Beacon – “The Ways We Separate”

Beacon are back with their debut full-length record, The Ways We Separate, to be released on April 29th, 2013 on Ghostly International.

Having previously put out two well-received EPs, No Body and the Ghostly-released For Now, Beacon’s new album deals primarily with the ideas and themes of separation, with the complexity of how we separate from others at the heart of the record.

The first single from the album, “Bring You Back,” can be heard now at FADER, who note how it “opens with a gorgeous harp-thing hitting not exactly when you expect it, then rolls out crunchy kicks and pleading singing that sounds not unlike Thom Yorke.” DUMMY describe the “shimmering ballad” as “something like ‘I Wish’ without the customary R. Kelly pomp or theatrics. It’s lovely.”

Having toured with How To Dress Well, Matthew Dear and Gold Panda in 2012, Beacon will play at SXSW this March with additional North American dates to be announced shortly.

Thomas Mullarney and Jacob Gossett, aka Brooklyn duo Beacon, introduced themselves to the world with the No Body and For Now EPs, both released last year on Ghostly International. The EPs were united by minimalist, R&B-influenced instrumentation, and also by a lyrical theme, with both serving as meditations on the darkness that underpins the most intense of human emotions: love.

The duo’s debut album The Ways We Separate both consolidates and develops these ideas. The album focuses, as the title suggests, on the idea of separation — both within the context of relationships and in a more intimate, psychological sense. As Mullarney explains, “The narrative contained inside The Ways We Separate deals with two kinds of separation: one where two entities grow apart, and the other where we grow apart from ourselves. Over the course of a relationship, the two sometimes happen together, one being the result of the other.”

Desires, passions and regrets are central to the songs on The Ways We Separate, which take a variety of perspectives to construct a nuanced reflection on the album’s central theme. ‘Between the Waves’ draws a clever analogy between relationships and soundwaves falling out of phase: “I know all the ways we separate/ Where we start to fade at different frequencies.” ‘Overseer’ catalogues a parting of the ways with discomfiting clarity: “Isn’t it fine?/ Taking it slow?/ Watching you watch me walk out your door.” And album closer ‘Split in Two’ explores how the extremes of love and loss can take you far away from being the person you thought you were, making explicit the connection between the two ideas of separation: “What I’d do for you?”, sings Thomas Mullarney, “Split myself in half/ Divided into two.”

Musically, The Ways We Separate finds Beacon working with a richer sonic palette than ever before —as Gossett says, “The production on this album is much more expansive than anything thing we’ve done thus far. We spent a lot of time exploring new gear and experimenting with how to pull a wide range of sound out of various instruments. Some of the key sonics that shaped this LP are analogue synthesis, lots of heavily processed guitar work, and vocal layering/processing.” While the abiding mood remains that of late-night introspection, the production draws from elements of hip hop and a wide gamut of electronic music, marrying intricate beats and subtle textures to honeyed pop melodies that belie the album’s conceptual depth. Rarely has bleakness sounded so pretty — this is a record that’s deceptively, compellingly beautiful, an exploration of a place both discomfiting and darkly seductive.

Release date: Monday, 29/April/2013
Track list:
1. Bring You Back
2. Feeling’s Gone
3. Between The Waves
4. Drive
5. Overseer
6. Late November
7. Studio Audience
8. Headlights
9. Anthem
10. Split In Two

Lusine -The Waiting Room

Seattle-based producer Jeff McIlwain’s work has long inhabited the fertile border zone between electronic pop and experimental electronic music — it’s a place that’s home to music that has both a brain and a heart, and McIlwain’s been exploring its boundaries for the best part of a decade now.

The Waiting Room is his third full-length under the moniker Lusine and announced for a February 19th release on Ghostly International (his first album since 2009′s A Certain Distance). As with all McIlwain’s work as Lusine, this is a record that’s characterized by both diversity and coherency, and you can hear that in the first single “”Another Tomorrow,”. Its other tracks traverse a variety of sonic landscapes as well, from the widescreen atmospherics of appropriately-titled opening track “Panoramic” through the digital soul arrangement of Electronic’s “Get the Message” and the club-friendly bounce of “First Call” to the slow-building Detroit-inflected closer “February”.

But for all The Waiting Room’s eclecticism, it’s also notable that it plays out as a coherent whole, with McIlwain’s deft production creating the sense of a single, logical journey — an album, rather than a simple collection of tracks. It also continues the excursions into vocal-led tracks that characterized A Certain Distance — exactly half of The Waiting Room’s ten tracks employ vocalists, most notably the aforementioned “Get the Message,” wherein guest vocalist and sister Sarah McIlwain makes Bernard Sumner’s words her own: “I don’t know where to begin / Living in sin,” she sings calmly, “How can you talk? / Look where you’ve been.”

As a whole, this is an album that’s both cerebral and visceral, a record that’s both rewarding of a serious headphone session and also warm and melodic enough to make listening as engaging in an emotional sense as it is in an intellectual one. Many artists flirt with these two extremities of electronic music; few tie them together as well as McIlwain does.

Artist: Lusine
Title: The Waiting Room
Release Date: 18-Feb-2013
Record Label: Ghostly International

Panoramic
Get the Message
Lucky
On Telegraph
Another Tomorrow
Without a Plan
First Call
By This Sound
Stratus
February

Matthew Dear – album teaser, Poolside remix Download

M ss ng p eces in collaboration with Matthew Dear present the Beams album trailer. You will find a dancer, a poet, a trumpet player and mainstay Ghostly visual artist and designer Michael Cina painting Dear’s portrait for the cover of Beams. This is the third time Matthew Dear and m ss ng p eces have joined forces.

Meanwhile, “Her Fantasy,” the highly praised lead single from Beams continues to be embraced. Recently, director Tommy O’Haver shared his self-described “mash-up” homage to Avant Garde filmmaker Kenneth Anger in his video for “Her Fantasy”. Poolside now slows “Her Fantasy” down to a cool breeze with their tantalizing remix.

Matthew is also confirmed to appear for Boiler Room in their breakfast show, next Tuesday 8th August. Tune in live at 10am to watch his set.

Beams is available August 27th (Worldwide) & 28th (North America).

Download:Matthew Dear – Her Fantasy (Poolside Remix)

Download:Matthew Dear – Crimewaves

Matthew Dear new Album “Beams”
Released on 27th August (Ghostly International)
Check For More HERE
Matthew Dear – Crimewaves

Matthew Dear announces new album ‘Beams’; debuts new track(Stream)

Matthew Dear Announces Details for Upcoming Album, Beams;
Offers Lead Track “Her Fantasy”

Released on 27th August (Ghostly International)

Matthew Dear, the relentless songwriter, producer and collaborator, offered an early taste of what to expect from Beams with the well-received EP, Headcage, in January of this year. The highlights were working with other producers (Van Rivers & The Subliminal Kid) and vocalists (Johnny from The Drums) which lent Headcage an openness and poise.

Recorded in Dear’s home studio and mixed at Nicolas Vernhes’ Rare Book Room studios in Brooklyn, Beams evokes a day-lit dreamworld at once strange and familiar. While the album’s dancefloor-ready tempos, major keys, and sun-warmed synths signal Beams as the lighter, brighter response to its predecessor, closer inspection reveals a squirming mass of oddball details. Dear’s latest productions creak and groan like anxious organisms, with slivers of guitar, electric bass, and drum kit darting in and out among the synths and samples.

Early on in Matthew Dear’s Beams— the New York-based artist’s fourth full-length, his first since 2010’s shadowy masterpiece Black City— something strange happens. A thick-fingered electric bass gallops in atop a driving backbeat as Dear sneers, “It’s alright to be someone else sometimes.” It may be odd to hear former techno-wunderkind Matthew Dear playing rock music, but the manic punk pulse of “Earthforms” is just one facet of Beams’ kaleidoscopic journey. Shot through with equal parts optimism and uneasiness, Beams is the latest transmission from one of pop music’s most fascinating creative minds.

Beams’ lyrics, meanwhile, are deeply personal, expressing vulnerability and confusion in startlingly immediate ways. “Do I feel love like all of the others or is this feeling only mine?” Dear sings on the strutting lead-off single “Her Fantasy“, later wondering “Am I one heartbeat away from receiving a damaging shock to my life?” Dear has grown into his songwriting voice, and he wears his current lyrical perspective—that of a man with something to lose—with an impressive grace.

When all is said and done, the central tension in Matthew Dear’s Beams— musical mischief vs. lyrical maturity—may not be a tension at all. After all, growing up involves learning to integrate all of one’s disparate selves. “I’m about 4 to 5 different people at any given time,” Dear says. “By allowing all of those different personalities to exist… the most pure and direct self can come through in the music. [The songs] may still be cryptic, and full of contradictions—but in my opinion, that is pure, unadulterated thought in musical form. They are direct lines to the center.”

In other words, Beams. Beams is slated for an August 27th (EU/UK) & 28th (North America) release date.

Today, Matthew offers “Her Fantasy”—the celebratory lead single from said album. If Beams is the sound of Matthew Dear waking up after the long, dark night of Black City, then “Her Fantasy” is the sun’s first rays, peaking over the horizon.  Opening with a head-turning whistle-and-cowbell rhythm, “Her Fantasy” signals Beams’ queasy optimism in classic Matthew Dear avant-pop form—that is, without verses and choruses per se, but by hustling through a series of wickedly catchy sections whose twisted internal logic becomes clear as the song progresses. The track builds to an ecstatic climax, in which Dear’s exhortation to “Sit where you stand / hand on your heart / hand on your man” is gradually engulfed in a cloud of treble-tickling distortion.

TRACKLIST:

01. Her Fantasy
02. Earthforms
03. Headcage
04. Fighting Is Futile
05. Up & Out
06. Overtime
07. Get The Rhyme Right
08. Ahead of Myself
09. Do The Right Thing
10. Shake Me
11. Temptation

http://ghostly.com/releases/beams |  http://ghostly.com/artists/matthew-dear | http://matthewdear.com/

Download:Shigeto -Huron River Drive

Download:Shigeto -Huron River Drive

The 2nd single of my next album “Lineage”.
Release date: January 31st 2012 Ghostly International
Written and Produced by Zachary Shigeto Saginaw
Release info: http://ghostly.com/releases/lineage-ep

Mux Mool -Planet High School on Ghostly International

Despite being accused as anti-human, repetitive, soulless, whatever, electronic music attracts the more devoted of idealists—the vinyl purist, the underground hero, the anonymous producer, etc. For Mux Mool, known to the government as Brian Lindgren, all his music connects to a certain outlook on life—basically, that the pre-established trajectory for adult life is being completely reimagined. He explains the concept behind his new album, Planet High School, this way: “Today, young Americans have very little to look forward to except endless war, endless debt, no Social Security, and [the fact that] none of us can live without the constant fear of poverty. We don’t need to have big houses and cars and a nest egg to get along. There’s nothing that says you can’t rent an apartment your whole life and not be happy.”

So, how does this economic ambivalence translate to an album of what is best (if not entirely) described as fluid, subsuming instrumental hip-hop? Hard to say. Planet High School certainly sounds different than SKULLTASTE, Mux Mool’s Ghostly debut from 2010. It’s funkier, more confident, and more comfortable. It sounds less like someone trying to prove a point by arguing and more like someone trying to prove a point by just being who they are. It’s leading by example, sonically speaking.

Songs like the delirious jazz rumble of “The Butterfly Technique” and “Live At 7-11”—which, by the way, resembles golden-era G-funk as filtered through an abused video game console and old breakbeat records—see Mux Mool enjoying the perch from which he sits. He knows what he’s good at, and the confidence shows. And there’s still some of that familiar, manic, video game-esque stutter in the album’s second half, specifically on synapse-tingling beat binges like “Cash 4 Gold” and “Get Yer Alphabets (Guns).” Mux Mool’s new view on life might be one of unassuming simplicity, but he still appreciates messing with your brain.

Artist:  Mux Mool
Title:  Planet High School
Label:  Ghostly International
Release: 07.02.2012
Tracklist
01 Brothers
02 Live at 7-11
03 Palace Chalice
04 I Ruin Everything
05 The Butterfly Technique
06 Hand On the Scantron
07 Raw Gore
08 Cash 4 Gold
09 Get Yer Alphabets (Guns)
10 Baba

Tycho -Dive

While his formative years were spent listening to everything from Yes to Photek, Scott Hansen didn’t get his hands on an actual guitar or drum machine until he left his native Sacramento for San Francisco in 1995. “Encountering this whole new world at 20 years old was a profound experience,” says Hansen, better known by his musical pseudonym Tycho and as the graphic artist ISO50. “At the time, I was just learning the processes of design and music; both felt very similar, and have flowed back and forth for me ever since.”

As seamless as his two creative outlets have been, nearly a decade passed before the release of Hansen’s first proper Tycho LP, Sunrise Projector (later expanded and reissued under the title Past Is Prologue). And while three striking singles have emerged since then, the sum of all those sepia-toned parts is nowhere near the double-exposed soundscapes of Dive. The product of a prolonged break from IS050’s design work and blog, it pays tribute to Tycho’s prismatic past (the dense, guitar-guided turning points of “Daydream” and “Adrift”) but spends most of its time pointing to the project’s not-so-distant future.

That can mean any number of things, really, from the halcyon hooks and hopeful horizons of “A Walk” to the expansive, wildly expressive tone poetry of the title track, an eight-minute epic that unfolds like a compressed concept album. Or at the very least, a restless vision of prog-rock—one that’s been coated in neon colors and filtered through a thick piece of blotter paper. And then there’s “Elegy,” a spare curtain closer that pairs a vulnerable crescendo with a fitting bridge to future works.

And with that, Dive establishes its position as the most diverse musical statement of Hansen’s multi-medium career; the point where his skills as a performer finally catch up with his vaporized vision of a world that doesn’t belong to any particular time or place.

“Nostalgia is a common thread in my work,” says Hansen, “but this album wasn’t driven by that idea. I see these songs as artifacts from a future which might have more in common with our past than our present.”
Artist: Tycho
Title: Dive
Release Date: 15-Nov-2011
Record Label: Ghostly International

Tracklist
A Walk
Hours
Daydream
Dive
Costal Break
Ascension
Melanie
Adrift
Epigram
Elegy

Com Truise-Galactic Melt out July 5 on GI+free download

When talking about the music of Com Truise (one of the many pseudonyms of New Jersey designer/musician Seth Haley), the nostalgia bit inevitably comes up, so let’s get that out of the way. Yes, his songs tap classic sci-fi and proto-electro in a way that is distinctly early eighties in scope. But they’re also remarkably weird—stutter-step proggy and intoxicatingly psychedelic, like those classic touchstones got drunk on lava lamp juice inside a pinball machine. After his well-received Cyanide Sisters EP, a grip of remixes for artists like Twin Shadow, Neon Indian, and, uh, Daft Punk, and a few floating MP3s, Truise’s first LP, Galactic Melt, will finally enter brainspaces this summer.

And what an appropriate title it bears. For a brief moment, opener “Terminal” subsumes you in warm, starry-eyed synth arpeggios, and then down the rabbit hole you go—from the keyed up, skyscraping machine love of “VHS Sex” and “Cathode Girls” to opuses like “Air Cal” and “Ether Drift” that sound like Doogie Howser’s idea of the perfect prom song—mathy, forlorn, funky, and mighty in technical ambition. That they’re all noticeably cinematic is, of course, by design—Haley envisioned Galactic Melt as a “sort of film score…from the mind,” chronicling the lift and death of Com Truise, the world’s first synthetic/robotic astronaut, from his creation and life on earth to his subsequent mission to a newly discovered galaxy called “Wave 1.” Eventually, Truise becomes one with his newfound cosmos, like Pinocchio becoming a real boy, but in the nether regions of imaginary space.

Haley says knowing when and how to complete such an opus was the hardest part of making the record, nevermind all the carefully synth programmed patches on his Sequential Circuits Split-8 or the three years of real life that transpired during its genesis. It’s a world unto itself, a sci-fi bildungsroman of sorts, and most importantly, an awesome escape from the corporeal.

download Com Truise – Polyhurt

release date:
July 5, 2011

Tracklisting
 1 Terminal 
 2 VHS Sex 
 3 Cathode Girls 
 4 Air Cal 
 5 Flightwave 
 6 Hyperlips 
 7 Brokendate 
 8 Glawio 
 9 Ether Drift 
 10 Future World 
 11 Galactic Melt [Vinyl Exclusive]

http://ghostly.com

Download:Shigeto -XLR8R Podcast 195

 

Download:Shigeto XLR8R Podcast 195

01 A Setting Sun “33 (JDSY Remix)” (Moodgadget)
02 Deru “Between You and Me” (Hymen)
03 Shigeto and Devonwho “Cirlces” (All City)
04 Simple “Barely Together”
05 Zack Christ “Fox Prawn” (Tall Prawn)
06 Mount Kimbie “Would Know” (Hotflush)
07 Pajaro Sunrise “Old Goodbyes (Charles Trees Remix)” (Lovemonk)
08 Shlohmo “Forgot Where I Was” (Friends of Friends)
09 Burial “Broken Home” (Hyperdub)
10 King Midas Sound “Lost (Flying Lotus Remix)” (Hyperdub)
11 Devonwho “Holup (Hi Res’ Refix)” (Klipmode)
12 Take “Neon Beams (Dibiase Remix)” (Alpha Pup)
13 Dabrye “With a Professional” (Ghostly International)
14 3LLL “Melt”
15 Shigeto “Children at Midnight (Saturn Never Sleeps Remix)”