Bandcamp has announced a new crowdfunding service to press vinyl.
The service will provide an avenue for artists and labels to create a vinyl campaign with no up-front investment while streamlining the financing, production, and fulfillment of vinyl records. The label or artist will set the pricing and profit margins and once a campaign reaches its minimum goal, Bandcamp will press and ship the vinyl record directly to fans. The company also says they’re working with a manufacturer with “over 60 years experience producing vinyl.”
The service will launch to all artists and labels later this year. You can check out a pilot program of the service here.
Later this month, Beats Of No Nation will return with the fifth installment of its Dance Ideas VA series.
The EP, simply titled Dance Ideas 5, presents a set of cuts from up-and-coming producers and label newcomers Conformal and LPTLG, as well as imprint regulars Lavan and Jus Jam. Musically, the tracks follow in the Dance Ideas lineage, ranging from the deep grooves of Conformal’s “Gathering” to Lavan’s sample-heavy house masterclass “Feels Good 2 B Good Again,” the sun-drenched beats of Jus Jam‘s “Attraction Rules”, and LPTLG’s soothing, dubbed-out closer, “Spleen.”
Dance Ideas 5 drops on April 26 and can be pre-ordered here, with Jus Jam’s “Attraction Rules” streaming in full below.
Aparde will release a new album on Christian Löffler’s Ki Records, titled Hands Rest.
Hands Rest is Paul Schröder’s second studio album, following 2017’s Glass, also on Ki Records. While reflecting the essence of Berlin’s club scene, the album also takes us into the depths of the musician himself, to a world that is both intimate and profound. As a result, it has the duality of an artist who is both entertaining Berlin’s nightlife through electronic sounds and delving deep into his own emotions through avant-garde pop.
It was created over the span of one year after the breakup of a long relationship. “The process was very diffused in terms of time, because over the past year my life circumstances have been very complicated and often frustrating, and I had to motivate myself again and again,” Schröder recalls. “It [the break up] was accompanied by numbness and repression. This was followed by a period of inactivity and the thought of ending my activity as a musician.”
Tracklisting
01. Tar
02. Hands Rest
03. Simple Things
04. No Need
05. Integrity
06. Layers
07. Foreign
08. Intimacy
Hands Rest LP lands June 7, with a video of “Hands Rest” streaming below and pre-order here.
Plaid will release a new album via Warp in June, titled Polymer.
Ed Handley and Andy Turner have been expanding the realm of electronic music as Plaid since they diverged from trio The Black Dog in the early ’90s. Today, after nine Warp albums, they stand alongside the likes of Aphex Twin, Autechre, and Nightmares on Wax as mainstays of the British label as it reaches its 30th anniversary. Their last LP, The Digging Remedy, arrived in 2016.
Covering a wide range of emotions, influences, and inspirations, Polymer is “an album for modern times,” the label explains. Its creation was informed by a manifesto of polyphony, pollution, and politics, exploring themes of environment, synthetics, survival/mortality, and humanity’s (dis)connection.
“The problems and benefits of Polymers felt like good themes for this album, their repetitious strength, endurance and troubling persistence, the natural versus the synthetic, silk and silicone, the significant effect they have on our lives.”— Plaid
Tracklisting
01. Meds Fade
02. Los
03. Maru
04. Ops
05. Drowned Sea
06. The Pale Moth
07. Dancers
08. Nurula
09. Recall
10. All To Get Her
11. Dust
12. Crown Shy
13. Praze
Polymer LP lands June 7, with “Maru” and “Recall” streaming below.
La Fine Equipe is the alias of four Marseille-based musicians, namely Oogo, Chomsky, Mr Gib & Blanka. Their music is a mixture of hip-hop, disco, R&B, funk, footwork, and they release via French tastemaker Nowadays Records.
“Fonk Jedi” (ft. Georgia Anne Muldrow & Declaime) is the final taste of their upcoming record, Fifth Season, out tomorrow. The vocals of Georgia Anne Muldrow, signed to Flying Lotus’ Brainfeeder, imbue the warped funk of the track with a psychedelic edge, whilst Declaime’s (Stones Throw) supple bars throws a dose of hip-hop into the mix. It’s a track that encapsulates Fifth Season: playful, euphoric, and unexpected.
Fifth Season, is set for release April 19, with more information here. In advance of the release, you can download track number 13, via the WeTransfer button below, or here for EU readers due to GDPR restrictions.
La Fine Equipe is the alias of four Marseille-based musicians, namely Oogo, Chomsky, Mr Gib & Blanka. Their music is a mixture of hip-hop, disco, R&B, funk, footwork, and they release via French tastemaker Nowadays Records.
“Fonk Jedi” (ft. Georgia Anne Muldrow & Declaime) is the final taste of their upcoming record, Fifth Season, out tomorrow. The vocals of Georgia Anne Muldrow, signed to Flying Lotus’ Brainfeeder, imbue the warped funk of the track with a psychedelic edge, whilst Declaime’s (Stones Throw) supple bars throws a dose of hip-hop into the mix. It’s a track that encapsulates Fifth Season: playful, euphoric, and unexpected.
Fifth Season, is set for release April 19, with more information here. In advance of the release, you can download track number 13, via the WeTransfer button below, or here for EU readers due to GDPR restrictions.
Experimental musician and poet Rupert Clervaux will release his debut solo album, After Masterpieces, on Whities.
After Masterpieces sets six recitals of Rupert’s poetry in unique, unpredictable, and expansive musical scenery. The broad thematic scope takes in aesthetics, ancient mythologies, the origins of language and music, epistemology, and ecology, to name just a few. Alongside the announcement, he’s released “In Shadowlands of Like and Likeness” and “L’amore che Muove il Sole,” (feat Anna Homler), both taken from the record.
Clervaux is based between London and Mallorca. He last appeared in 2016 with an album alongside Beatrice Dillon called Two Changes, but has also collaborated with Alexis Taylor, Ben Vince, and The Radiophonic Workshop.
Tracklisting
01. Prelude Her Fingers of Pink Light (feat. Anna Homler)
02. Hidden in the Frail Partition
03. In Shadowlands of Like and Likeness
04. Damper and Drum
05. Make Nature Speak
06. L’amore che Muove il Sole (feat. Anna Homler)
After Masterpieces LP lands May 24, with “In Shadowlands of Like and Likeness” and “L’amore che Muove il Sole” (feat. Anna Homler) streaming on Bandcamp.
This Saturday, April 20, Pink Mammoth will celebrate its 15-year anniversary with a 15-hour party in Los Angeles.
The event will go down at Saint Vincent Court in Downtown Los Angeles, with a stacked lineup including Thievery Corporation’s Rob Garza, Deep’s Marques Wyatt, Lonely Boy (Live), Tara Brooks, Facundo Mohrr (LA debut), Pink Mammoth’s resident DJs, and more. The event will also offer a range of boutique clothing vendors, as well as cuisine from neighboring restaurants.
Sound will be provided by Danley Sound Labs courtesy of Subtract Music.
Un rêve is an experimental musician from southern Mexico City, real name Diego Vazquez Cornejo (a.k.a Didac.) For over a decade, music has been his emotional crutch, an outlet for his memory and dreams. His sound is deeply introspective and evokes images of intimate and sensitive landscapes.
2014 saw his first album, Por la hierba que besa mis tobillos cansados, and soon he’ll release his sophomore album, Cómo árboles al cielo… encuentro.
The record is mastered by Taylor Deupree from 12k (who has worked with musicians like William Basinski, Ryuichi Sakamoto, and Alva Noto, among many others). It’s scheduled for April 20 digital-only release, and there is currently a Kickstarter campaign to fund a limited vinyl pressing.
Ahead of the digital release, you can stream “Mientras caía junto a luciérnagas” (ft. Mar De Sombra) (meaning “while falling with fireflies“) in full via the player below.
Tracklisting
01. Las aves se reúnen en tu interior
02. encuentro (transition 1)
03. El destello oculto en las hojas
04. encuentro (transition 2)
05. En el silencio se escuchan ecos
06. encuentro (transition 3)
07. Hado
08. Mientras caía junto a luciérnagas (ft. Mar de Sombra)
Flying Lotus will release Flamagra, his much-aniticipated new album, via Warp next month. The album features (in order of appearance) Anderson .Paak, George Clinton, Little Dragon, Tierra Whack, Denzel Curry, Shabazz Palaces, Thundercat, Toro y Moi, Solange, and more. David Lynch even pops up for an eerie narration wherein he warns that “Fire is coming.”
It’s been nearly five years since the last Flying Lotus album, the Grammy-nominated You’re Dead! Since then, the multi-disciplinary Los Angeles artist has remained in constant orbit, collaborating with Kendrick Lamar on the classic To Pimp a Butterfly, directing and writing the Sundance-premiered comic horror hallucination “Kuso,” and producing much of Thundercat’s Drunk. He’s also nurtured his Brainfeeder imprint into one of the most consistently innovative record labels of the decade.
Flamagra is a work that “sweeps up every quantum advance and creative leap of the last dozen years of Lotus’ career and takes them even further,” the label explains. It encompasses hip-hop, funk, soul, jazz, global dance music, tribal poly-rhythms, IDM, and the L.A. beat scene, but it “soars above a specific vortex whose coordinates can’t be accurately charted,” the label adds. It’s described as an “astral afro-futurist masterpiece of deep soul, cosmic dust, and startling originality.”
“I’d been working on stuff for the past five years, but it was always all over the place. I’d always had this thematic idea in mind—a lingering concept about fire, an eternal flame sitting on a hill,” Lotus says. “Some people love it, some people hate it. Some people would go on dates there and some people would burn love letters in the fire. Then I went to this party and heard David Lynch saying the words that he wound up saying on the record. And I was like: ‘That’s it, we’re just going to go in that direction.'”
Although the album is built on traditional elements of hip-hop, there’s a newness present that stems from Lotus’ newfound appreciation for the piano. A visit to an art installation created by Tokyo’s Team Labs also triggered his childlike capacity for wonder, and Flamagra aims to be emblematic of that expansive mindset.
It was going to be a 10-track project, then a straight up beat record with no jazz solos, and various other things, until Lotus realized that it had to contain everything, “the complicated and jagged realms of emotions and ideas spiralling in the smoke-riddled, light-polluted San Fernando Valley sky,” he says.
The album also pays tribute to Lotus’ friend and collaborator Mac Miller with tracks “Find Your Own Way Home” and “Thank U Malcolm.” “This album has been a refuge for pain and trying to make the most out of that pain,” Lotus says. “Music can heal and in the wake of that tragedy it reminded me what I’m here to do. As we get older, we start to figure out what our purpose is and embrace it and I want to do good things with my work. I want it to be able to help people through tough times and inspire them to be creative.”
Tracklisting
01. Heroes
02. Post Requisite
03. Heroes In A Half Shell
04. More feat. Anderson .Paak
05. Capillaries
06. Burning Down The House feat. George Clinton
07. Spontaneous feat. Little Dragon
08. Takashi
09. Pilgrim Side Eye
10. All Spies
11. Yellow Belly feat. Tierra Whack
12. Black Balloons Reprise feat. Denzel Curry
13. Fire Is Coming feat. David Lynch
14. Inside Your Home
15. Actually Virtual feat. Shabazz Palaces
16. Andromeda
17. Remind U
18. Say Something
19. Debbie Is Depressed
20. Find Your Own Way Home
21. The Climb feat. Thundercat
22. Pygmy
23. 9 Carrots feat. Toro y Moi
24. FF4
25. Land Of Honey feat. Solange
26. Thank U Malcolm
27. Hot Oct.
Flamagra LP lands May 24 via Warp Records, with “Fire Is Coming” feat. David Lynch streaming below.
