pre-released on February 2, 2014 as issue # 24 on www.other-people.net

Mastered by Rashad Becker - Distributed by Word And Sound - © Other People 2014

Several years ago, Valentin Stip was sitting alone by a harbor in the small French town where his parents grew up. "I heard all the sailing strings hit the masts, and I realized that every sound you hear is potentially music," he says. "The only thing that makes sound into music is the mind, arranging it." Since then, Valentin Stip has been building a bridge between the sounds that live inside and outside his head. On Sigh, the 21-year-old producer's full-length debut on Other People, Stip organizes classical piano, lightly sputtering grooves and intimate found sounds into an album of compositional grace and emotional honesty.

Valentin Stip emigrated to New York City in middle school and immediately fell in with a creative crowd—including then-fledgling producer and future Other People label head Nicolas Jaar. Upon learning the ins and outs of electronic production, Stip discovered a new, more personal way of interpreting the darkly shaded piano music he'd been writing. He soon released a string of melancholy, beat-based EPs on Nicolas Jaar's Clown & Sunset label, Anytime Will Do (2011) and Angst (2013), and toured alongside Jaar, all while he was still in college.

With eight songs clocking in at nearly an hour and sequenced as a continuous piece of music, Valentin Stip's Sigh charts a winding path through its creator's psyche. As Sigh unfolds, sounds become as tactile as objects: overcast electronic atmospheres rumble and swirl, minimalist piano melodies chime in the distance, and subtle programming percolates like ripples on the surface of a lake. Moments of sombre introspection give way to time-stopping beauty, as when the jet-black drone of "****" opens up into "Regards sur L'Enfance", all sun-dappled vibraphones and sandbox melodies. On "Aletheia," Stip subliminally intones "Everything I say is a lie" as ambient passages give way to Eastern melodies and a gently head-nodding conga beat. Sigh ends with the achingly spare, Debussy-esque chords of its title track, a heavy-hearted comedown built on little more than a single repeated piano note, pinging static, and—well in line with its creator's musical worldview—tiny intakes of breath.

OP006 Valentin Stip - Sigh

Tableau II

Aveu

Valentin Stip - Regards Sur L'Enfance (I Et II)

Other People is a record label started in New York City in 2013 by Nicolás Jaar. In its 10 years of existence, it has featured the sonic work of over 70 music releases, highlights include Terepa (2015), a "telepathic" collaboration helmed by Kohei Matsunaga (aka NHK’Koyxen) featuring Rashad Becker, Charlotte Collin, Lucrecia Dalt, Laurel Halo, Julia Holter, Grégoire Simon and Kohei himself, Caves (2021), a compilation of silences featuring Laraaji, Aho Ssan, Ana Quiroga and more, Weavings (2022), a collaborative live piece with Juliana Huxtable, Ellen Fullman, Wukir Suryadi and Rully Shabara of Senyawa, Angel Bat Dawid and others. The label has also put out the 1990 spoken word piece "Conspiracy of Women" (2015) by Lydia Lunch, as well as Tomaga & Pierre Bastien's collaborative album entitled Bandiera di Carta (2019) and Lucrecia Dalt's Esotro / Veta release (2014) with remixes by William Basinski and John Wall. It has also featured the likes of Magdalena Dàugosz, Barbara Zawadzka, Bernadetta Matuszczak, Krzysztof Knittel, Bogusław Shaeffer, Saint Abdullah, Eomac, Dienne, Charbel Haber, Okokon, Against All Logic, FKA Twigs, Darkside, Nicolás Jaar and others.  It has featured the visual work of Maziyar Pahlevan, Africanus Okokon, Zofia Kulik, Jena Myung, Charbel Haber, Abeera Kamran and Somnath Bhatt among others. The label’s current contract states that an artist on the label owns all their rights and decides the full percentage of the revenue they wish to make from their releases on the label, after recoupment. Any of the label’s profit gets given out to artists in forms of grants, workshop and educational initiatives. The label has collaborated in this form with more than three dozen exceptional organizations and individuals in the past three years. Although the label works not-for-profit, it is not a registered non-profit.

OP006 Valentin Stip - Sigh

OTHER PEOPLE