High Aura'd - No River Long Enough Doesn't Contain a Bend
LP Release: October 13th, 2017
Digital Release: October 27th, 2017
No River Long Enough Doesn’t Contain a Bend, the newest album from John Kolodij’s High Aura’d project, is a document of place. In 2015 the artist moved to Ohio from his familiar coasts of Rhode Island. In attempt to grapple with the marked difference in geography Kolodij dove into discovering the old forest and rivers of Steelhead Alley. The resulting album is a deeply Autumnal work. Calm, warm, bittersweet and resolute in the face of the coming changes. High Aura’d records previously have touched on the darkness and light of the American wilderness, but never in such an “Americana” form as this. This is a document of a guitarist as cartographer. Digging deeper and deeper into what he is capable of shaping in your mind. This is poetry, if not in form, at least in feeling. The album features an small army of longtime collaborators: including John Twells (Xela), the renowned trumpeter Greg Kelley, Glenna Van Nostrand (Omnivore), Ken Linehan,and Angel Olsen. Mastered by Helge Stien at Audio Virus LAB. Packaging and design by Kevin Gan Yuen (Sutekh Hexen, Viraloptic) with a hidden-in-plain-sight short story by William Cody Watson.
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Aquarelle - Leave Corners
Digital Release: September 29th, 2017
LP Release: October 20th, 2017
An album many years in the making, Leave Corners is the 4th full length LP from Ryan Potts’ Aquarelle project. The album finds Potts developing his sound largely without the use of his standby instrument of the guitar, instead focusing on his interest in other stringed instruments and their interactions with feedback and distortion. Because of this new focus on sine waves, strings and feedback, the album opens with “Open Absence pt. 1” which serves as an overture of sorts. A peek into the new focus for the project. Then, almost as a nod to his past, the album bursts forth with the most “classic” Aquarelle track of the album “Open Absence pt. 2”. With its layered guitar and half buried crackling and rattling percussion it is almost the apotheosis of the styles from his previous stunner Sung in Broken Symmetry. The rest of the album expands the palette mightily, diving into saturated walls of subtly oscillating tones (“Cut Stone”), cyclical chimes and cello phrases (“Brass Logic”), and the haunting smoky strings of the closer “The Horse Has Run”.
The album artwork for Leave Corners, created by Hannah Devereux, features fine, intricate lines that collide in subtle fashion which Ryan felt resonated heavily with his own vision of the album.
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Elkhorn - The Black River
Release: April 14th, 2017
The Black River is the debut LP from Elkhorn, the duo of Jesse Sheppard (12 String Acoustic) and Drew Gardner (Electric Guitar). The album straddles the story of american guitar music by digging into deep folk, Americana, jazz and psychedelia. The outcome sits somewhere between the primitive reveries of the Takoma school and the electric/frentric fringes of Steven R. Smith, Ben Chasny and Tom Carter. What sets Elkhorn apart from these luminaries is the complementary interplay of the duo. The two voices are distinct yet wholly dependent on each other to create a unique statement on what a guitar "duet" is capable of.
In August of 2016 Elkhorn released their debut tape on Brooklyn's Beyond Beyond is Beyond and embarked on a eastern US tour. A tour diary and playlist of some live recordings can be found at Dying For Bad Music
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“It is both masterful and beautiful in its construction ”
Camedor - En Ut / Alba
Release: Feb 27th, 2017
February brings us a release from a newcomer by the name of Camedor, one José Orozco Mora from Mexico. I recently received this EP as a demo and instantly fell in love with it. We are offering a very limited-edition run on clear blue vinyl with a screenprinted clear sleeve. Only 100 copies will be on offer, so pick it up today. The EP includes two sun worshipping tracks of looping layered guitar, including an arrangement of Terry Riley’s “In C”!
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Medina / Walsh - Vault of Angels
Release: Nov 11th, 2016
Debacle Records is pleased to announce its first release from Seattle’s Josh Medina and Paurl Walsh, a seven track affair that sees the duo pushing further out into a shared realm of atmospheric drone, industrial and sample-based work with fragments of Americana, American primitive guitar and psych, turning this broad matrix of influences into a series of dense exercises in tension and release. Having previously explored similar ground with a cassette last year for hometown label Hanged Man, Vault of Angels sees a matured vision from the collaboration,working guitars, keyboards, electronics, and a range of signal processing techniques into a distended, abstracted sense of naturalism, compositions that replicate and elaborate on the misty landscapes of their home state.
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TOME TO THE WEATHER MACHINE - REVIEW
Chambers - Sigma Flare 1
Release: May 27th, 2016
Ex Yellow Swans member, Gabriel Saloman, teams up with Vancouver, BC mainstain, Michael Red, for the spontaneous, yet congruent collaborative project, Chambers. DBL100 acts as the second in a two part piece by the adventurous experimentalists, and is the final iteration of the Sigma Flare sessions.
Sigma Flare II is a narration of Saloman and Red’s minds, a manifestation of a journey marked by texture-heavy melodic arrangement and dub-style rhythms. This session captures the lush, natural beauty of the artists' Pacific Northwest home while simultaneously sketching its ominous yet vibrant urban sprawls -- a work full of thoughtful and spacious production that leads the listener through gentle corridors and meditative plateaus. Never has a moment been more shepherded by seemingly endless organic improv and exploration, while appearing to end so seamlessly at the very place it began.
Sigma Flare II is the final piece in Chambers' inaugural session, a statement, that will soundtrack your headspace and internalizations for an indeterminate period to come.
Chambers - Sigma Flare I
Release: May 27th, 2016
Chambers, a collaboration between Gabriel Saloman and Michael Red, debuts their EP Sigma Flare 1 October 2nd on Debacle Records. With a sound loosely described by the pair as “experimental dub,” derived by their mutual interest in the spacious hiss and tectonic bass of German outlet Rhythm & Sound, Chambers met for dusk-to-dawn exploratory recording and listening sessions in their home studios in downtown Vancouver and nearby Sunshine Coast. This mix of raw urban grime and sea-meets-mountain grandeur intuitively wove its way into the duo’s sound -- equal parts late night wanderings through abandoned streets and cold ocean waves crashing against stone.
Xua - Mekong Moon
Release: May 27th, 2016
Mekong Moon is the debut LP from Xua, aka Joshua Lee Vineyard, of Portland, Oregon’s space funk outfit Swahili. The genesis of Mekong Moon came during a hiatus for Swahili, during which Vineyard traveled across Southeast Asia. Like some strange combination of Alan Lomax and Anthony Bourdain, the album is the first in a series of “aural slideshow” records combining his love of ‘70s synth techniques, sci-fi retrofutures, and the field recordings of his travels.
In Xua's own words: “As a child in the '80s, the talk of an emerging Asian economy, during the transition between analog and digital, taking over the world had stuck with me. What would a future world sound like if eastern culture emerged as the world's dominating power? What unheard radio transmissions would emerge?”
The result is an album that references '70s synth albums -- not the Germanic powerhouses of Tangerine Dream and Kraftwerk, but instead the “fourth world” pop of Brian Eno, Jon Hassell, and Moebius & Plank stewing in the humidity of a Southeast Asian sunrise.
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