High Plains - Cinderland - VINYL LP

Cross Record's new album, Crush Me, is steeped in the pressures and wonders of existence-a profound statement, especially coming from artist and death doula Emily Cross. A two-and-a-half-year gestation period offered challenges, disappointments, and joys reflected in the cramped space of the album, which explores how we handle the weights we carry. Emily Cross had held hundreds of Living Funerals and was as many episodes deep into her podcast, What I'm Looking At. She was five years into serving clients as a death doula and fresh off a tour with Loma, her band with Jonathan Meiburg (Shearwater) and Dan Duszynski, when she began work on her fourth album. After moving from Austin, TX to Dorset, UK, she established the Steady Waves Center for Contemplation (named after a track from her second record, Wabi-Sabi), where she hosted Living Funerals, met clients, scheduled mindful tea sessions, and showcased experimental music nights. All the while, she was scribbling down song ideas. Cross's Tascam four-track demos finally reached readiness, and she sent them to an interested major independent tag. She was encouraged to push her imagination to the limits of what a record could be. So, unlike her usual process of recording as inexpensively as possible, she prepared a two-week recording session in Germany with a group of skilled musicians from around the world. True to her previous work, Cross left plenty of room in her demos for experimentation, collaboration, chance, improvisation, and complete obliteration, then resurrection when necessary. Comfort and traditional structure were eschewed in favor of unaccountable magic, prayers whispered into The Void. Cross is comfortable with the chaotic and unpredictable, a perspective demanded by her work and writing style. Album Tracks 1. 1. I Can Lie 2. 2. Rolling Backwards 3. 3. Charred Grass 4. 4. Right Thing By Me 5.

Norman Connors brings funk to soul in this classic double-album combo. Whether he's croonin', groovin' or both, these stellar and nautical adventures are must-owns! Album Tracks 1. We Both Need Each Other 2. Betcha By Golly Wow 3. Bubbles 4. You Are My Starship 5. Just Imagine 6. So Much Love 7. The Creator Has a Master Plan 8. Betcha By Golly Wow [7Inch Version] [Version] 9. We Both Need Each Other [7Inch Version] [Version] 10. Phoenix 11. Once Again 12. Treat Me Like the One You Love 13. East 6th Street 14. Guitar Talk 15. Let Me Be the One 16. Look Ahead 17. I'll Always Love You InchTInch

In his 13 years recording as How to Dress Well, LA-based musician Tom Krell has played with the concept of what we hear and how we communicate in order to create music that exists somewhere between celestial transcendence and an outsider approach to what pop music can be. In Krell's musical world, the weight of a sample comes from his history with it, the meaning of a lyric fragment is stretched and distorted, it's core skirting universal interpretation in favor of specificity. On new album InchI Am Toward YouInch, his first new music in nearly six years, Krell was in search of a return to the open-hearted, uncynical approach to music making that he adopted as a kid, and carried through the of his haunting breakthrough debut, 2010's Love Remains, when he was making music in relative anonymity with little external pressure. He sifted through hundreds of snippets he'd recorded in the preceding decade, finding inexplicable samples and snatches of audio that began to cohere into an album that stripped back the density of previous albums to create some of his noisiest, most free, and most poetic music to date. Album Tracks 1. New Confusion 2. Contingency/Necessity (Modality of Fate) 3. Crypt Sustain 4. No Light 5. Nothingprayer 6. On It and Around It 7. Song in the Middle 8. Gas Station Against Blackened Hillside 9. A Faint Glow Through a Window of Thin Bone (That's How My Fate Is Shown) 10. The Only True Joy on Earth 11. A Secret Within the Voice