i like music like this where genre is just good

Faith In Strangers’ was written and produced between January 2013 and June 2014, and was edited and sequenced in late July this year. Making use of on an array of instruments, field recordings, found sounds and vocal treatments, it’s a largely analogue 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 analogue 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.

How It Was

On Oath

Violence

Time Away

No Surrender

Science And Industry

HTRK – Body Lotion

Body Lotion is a collaboration between Belgium's Sleeperhold Publications, Australian duo HTRK and London-based artist David Ferrando Giraut. The three tracks on the record—"Sugar," "Punch" and the title track, "Body Lotion"—date back to the sessions that led to the band's 2011 album, Work (Work Work). For any HTRK fan, the opportunity to hear three unheard Work (Work Work)-era tracks is reason for both celebration and reflection. Two of the songs feature the unmistakable basslines of Sean Stewart, who died in 2010, before Work (Work Work) was released. 

Both "Sugar" and "Punch" were recorded live in HTRK's London rehearsal room, the then trio of Jonnine Standish, Nigel Lee-Yang and Sean Stewart. On "Sugar," Jonnine's voice smolders through smeared drums and Sean's bassline. "Punch" is spare and confessionary; "Body Lotion" is suggestive, winking and bruised, a trademark HTRK hook submerged beneath the murk. All three tracks mutated from the recording sessions that ultimately led to Work (Work Work) track "Slo Glo." While they all stand as striking individual songs, they share subtle elements in common—a lyrical idea here, some guitar parts there. 

David Ferrando Giraut's distinctive artwork adorns Body Lotion's sleeve and one side of the wax. (All three tracks feature on the record's A-side.) The Spanish artist has a deep and intimate connection to HTRK—he was living with Nigel in London at a time when Sean would visit to sketch out songs in Nigel's tiny room. They've collaborated before, too: Jonnine has narrated and appeared in some of his films, while Nigel has provided the music. Giraut's previous installations have often carried a musical lean—he's used LP covers and turntables in the past—and he's found a rich stream of creative inspiration in music's ability to create meaning and change in memory and behaviour.

This year has seen HTRK return with Psychic 9-5 Club, a bold and triumphant album, one that marked the beginning of a new era for Nigel and Jonnine. Body Lotion presents a beautiful, bittersweet glimpse into the recent past. 

About Sleeperhold Publications:

Sleeperhold is a Belgian-based publication platform. It's aim: to produce ten outputs, spanning different realms of the arts, and then cease to exist. Its current project is a run of ten vinyl records—HTRK's 12-inch follow previous efforts from Tropic Of Cancer, Moon Duo and Disappears. Before the vinyl series, Sleeperhold put out a photobook, a poster set, a deck of cards and short stories. They say: "There is no recurring theme, there is no recurring format, there is no recurring audience."

SHP #5.4: HTRK - Body Lotion

"journey to the heart of electrons" Everything we dig on Earth is ephemeral what we record is sent like a bottle to the sea to the edge of galaxies

the ephemeral recorder

@samoyed revives hibernating label Flask for the release of forthcoming album, 'Saturday'.

Pre-order digi above and vinyl via Redeye - http://www.redeyerecords.co.uk/vinyl/69310-

Read more on Dummy: http://www.dummymag.com/features/premiere-samoyed-angel-st-nunez

Premiere: Samoyed - Angel St. Nunez

Following on from a pair of Extended Players released in 2011 ("Passed Me By" / "We Stay Together") Andy Stott returns to Modern Love with 'Luxury Problems', an 8 track album of new material recorded over the last 12 months. Five of the tracks on the album feature the voice of Alison Skidmore, Andy's onetime Piano teacher whom he hadnt seen since he was a teenager back in 1996. There was no grand gesture in mind, it just sort of happened - but after almost a year of studio work the result is really quite unlike anything you'll have heard from him before. 'Numb' opens the album with Alison's voice; layered and looped but essentially left bare and exposed, tumbling into a dense shuffle, sort of somewhere between Theo Parrish and Sade, but more f*cked. 'Lost and Found' follows and deploys a growling rave bassline and a disturbed vocal, the beat assembling itself around a squashed Linndrum like a submerged Prince/Cameo production, haunted and impenetrable, but full of funk. 'Sleepless' started life as an African drum edit that sooner or later succumbed to Stott's intense rhythmic shifts. It's a sound that's been imitated countless times since the release of 'Passed Me By', here re-tooled and re-built for its next evolutionary phase. 'Hatch The Plan' ends the first half of the album with some heavily treated location recordings and a low end grind that probably doesnt quite prepare you for the vocal arrangements that follow - it's just a beautifuly inverted pop song. The second half opens with 'Expecting', the most recognisably 'Stott' moment on the album: a wrecked, deliriously knocked-out 4/4 shuffle deployed at halfspeed; those heavy kickdrums sucking in everything around them. 'Luxury Problems' is next and offers up the album's most quietly euphoric and open 5 minutes; conventional arrangements and drumloops disrupted by sharp disco bursts that mess with what you know: it's straight and beautiful and unbalanced and damaged, somehow all at once. "Up the box" switches up the narrative and goes somewhere else entirely, an extended intro that seems to build continuously for 3 minutes before breaking off into a slowed-down Amen edit, creating a kind of narcotic Jungle variant that fragments everything and ends just at the point you think it's going to go off, before "Leaving" finishes the album with an almost unbareably beautiful arrangement of voice and synth and a final key-change that takes you from joyful to forlorn in an instant.

Violence

modernlove

Recent comments

Aza🌺

AmbivalentAvarice

Jordan ♣️

Bernours

Related tracks