Chicago solo artist Lipsticism uniquely interweaves elements of shoegaze, house, hyperpop and experimental pop, and ambient music for her debut Phantom Limb album Wanted To Show You, a highly accomplished listening experience both honeysweet and emotionally crushing.

A key moment on Lipsticism’s Wanted To Show You is the single “Feeling Why Do You Follow”. Its entrancingly measured alchemy of Lipsticism’s precious materials - spacious, haunting synthesis, angelic voice, thumping house kick-n-hats, balmy and achingly melodic prettiness - coalesces with the spellbinding imagery cast by its opening lyric: Why do you follow me into dreams? / you crawl on top of me. While Lipsticism’s music is inherently dreamlike (and dream pop-like) in its gauzy, hazy unreality, it brings a tangible embodiment along for its bliss-out joyride, at once nostalgically familiar and skewed.

The record, writes Alana Schachtel - the musician behind Lipsticism - grapples with “the fleeting nature of relationships. The feeling of wanting to connect with someone after they have passed.” Schachtel’s songcraft reaches across a plane, its slow-motion dancefloors imbued with magical light to make even recognisable instrumentation float weightlessly through her sonic space. The acoustic guitar appears on occasion, revealing Lipsticism’s early, self-released roots of freak-folk and bent-Americana. Her voice is often so lush as to seep like plasmic energy through the blinking lights of her synthesis and beat programming, but always true, always authentic.

Bound together in adroit narrative flow, Wanted To Show You swells and eddies. “That’s Enough”, midway through the album, drops all masks for a quiet and swooning study of vulnerability, and the alien-planet club that had welcomed AR Kane, Animal Collective, and Gillian Welch for a Chicago house rave DJ’d by Ivo Watts-Russell reaches an unexpectedly beatific and confessional comedown.

Later in the album, “Erased” begins with a deceptive lite-jazz synth wiggle that morphs into a swampy, fugged-out wash of pads over intoxicating two-step beat programming. Its spectral vocal halo is a kind of deja vu of quasi-familiar shadowplay, here and not here, but revealing deep mysteries in understated and unassuming catharsis. Here, and across the record, the presence of Schachtel’s mix and mastering engineer Angel Marcloid (aka Fire-Toolz) can be felt in its strange and changeling giddiness, in its balance of sound design against voice.

Lipsticism is the solo project of musician and producer Alana Schachtel. Born and raised near Chicago, she spent the majority of her adult life in the Pacific Northwest, where she first started experimenting with sound. Because of her background in dance, she began writing music by imagining choreography and creating the rhythms and melodies to match. Her latest compositions blend her love of sound design and song and integrate a broad spread of influences. Some highlights of her musical career have been performing and touring with Chanel Beads, Urika's Bedroom, Avey Tare (of Animal Collective), Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith, Blue Hawaii, and Jerry Paper.

Lipsticism - Erased

You Are Not My King

Never felt more free
In this landlord democracy 
Never been this fine
Since before the Maginot Line
You are not my king

We’ll have another war 
On some god forsaken shore
I'll spin you on your dime
It’s gonna cover up my crime
You are not my king

Soon our day will come
(It’s gonna be our time)
Soon your day will be done
(It’s gonna be over for you)

You are not my king
No, you are not my king
You are not my king
You are not my king

Soon our day will come
(It’s gonna be our time)
Soon your day will be done
(It’s gonna be over for you)

Never felt more free
In this landlord democracy 
Never been this fine
Since before the Maginot Line
You are not my king
No, you, you are not my king
You, you are, you are not my king 

You Are Not My King

Original music. Written by Aze Stevens. For pitch, licensing, or collaboration. 100% original. Contact azestevens@gmail.com


Chorus
You are my baby
You are my girl
You are the best thing that ever happened to me in this world

Verse 1
I was alone
I took my time
Then one day I turned and found you there at my side
We travelled far
We hurried deep
We wove our dreams each night before we went off to sleep

Verse 2
I don't care no more
if the stars won't allign
And I don't need to see 
Some supernatural sign
And I want to know
That you're willing to be mine
Lay it on the line
Keeping your heart so kind

Copyright 2025. All rights reserved. Words and music by Aze Stevens. Contact for licensing.


Note
Recorded on Tascam 24 with acoustic and electric guitar. Not super happy with electric guitar parts. In the future I will consider more carefully if it is necessary to include everything I record on the final song version. But overall this is a good song. A bit poppy. Verse 2 provides opportunity to showcase a strong voice.

11. You Are My Baby (for Kiko)

File Updated 01/05/25 @ 11:45AM GMT ~ Day mode in. Vox redelivered and acoustic guitar one full run added

A  song acknowledging one of the first massacre's in the formation of Isreal and the beginning of the destruction of Palestine as an entity. I get frustrated when people switch off from the whole situation justifying that in their heads because of what happened on October 7th. That was obviously terrible but it's the 77 years that need to be addressed to fix it and Israeli culture seems to have a very ingrained poison of denial to themselves what is happening and that in turn gives them a clean conscious very unusually as they ethnically cleanse the Palestinian population. This has been the case right since the forced creation of their state in 1948 it seems and October 7th is the latest big reason to continue that pressure of removing non Jewish people from the area. We all need to be candles for this or nothing is going to change. Only when we are all saying it can this giant bubble within Isreali society and in turn what the extreme powers that be do with that ignorance be burst...  Isreal is the only society that can change this but the will for them to do that may have to be forced upon them by people power because it involves actually changing their psycology and how they see other humans. They project this charade of being a moral compass when the complete opposite is true in the real world...

The example at the heart of this song is Tantura. One of the worst massacres which the Palestinians suffered however despite clear evidence it's complete denial from inside Isreal and all paper trails are very obviously covered up. The Palestinians call these moments Al Nakba (The Catastrophe)... Within Isreali society they do not even acknowledge there was a Nakba at all and it appears to be tabboo to even talk about it. Again the ingrained denial of their own past and the real truth of what happened when they forced the formation of the state. So with this context it's not ok to switch off becuase you hear terrorist/hamas/oct 7th.... The Palestinians have been terrorised by Isreal since day 0... However the Isreali's don't like to talk about those facts....

Massacre for Zion

437. f---er (eels).mp3

001. dreams (harding).mp3

438. billie jean (michael jackson).mp3

'suck on it' with Falsestart

Falsestart: beat, mumble track, bass, rhythm guitar
Scotty: acoustic drum kit, lead guitar, lyrics, vocals

Well, today I can't rise out of bed.
Invasive thoughts stuck in my head.
Who gives a fuck if I am dead?
Nobody but me, now, it seems.
So many loves and friendships deceased.

Now, I'll rise up and live again.
For, I've forgotten former friends
and ex-loves that were pretend.
I can, now, let it be.
There's no such thing as defeat unless you retreat.

Let's pick up our bones,
go for a stroll.
Burn through a few cones,
relent control.
Relax and let it happen, baby.
Some pushin' too hard to force this life.
Let the universe show you paradise.
It's magic. Yet, tragic
that so few care about no one but themselves.

I could care less if you are dead.
You already are, inside my head.
Your reasoning, already fled.
You think you're justified
by convincing yourself of 'truths' within lies.

Keep spiraling down those rabbit holes
of YouTube and podcasts to regain control.
It's helping nothing but you alienating 
yourself from a life, organically,
but you're too fuckin' far gone blind to see
that you're trapped in a now blackened world.

What happened to you man?
To you girl?
To you world?
We're so different.

And now I'm trapped within my head.
And all of you out there are dead.

Buy the shit.
Eat the shit.
Every bit.
Feel like shit.
Suck on it, baby.

suck on it 'demo' (with Falsestart)

We flush our toilets and it flows into the sea
We go down to the beach and we swim happily
We take our trash and we toss it in a can 
The garbage truck takes it away and where it goes – no one gives a damn
Every day we throw more trash into the pile
Disposable packaging never goes out of style
Every day we exist, we generate more junk
We buy stuff we don’t need, and it ends up the dump
They say one person’s trash is another person’s treasure
But I don’t think used plastic straws are going to give anybody pleasure
They say the average Tom Dick or Harry and even if you’re a girl named Jane
You’re probably walking around with a teaspoon of microplastic in your brain
I separate my paper and plastic into separate bins 
But sometimes I wonder if I’m accomplishing anything
Thousands of years from now, if humans have gone extinct
And aliens dig up our trash, I wonder what they’ll think
Our art and music will be gone but our trash will linger on
The stuff we threw away will be all that’s left of humanity
There’s so much trash in the world today
You’d think by now we’d have found a better way
Civilizations rise and civilizations fall 
And the trash be leave behind will be a gift to future generations from us all
Every year we kick the can farther down the road
Causing more damage to this planet that we’ ve been bestowed
Some people  will tell you don’t worry everything is fine
We’ ve gotta cut the regulations so we can help the bottom line
When you share a bed with a partner they say it’s best to hold in your gas
But when it comes to our stinking trash, we give ourselves a pass

Trash

anuncio publicitario (voz de vocaloid)

everything you know is wrong - chumbawamba
everything you know is wrong - black grape
ghost of stephen foster - squirrel nut zippers
you're my chocolate - savages
sweet thang - shuggie otis 
indian summer(ucpberlin bootleg)- jim morrison
drug song - janko nilovic
there's something on your mind - etta james  bb king
ride into the sun -  the velvet underground
a blind man can see it -  james brown
howling around my happy home - daniel norgren
bonus track
hey you - dope lemon

a debt to be paid and respect to be made to the following and many more for not giving me too much grief for lifting their tracks : annie frank zabba - white devil sound.- crackwhorasaurus - roger's stoned- happy.taco.entertainment - - late.nite.hash - nacht.späte.haschisch - sex.offender.14 - 404 not found - funky boogie brothers . zzygy zee. ......... and many more

mixes are time capsules of sound. each capturing a moment in time that will not be repeated the same way. each mix is meant to transport the listener in their own time machine to their own destination. these are soundtracks for daily living..."music gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination and life to everything"

everything you know is wrong - pretty crazy show volume 56

simple stuff. still trying to work things out. you can find a more coherent archive for 'The Interminable' on bandcamp - find link below.

You Are Not My King

The Interminable

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The Interminable

neil harding

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