COLOURED BALLS - 'HEAVY METAL KID'

Formats

• JAW043 - 7"

Details

This is our 4th COLOURED BALLS release! Collect 'em all! This is a first time ever unique pairing of “Heavy Metal Kid” b/w “Around And Around” (previously unreleased on vinyl). Once again, EMI Australia completely dropped the ball when they didn’t issue the scorching “Heavy Metal Kid” as a teaser single for the brilliant album of the same name, released in October ‘74. By that time, EMI was seemingly losing interest in the group since The ‘Balls weren’t churning out pop hits. They were also being demonized by the conservative press for violence, both real and imagined, at their gigs. “Around And Around” dates from their final recording session from early ‘75 and has never been released on vinyl before. This is, hands down, Coloured Balls’ most soulful track. It’s heavily influenced by the Muscle Shoals sound. If you can imagine - think Etta James “I’d Rather Go Blind” era with a wah-wah and even a talk box for added effect given the Coloured Balls treatment. Coloured Balls are one of those groups that called it a day much too early and left us all wanting more. It’s a privilege to bring this to you. This is sourced directly from the master tapes and has never sounded better. We swear you can hear some extra guitar bits on "Heavy Metal Kid" that have never been audible before! Cover is printed with a special metallic silver ink, these mock-ups don't do it proper justice! 

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EZRA FEINBERG - 'RECUMBENT SPEECH'

Formats

• RSR01 - LP

• RSR01CD - CD

Details

Recumbent Speech, Ezra Feinberg’s second album, opens with a lament. Named for the Robert Frost poem, “Acquainted with the Night” was written during one of the many devastating spectacles of injustice under our current regime. Repeating flutes and synths beam out of a low-end darkness, reflecting a collective sense of loss and alienation. Rising slowly, thickening with guitars and strings, “Acquainted with the Night” lifts off, and so too does the album from there. The second track, “Letter to my Mind,'' features the dynamic interplay of Feinberg's guitar with the loose and playful drumming of Tortoise's John McEntire, both pushing and pulling atop a looping bass figure. "Palms Up" begins with a lockstep pulse recalling early Terry Riley before jumping into an Ashra-like jam with Afrobeat accents. Side B opens with "Ovation," a tryptic with McEntire on drums which sets a wide lens onto a sweeping landscape, with soaring flutes, wordless vocals, and a hypnotic bassline played on a humming fretless that recalls classic ECM jazz-fusion. The piece plunges into an ambient, interior space before reemerging with a guitar solo fried through an old Space Echo effects processor, conjuring lidded Pompeii-era Pink Floyd. The album's title-track finale, "Recumbent Speech," features the magical pedal steel of Chuck Johnson. Unwinding atop a Balearic analog synth pattern, Feinberg stretches textures of Fender Rhodes and acoustic guitar around Johnson’s lyrical steel, with nods to Japanese ambient legend Hiroshi Yoshimura, as well as Cluster & Eno. Recumbent Speech refers to the possibilities, pleasures, fears, and fantasies that occur the moment the noise dies down, when we are recumbent, in repose but still awake, still speaking, and still aware of ourselves as part of the maddening world. Ezra Feinberg is a guitarist, composer, and psychoanalyst living in Jackson Heights, NY. Feinberg was the founding member of the San Francisco psychedelic rock collective Citay, releasing albums on Important Records and Dead Oceans throughout the 2000s. After relocating to NYC, he issued his first solo record, Pentimento and Others, on his imprint Related States and on cassette on Stimulus Progression in 2018. The release, his first since Citay folded in 2012, earned praise from numerous music outlets including Paste Magazine, The Wire, Stereogum, Vice, and Aquarium Drunkard. In recent years, Feinberg has performed and toured near and far with Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, Steve Gunn, Alexander Turnquist, Cruel Diagonals, Daniel Carter, Jonas Reinhardt, Christopher Tignor, Kath Bloom, Robbie Lee, High Aura’d, Glasser, Ava Mendoza, Buck Curran, Real Estate, and many others, and has ongoing studio collaborations with Jefre Cantu-Ledesma and Arp, contributing both guitar and songwriting to the last Arp album Zebra.

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WILLIAM CASHION - 'POSTCARD MUSIC'

Formats

• FC054 - LP

  767870662010

Details

Short Bio: William Cashion's debut solo album Postcard Music is a collection of sound experiments influenced by meditation, traveling, and the ocean. In crafting his first solo record, Cashion experimented in the studio, driven by a potentially infinite riddle: “what is the sound of a song that has no beginning and no end?” - a question which explores music’s unique ability to distort our sense of the passage of time—or even take us outside it. The resulting album builds upon the most intriguing results of months of exploratory writing sessions. About the Album: Future Islands bassist William Cashion collects postcards. Years in one of the country’s hardest-touring bands often find him rushing from destination to destination without time to take a deep breath, let alone be present in each locale’s sights and sounds. But bringing home postcards helps coalesce ephemeral moments into souvenirs he can return to and access again. In crafting his first solo record, Cashion experimented in the studio, driven by a potentially infinite riddle: “what is the sound of a song that has no beginning and no end?” Exploring music’s unique ability to distort our sense of the passage of time—or even take us outside it—Cashion welcomed elements of repetition and chance into his process. The sessions were also highly informed by meditation, a new regular practice Cashion introduced to his daily routine during this period. The resulting album builds upon the most intriguing results of months of exploratory writing sessions. Acclaimed UK designer Chris Bigg helped visualize the world of Postcard Music, and Cashion’s wife, visual artist Elena Johnston contributed a painting to the album's inner sleeve. Cashion and Johnston have previously worked together on a series of collaborative paintings and brightly colored, curved neon light sculptures. During downtime between projects, he retreats to the beaches of North Carolina near where Future Islands formed. The eleven songs here were recorded in sessions in the Outer Banks, the Eastern Shore of Maryland, and Cashion’s current hometown Baltimore. Postcard Music is Cashion’s first solo album, and will be released in July, 2020

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Lightning Bug
Whalehead
Triple Ocean
Twin
Pi?a Rosa
Still Pond Creek
Vizcaya
Abelone
Cana Cassette
South Atlantic
Fulgurite

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Future Islands bassist William Cashion?s debut solo album

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JACUZZI BOYS - 'THE PITS'

Formats

• TMR668 - 7"

Details

Slaying the scene and making it look easy, Jacuzzi Boys are back at it with a new garage glam-punker 7”. You’ve caught them touring the world, playing shows and festivals far and wide, and steadily winning hearts and earning their place as fixtures of the American garage rock scene. These songs? They’re tight. They’re balanced. They’re right on the money. The A-side “The Pits” is a phenomenally fuzzed glittery rocker complete with breathy Bolanesque bits, swooping bass and energetic percussion. Meanwhile, “Offended” is a blistering 1-minute garage rock whirlwind for anyone who has dipped their toes into the rank cesspool of online comments sections.

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CHRISTIAN LOFFLER & STEFFEN KIRCHHOFF - 'BALTIC SEA'

Formats

• KI006 - 12"

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The second part of the Ki Split Series is a feature of our homegrown talents Christian Löffler and Steffen Kirchhoff. The two friends are part of the Ki family since the beginning (Löffler was responsible for the first release on Ki and Kirchhoff for the third). Both artist have a close connection in sound aesthetics and atmosphere, since they still inspire each other every day. „The first people to listen to my unfinished tracks are my girlfriend, family and Christian Löffler“ says Steffen Kirchhoff about his process of making music. They are also both artists throughout: Christian manages to have different art projects running from music to painting and Steffen is also a very talented photographer. But what impressed the international audience lately were their live-sets, which they already performed all over germany and europe. In this release everything comes together what these two exceptional talents learned on their journey so far. A remarkable aspect is the use of samples, which both seem to have discovered as a new passion in their process of making music. On the Ki Split Series 2/3 you can listen to Christian Löffler and Steffen Kirchhoff experimenting with beautiful samples and underlining the whole piece with their unique sound structure. Both in their respective very own romantic approach to deep, melancholic techno music. The cover artwork and photography comes from Christian Löffler.

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CHRISTIAN LOFFLER - 'ASPEN'

Formats

• KI008 - 12"

Details

„Aspen“ is the name of Christian Loeffler’s Single before his debut album on Ki called „A Forest“. The name of the single is not to be misunderstood as a dedication to the ski resort in Colorado. It’s rather a dedication to Christian Loeffler’s home region in the north of Germany. Loeffler walked out into the forests near Darss, to take field recordings of the trees that commonly grow in that area, which are called „Aspen“. The landscape near Darss is characterized by signs of storm and rough sea climate, but is also considered as a popular health resort in Germany. The tracks on „Aspen“ create this contrary atmosphere: Noise and silence, destruction and peacefulness, electronic sounds and traditional instruments unite in harmony. The Cover Artwork for „Aspen“ was taken by Christian Loeffler himself in the Forests of Darss.

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CHRISTIAN LOFFLER - 'MARE (REWORKS)'

Formats

• KILP012 - 2xLPs

  4050486998915

Details

What can music do that everything else can't? Something is different and better because it is direct and not interrupted by anything in this profession. Music, so strangely authentic, can save whole youngsters or sweep off the table like a checkered tablecloth full of junk. Everything blurs, gets into each other, holds the essences ready and immediately into the perceptual, into what absorbs, the senses, the recording trumpets, this torn ear, which can be nothing more than full of what comes there. And something comes, uninterrupted sound, current, current, entry into the tunnel, into the new (new !, the only meaningful band name), into the unknown and unprecedented. Everything is new and unknown and absolutely never existed and heard - every second, forever. That everything should have been there before is nothing more than an annoying misunderstanding, you can almost believe it yourself, the power word, elongated in all directions, hollow and unlikely, by people who could all be my father. The buzzing of flies over the bio bin: avant-garde soundtrack. The rustling of blood in the ear: the beginning of every sound art. Only the greatest possible silence, the space in which things sound and can reverberate, gives the whole that kind of pupation, transformation quality that iridescent us. And that goes directly against dying, against zero. That something is, and not nothing, is the most beautiful positivism that there is. Everything swings permanently, is continuously positive instead of zero. And strictly speaking, it also flickers when there is silence in the plus range. Because there is no silence, whatever that is, only whirring, whirring, bubbling, noise, hum, crackling (etc.) on a more or less (in) audible frequency. We know little of the sounds that the moon or other lumps of space may cause, of dolphins and whales, whose singing is like a call from rooms, of which it remains unclear whether they scare or comfort us deeply. We now also know, for example, that we have Christian Löffler's music. Since his debut album in 2012, word has gotten around that this is not just about hip electronica, but something that deals with us, our soul states. Self-immersion, this music seems to be throwing to us, as self-protection, as a bulwark against a world in which elections are won by half-madness, capital flies through the area like a sickle-stricken sickle, to destroy existences en masse and the Middle Ages crawling freely from all holes and marching forward again. This horribly transparent, because completely open longing for some form of existence that does not exist, for something that could be the opposite of our inadequacy, this imperfection that produces little more than shit. How desperate does our brain have to be that it constantly wants to be better than it can? This tremendous simplification continues, thinking only in headlines, fuzzy terms everywhere, because the simple answers to the burning questions are quite okay in the long run, at least so okay that it doesn't hurt enough. The present as a great anonymous placeholder for a much wider sense of displeasure. Hence the shooting fantasy shit everywhere, the stupidest glorification of the Middle Ages, Sunday evening depressive TV, the leisurely drift into the self-chosen Ikea world, into the final immaturity. If they would at least shut up, but no, they have to go on missions, start talking, and kick things off, the consequences of which are still completely unpredictable. But I want to shut up myself and concentrate on what is absolutely necessary. In a world like this, you may only be able to travel inside. There you will find everything you need, at least in theory. What do you need? This music knows. Everything flimsy of one's own existence, that is, what one can dream of under the hand in a fraction of a second immediately falls apart. Something is missing, something is wrong, you know that, that is the basic feeling with which you enter the street anyway. Actually everything is even more difficult to bear with this music because it offers a hint that everything could be completely different. And in a way that just can't be, especially not in the long run, especially not with us, you or me. So this music shines as a utopia through the gaps, the branches of the trees. Or, on the other hand, as a costume image of failure, the glowing, constant restlessness endowed with little hope. Let's take a track like "Neo" from the new album "Mare" - something pulls together here like a cat that has curled up to sleep. Or “Youth”, which blatantly tells of the thousands of past summers, in which something like childhood took place and is gone forever, only to then rely on an old bass sequence in “Lid” and breathed one, to murmur muttered vocals, who notices that he cannot really choose between lamenting and starting anew and prefers to break out of the whole track in beauty, beauty whose sad glow retreats again and again in the course of the album, as in "Athlete" and "Vind" to spend the winter somewhere other than in the track itself. Here there is a kind of interruption in the knowledge that all knowledge is only knowledge of death. 

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Reworks: Max Cooper, Aparde, Zimmer..

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CHRISTIAN LOFFLER - 'ALL COMES / NOTES'

Formats

• KI011 - 7"

Details

Before his upcoming EP Christian Löffler returns with this seven inch sized record. Just like its unusual format this release features two unique pieces of music and an artwork created by Löffler himself. As well as on his debut album „A Forest“, he teamed up once more with Danish vocalist Gry Bagøien. The result is an outstandingly beautiful house track born by her fairylike singing and gloomy chord stabs. A more than worthy follow-up of their first collaboration „Feelharmonia“. The other song on this Vinyl is a dark interpretation of Löffler’s work. As a massive fan of Ki Record’s unicum Monokle he was very happy to have him as a remixer of one of his yet unreleased tracks „Notes“. With his very own aesthetics he gives it a sinister touch. Monokle might be the most interesting remixer these days. The original track “Notes” will appear on the upcoming Christian Löffler EP.

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