Cream Dream is Teddy Ouwerkerk, a Long Island based designer and producer with a flair for combining disco, soul, and funk circa 1970 with house and contemporary beat-making. Cream Dream: Collected gathers his first three self-released EPs, issued prior to the release of his free-to-download debut album Love Letter; the Paradiso and Total Babe EPs, as well as his mixtape Spliffy Beats vol. 1 and two muggy bonus tracks from the same period. It’s the first such compilation of his prior work, but it turned out too well and the tape’s way too good looking for it to be our last.
Perhaps our most notoriously overdue cassette, the ill-fated PBUH037, which we pressed last year but had to sit on until… well, just about now. Featuring reworks of artists that run the gamut from the Cyclist to Barry White, these are some of the best remixes we’ve ever had the opportunity to put to tape (if you know our proclivities, you’ll know we’ve pressed more than most). Thanks to Beau himself for the incredible packaging design on this one.
“Beau Sorenson was born and grew up in remote northwestern Wisconsin, where it doesn’t necessarily take a village to raise a garage band; at least when you can count on the intervention of drum machines and a four track recorder. Sorenson’s interest shifted to synths as the 80s were losing their flavor, amassing ‘a small pile’ of them alongside as many other homemade pieces of equipment. Now a studio engineer with diverse credits, running the gamut from Sparklehorse and Death Cab For Cutie to Czarbles and Testa Rosa, Sorenson’s intimate knowledge of the equipment he uses gives him ample range for experimentation, a quality particularly palpable in his remixes. A small but growing appendage to his more technical work, Sorenson’s moniker Beaunoise reveals the fullness of his kaleidoscopic aural impulses – remapping the work of others through the refractive prisms of pop culture and contemporary technology. More so than his own more abstract compositions, remixing serves as a technical and personal laboratory for Sorenson to explore new production techniques, though also to test perception; to enjoy and admire a song enough to deconstruct and rebuild it with respect for a range of potential outcomes. This is the first release to collect his remixes. With several other projects slowly simmering on the backburner, Remixes serves as a strong counterpoint to his previous ambient work.”
Stream it below or click through here to order the tape.
Here’s video of our buddy the Cyclist playing a short live set at the Boiler Room! Check out his new album from Leaving Records/Stones Throw - do yourself a favor and get the cassette version, it’s one of Leaving’s finest.
Happy Release Day! We’ve been shipping copies of Space Junk since last Friday, but today’s the album’s official release date. Activity at the USPS will be particularly vigorous today, robust even, as we stand dutifully in line to ship a tote-bag full of cardboard squares we’ve filled with music-loaded vinyl rounds, though eventually we’ll come home to wait for the reviews. I must be getting old, because this mediocre review from the 405 just seems funny - seems like the album wasn’t psychedelic enough for him, but he also intimates not liking psych music on principle, so go figure.
Order a copy of Space Junk on vinyl from our bandcamp.
In the meantime, check out the latest single from the album, “You & I” - premiered last week over on Pitchfork.
“Proposed by lo-fi recorder and pop auteur Emily Reo, the Clubhouse Split collects songs from four similarly active female musicians, enlisting Johanne Swanson, aka Yohuna; Rebecca Doerfer, aka Brown Bread; and Malee Bringardner, aka MoonLasso. Though each is animated by their own unique projects, the impetus for the Clubhouse Split came from a mostly independent discovery and appreciation of each other’s music, the final gaps in familiarity being filled as each musician accepted in succession Reo’s invitation to collaborate on a split cassette. Their music is elegant, elaborately realized, and fully apprehended - each has been towing their own line for years at the heart of an expanding “post-colonial” music economy (no stuffed-shirt labels for these ladies).
Though the whole of human history is difficult to perceive for ‘most’ humans, because female voices are so thoroughly undocumented prior to recent centuries, tension in the form of radically opposite self-conceptualizations leaves thinkers of different genders designing their ideal self according to rules that sometimes don’t translate. That isn’t to say that women don’t have role models, just that we live in the throes of a protracted realignment. Progress as a species is the pace of our collective re-investment in the integrity of transcendent principles - in the face of an undesired state, we conceive of an ideal and (ideally) progress toward it. These four women have made it their work to model positivity and strength in the pursuit of a ‘public’ creativity, brooking no compromise and allowing their sincerity to play out across their respective bodies of work.
In the spirit of good will and basic arithmetic, the Clubhouse split offers eight songs and four genuine exemplars for anyone cognizant. If you include the packaging designers, that total raises to six; much thanks to artist Kaley Dickinson and designer Liz Pavlovic for their contributions.”
Lil Kids’ Lopato-produced album Slow Rainbow has been circulating digitally for a little while now, you can read a bit about mainstay Adam Kane in Interview Magazine and check out some of his more recent releases at the Lil Kids bandcamp. Still, even with another new album on the horizon, Slow Rainbow has been one of our favorite albums for the last year; Lopato’s unorthodox beats and transcendent sample work forming the perfect skeleton for Kane’s whimsically pragmatic lyricism. The partnership is versatile and Lopato’s production facilitates an impressive range on Slow Rainbow, Kane’s readings ably completing each collaboration with just the right kind of swagger.
We’re happy to share it! Cassettes will be shipping out later this month, but feel free to stream the album and preorder tapes on our bandcamp.
Only a few weeks away from the one year anniversary of our cassette release of their last EP, (Love) That’s All, Welcome Back Sailors unveil a video for none other than the tape’s third track. The twilit sequence of footage for “Flesh & Blood” was produced by their fellow Italian, Francesco Brunotti, whose eye for imagery drew rather a lot from the song; a shot of Andy Warhol’s “Silver Clouds” installation in Pittsburgh even brings the band’s conceptual universe closer to our West Virginia base than we or the band has managed to date.
In February Night-People Records will release Kraken, the follow-up EP to unhappybirthday’s debut album with Crash Symbols, Sirup, joining our friends and Crash Symbols alums Featureless Ghost on the Iowa City imprint. It’s only the first in the band’s beautiful plans for 2013.
Portals shared a first teaser yesterday; aLogan Owlbeemoth produced video for the title track, previously only demoed in the band’s Live in Paris tour EP. The track itself is an exciting promise of versatility and a strong instrumental counterpoint to darker cuts on their debut.
Earlier today, ThisIsFakeDIY unveiled the a new single from British psych-rocker Luke Donovan, aka Spectral Park, announcing details of his debut full length’s proper release February 4th on Mexican Summer. We couldn’t be happier to say that we’ll be handling the cassette, which we’ll elaborate on in more detail next month.
In the meantime, “Ornaments” is one of our very favorite tracks from the album and you have it in your power to preorder the record on vinyl here. Go with God.
