "Knockturning" to a bout of Grouper-as-spectral-jazz diva styles of Population 5120, and all in a way that makes the exploded hyaline castles in the sky dimensions of Airship seem totally feasible next to the cavernous avant-techno impulses of Carpathia. Never following a linear path, Chaines is as likely to incorporate doom-laced chamber motifs and asymmetric techno rhythms as operatic vocals and microscopic sounds, always with a sensitivity to the metaphysics of space and spirit which coolly sets their work apart. Held up beside Slip's celebrated recent releases, Chaines find themselves amid exemplary, boundary-morphing company, whose diversity finds a common strength in the will to express something of a pathos beyond easy comprehension, yet which can be felt and understood immediately and instinctively by anyone with an open mind and a thirst for the new. Artwork by Chaines. Mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi.
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SLP 044LP
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Singular avant-garde voice Ashley Paul commits a bewitching debut to Slip with Lost In Shadows; a tender yet discordant suite inspired by her new role as mother to a young child. Few would call Ashley's music "easy", but it is also heavily rewarding in its own, uncompromising way and now finds its audience on the acclaimed Slip imprint amid a roster of boundary-morphing composers including Chaines, Mica Levi & Oliver Coates, Yeah You, and Laurie Tompkins. Recorded over three weeks at FUGA in Zaragoza, Spain and premiered at Counterflows 2017, on Lost In Shadows the multi-instrumentalist plays guitar, sax, clarinet, voice, and percussion. In a mark of distance traveled since her last album, however, she draws on recent collaborations and work with pre-eminent composers such as Rashad Becker, Lucy Railton, and Rhys Chatham to also delegate roles to a new ensemble of players on tuba, baritone sax, cello and percussion, who serve to render the dynamics of her music with stronger attention to bass rhythms and intricate, iridescent dissonance. The expanded personnel lend new flesh to Ashley's work, hinging around her tremulous vocals and bringing her ideas to life in 11 parts that hold to a perceptive knife edge between lullaby-like and restlessly tooth-achy: mixing the off-key filigree of her vocals at asymmetric tonal angles to the instrumentals -- a solution of jazz, chamber music, modern composition, and folk craft expressing a complexity of ideas that may well have fallen apart if handled by composers unable to hold their nerve quite as well as Ashley. As with all her works, a sense of intuitive, instinctive alchemy is at the core of Lost In Shadows, as Ashley's jarring tonal juxtapositions and her own elusive vocals act out a metaphor for the challenge of nurturing new relationships in testing circumstances, an experience she describes as "many hours spent awake at night in a dream like state of half consciousness, darkness and solitude; an overwhelming feeling of loneliness and exhaustion made light by a profound new love." Ultimately, the results are cranky as much as delirious, uncannily relaying a state of mind and sensations which will only ever be felt by some of its potential listeners yet offers myriad possibilities for interpretation to all. Artwork by Gayle Paul.
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