7" is Limited to 300. With Download Card and Insert. 
http://nightschoolrecords.bigcartel.com/product/lssn019-sally-dige-forget-me-losing-you

Statuesque Vancouverite Sally Dige is emblematic of a restless spirit flitting in and out of view, an apparition just out of reach. 

On "Forget Me"the idea of self is brought into focus then blurred  as Dige intones a gothically-enhanced hymn to self-erasing. Over an emotionally wrought 4 mins, post-punk bass lines and moody synth-leads edge the author into willed obscurity from view. On the edges of the song are hints at a fractured, fragile character: "I'd rather go alone / and not be missed by anyone." Is it auto-biographical? Or a character impeccably acted? On the other side "Losing You" proves that Sally Dige never gives too much away. Here she wears the mask of a jaded lover watching the physical and moral collapse of someone once loved, confronted with something unrecognisable. Melding an Italo Disco skeleton with dark analogue synths, in many ways the music is similarly an eroded form once recognised, now perverted into a propulsive, strange new language.

Forget Me (From LSSN019)

Limited 7" with download. Black lithoprint on silver pantone ink. "Major Tom" features on the forthcoming "The Space Lady's Greatest Hits."
PREORDER: http://nightschoolrecords.bigcartel.com/product/lssn018-the-space-lady-major-tom-radar-love-7

The Space Lady began her odyssey on the streets of Boston in the late 70s, then San Francisco ten years later, playing versions of contemporary pop music with an accordion and dressed flamboyantly, transmitting messages of peace and harmony. Following the theft and destruction of her accordion , The Space Lady invested in a then-new Casio keyboard, complete with a phase shifter and headset mic, birthing an otherworldly new dimension to popular song that has captured the imaginations of the underground and its leading exponents ever since.

The legend of The Space Lady has continued to grow in the 21st century. Originally featured on the landmark 'outsider' compilation Songs In The Key Of Z, then on mixes by Erol Alkan and John Maus, this music has transcended genre, style and fashion, opening up hearts and minds along the way.

14 years ago The Space Lady packed away her Casio synth and silenced her distinctive voice, retiring from the streets of San Francisco. Now, more than 30 years after her initial forays on Haight-Ashbury Harvard Square and Haight Ashbury, she has surfaced with the first ever official release of her timeless, startling, haunting music and, even more remarkably, has re-started her live career. Now in Colorado, The Space Lady continues to spread her message of peace, harmony and love.

'Major Tom / Radar Love' will be released on limited 7" with download (black lithoprint on silver pantone ink), and features on the forthcoming LP/CD/Download, The Space Lady's Greatest Hits."

Major Tom (from LSSN018)

From The New Heaven (Night School, November 2021)

Fine Place - It's Your House

DBL Gatefold LP w/ MP3, Black/White Vinyl & A2 Screenprinted Chrome on Black Poster
Edition of 600.
It would be easy to say that Molly Nilsson needs no introduction, but These Things Take Time is an introduction. Originally self-released in 2008 on a limited CDR run with hand-folded sleeve, Nilsson’s debut album has slowly taken over the hearts of many. In 2014 this modern classic of autonomous, DIY pop and punk-as-you-like attitude is presented on vinyl for the first time in a beautiful edition featuring unreleased bonus tracks across two discs, an exclusive screen printed A2 poster and new sleeve notes from the artist.

Molly Nilsson’s first recordings under her own name have grown in stature to occupy a prominent positioning in the global pop underground despite initially only being available on CDr. Though Nilsson’s songwriting prowess and commandeering of other genres has grown since 2008, her unique voice is seen in raw form on These Things Take Time. Many of the themes she would develop later were inked first here: the romance of loneliness on “The Lonely,” “Whisky Sour,” “Hey Moon!”, the folly and intoxication of youth seen in “Joyride,” “Poisoned Candy” and dogged self-reliance as on “The Diamond Song” or “Wounds Itch When They Heal.” Also included here are unreleased recordings from the same period that were left off the original release, a further window into a turbulent, exciting time for an artist just discovering her power to touch and communicate with the listener.

Lend Me Your Love - (from These Things Take Time - Vinyl Edition)

To preview and then commemorate the Night School All Day even at The Art School in Glasgow on May 25th, the first 100 attendees will receive the "You Know Where You Are" cassette featuring tracks from Molly Nilsson, Group Rhoda, Clip Art, Yong Yong, Meddicine, Hausfrau, Happy Meals, Ubre Blanca and Apostille. 

Molly Nilsson - Summer Cats

PREORDER: http://nightschoolrecords.bigcartel.com/product/lssn028-happy-meals-apero-lp

Happy Meals is the Glasgow-based duo of Suzanne Rodden and Lewis Cook, life-partners since high school finding expression in cosmic form. Originally from the Scottish borders, Rodden and Cook (also of The Cosmic Dead) began Happy Meals in a flurry of experimentation at Glasgow’s creative hub The Green Door Studio. Initially the result of a free music production course, Apéro sees the pair embark on a blissful voyage into a love-fuelled, outward-looking hedonism. Both artists operate machines and sing but it’s the dominating Franco-Scottish lingua-franca of Suzanne Rodden that imbues a sense of seductive fun to the album.
Their first recorded statement, Apéro is an instant rush of Kosmiche-disco, utterly addictive and inviting. The epic Crystal Salutation welcomes the listener in with analogue synths delayed into the horizon before Electronic Disco ushers in distorted drum machines and Rodden’s disco-at- sunset vocal. Album stand-out Altered Images is a pop-masterpiece, mixing French / Italo disco, acid basslines and a sense of Scottish optimism. Age Of Love is unabashedly the feeling of being up until day-break, with layered synths climaxing all-around. Retro-futuristic visions abound on the beat-less Visions Of Utopia before closer
Le Voyage reprises back the cosmopolitan disco, playing out the perfect club night in ecstatic fashion. It’s an enchanting, inclusive vision; everyone is invited, the future is bright.

HAPPY MEALS - Altered Images (from Apéro LSSN028)

Circular patterns morphing through time, loop and ritual form the fabric of Proserpine, the latest work by Leeds-based musician, Teresa Winter. Recorded from a summer to a winter through 2021 and 2022, Proserpine is Winter’s most cohesive, focused music to date: confidently revelling in space, fixating on isolated sounds and giving way to satisfying, swirling waves of vocal and electronic buzz. Proserpine is Teresa Winter’s debut recording for Glasgow-based label, Night School.

On Proserpine, musical patterns revolve and intersect with each other, transmogrifying the music’s narrative. Over-arching themes emerge: continual change, elusiveness. Insubstantiality emerges into concrete reality in the form of recognisable field recordings: the purring of a pet cat, the hum of a live cable. The loops and patterns are sometimes just out of sight, the click and whirl on Child Of Nature is the backdrop to hymnal vocalisations by Winter, who intones spell-like text in conversation with herself. On opener Circles, Winter’s vocal is pre-linguistic, detached syllables falling into flowing streams, before Plume’s field recordings seem to juxtapose nocturnal and diurnal wildlife. "You said I was a Flower Of The Mountain" sings Winter, as James Joyce's Molly Bloom does but the carpe diem desire in Ulysses is dissipated here, spread out by gauzy, droning organs. Here desire is blown up and out, changed into something undefinable but no less powerful.

Change is at the heart of the album. The Roman goddess Proserpine, herself a reimagined version of the earlier Greek goddess Persephone, is always between: between summer and winter, the land of the living and the underworld, constantly emerging into new states of being. It’s a fitting metaphor for Winter’s work. Like an Apple feels like it soundtracks this in-between state, long, trailing reverb smudging synth keys and Winter’s achingly beautiful vocal performance. The effect is stirring but flitting in and out of perception, sometimes Winter’s presence feels of this world, of musical instruments and practises and at others it feels like the music is about to phase into a different plane, a different universe. 

While Proserpine references the myths and cults of the classical, pre-Christian era, Winter’s restless preoccupation with the mechanics of religion informs the album in other ways. Ritual is present through out, either in the mantra-like vocalisations or even the private rituals we are invited to witness: on Fireworks the listener eave drops into the protagonist's private bonfire. On the stunning Lamento, layers of Choral vocal interlock in celestial patterns that recall catholic mass: it’s an overt effect that simulates the ecstasy of religious fervour and also reminds the listener of the use of vocal that runs through Proserpine. Winter’s vocals often echo with the euphoria of obliteration, of disintegrating in an awful bliss. It’s an effect achieved with finality by the closer New Water as the piece begins with voice before burning up in the atmosphere of elegiac violins and enveloping undertows of whirring synth patterns and ghostly pads. Proserpine is forever turning, changing, always elusive and quietly revelator

Teresa Winter - Flower Of The Mountain (from Proserpine, LSSN086)

From out of nowhere - if nowhere is the febrile, warped and twilit imagination of Julia McFarlane - comes Whoopee, the second album by J.McFarlane’s Reality Guest. Whoopee is an esoteric, kaleidoscopic movie in music form directed by Julia McFarlane and co-conspirator Thomas Kernot. Full of life, breakbeats and smokey vignettes on the fragile nature of interpersonal relationships, Whoopee is a stylistic evolution from everything McFarlane has done before. Surreal, beautiful in parts and replete with the aching wisdom McFarlane’s songwriting has always promised, this Reality Guest pulls back the curtain on a whole scene of naked truth.

Recorded in Melbourne in bursts since the release of 2019’s Ta Da, Whoopee features a new sound palette and band member in Kernot. The duo dive deep into electronic pop tropes, mining digital synths, samples, breakbeats and deep bass grooves, largely dispensing with live instrumentation. If Ta Da took twists and turns with your expectations, offering a Dada-ist, monochromatic take on pop music, Whoopee is McFarlane’s subterranean love-sick pinks, reds, greens, purples and blues. Becoming something of a tradition, the album starts with an instrumental intro pilfered from a 90s’ spy film or cinema intro music, puffing up the listener for the heart-squeezing bathos of Full Stops. Over a bleary backdrop of walking bass lines, jazz-inflected keys and smoked-out atmosphere, McFarlane’s poetry narrates the fragile state of a relationship: “You put a full stop where I thought there’d be a comma, I want the story to continue even with all the drama.” Over a palpable pain, the narrator is revelling in the drama of a relationship, addicted to tumult and heightened emotion. On Sensory, a space age bachelor lounge pad ballad, the converse state of the previous song is explored, here the narrator is battling the numbness of being out of the drama, stuck in a sensory-deprivation tank, anaesthesized and battling to emerge from the fog. Wrong Planet explores an otherworldly pop music, hewing a bright hook out of a sense of confusion. A bona-fide, sing-along chorus bursts out of the narrator musing on the absurdity of existing in this reality. It speaks of one of Julia McFarlane’s main talents, her knack of inspecting human relationships and states with a clear perspective, like an alien visiting Earth and realising everything we are is really, really strange. 

Whoopee is both more accessible than previous Reality Guest work and somehow more obfuscated. Where the production on Ta Da was dry, sharp and strange, this Reality Guest is blurred, almost smeared with the effluvium of 90s+00s culture and existence. Through it all, it’s hard to deny the undeniable pull of the songs. Precious Boy carries on the lounge theme with a whole sampler of cut up sounds fading in and out of the haze as McFarlane’s voice is right up to the speaker cooing and free-associating, maybe in love or maybe in confusion… maybe they’re the same thing? Sometimes the listener is invited to just bathe in the tone of the vocal, as on Apocalypse, where the texture and timbre of the vocal is luxurious, bathing in piano tinkles and double bass throb. On lead single Slinky, a cut up beat reminiscent of Washingtonian Go-Go drum patterns leads, the song slipping through your fingers, elusive and presenting sound as pure pleasure. Closer Caviar jumps back into the broken breakbeats of a surreal funk, fuelled by the sensory pleasure of the music, a hedonistic whirl in rapture, the narrator now living life to the fullest in all its giddy heights and deep troughs. This is the album’s main character fully-actualised and in the terrible, beautiful moment. You don’t emerge from this cinema with any new knowledge, but you see the world how it really is. Until the next time.

J.McFarlane's Reality Guest - Full Stops

Yuching Huang - You, An Illusion (from The Crystal Hum LSSN095)

Yuching Huang - Love (from The Crystal Hum LSSN095)

Amery - Mountain FM (from Continue As Amery)

Cut The With The Cake Knife was recorded by Rose McDowall in 1988/89 following the break up of her group Strawberry Switchblade. Produced with the aid of several musicians in several studios, the album features songs written for the fabled second Strawberry Switchblade album. More importantly perhaps it showcases the honest, direct and life-affirming songs of one of the greatest unsung songwriters of the modern pop era at a tumultuous time in her career.

Tibet opens the set and could be one of the best pop songs you’ve never heard. The innate sadness of the songs’ content – the loss of a friendship, impending sorrow – is heightened to heart-melting level by McDowall’s pop nous and melodic sensibility. Choruses and hooks are everywhere on Cake Knife, from the outsider take on stadium 80s pop in Wings Of Heaven to the spiraling, ecstatic So Vicious, a glorious anthem that highlights the human fragility in McDowall’s vocal performance, an instrument that has never lost the naïve purity it first exemplified in Strawberry Switchblade’s early 80s recordings. The centerpiece of the album, the title-track, is the greatest Switchblade pop chart hit that never was. Like the veiled melancholy of her former group’s hits, Cut With The Cake Knife hints at a darkness beneath the gloss, a darkness that saw McDowall delve into more esoteric territory with her subsequent recordings and collaborations. Cut With The Cake Knife serves as the bridge between the pop music McDowall had been making with her friends Jill Bryson, Lawrence from Felt and Primal Scream to what became a more extreme, deep sound informed by neo-folk and post industrial music.

Rose McDowall’s role in the canon has always been one of an outsider. Beginning in Glasgow’s East End in the avant proto-noise group The Poems, achieving fame briefly in the 80s and then disappearing into counter-cultural folklore, the emphasis in the internet-age has been skewed towards her image and cultural significance. Unseen to many, her solo work, her groups Sorrow and Spell and her collaborations with a whole host of underground luminaries have still touched lives. As McDowall elucidates: “They're real sad songs, about real life. I've had people come up to me to say I'd connected with them and helped them. I remember a gig in America when we made a whole room cry. It was bizarre. A couple at the front of the stage started crying and then these two boys beside and  suddenly everyone was crying. And I thought, "that's power."

Night School’s issue of Cut With The Cake Knife includes unpublished photographs, extensive sleeve notes from Rose McDowall and 2 bonus tracks culled from the bootleg 7” “Don’t Fear The Reaper.”


ROSE MCDOWALL - Tibet (from Cut With The Cake Knife LSSN027)

ROSE MCDOWALL - Cut With The Cake Knife (from Cut With The Cake Knife LSSN027)

nightschoolrecords.bigcartel.com/artist/m…-nilsson

A sweeping, cinematic, emotional change is in the air. Molly Nilsson’s sixth studio album Zenith begins with clear, wide eyes open to Earth as we would love it to be but seldom is. Recorded in her home of Berlin and whilst touring and, as ever, conceived, produced, written and recorded in solitude, Zenith is Nilsson’s big statement and consequently her most affecting work to date. It sees her reveling in big arrangements, sweeping synth strings, bigger choruses and emotions. Like the rest of us she looks within and to endless sunsets in wonder and puzzlement.

That Molly Nilsson is a DIY cult figure is beyond question; she has always written directly and with wit straight down the line between the universal and the personal. The difference with Zenith, and you can hear it in the opening chords of opener The Only Planet, is that her scope is now much wider and her heart heavier than ever before: over a post-ecstatic dusk, Nilsson serenades the globe in a loving embrace. Following on, 1995 is, arguably, one of Nilsson’s finest songs to date. It’s one of those songs to learn the lyrics to, to listen to on repeat, a reason to wear the grooves down to the bone, it’s why pop music can be one of the greatest art forms we have. It’s an example of how, on this album, Molly draws the listener closer to her heart than ever before. There’s simply no escape from the line “The plans that you made / when you still had the time / I’ve saved all the things that you left behind but by now I guess I’d consider them all mine /Windows 95, is only a metaphor for what I feel inside / Although I’m older now / there’s still an emptiness that’s never letting go somehow.” Show-stopper Mountain Time is the soundtrack to being on the run, from societal conventions, from normative ideas of happiness, from your surroundings. It’s the intoxicating call of the renegade. That’s not to say that Nilsson’s light touch has been forsaken for grandiose statements. Bunny Club begins as a demo-sketch before breaking into a fast-paced tale of doomed romance with big rave synths and Bus 194 (All There Is) sees Molly joyride through a city on a happy hardcore bus. But it’s tracks like Tomorrow and another contender for best-ever-Molly moment, Happyness that the true scale of what she’s accomplished reveals itself. We’re locked in a spiraling orbit, strings and bass whirling, gazing at the spinning planet below us as we contemplate both the ultimate freedom in loneliness and the glimmer of hope in the Other. Can we ever be truly with someone? Are we ever truly alone?

Over the 13 tracks here we get the impression that Nilsson may always be restless; like anyone else she has conflicting feelings of love and hate. It’s just not many other people can tell you exactly how you feel before you know it yourself.

MOLLY NILSSON: Mountain Time (from Zenith)

http://nightschoolrecords.bigcartel.com/artist/molly-nilsson

A sweeping, cinematic, emotional change is in the air. Molly Nilsson’s sixth studio album Zenith begins with clear, wide eyes open to Earth as we would love it to be but seldom is. Recorded in her home of Berlin and whilst touring and, as ever, conceived, produced, written and recorded in solitude, Zenith is Nilsson’s big statement and consequently her most affecting work to date. It sees her reveling in big arrangements, sweeping synth strings, bigger choruses and emotions. Like the rest of us she looks within and to endless sunsets in wonder and puzzlement.

That Molly Nilsson is a DIY cult figure is beyond question; she has always written directly and with wit straight down the line between the universal and the personal. The difference with Zenith, and you can hear it in the opening chords of opener The Only Planet, is that her scope is now much wider and her heart heavier than ever before: over a post-ecstatic dusk, Nilsson serenades the globe in a loving embrace. Following on, 1995 is, arguably, one of Nilsson’s finest songs to date. It’s one of those songs to learn the lyrics to, to listen to on repeat, a reason to wear the grooves down to the bone, it’s why pop music can be one of the greatest art forms we have. It’s an example of how, on this album, Molly draws the listener closer to her heart than ever before. There’s simply no escape from the line “The plans that you made / when you still had the time / I’ve saved all the things that you left behind but by now I guess I’d consider them all mine /Windows 95, is only a metaphor for what I feel inside / Although I’m older now / there’s still an emptiness that’s never letting go somehow.” Show-stopper Mountain Time is the soundtrack to being on the run, from societal conventions, from normative ideas of happiness, from your surroundings. It’s the intoxicating call of the renegade. That’s not to say that Nilsson’s light touch has been forsaken for grandiose statements. Bunny Club begins as a demo-sketch before breaking into a fast-paced tale of doomed romance with big rave synths and Bus 194 (All There Is) sees Molly joyride through a city on a happy hardcore bus. But it’s tracks like Tomorrow and another contender for best-ever-Molly moment, Happyness that the true scale of what she’s accomplished reveals itself. We’re locked in a spiraling orbit, strings and bass whirling, gazing at the spinning planet below us as we contemplate both the ultimate freedom in loneliness and the glimmer of hope in the Other. Can we ever be truly with someone? Are we ever truly alone? 

Over the 13 tracks here we get the impression that Nilsson may always be restless; like anyone else she has conflicting feelings of love and hate. It’s just not many other people can tell you exactly how you feel before you know it yourself.


MOLLY NILSSON: 1995 (from Zenith)

Buy Fruit Juice here, Shipping from MAY 12th.
http://nightschoolrecords.bigcartel.com/product/lssn039-happy-meals-fruit-juice-12

Fruit Juice is the first new recorded material from Glasgow-based electronic avant pop duo Happy Meals since the intense aftermath of Apéro, their debut album which garnered a place in the Scottish Album Of The Year final 10. Shorter in scale but sharpened and expanded, Fruit Juice takes the tender experimental beginnings and unabashed pop moments of ther first LP into undiscovered countries glowing with possibility.

Since Apéro’s release at the end of 2014, Suzanne Rodden and Lewis Cook have toured the globe, from Moscow to Bombay via various European festivals, and have honed their dynamics live, in the moment, improvising and twisting the beat into new forms. As their live show has become more visceral and cinematic, Fruit Juice documents the duo’s new confidence. Run Around opens the E.P., with a sun-soaked tropicalia as conceived by the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, Rodden’s vocals warped into wordless peons to the rising sun. La Labas reaquaints the listener to Rodden’s Franco-Gallic tendancies, but this time Happy Meals reveal a sparse melancholy, with spacious percussion and synth fragments giving way to one of the group’s most immediate moments to date. If You Want Me Now is pop music, pure and from the source. Alternating between French and English, Rodden recreates the live persona that has emerged since the group’s beginnings; an unrestrained performer bringing the innate sensuality beneath Happy Meals’ surface exploding into the light. Cook’s production work here sounds fresh and classic simultaneously,  a glorious Jacno tribute enthralled to House music and Italo Disco. Fruit Float, opening Side 2, draws us back up into the cosmos, with arpeggiated synths from Cook’s synth arsenal duetting with a flute solo before Suivez Moi delivers another pop song worthy of eternal repeat, a slice of electro not unlike the heights of Dare!-era Human League. Seductive and irresistible, it precedes the biggest step-up in Happy Meals’ recorded output, the acid-fried Now That You Have Me: ostensibly a high-BPM remix of If You Want Me Now that hints at the insanity of the final moments of a Happy Meals live show.

Released as a limited to 500 12” featuring marble-painted artwork hand-made by the band, Fruit Float precedes Happy Meals’ 2nd full length album recorded on the Azores Archipelago. Each Fruit Float sleeve will be different and feature a digital download.


HAPPY MEALS: If You Want Me Now (from FRUIT JUICE LSSN039)

Shinkansen No.1 / New Ways is the second release from CC DUST, a new duo from Olympia, Washington featuring Maryjane Dunphe and David Jaques. Shinkansen No.1 introduces the record with a more industrial, harder edge than much of the group’s debut 12” (CC DUST – S/T), a fast paced, urgent song powered by by fast kick drums and Jaques’ bassline acrobatics. CC Dust opened every show on their recent European tour with this salvo, a dark energy that spirals upwards, with Dunphe’s vocal giving the production space to build into a crescendo.

New Ways on the other hand, is perhaps Dunphe’s finest moment yet set to disc. Dunphe is a performer who battles restraint, her every vocal performance a tour de force and New Ways is one of the most emotional and transcendent performances imaginable. With a terse retraint in the verses, the chorus here erupts into an anthem for doomed youth, with every crack in Dunphe’s voice hitting the listener square in the chest.

A light that casts shadow, CC Dust is doomed, romantic music anchored by Jaques’ live bass and the powerful performance values Dunphe has honed both in her punk group Vexx and in various film and performance projects. Musically, CC Dust’s precedents might be considered the European synth pop originators of the early 80s, there’s also an abundance of low-end hooks played on baritone and bass guitars that teases the ear like early New Order productions, but in Dunphe’s passionate vocal performances there’s a close-to-the- 
bone reality that bypasses cool detachment.

CC Dust play and write real songs lived. A desire for desire. What is it? How does it manifest? Is it all worth the tumult? CC Dust offer no answers as there are none, but they ask the right questions in a life-affirming way. Doomed, romantic, unanswerable and vital.

CC DUST: New Ways (from Shinkansen No. 1 /New Ways 7" LSSN043)

School Daze and RPM proudly present a compendium of the demo cassette generation from the early 1980’s, filtered through (principally British) independent women of the post-punk era.

‘Sharon Signs To Cherry Red’ began life as the archetypal independent single released on the obscure Lowther International label by archetypal independent act, The Kamikaze Pilots, the review of whom by Danny Kelly in the NME gives us the starting point: “Disturbingly, also from Norwich…comes this plaintive tribute to/assassination of all the earnest misery gobs ever signed to Cherry Red’s roster, with particular reference to the Tracey Thorn pantheon”. What was a gentle mocking of The Marine Girls et al is now the starting point for this meander through the 80s’ underground, a period which enabled more involvement from women in independent music, a slight, if not complete, freeing up of the male-dominated hegemony that had existed before punk. Many of these artists were night-time John Peel session regulars, fighting for daytime coverage in the press, walking the fine line of questioning from the NME (hip young gunslingers asking sexual politics) and Smash Hits (Milton Keynes readers asking which hairspray they used).

‘Sharon…’ is but an overview of a fertile time, when the democratization of music through punk had resulted in new viewpoints, talents and perspectives finding their voice. The breadth here is a joy: from the sugary Dorothy (originally on Throbbing Gristle’s Industrial Records) to ex-Dolly Mixture Debsey Wykes’s Sarah Goes Shopping,  from the punked scrawl of The Petticoats to the avant funk of Bristol’s Scream & Dance, the one thread all these groups have in common is their fierce independence. That and their XX chromosomes. Some of these recordings are surfacing for the first time on “Sharon Signs To Cherry Red,” while others are from rare 7”s and compilation releases.

School Daze is a new imprint to the Glasgow-based Night School, focusing on discovering and sharing the past.

Strawberry Switchblade - Seaside (Go Away)

1982 4-Piece Demo” is the first official, fully-licensed and unreleased material to be released under the name Strawberry Switchblade in 30 years. Since disbanding amid major record label acrimony and personal differences in 1986, the already-cult band have since grown in stature and legend. Trailblazers in many ways, the band’s mythology justifiably centers around the charismatic duo of Jill Bryson and Rose McDowall, but that isn’t a complete picture.

Bryson and McDowall’s growing friendship, having met some years earlier on the punk scene, became a creative partnership: Bryson’s art school background and McDowall’s history in avant-punk group The Poets meant Strawberry Switchblade was a band pitted against many established norms. The band’s very first incarnation, an all-female 4 piece, recorded one demo at Glasgow’s Hellfire Club and played a handful of gigs. Friends Janice Goodlett and Carole McGowan completed the line up on bass and drums respectively. Strawberry Switchblade would eventually pair down to a duo and go on to chart success but it’s in these raw, passionate recordings that the songwriting and vocal elements were being hammered out and explored in real time.

“Spanish Song” is a previously unreleased song. With Rose McDowall’s instantly recognizable lead vocal dovetailing with Bryson’s harmonies and lead guitar, it’s the first glimpse at an alternative history of Strawberry Switchblade. This incarnation could easily have been featured on a Nuggets compilation or a precursor to the indie-pop revolution that would take over British bedrooms a couple of years later. Trees & Flowers is instantly recognizable, a bona fide classic that would earn the band its first record deal. Here it’s given a more forceful rhythm section: Goodlett and McGowan’s playing is in fact accomplished and doesn’t hint at the bands’ youth. Go Away would also surface later on the band’s debut LP but here it is a moody-garage stomper with a psychedelic, haunting refrain. These 3 songs point to a tantalizing future of the band that was never realized.

Remastered and restored by Sean Pennycook from the original cassette, with artwork based on a single photographic contact sheet (the only visual evidence of the band in this form) and with a booklet of photographs and new text from contemporary Stephen Pastel.

STRAWBERRY SWITCHBLADE - Spanish Song (from LSSN048 - 1982 4-Piece Demo)

MOLLY NILSSON: Meanwhile In Berlin (from Follow The Light 2017 Reissue)

MOLLY NILSSON: Truth (from Follow The Light 2017 Reissue)

MOLLY NILSSON: I Hope You Sleep At Night (from Follow The Light 2017 Reissue)

MOLLY NILSSON: I'm Still Wearing His Jacket (from Follow The Light 2017 Reissue)

MOLLY NILSSON: Hello Loneliness (from Follow The Light 2017 Reissue)

Limited to 800, Hand Numbered, with Download Card and Insert. Preceding her epic new record Imaginations, due May 29th, Single features two exclusive new songs not available on any other release. 

Molly Nilsson is in a mood: the mood for love, perhaps? For an artist who has spent almost 10 years skirting the issue of love, almost addressing it, taking it out to dinner only to stand it up, “Single” almost lands a sucker love-punch to the listener’s heart. About Somebody seems to be about somebody, or maybe even somebody’s body, about desire too, perhaps. How else to interpret the line “Babe I want to party with you every night, and have a hard-on for the rest of my life?” But this is a Molly Nilsson song, and this is Empowering Content. Over a rousing, even anthemic, verse/chorus one-two, a soaring synth-string hook that rides the handclaps beautifully, we‘re soon left wondering whether our beloved narrator is really focusing on the “other” at all. Love lets you down: treat it mean, keep it keen, and remember if you can’t love yourself how the hell are you gonna love any body else? 

On the flip, Quit (In Time), is a classic minor-key Nilsson elegy to obsession and addiction, sounding almost close to an early 80s Springsteen love-story. Here we imagine Nilsson at the piano, her heart a resounding bell for all longing. If About Somebody is the tumultuous onset of an affair, here we’re hopelessly drawn to the flame, unable to leave alone that which causes the sweetest pain. It’s a universal theme, the longing for something we shouldn’t have, and Nilsson seems to elucidate the feeling with a precise, razor-sharp lyrical nous that fans will instantly recognize. 

“Single” is about the self and the other; about navigating the love of others that tries to trip us up. But it’s also about you. “Single” is because you’re worth it.

MOLLY NILSSON: About Somebody

An ethereal, unresolved presence fading into the stereo field, Hilja breathes into life with a haunted synth line and self-sampling vocal hook that instantly creates an enchanted space. Hilja is the debut album by Glasgow-based musician Maria Rossi aka Cucina Povera. Named after a style of southern Italian traditional cooking associated with precarity and making-do, a philosophy of simplicity and stoicism that applies perfectly to the spare but beautiful music Rossi experiments with. Hilja’s marriage of minimal synth, field recordings and the hymnal dexterity of Rossi’s vocal performances creates a new language, sometimes literally, to be spoken in some mythological Fourth World we’ve yet to create.
 
Originally from Finland, Rossi brings an acute sense of space, surroundings, and practicality to her working practice, with each composition often relying on a limited sound palette to create deeply affecting messages which transcend language. Cucina Povera’s power is to communicate purely, often down to the solo-choir nature of Rossi’s multi-layered voice, an achingly beautiful instrument which has seems to have an innate spirituality in its grain. The tension between the means and the end is at the heart of Cucina Povera, the invocation of a kind of secular spirituality at times using nothing but Rossi’s voice. Indeed there’s almost a Dogme-like purity to the arrangements: Elektra is a soothing song based around the lapping waves of Rossi’s wordless backing vocals and a simple field recording of stones knocked together. Kehoitus is completely a cappella, a haunted fairytale told in glossolalia, evoking a quasi-religious experience with very little.
 
For music often minimal and simple there’s a boldness that belies Hilja’s status as a debut. Rossi allows each word, each sound and rhythm to exist in its own space, finding its own relationship with its surroundings. Mesikämmenen Veisu is perhaps the most ecclesiastical sounding composition here; burbling water trickles below a virtuoso vocal, with incredible arrangements in several registers undulating above. A meditation to relieve hunger and restriction, it’s a perfect summing up of Hilja, a music ambient but completely earthed, finding enchantment in what you have to hand, the realism of magic, the magic of realism.

Cucina Povera: Totean

MOLLY NILSSON - Serious Flowers (from Twenty Twenty, 2018)

Released May 27th. Night School Records.
CD/LP/Digital.
Pre-Order: http://nightschoolrecords.bigcartel.com/product/lssn016-terror-bird-all-this-time-lp

“All This Time” is the 3rd full length LP from Terror Bird - aka Nikki Nevver - and is by far the most personal, emotionally affecting and musically developed. Recorded at home over a period of 5 months, the 10 songs on “All This Time” document a period of intense emotional upheaval, a period wherein Nevver underwent major shifts in her personal life, rediscovered the solo recording process (previous albums having used live drumming and studio production) and married a raw, personal music with a straight-to-tape aesthetic most in-tune with her early recording experiences. The difference this time is that Nevver’s unique voice - at turns operatic and fragile, untutored and wearing its heart on its sleeve - serves as the perfect conduit for the emotional turmoil in the songs.

Nevver’s voice has grown into a formidable instrument, a towering, unabashed vocal whose resonance curls around the synth and drum machine production, at times duetting with itself, at times scaling the vocal register to reach new dramatic heights. Brought up on the music of the 80s “studio” - The Smiths, Kate Bush, The Cure - Nevver’s music exists beyond modern zeitgeists or considerations, subverting “big production” music into a personal DIY aesthetic. It’s a pure songwriting that outgrows genre and thrives purely on the merits of direct communication between songwriter and listener. 

Each song on “All This Time” serves as a chapter in a narrative that is universal; from the self-doubt and loneliness of opener “The Wrong Way,” to the doomed bedroom romance of “Try To Break Me,” from the masochistic guilt of “Locket” to the near-anthemic “Lust & Violence.” Each song speaks directly, plainly, to the listener, dispensing as much as possible with the unnecessary augmentation of modern pop music; “All This Time” is simply the deeply romantic, part-doomed / part-hopeful songs of a singular, unique talent.

The Wrong Way (From LSSN016 - "All This Time" CD/LP/Digital)

Preorder Spiral picture disc (limited to 100), Standard Black vinyl and CD here: 
http://nightschoolrecords.bigcartel.com/artist/molly-nilsson

The Travels represents a signpost in the continuing journey that is the songs of Berlin-based artist Molly Nilsson. ourneys offer change - the possibility of renewal - and accordingly on The Travels Molly Nilsson’s resonant voice is found curling around a new sense of optimism and wide-eyed discovery that was only alluded to in her previous work. Songs like “Dear Life” might be spiked with a barbed sense of the dejected, but the presiding feeling is one of optimism, of being in love with life despite a shield of cynicism. “Dirty Fingers” brings a melancholy recognisable from previous work but with an incessant beat and ecstatic underpinning it becomes apparent that a new force is at play here. In case the listener missed it, “The Power Ballad” brings an endearing, sincerity to proceedings that also offers a tantalising question: can you be sceptical about love but still be bewitched?

On her 5th long-player, Nilsson’s perspective is challenged and manipulated by changes in environment and psychological space: like any other traveller the protagonist brings their own set of values and emotional states and new places, colouring them with a wash of subjectivity. Like any other traveller Molly Nilsson reacts to her environment and shares her unique version of it to other people.

Based loosely on Marco Polo’s “Travels” and reading like a map of the protagonist’s geographical and inner journey, The Travels reveals new places and new emotions that are never the same to the beholder. Nilsson’s art is in turning this subjectivity into a cloak that almost anyone can don for the trip.

Popular tracks by Night School Records