Soup Boys (Botany Remix)

You can read more about Botany here: http://westernvinyl.com/artists/botany.html

And you can pre-order the forthcoming Botany album Lava Diviner (Truestory) here: https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/lava-diviner-truestory/id712459798

Heems - Soup Boys (Botany Remix)

Since the release of their debut album Idol Omen in 2009, Glass Ghost's founding members Eliot Krimsky and Michael Johnson have kept busy.  In addition to playing dozens of shows, including a tour with White Rabbits, Johnson joined Dirty Projectors as their new drummer, Krimsky has been collaborating with Here We Go Magic on keys, and the duo welcomed two new members to the group, Tyler Wood on keyboards and percussion, and Aerial East on vocals.  Like their debut, LYFE was produced by Tyler Wood, who also produced Joan As Policewoman’s 2014 album The Classic.  For the LYFE recording sessions, the group recruited many of their friends to contribute, including Joan Wasser of Joan As Policewoman, Nat Baldwin of Dirty Projectors, and Christopher Tignor of Slow Six and Wires Under Tension.  Pushing their songs to new levels by working with Brooklyn's musical elite is nothing new for Glass Ghost.  They worked with more than a dozen of their friends from Brooklyn's music community, including Sharon Van Etten (who in 2011 noted “Eliot Krimsky is one of my favorite writers.”), Here We Go Magic's Luke Temple, and Matt Iwanusa of Caveman, for their debut which was described by the New Yorker as “elegant compositions of frosted indie pop,” and by Time Out New York as “weird and mournful yet highly rhythmic." 

On their new album LYFE, Krimsky (who's currently working on his M.A. in Media Studies at The New School, where he’s exploring the convergence of technological mediation, identity and music) turns his observations of the absurd and mundane into metaphors about living in a world where every detail about your life is harvested, quantified, and used by marketing companies to manipulate your behavior.  Rather than sounding didactic or overly intellectual, the songs provide windows into the band's internal world, as Krimsky's tender falsetto glides over the icy landscapes of synths, strings, woodwinds, and regal horns.  As the product of Krimsky, Johnson, and Wood's mutual trust, vision, and relentless attention to every detail, LYFE masterfully blends airy, melancholy, and chilly atmospherics with Glass Ghost's irresistible bottom-heavy grooves and hooky pop sensibilities.

Glass Ghost - Wait A Second

From the album Blast Off Through the Wicker available July 14, 2017 on Western Vinyl

Bandcamp https://artfeynman.bandcamp.com/album/blast-off-through-the-wicker
iTunes http://hyperurl.co/a49jo3
WV http://westernvinyl.com/shop/wv162

ART FEYNMAN
Instagram https://www.instagram.com/artfeynman/
Facebook https://www.facebook.com/artfeynman/

Blast Off Through the Wicker documents Art Feynman looking for life in the lifeless, questioning what it means to be living.  There is a calm, disciplined pocket to be felt in everything Feynman does; krautrock slink, staccato bounce, and pentatonic bursts of Nigerian Highlife fuzz pour on the temporal canvas with unquestionable ease, never falling in the wrong place. Even more admirable is, that his “canvas” is a four-track tape recorder, and that Blast Off features no loops or drum machines despite its aesthetically faithful motorik and afrobeat underpinnings.  Nowhere is this fact more surprising than on album standout “Slow Down” which pulses along infectiously with a crunchy backbeat, and deftly arpeggiating bass lines that are so locked-in that it would be hard to fault an unknowing ear for assuming the whole thing is tediously programmed.

There are gentler sides to Blast Off that conjure the spacey tenderness of Arthur Russell inventively and respectfully, without adopting their muse’s palette wholesale. In this regard Blast Off is an endearing collection of songs that capture the ear with warm-yet-clear cassette aesthetics and spot-on musicianship, both of which form an angle that points lovingly to Feynman’s deep and varied influences. Make no mistake-- this one truly is alive.

Blast Off Through The Wicker

Art Feynman - "Feeling Good About Feeling Good"

Title track from Joseph Shabason's debut Aytche available August 25th from Western Vinyl

Pre-Order Aytche:
Bandcamp https://josephshabason.bandcamp.com
iTunes https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/aytche/id1245245891?ls=1&app=itunes
WV http://westernvinyl.com/shop/wv165

Joseph Shabason
Twitter https://twitter.com/JosephShabason
Instagram https://www.instagram.com/josephshabason/

Saxophonist and composer Joseph Shabason’s debut Aytche builds a bridge off of the precipice his forbears established, skirting jazz, ambient, and even new age with the same deliberate genre-ambiguity that made their work so interesting.

Aytche is a document of exploration both inward and outward. Every step taken in sound-design mirrors a stride in emotionality, as Shabason employs a variety of effect pedals to coax rich moody textures from his instrument.  He explains, "I feel like robbing the sax of the ability to shred by effecting it and turning it into a dense chordal instrument really helps the instrument become something that it's not usually known for."  Aytche deals with themes of degenerative illness and assisted suicide with eloquence that instrumental music rarely achieves regarding any subject, much less such difficult ones.

Album highlight “Westmeath” approaches Aytche’s subject of inspiration head-on. Here, the album’s only verbalization appears in the form of an interview with a man discussing his father’s trauma and eventual suicide after surviving the holocaust.  Though we only hear a few obscured words and phrases from the interview, the impact is powerful.  For Shabason, whose grandparents survived the holocaust, this selection is anything but frivolous.

Aytche

Joseph Shabason - "Aytche"

From the full-length album 50,000,000 Elvis Fans Can't Be Wrong available from Western Vinyl on August 4th.

Pre-Order the album:
iTunes http://hyperurl.co/xdhreq
WV http://westernvinyl.com/shop/wv160

50,000,000 Elvis Fans Can't be Wrong is the debut by Alabama-raised, Austin-based Caroline Sallee, aka Caroline Says.  After college Sallee took a job as a waitress in Yellowstone as an exercise in solitude and independence.  With the money she saved there, she took a transformative journey via Greyhound to explore the West Coast before returning to Alabama where she would record her debut album in her parents’ basement.  50 Million puts us in the seat right next to Sallee where we can feel the warm West Coast light through the window, the bus route charting the lines between our youth, and our delayed future.  These kinds of debuts can sometimes feel like an over-promise of what is to come, but in the case of Caroline Says there's clearly plenty more thread to be unraveled. It'll be a pleasure to see where the next bus ride takes us.

Caroline Says
https://www.facebook.com/carolinesaysmusic
https://www.instagram.com/carolinesaysmusic/

Caroline Says - "Winter Is Cold"

She's a Buddhist, I'm a Cubist (Remix ft. Angel Deradoorian, Cities Aviv, G-Side, Big Baby Gandhi, Deniro Farrar, KDz Kenny Dennis)

She's a Buddhist, I'm a Cubist Remix f. Angel Deradoorian Cities Aviv G-Side BBG Deniro Farrar KDz

Remix of 'Teenage Dream' from the 2011 Lushlife mixtape, 'No More Golden Days'. Instead of a Katy Perry flip, the new instrumental uses individual notes meticulously sampled from a vintage autoharp.

Teenage Dream (Autoharp Remix)

From the album A Light Below.  Available October 11, 2019 on Western Vinyl.

Pre-Order: http://hyperurl.co/2frc3y

“For my last record I built software and performance methods that let me wield modern electronic forces using acoustic instruments: my violin and percussion. Using custom violin processing, kick drum triggered synths, tuning forks, hi-hats, triangles, and bells, I created a space for truly contemporary and highly expressive instrumental narratives, often surrounded live with vivid video. Using no overdubs, pre-recorded tracks, clicks, or looping, this music dismissed electronic music’s grid, reclaiming time as a first order expressive element, flexing it, while doubling down on the performance aspect of this performance art. The music brought me around the world, from Tbilisi, Georgia to Havana, Cuba, and many points between, ever-refining my ideas for what might be next.

”A Light Below holds those truths as, now, self-evident. From this place I departed for territory even more emotionally ambitious, more dramatic. I’m also pushing my instrument’s technique further. Slow, heartrending lyricism remains on tracks like “Known By Heart” and “What You Must Make Of Me” but there is also the angular, high-energy bariolage of “Your Slow Moving Shadow, My Inevitable Night” and the beat-driven hocketing of ”I, Autocorrelations” where my violin processing creates “mirror selves” that ricochet around me in a propulsive, somatic trance.

“Since the last LP, my technique for tuning forks also earned some attention (and an honest-to-God tuning fork sponsorship). Again, I wanted to push the musical possibilities here, dialing those gestures in to create locked, luminous polyrhythms alternating with left hand pizzicato. I combined these methods with cascades of triggered synths in “The Resonance Canons”, an 11 minute trip ending in complete vulnerability—as the tuning fork loses its resonance, I continue knocking it against my bridge, a final ostinato built from processed noise and resonant wood.

“The goal of all this isn’t to be tricky or “smart”. I’d hope the music already clued you in, I’m most interested in what deeply moves the heart. This world is fucked; we need new methods we can believe in to trade stories, to share laughter and pain. This record is a conduit for a lot of personal darkness I only hope gives some voice to your own. Along with my daughter, it’s also the light that kept me living, down there in the studio after she’s asleep, looking for new ways to be.“
– Christopher Tignor

Tignor has released 9 LPs across the Western Vinyl and New Albion labels to critical acclaim within the classical and experimental communities. He has collaborated with numerous artists at the boundaries of popular music including Keith Kenniff (Helios), Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, John Congleton, and post-rock titans This Will Destroy You. While a young artist in NYC, Tignor mixed bands at CBGBs, was an assistant to La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela, and served as the technical director for 9 years for a New Music festival produced by Phillip Glass. Tignor discovered computers through his college electronic music studio (as a creative writing major), subsequently obtained his Masters in computer science from NYU, proceeded through Princeton's PhD program in music composition, and was later recruited for a software engineering position at Google, where he has worked since 2011.

A Light Below

Christopher Tignor - "I, Autocorrelations"

From the forthcoming release White Mountain by Úlfur, "So Very Strange" features vocals by Alexandra Sauser-Monnig of Mountain Man.

Ulfur - "SO VERY STRANGE"

An independent record label based in Austin, TX.

Christopher Tignor - "I, Autocorrelations"

Western Vinyl

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