INIT://MEMORY

Pre-order

Shapeshifter

From the album Anne.  Available November 16, 2018 from Western Vinyl.

Bandcamp https://josephshabason.bandcamp.com/album/anne
iTunes https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/anne/1427808233?ls=1&app=itunes
Spotify https://open.spotify.com/album/19FD6RN5K3xYFThAHM4fGy?si=0hUO0rFVQAigvSPTvJL_4w
WV http://westernvinyl.com/shop/wv182

Joseph Shabason
Twitter https://twitter.com/JosephShabason
Instagram https://www.instagram.com/josephshabason/
Facebook https://www.facebook.com/josephshabason

Anne, the second album By Toronto saxophonist and composer Joseph Shabason, is a tonal essay on degenerative illness. Delicately and compassionately woven with interviews of Shabason’s mother from whom the album takes its name, Anne finds its creator navigating a labyrinth of subtle and tragic emotions arising from his mother's struggle with Parkinson’s disease. Across the nine vivid postcards of jazz-laden ambience that comprise the album, Shabason unwraps these difficult themes with great care and focus revealing the unseen aspects of degenerative diseases that force us to re-examine common notions of self, identity, and mortality. 

Shabason’s uncanny ability to manoeuvre through such microscopic feelings is mirrored by his capacity to execute a similar tightrope-walk through musical genres. His music occupies a specific space that is as palpable as it is difficult to pin labels to. On Anne’s second track “Deep Dark Divide” rays of effected saxophone shine behind clouds of digital synthesizer that echoes the sound of jazz in the late 80s, but with a Jon Hassell-esque depth of sensibility that consciously subverts the stylistic inoffensiveness of that era. There is detail and idiosyncrasy beneath Shabason’s dawn-of-the-CD-era sheen that elevates the album far beyond a mere aesthetic exercise.

Still, the sounds on Anne are not so experimentally opaque as to stand in the way of the album’s through-line of sincerity and emotionality. When dissonance is employed it is punctual and meaningful, like on album-middler “Fred and Lil” where a six-minute cascade of breathy textures builds suddenly to an agitated growl, only to abruptly give way to Anne Shabason speaking intimately about her relationship to her own parents. Snippets of such conversations see her taking on something like a narrator role across Anne while the sound of her voice itself is sometimes effected to become a musical texture entwined into the fabric of the songs without always being present or audible.  The subsequent piece “Toh Koh” then drifts into playful disorientation as a lone female voice echoes the two syllables of the title, recalling the vocal techniques of composer Joan La Barbara, or even the light-hearted mantras of Lucky Dragons. From here the album veers back onto its aesthetic thoroughfare with “November” where Shabason lays muted brass textures atop a wavepool of electric chords provided by none other than the ambient cult-hero Gigi Masin, one of Anne’s many integral collaborators.

The serene tragedy of the album distils itself gracefully into the ironically titled album closer “Treat it Like a Wine Bar” wherein flutters of piano and mournfully whispered woodwinds seem to evaporate particle by delicate particle, leaving the listener with a faint emotional afterglow like a dream upon waking. There is a corollary to be drawn here with what it must be like to feel one’s own mind and body drift away slowly until nothing remains, while the collection of memories and abilities that we use to denote the “self” softens into eternity. On Anne, it is precisely this fragile exchange of tranquillity and anguish that Joseph Shabason has proven his singular ability to articulate.

Anne

Joseph Shabason - "Fred and Lil"

foggy

With seemingly effortless precision and a sense for the imperfect, Popp merges Ambient, Third Stream and Minimal Music on his debut album „Laya“. The title derives from the Sanskrit language and signifies a place of rest and mental inactivity. In the spring of 2019 Popp created these 8 tracks from hours of improvisation in his own studio. The moments thus captured were then enriched with more sounds and effects to add layers and shed the manually played percussion of all its earthliness. The result is an album of concealed complexity and unadorned beauty. 

Raised on an old farm in rural Bavaria, Simon Popp started playing the drums at the age of 9. During his studies at the Academy of Music and Theatre in Munich, he extensively studied music from countries like Ghana, Benin, India and Cuba where rhythm is central to culture. On his quest for this world‘s sounds, Popp collected and recorded a wide variety of drums and other instruments, adding to the placelessness of Laya.

releases July 12, 2019 

Written, Recorded and Mixed by Simon Popp 
Mastered by Christoph Stickel at CS-Mastering 
Distributed by wordandsound, sales@wordandsound.com 
Artwork by Miro Maria Schachtner 
Design by Daily Dialogue

Lilac

buy vinyl/digital nicemusiclabel.bandcamp.com

taken from Thomas Hardisty 'Peace In The Plaza' NM028V

Nice Music presents the debut album proper from Melbourne's Thomas Hardisty, known for his varied and imaginative contributions to Nun, Constant Mongrel, Woollen Kits and more. Hardisty has quietly laboured on 'Peace In The Plaza' over the 2 years leading up to its release, taking time to channel the wordless profundity which fills this record in plumes of contemplative melody and warmth. His placid focus on understated expression on this recording seems to be fueled deeply by its decided concept; a study of the mind's quiet hours which bookend the working day's concerns. This essence slides glacially within a specific physical space, encapsulated entirely by the suburban valley in which Hardisty has found himself - Northcote's verdant suburban strips which back onto parkland and more namely, the somewhat notorious Northcote Plaza. The ghosts of concepts such as sobriety or daily responsibility linger with indolence in the distance while this music gives space to a purer consciousness, albeit within a commonly experienced inner city milieu. Hardisty wields the sleight of hand to animate this juxtaposition, intangibly and lovingly. 

For fans of Hiroshi Yoshimura, Abul Mogard

Peace in the Plaza

Peace In The Plaza

Thomas Hardisty 'Peace in the Plaza'

その反対に沈黙の中で、自分の心の中と向き合い、初めの一歩として何のプロセスが動いているのを知るようになり、見性への道へ歩き始める。~ Opposite to this, surrounded by silence, one can face towards one's own self, and as a first step on the road to self-awareness come to know which processes are occurring.

New album from iu takahashi out May 31, 2020.
@iutakahashi

Listen: https://umerecords.bandcamp.com/album/contour

ume006

Download

iu takahashi ~ Contour (snippets)

Listen in to the next installment in our Accidental mini mix series with some old and new goodies by recent signee on the label Abby Lee Tee. 

Featuring tunes from Accidental artists Dominic Voz, Julian Sartorius, Kirk Barley along with new discoveries Teebs and Guy Birkin, or the OGs Ahmad Jamal and Beatminerz the mix flows perfectly with Abby's signature ambient intricacies, accompanying smoothly the beginning of the week.

Full track list via our Facebook, Instagram and Twitter pages.

Abby Lee Tee – Accidental Mini Mix

Olta Karawane show continues with Part 2: Marc Ribot, Arto Lindsay, John Zorn, Steve Beresford and other hungry friends of John are waiting for him on the shore.

Marc Ribot, Arto Lindsay, John Zorn, Steve Beresford And Others.....[Olta Karawane]

From Causa Sui's new 2LP, "Szabodelico", out on El Paraiso Records November 13th!

Order: 

www.elparaisorecords.com
www.normanrecords.com
www.juno.co.uk

Japan: www.diskunion.net

Info:

Something different from Causa Sui.

While Causa Sui have always had one foot in heavy psychedelic rock, they've had the other one deep in a wide variety of esoteric styles. On this new double LP set, that other dimension of the band is being explored full-scale. ”Szabodelico” paints with a colourful palette, both compositionally and sonically - digging deep into an assortment of cultures, eras and sounds with a true crate-digger mindset.

Throughout their 15 year life-span Causa Sui has always been about seeking out new directions, exploring the past and the present in a way that's unique at each step of their subtle progression - forging new paths into an existing map. ”Szabodelico” feels like discovering a small room under the stairs of your own house: familiar, yet new and exciting. Their latest vision is an elegantly zoned-out version of itself: a turn inward. Anti-bombastic, yet rich with ecstatic harmonics and dynamics. The band stringed together a long series of sessions in 2019 and early 2020 in their studio in Odense, often prioritizing playful first takes and good vibes rather than clinical perfection.

Sparsely dubbed and mixed with a natural, full bodied flavour by Jonas Munk during the summer of 2020, each track has its own aesthetic. There's no simple equation to sum up the 13 individual parts of the album, but as a whole it creates an entity that's as complete as each of its parts. From the windblown opener ”Echoes of Light”, to the closing slow-motion epic ”Merging Waters” you'll find yourself asking where did the time go? The answer of course is: Szabodelico.

Causa Sui: "La Jolla"

Lead single off IKSRE's 'Transmission' remix collection.
Cassette Tape + Digital release date: December 18th, 2020.

IKSRE / Soundcloud - https://soundcloud.com/iksremusic
JQ / Soundcloud - https://soundcloud.com/jq_music

Transmission

TAPE + DL

IKSRE - A Storm To Begin (JQ Remix)

Label helmed by KEXP DJ Alex Ruder. 
It's a feeling...

IKSRE - A Storm To Begin (JQ Remix)

Hush Hush Records

Recent comments

SNOWDN

Related tracks