Explorations

Artist: DEATH AND VANILLA
Album: EP (Vinyl Edition)
Cat#: HITD 001

Limited edition of 500 copies on black vinyl (w/ poster + mp3 download voucher)
Release date: 8th January 2014
www.deathandvanilla.bandcamp.com

Label, orders: www.handsinthedarkrecords.com

DEATH AND VANILLA - Run Rabbit Run

A remix I did for Samaris back in the day but was never released. Enjoy!

Samaris - Viltu Vitrast (Muted Remix)

"Propped Up" is the first single to be taken from the debut album Hide and Seek from Mammoth Penguins, the new band fronted by Emma Kupa, formerly of BBC 6 Music favourites Standard Fare.  With a stirring chorus that makes you want to pump your fist and a call-and-response section that begs you to join in (“regrets, mistakes,…”), the rip roaring “Propped Up” talks about how we're all dependent on others to distract us from negative thoughts.
 
The album Hide and Seek is due out on 10 July via Fortuna POP!, the album is an exhilarating collection of indie anthems, with Emma's candid songwriting and heartfelt vocals at the fore. Chugging away like a great lost Weezer record, the songs are bold, loud and outrageously catchy, with lyrics that hit just the right chord, exploring the burgeoning responsibilities of being in your late 20s/early 30s.
 
When the much-loved Standard Fare called it a day after nine years and two albums, Emma Kupa upped sticks and moved from Sheffield to Cambridge, where she recruited Mark Boxall (bass) and Tom Barden (drums). Previously the bassist and lead singer in Standard Fare, Emma relished the switch to guitar in Mammoth Penguins, allowing her the space to deliver her trademark soaring vocals and to indulge in the occasional mean guitar solo. With Tom’s driving energy and Mark’s bouncy pop bass they quickly developed their riff-tastic powerpop sound.

Recorded at Sickroom Studios in Norfolk by producer Owen Turner (Magoo, Factory Floor), Hide and Seek captures the band at the age they're at right now, reflecting on different aspects of being in their late twenties. With Hide and Seek, Mammoth Penguins have produced a wonderfully varied record, each song a story, nuggets of joy, despair and hope. Already onto her second great band, feeling inadequate isn't something that Emma Kupa needs to do.

Mammoth Penguins - Propped Up

Snowy Nasdaq & Snowy Life - Same Mistakes

@mammutis https://www.facebook.com/events/1431355720522669/
original found here: https://soundcloud.com/mammutis/str-ndin-1

Mammút - Ströndin (Samaris remix)

http://makeness.world

Exclusive 12" vinyl: hyperurl.co/g4om3s
Stream: hyperurl.co/y48bu3


Rogue



Astronauts
End Codes album
Lo Recordings
6th May 2016

Dan Carney is a songwriter based in east London who releases music under the name Astronauts. He also enjoys spending time with his daughter and his partner, going for long walks, reading, writing, looking out of the nearest window, and making overly ambitious travel plans.

After the single ‘Skydive’ went viral in June 2014, the debut Astronauts album ‘Hollow Ponds’ was met with critical acclaim. This led to live performances far and wide, with Dan visiting Italy, Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany, France, and Switzerland in 2015 alone, as well as – equally thrillingly - having a song used on the BBC’s darts coverage in his native country.

Radio support also came from all over, with Radio 2 (Huey Morgan) and 6 Music (Lauren Laverne, Cerys Matthews, Radcliffe & Maconie, Steve Lamacq, Tom Ravenscroft, Gideon Coe) in the UK, to US stations such as KCRU in Los Angeles, all queuing up to broadcast Dan’s efforts to the public.

In between all of this, Dan has found the time to write and record his second full-length, ‘End Codes’. It channels the melancholic intensity and rich arrangements first encountered on ‘Hollow Ponds’ into eleven beautiful new songs, while also managing to sound more coherent and focused than its predecessor.

Lyrically, it’s Dan’s trademark intriguing blend of resignation and defiance, all delivered with a world-weary estuary twang which combines the colloquial fragility of Robert Wyatt with the eerie double-tracked smoothness of Elliott Smith. Cuts such as opener ‘Recondition’, ‘Split Screen’, and ‘Breakout’ are propelled along by a familiar sprawling, motorik intensity, simultaneously fraught and uplifting, and just repetitive enough to lodge themselves firmly in your consciousness without becoming labored or tedious.

Elsewhere, however, there’s variation and versatility in abundance. The woozy, pastoral otherness of ‘When It’s Gone’ – inspired by the cautionary paean to faded youth which adorns the grave of the Black Prince at Canterbury Cathedral - cements Dan’s status as the nearest thing Essex has got to Jonathan Wilson, while ‘Dead Snare’ mines an ominous trench of paranoia and dreamlike malevolence, dark acoustic guitar lines intertwining with creaking cello and a nagging lyric which sets out a bleak, recriminatory inner monologue.

There’s also the steady, cyclical lead single ‘Civil Engineer’, possibly the finest folk-pop song yet written about the vagaries of a career in civic planning, and the triumphant Laurel Canyon-via-Romford CSNY-style harmonies of ‘You Can Turn It Off’. Closer ‘Skeleton’, with its defiant drone-gospel coda, triumphant and boisterous over a yawning chasm of electronic sadness, channels the likes of Fugazi, Tortoise, and The War On Drugs, proving that Dan’s horizons extend significantly further than many of his supposed “indie folk” contemporaries.

Dan hopes that ‘End Codes’ will appeal to his existing small-but-probably-dedicated fan-base, while also attracting new listeners, as it’s the best thing he’s ever done. We like ‘End Codes’ very much, and we hope you do too. Dan is, as ever, available for interviews, lovingly curated playlists, and questionable sports science product endorsements.

ARTIST LINKS
www.lorecordings.com/artist/astronauts/
www.facebook.com/pages/Astronauts…71?ref=bookmarks
twitter.com/AstronautHeart

LABEL LINKS
www.lorecordings.com
www.facebook.com/pages/Lo-Recordi…/448401545307474
twitter.com/lorecordings

CONTACT
Press – John Power – john@thebestinshow.net
Radio – Sean Newsham - sean@mutante-inc.demon.co.uk
Label/licensing - Gavin O’Shea - gavin@hub100.com


End Codes

Buy on Bandcamp

Recondition

"Nebula" from 'Will' by Julianna Barwick, out on Dead Oceans on May 5, 2016
Dead Oceans: http://smarturl.it/jbarwick
iTunes: http://smarturl.it/jbarwick_it
Amazon: http://smarturl.it/jbarwick_amz
Support you local independent record store: http://smarturl.it/jbarwick_ind


Nebula

Julianna Barwick - Nebula

http://n5md.com/discography/246/Mutogibito

Dalot - Lift

Music : Maciek Sawoch
Lyrics : Natasza Ptakova
Mix/Master : Kuba Sojka
Photo : Wiktor Franko

Dissonance

Single off "STRANNIK EP" Out 5.27.16

Copyright 2016 ALEK FIN & GALUN
Produced, Recorded, and Performed by ALEK FIN & GALUN
Mastered by Dave Cooley for Elysian Masters
Artwork by Alloy Studio

STRANNIK - EP

ALEK FIN & GALUN - Clone

Taken from "Sundur" out on Morr Music August 19th 2016
Buy the album: http://bit.ly/2aZaax6

Sundur

Buy the album

Pascal Pinon: 53

A Hermitage

Jambinai - For Everything That You Lost

From the album Modern Country, out June 3, 2016 on Merge Records.

Modern Country

William Tyler "Sunken Garden"

Strange Relations' "Going Out" EP out 7/8/16 on Tiny Engines

Strange Relations - Ceremonies

'Kaleidoscope' appears on the upcoming album 'Moon Saloon' from Arc Iris. Pre-order now...

CD/Vinyl: https://bellaunion.greedbag.com/buy/moon-saloon-1/
iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/gb/album/moon-saloon/id1106687308?app=itunes

Kaleidoscop

Arc Iris - Kaleidoscope

Modern Studies' debut album Swell to Great is out on digital, CD and vinyl on Song, by Toad Records on the 12th September 2016.

Modern Studies are a chamber pop band from Glasgow-via-Yorkshire.  Their quietly experimental landscape songs are played on analogue synths, cello, double bass, drums, guitars, a wine-glass orchestra and, at the creaking centre of things, a Victorian pedal harmonium.

The band came together in early 2015, when Glasgow songwriter Emily Scott recruited old pals and collaborators Pete Harvey (King Creosote, The Leg), Joe Smillie (boss of Glasgow’s The Glad Cafe) and Rob St. John.

Working throughout the year at Pumpkinfield – Pete’s rural Perthshire studio – the band shaped a set of Emily’s skeleton songs, drawing largely from the salt and spray of the sea.  This communal arts-und-crafts-werk resulted in their debut LP ‘Swell to Great’ (named after a stop on the wheezing old harmonium), which will be released on Song, by Toad Records of Edinburgh, Scotland in September 2016.

The band also began an ongoing collaboration with London-based label Earth Recordings in 2015, contributing a Shirley Collins cover ‘The Bold Fisherman’ to the ‘Shirley Inspired’ tribute LP.  More releases with Earth are planned for later in the year.

Modern Studies will play a selection of UK shows and festivals throughout 2016.

***

A recent past, a decade ago.

A Belfast-born Victorian harmonium is entrusted to the care of Glasgow chamber-folk singer Emily Scott. It looks like it should sound: imposing and statuesque, ornately carved with wax-dripping candle holders, organ stops with enticing names and elaborate levers, yet the years have taken their toll.

The ‘mouse-proof’ treadles are mended with gaffer tape. Its breathing is choked and laboured; a ridiculous amount of pedalling is required to produce even the simplest melody. Most of the keys don’t sound; some muster but a grim rattle. Those tones which can be coaxed from within are off-key in one way or another.

And yet, they fall in love, and conspire together to bring about a skeletal cluster of musical fragments. Slowly but surely the harmonium gives up its provenance. Cigarette cards of moustachioed soldiers tucked between the keys, a Miss Havisham drape of cobwebs, a selection of foxed and edgeworn song-sheets, and a short hand-written history of a short life.

A distant past, a century ago.

A Belfast-born Victorian harmonium is entrusted to the care of Daisy Skelly, a music teacher with a sweetheart lost to the Great War, and who would succumb to typhus in her mid-twenties.

Early 2015 and the harmonium migrates to Pumpkinfield, a studio in rural Perthshire. It becomes the thing around which a constellation of people, instruments and ideas begin to orbit. Fragments become lines become songs.

Vinyl/CD pre-order

Modern Studies - Dive Bombing

Live at Mengi in Reykjavík Iceland in April 2016.
With Tumi Árnason on saxophone and Shahzad Ismaily on drums. 
Mixed by Paul Evans

Explorations

knittyhiker