RIYL: Alog, Bjork, Brigitte Fontaine, The Focus Group

Rippling like a thumbed-through flip book of vaporous, hazy memories or maybe like a box of old photos left to the devices of the wind, Yo-Yo Blue feels like a curated tour of a fevered dream. Replete with childhood recitals, fragments of half-remembered stanzas and sumptous j-pop interludes, we sense that this was a life lived well and well lived. As the shadows fall around our eyes and the summer skies turn from pink to the bluest-black the sensation of being lifted and rocked slowly slips away…

PLVS VLTRA is Toko Yasuda, formerly of Enon

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Limited edition of 100 pro-dubbed & imprinted cassettes w/ download card + sticker of collage by Toko

1. Lovely
2. あっち池
3. Madame Mademoiselle
4. Sitcat (Yo-Yo Blue)
5. 999
6. Hotpocket
7. ちょ-ちょ (with Nico)
8. 私は小人
9. Night Walk
10. Falling Slowly
11. Good Night
12. White Elephant
13. Pictures Echo

RIYL: Heldon, Tonto’s Expanding Head Band, John Carpenter

Cremator’s new album title comes from a tale about a sudden, radical shift from a controlling, benevolent, and sterile society to one of individuality and danger ruled by an elite group called the Instrumentality. Now picture the soundtrack circa 1979 by Klaus Schulze and filmed by Jean Painlevé. Flickering images beyond your stars have trapped you in the dark as you recline in your velvet-lined pod whilst arpeggios and synth washes swirl around the ship, returning from the ether, leaving crystal contrails – and that is just the opening sequence.

Cremator is Matt Thompson of Rashomon and Zoltan

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Limited edition of 100 pro-dubbed & imprinted cassettes w/ download card

1. Alpha Ralpha Boulevard 20:15
2.Catmaster 17:44

RIYL: Tim Hecker, Mouse on Mars, Loscil

The voices of futures past howl through PNG files of grass and waterfalls – thumping and thrumming, bumping and humming – but always subservient to the pulse. It’s a very pleasant factory where the tunes for imaginary holidays of post-Christian digital paganism are made: some static is playing dub on a radio in the background, mechanical insects flit about your head plucking harps from a laser bandstand and the air always smells of ozone. But the beat, the beat is what drives us through our toil – always the beat.

Black Hat is Nelson Bean of Seattle, Washington

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Limited edition of 100 pro-dubbed & imprinted cassettes w/ download card

1. Ashe – 5:25
2. Three Masks – 1:06
3. Jaune – 7:07
4. The Lattice And Cormorant – 4:28
5. Arabesque – 5:05
6. Singing Point – 5:57

Not technically a Field Hymns release but an offering from Oxykitten: “Fugue State is a collection of 4 and 8 track tape recordings from Oxykitten’s past. Previously floating around as the spirits of albums never requited, these killer but odd cuts are newly assembled in a shiny and happy home. Hope you enjoy….”

GET IT FOR FREE

So the cassette/small run/net label world is a pretty incestuous thing – because we don’t have to wait until we sell 1000 CDs or 500 records to release another album, artists like us tend to be prolific. This really is the benefit of tapes – burn bright and fast, and leave them wanting more. Make 100 tapes for a label move on…

Here are some current albums by folks who have released albums with us and what they do when they are not here.

Bastian Void

Joe Bastardo is also one half of  Looks Realistic which just put out a kickass cassette/VHS combo on the great Constellation Tatsu. He also has project called Homeowner which will have a release on the incomparable Orange Milk in April or May and then another title as Bastian Void on Architects + Heroes a month later. In case you didn’t know, he is also head honcho at Moss Archive which has a full slate of great albums coming out this year. Joe Bastardo = awesome, just in case you are bad at math.

Grapefruit

Grapefruit (Charlie Salas Humara – also of Pinks Quieter, Sun Angle and Regular Music ) has three albums out currently on Golden Cloud, Gnar, a digital release on AmDiscs + a Sloow tape that is now sold out. The man is too brilliant to sleep, luckily for us all. I have heard a copy of the Sun Angle album recently and it blew my mind – best band in Portland right now.

Charlatan Meets The North Sea

An amalgam of both projects Charlatan and The North Sea, Brad Rose the man over at Digitalis should have prolific engraved on his headstone. In fact, were I to type out all he has recorded I’d weep with frustration, but lately he has put out excellent work on vinyl over at Type and Rubber City Noise. And Digitalis has just been killing it lately with their releases – super kudos from us.

Andreas Brandal

Andreas has current releases on Lighten Up Sounds, Hair On My Food  and a now out of print tape on Tranquility Tapes. I am sure he has great stuff cooking as we speak…

Zac Nelson

Zac has been a busy bee: a full length vinyl release over on Debacle, a cassette on Goldtimers, and another on Further – there is more no doubt but the internet is blank to your intrepid reporter.

Nodolby

Michele Scariot is not only prolific, he also runs Dokuro, a most excellent label out of Italy. Instead of typing this out I will just direct you to the wiki of the small-run world, Discogs – but I feel like there are probably some missing titles here…

Adderall Canyonly

AdCan has an album on Tranquility Tapes,  Rubber City Noise and a release soon on Under the Spire. Also in the meantime was a release as The Dept. of Harmonic Integrity over at Beest.

Garth Klippert

And the award for the most prolific of the year goes to Garth: his band Old Light is planning five cassette releases recorded and released in one year on PDX label Curly Cassettes . That is a lot of old dinosaur guts but will surely worth it. Rumor is that there is also a vinyl release slated for this year too…

THE CATS’ ORCHESTRA – NO KEYS

RIYL: Fonal Records, Kluster, early Kraftwerk + a touch of biscuit

It’s just a normal night for The Cats’ Orchestra…somewhere else. The little factories hum, tiny drunks stumble home, miniature drive-ins play wee adventure movies, a flock of robot geese flies over, and an orchestra made of pint-sized Russian cats fiddles away on prepared violas, contact-mic’d cigar boxes, and underwater wine glasses on the bandstand. The half-tunes, half-abstractions of this naively brilliant one-man orchestra are a fine demonstration of acoustic and wonky electronics tools that build scaffolding to bring us to the cosmic. This is one of the most appropriately-named groups ever, though we wouldn’t have thought cats had such good taste in music. A rare example of delightfully meandering plink-plonk that you can’t help but follow.

The Cats’ Orchestra is poet and musician Nicholay Syrov, label head of Moscow’s Dumpster Diving Lab and editor of magazine Nisha.

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REGULAR MUSIC – RUINS

RIYL: Squishy Psychedelia, Tangerine Dream scoring a nature program, Nitrous Oxide Smoothies

Somewhere deep in the CPU sleeps the mind of a poet, dreaming in binary of a particular time and place in space. How he got there is of no consequence to us, rather it is his dreams that concern us now. Sun is the square wave, the color blue, the saw wave. Trees and the merest hint of grass on the hill behind are pink noise, the sea a pulse wave. We are seeing in two dimensions but hearing in three as the code unwinds, pausing, turning and leaping towards the horizon as the wind, played here by a low E, carries us past the seagulls on the horizon and towards the beautiful digital expanse above.

Regular Music is a Portland, Oregon electronic super group consisting of E*Rock of Audio Dregs, Marius Libman of Copy and Charlie Salas-Humara of Grapefruit / The Planet The / Panther.

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Limited edition of 100 pro-dubbed & imprinted cassettes w/ download card