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viewing 1 To 18 of 18 items
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TNP 028LP
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Skin Town's unexpected return with their new album Country finds the duo upping the already high bar set on their striking dark pop gem debut The Room (TNP 012CD/LP, 2013) with a dauntless artistic statement that trades clever posturing for vulnerability. Yielding their prowess with more restraint, Skin Town's Country hits harder and cuts deeper - doubling down on their narcotic cocktail of strong R&B hooks, spacious bewitching productions, and marked sense of melody that puts vocalist Grace Hall and multi-instrumentalist Nick Turco in a class of their own. Many saw that potential on their debut with support from Dazed, Interview, The FADER, KCRW, as well as artists like Tinashe shouting out Skin Town. Lamenting on the duo's unmistakable chemistry, Pitchfork says, "Turco's synthscapes are huge and scene-stealing, while Hall's husky voice strikes a glorious medium between Abel Tesfaye and Sade." Their latest is even more potent, a particular strain of sad dance music that feels timeless and raw. Country refines Skin Town's minimal framework of tethering hip-hop/R&B rhythms to Hall's smoky, precise phrasing exploring richer atmospheres and darker concerns. Written and recorded over three years, the album touches upon depression, loss, hedonism, poverty, rebellion, sex work, empowerment, and love's contradictions. The album's completion was sidetracked many times with Hall suffering a string of life-threatening mysterious immune system ailments, as a result there is a lot of pain and joy in this record, made with literal blood and tears. The opener "Bad" signals at this departure from their upbeat predecessor stripping away the beats, relying on the interplay between Turco's ringing chords, the enveloping synthwork and Hall's melancholic, rhythmic intonations. "Mute" brings back the drums, couched in a slinking hip-hop beat and a creeping synth lead. Throughout the record, Turco's productions glean from an eclectic, disparate mix: melodic Amiga tracker music, metro boomin', new age, while Hall seems ever-more comfortable exploring syncopation and half-rapped/half-sung excursions. This is inventive, uncanny pop music where Enya, Offset, Zola Jesus, and Future inhabit the same space.
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TNP 021LP
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Conceived and recorded quickly over only a few brief, yet intense studio sessions utilizing an array of new and vintage hardware, the debut from Psychic Health captures the duo's sharp, intuitive minimalism and sense of unpolished energy. The collaboration between Los Angeles residents Devon Stevens and Gabriel Mousey, is informed by their time in Berlin and Melbourne where they found inspiration within many mutations of uncompromising sound system music. Creeping soundscapes throughout their self-titled full-length are stripped-back, designed to be played loud for maximum effect. Psychic Health rewards patience by slowly unraveling rhythmic structures, careening between dubby, hypnotic techno, and barbed industrial chug -- not sounding out of place next to titles from Sandwell District, Avian, and Droid. Inviting repeated listens, the album makes an excellent companion for those seeking a brief expedition into the half-lit depths of the psyche. Psychic Health was created with: Elektron Machinedrum, Analog 4, Octatrack, Teenage Engineering OP-1, Roland Juno 106, Eurorack Modular DSI Evolver. Edition of 300.
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TNP 027LP
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If Psychic Health's self-titled debut album (2015) took the lessons the LA duo learned in the teeming clubs of Berlin and Melbourne, their latest LP, Exclusion, looks inward; it's a document of the duo tunneling down the studio wormhole. As such, Exclusion is a remarkably dynamic effort, adeptly jumping between evocative ambience ("Jamaica 88", "Ryso") and equally expansive dancefloor fair. Examples of the latter, such as the album's obvious centerpiece and titular track, "Exclusion", document Gabriel Mounsey and Devon Steffens's harnessing modular beast technology for peak techno utility, finding a clear thoroughfare between the soaring strings of Derrick May's classic Transmat releases and Ostgut Ton's current EBM-inflected precision. As you'd expect from Mounsey's background in film composition, Exclusion whirls with imagery. It's a Los Angeles album, but focuses on raw beauty of the city at night -- the lights in the distance, and the desolate downtown streets where kick drums often waft from disused warehouses. While their debut album opened notable doors for the group, landing distribution from Hard Wax and a feature in the Netflix series Sense8, Exclusion is an altogether masterful turn for Psychic Health, their complete studio immersion, easing the listener into deeply hypnotic states.
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TNP 026LP
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Forging an idiosyncratic musical language, told through exotic rhythms and adventurous wordless vocal explorations, Deal is Fay's boldest work yet, moving further away from the pop signifiers of previous exploits. With an articulate minimalism, Deal flexes and shapes these elements to their maximum potential through vast spatial movements that evolve down unexpected paths. Compositional directions diverge through variations on a theme. The album's complex choral arrangements and daring structural ideas demonstrate a deft understanding of music foundation while departing into abstract possibilities outside of these standards. A conversational interplay between drum and voice is at the center, highlighting the human element. A loose, primal urgency guides these compelling and playful electronic compositions that favor intuitive sense perceptions over self-expression. The voice acts as a beacon throughout the record, leading the rhythms and arrangements towards their next move. Deal is music for movement, an active listening experience that feels narrative or visual, building tension and anticipation of where the piece will lead, and what will happen next. The album uses sparseness to its strength, with each note and drum hit sounding more potent and unexpected. Here you'll find soul, exhilaration, guts, humor, freedom, play, human's animalistic nature. With a willingness to embrace the potential for new music, Deal is a brave and different record that will reward listeners.
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TNP 025CD
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Arriving three years since their mesmerizing new age-tinted synth-pop offering F.M. Sushi (TNP 008CD/LP, 2013) Rainbow Arabia's third full-length album L.A. Heartbreak wades through familiar neon waters but even more deliberately. Rainbow Arabia keep the focus on what distinguishes them from the sea of electronic pop acts out there, Danny Preston's adventurously exquisite arrangements, sturdy songcraft, and Tiffany Preston's potent vocal delivery. L.A. Heartbreak's dreamy, melodic machine pop takes cues from Tangerine Dream, Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark, Giorgio Moroder, Jan Hammer - confidently painting with bolder strokes with leaner, brighter production and infectious hooks evoking '80s radio pop that skew more towards Madonna and Cyndi Lauper rather than darker post-punk influences referenced on Rainbow Arabia's earlier albums. Recorded at home in Los Angeles, L.A. Heartbreak was born out of a tumultuous time for the duo with lyrical themes waxing on failing relationships, mortality, and change. In the three years since F.M. Sushi, the couple have been co-running the left-field leaning electronic label Time No Place, while slowly piecing together songs for their third album, inspired by the diverse selection of electronic and dance music scenes in Los Angeles they are ingrained in. However, after many arduous months of recording, further exacerbating the fracture in their musical partnership and marriage, that album was scrapped. They opted to instead start new and record something more direct and honest. The resulting nine songs on L.A. Heartbreak benefit from the duo's best instincts. By deciding to write and record the album quickly, a sense of immediacy shines within this vital collection of prismatic synth-pop.
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TNP 020LP
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An ode to ritual and the language of dance music, PHORK's Disappear in Raveland contains adventurous, surrealist musical ideas within a strict club framework giving equal credence to footwork, Chicago house, techno, and drone. The resulting epic collage shifts focus away from sound-design, instead ornately sculpting new forms out of familiar, well-worn drum-samples and sounds taken from free sample-packs. Rather than exploring the variety of structures in these genres separately song by song, PHORK ambitiously combines them all in each arrangement. With surgical precision, footwork's frenetic drum-programming is laid out and mesmerizingly reconstructed to comfortably sit alongside Mark Fell, Mike Q, or Terry Riley. While it's clearly experimental by nature, make no mistake -- Disappear in Raveland's minimalist excursions could function as a secret weapon for discerning DJs seeking to thrill the most daring dance audiences.
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TNP 017LP
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Haunting in its ardor for subdued atmospheric murk and dissipating electronic dream-pop transmissions, Pazes's debut full-length album, Induced, is an exercise in musical intent vs. the unknown forces that forge the end result. Commenting on the process, the Berlin-based (by way of Brazil) Pazes remarks, "I like to think feelings and ideas are separate things and if I'm expressing anything with music, I want it to be the latter. However within the process it becomes very hard to control what you're doing and where you're going. Naturally, this is analogous to many other realms of experience, this difficulty in exerting some sort of control over actions even when things are very clear and defined." Focused and fluid, Induced curiously exudes an uncommon sense of mystery and melancholy presenting itself in vaguely menacing starkness, wistful ambience, creeping bass groan, and the exploration of textures ranging from almost weightless to gritty. Cascading arpeggios meet off-kilter rhythm structures containing elemental traces of hip-hop/trip-hop and leftfield techno/dubstep, yet the mood of Induced has as much in common with bleary-eyed post-punk or shoegaze as it does with any contemporary electronic music scenes. Largely an instrumental journey, with Istanbul's Biblo contributing vocals to otherworldly songs ("Sion" and "Every One") and Paris-based pop chanteuse Andrea Balency appearing on the heart-wrenchingly gorgeous album closer "Remnants."
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TNP 015LP
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Unified by dub's loose sense of space and deep sub-frequencies, CHLLNGR's unique amalgam of soul, pop, stripped-down beats, and decaying atmospheres has earned the Copenhagen-based artist, Steven Jess Borth II, adulation from press and peers alike. The nocturnal, murky worlds of his debut Haven and its follow-up EP Datter alluded to subtle pop possibilities featuring Borth's soft-touch vocals woven into structures indebted to modern R&B's sleek minimalism and the techniques set forth by dub reggae's chief architects King Tubby, Scientist, among countless other legends. An artist who shines in the collaborative process, Borth's acclaimed debut Haven featured Coco (of Quadron), Aku (of Dragons Of Zynth), Teachers, and he has been a consistent cohort of South African MC Spoek Mathambo, partnering in composing, production, and touring as Mathambo's multi-instrumentalist secret weapon over the past few years. CHLLNGR has been working on his next full-length for the L.A.-based Time No Place label. Recorded at the newly-built Red Bull Studios in Copenhagen, Borth took a different approach by recording most of the new record at a legitimate studio as opposed to his previous DIY methods. Again, a collaborative effort: the new album features contributions from up-and-coming vocalist JOSIAHWISE IS THE SERPENTWITHFEET, Grace Hall of Skin Town, Doctor Echo, Dusty Brown, Nikolaj Manuel Vonsild (When Saints Go Machine, Cancer) and the UK-based artist, Dels. Keeping much of CHLLNGR's signature moody starkness, his LP strives for brave eclecticism, digging deeper into his future-minded soul music explorations.
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TNP 014LP
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Two years after the release of her groundbreaking LP DIN, Fay re-emerges with her new exhilarating new masterwork, Deathwatch. Treading many of the signature avant-pop and rough-and-tumble R&B tropes first heard on DIN, Deathwatch expands the sonic palette, pushing elements of drone, no wave/post-punk, and dub higher into the mix. With a tight focus on exploring the physical within the realm of machine music, Deathwatch (like DIN) was conceived using the same process of editing and stitching sounds together visually without the help of sequencers or even a grid. While this is music made with computers, Fay's painstakingly unique process highlights the raw human element to her music, reflecting the blood, sweat, and pain expended throughout her addictive, unquantized rhythm explorations.
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TNP 012CD
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Maneuvering the perilous depths of heartbreak and ecstasy, Skin Town's bewitching R&B pop stunner The Room approaches the elusive mysteries of desire and longing with directness and urgency. Unabashedly romantic (and delightfully hedonistic), the L.A.-based outfit's modern R&B may sit alongside nicely with contemporary hit-makers like The Dream or Mike Will Made It, but they align closer to the freakiness of Ginuwine, Adina Howard, and Silk, juxtaposed against feather-weight synth trails of new age. There is a narcotic pull in Nick Turco's (synth/keys man for Zola Jesus) lean, spacious productions that serves as the perfect foil for Grace Hall's commandingly astonishing voice, which guides you throughout The Room, alternating between sinister sultriness and breathtaking sweetness.
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TNP 012LP
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LP version. Maneuvering the perilous depths of heartbreak and ecstasy, Skin Town's bewitching R&B pop stunner The Room approaches the elusive mysteries of desire and longing with directness and urgency. Unabashedly romantic (and delightfully hedonistic), the L.A.-based outfit's modern R&B may sit alongside nicely with contemporary hit-makers like The Dream or Mike Will Made It, but they align closer to the freakiness of Ginuwine, Adina Howard, and Silk, juxtaposed against feather-weight synth trails of new age. There is a narcotic pull in Nick Turco's (synth/keys man for Zola Jesus) lean, spacious productions that serves as the perfect foil for Grace Hall's commandingly astonishing voice, which guides you throughout The Room, alternating between sinister sultriness and breathtaking sweetness.
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TNP 010LP
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Zoos Of Berlin's sophomore album Lucifer in the Rain is an exquisite work of slanted pop and cosmopolitan art-rock. Endlessly rewarding, with meticulously-arranged instrumentation and lysergic narratives, the Detroit-based outfit's latest album fully realizes their vision of boundless 21st century pop. Full of twists and turns, it's easy to be swept from one section of the song to the next without knowing where they begin and end, distilling elements of glam, jazz, post-punk, bossanova, motorik grooves, electronic ambience, and anything else that will fit; into something wholly unique, referencing both the past and future reminiscent of Low-era Bowie or Roxy Music getting in a room with Broadcast and Tom Zé. Produced in Nashville by Collin Dupuis, who has engineered for Black Keys, Carl Craig, Dr. John, and Tomahawk. He is also the band's drummer.
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TNP 008CD
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This is the follow-up to Rainbow Arabia's critically-acclaimed debut LP on Kompakt, Boys and Diamonds (KOMP 088CD/KOM 217LP). Exploring a strange ecosystem balanced with equal parts tech-noir and Adriatic light, Rainbow Arabia land on a new world with their second full-length album FM Sushi. Vaporous FM-synthesized melodies streak across the planet's neon sky, disintegrating into its plush, hypnotic atmospheres. Two musical vectors simultaneously approach 1985 and 2025, intersecting briefly in the present. Their Weirding Modules* are armed with sounds reminiscent of Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark, Tangerine Dream, Vince Clark, and Jan Hammer. Rainbow Arabia prepare for a war of wavelengths where amplitude and timbre arrive at a sunset-lit shore, emerging from a white Ferrari, armed to the teeth, and prepared for action of Miami Vice magnitude. Tiffany's mercurial pop vocals float into a cavernous section of the subconscious, draped with plush tapestries of sound. With the addition of Dylan Ryan (Icy Demons, Cursive, Herculaneum, Michael Columbia), they have another force contributing to the evolution of their sound. Ryan's drive on tracks like "River's Edge" and "Three Moons" possesses a spellbinding motion where the listener is engaged by the rhythm; pushed, pulled, and pleased by cymbals, dropped into the mix like stones skipping over a still, mirror-like lake with treated delicate ambience. With its choir-like synths, analog sequencing and new age saxophone solos, FM Sushi is determined to set a crystalline path into a future filled with colors that mankind has named only in dream. *The Weirding Module is a sonic beam weapon that translates certain specific sounds into attacks of varying potency. The sounds that the device translates into attacks are presented as being somewhat rare.
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TNP 008LP
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LP version. This is the follow-up to Rainbow Arabia's critically-acclaimed debut LP on Kompakt, Boys and Diamonds (KOMP 088CD/KOM 217LP). Exploring a strange ecosystem balanced with equal parts tech-noir and Adriatic light, Rainbow Arabia land on a new world with their second full-length album FM Sushi. Vaporous FM-synthesized melodies streak across the planet's neon sky, disintegrating into its plush, hypnotic atmospheres. Two musical vectors simultaneously approach 1985 and 2025, intersecting briefly in the present. Their Weirding Modules* are armed with sounds reminiscent of Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark, Tangerine Dream, Vince Clark, and Jan Hammer. Rainbow Arabia prepare for a war of wavelengths where amplitude and timbre arrive at a sunset-lit shore, emerging from a white Ferrari, armed to the teeth, and prepared for action of Miami Vice magnitude. Tiffany's mercurial pop vocals float into a cavernous section of the subconscious, draped with plush tapestries of sound. With the addition of Dylan Ryan (Icy Demons, Cursive, Herculaneum, Michael Columbia), they have another force contributing to the evolution of their sound. Ryan's drive on tracks like "River's Edge" and "Three Moons" possesses a spellbinding motion where the listener is engaged by the rhythm; pushed, pulled, and pleased by cymbals, dropped into the mix like stones skipping over a still, mirror-like lake with treated delicate ambience. With its choir-like synths, analog sequencing and new age saxophone solos, FM Sushi is determined to set a crystalline path into a future filled with colors that mankind has named only in dream. *The Weirding Module is a sonic beam weapon that translates certain specific sounds into attacks of varying potency. The sounds that the device translates into attacks are presented as being somewhat rare.
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TNP 005LP
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Castratii are a paradox, a wonderful vision of a life that might have been, and still could be. Enveloping shrouds of ambient musical strands, woven together into a swinging bridge that hangs over a chasm of endless possibility. Created and constructed from one Australian summer to the next, the creation of their debut album Eora persisted through the extremities of the Australian bush -- heat, humidity, cold, and rain to create a singular document as vast and mysterious as the landscape it was created for. A lucid journey that takes place mostly through the darkness, the tension and foreboding atmospheres looming tie together Castratii's album of witchy doom-pop. Heavy one moment, channeling a drone and pulse into the concise framework of electronic pop of the more industrial persuasion, while at other times, it's easy to get lost in their sustaining, enveloping ambient sprawl. Inspired by their remote surroundings and paralleling it to our own individual desolation caused by the internal dialogue within all of us, Eora aims to sonically and lyrically map this wilderness.
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12"
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TNP 006EP
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San Gabriel is the new forward-thinking beat project from the multi-instrumentalist/producer Butchy Fuego (note: Fuego also performs and is a touring member of Boredoms and was a founding member of now-defunct Pit Er Pat.) His upcoming album Volfe is full of warped and pulsing pan-global club music; a signature marriage of tropical riddims, dubbed-out soundscapes, and modern R&B minimalism. Striking the perfect balance of booming bass and tricky rhythms, Volfe makes for some serious sideways heat.
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TNP 004LP
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Exploring wild, new directions in body music, DIN, the debut LP from FAY is an absolutely stunning introduction with a pinpoint focus on retaining the physical within the realm of machine music. While clearly electronic in nature using synthetic sounds, there is a uniquely raw human element in her music that reflects the amount sweat, blood, and pain expended throughout the creation of DIN that makes it stand apart. The album's fractured, meticulously-composed sonic structures make nods to modern R&B, and feature looping vocal mantras, exotic rhythms (zouk, gamelan), bass music's pressurized subs, and musique concrète's time-disorienting arrangements. Balancing sounds both hypnotic and (sometimes deliberately) harsh, the resulting album is one with few reference points, shrouded in mystery -- a mystery that only deepens and intrigues upon closer listen, even as the music and process unveils itself. The cover art for DIN demonstrates how the record was edited and stitched together, visually. Each sound was placed, not in a grid or sequence, but its distance in time from the others is measured by visual space. Rhythm is central throughout DIN. Separated by clanging percussion, album opener "How It Feels Good" feels like episodes, chapters or scenes on a theme. With the protagonist illustrated by the looped vocal, the song is driven by a thumping body drum, like an echoing heartbeat. The droning stop-start rhythm in "That's the Part" is a catharsis -- a void -- at which you move and nothing else is able to interrupt that movement. The frantic drum riddims of "Shadow I" are anchored by a steady pulse of sub-frequencies and a loopy, rapid-fire electric piano riff, while "Let It Go"'s stark, sinewy grooves may have you imagine Missy Elliott/Timbaland against John Cage's ethos of "getting rid of leaves to make trees visible." Ambitious and uncompromising, FAY's debut album maintains a human element and an unflinching commitment to minimalism and economy.
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12"
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TNP 003EP
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Nguzunguzu's (pronounced en-goo-zoo-en-goo-zoo) bubbling, otherworldly productions stitch percussively-forward experimental sounds into a club-friendly framework. Pitchfork Media called their Perfect Lullaby Mix "the most unique and evocative DJ mix of the year," with props also from The FADER, XLR8R, Stereogum, LA Times, and The New York Times. The Mirage EP is Nguzunguzu's breakout EP (from 2010) made to have and hold in the physical realm for the first time. The new version features a rework from Dubbel Dutch and mind-melting artwork. Limited edition of 500 on clear vinyl.
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