at the beginning of 2014, liverpool’s outfit found themselves scattered across two countries and three cities, separated by life and love from each other and from those closest to them.
slowness, the band’s second full length lp due june 15 on new label home memphis industries, is the sound of its five members snatching intensive weeks to plant themselves in one place, with the tensions of touring, moving, and transatlantic relationships still weighing heavy in mind, to create an album with bold presence.
slowness paints a portrait of distance using haunting piano, piercing synthesizers and guitars, all underpinned by outfit’s trademark rhythm section. it dwells on physical distance between lovers, the emotional distance when we return, and the ways in which we imagine each other thousands of miles apart.
over the stuttering synths of opener “new air”, the duelling lyrics of vocalist andrew pm hunt and keyboardist thomas gorton are rooted in optimism and beckon an unseen presence to join them in a new life, whilst closer ‘swam out’ sees the band go from beaten and worn down to joyfully triumphant over the course of a song decorated with decaying skype noises and 1am phone calls. the album’s contrasting textures and timbres recall late period talk talk and other more expansive new wave outsiders, but there is a deep sense of modern life to slowness.
following up their critically acclaimed debut “performance”, outfit toured with everything everything, played the 6 music festival, festival no. 6, end of the road and pitchfork paris as well as several sold out london headline dates showing that the band could thrive as much in the live arena as they could in their home studio space- a brutalist block of flats in liverpool.
slowness is outfit’s most cohesive work to date, a marked progression both sonically and emotionally, capturing the harrowing shock of being in love and apart, and the stillness of staring into screens. ultimately, though, slowness sounds like a band coming to terms with themselves as artists and people to create an album that celebrates life’s obstacles: a record made between new york, london and liverpool — a piece of work compelled by distance.

Son Lux has gone from the solo project of Ryan Lott to a trio, featuring Ian Chang on drums and Rafiq Bhatia on guitar. They have announced their forthcoming LP Bones, the follow-up to 2013’s Lanterns and last year’s Alternate Worlds EP, and it’s due out June 23 via Glassnote.
In addition to announcing the record and personnel changes, Son Lux have premiered the first single “Change is Everything” via NPR. The track expands on the immediacy of Lanterns and seems to be geared to a larger audience, masterfully honing huge melodies to go along with the, at times, dark and propulsive pulse of Son Lux’s music.

When the biggest stars in our universe begin to burn up and collapse they release neon gas. When electricity is passed through neon gas it glows. When it’s captured within glass we can use it to make coloured light. When that glass is shaped into the outline of a naked girl it can be hung outside a strip club. In this meeting of the celestial and the profane, the epic and the particular, lies Jaga’s new album Starfire.
In December 2012, Jaga’s main songwriter, Lars Horntveth, left Norway and moved to Los Angeles. There, on the other side of the world, inspired by the space around him, the size of the sky above him, the endless light flashing past as he drove round the city at night, he began composing the new suite of works which would become Starfire. Periodically he was joined by other members of the 8-piece band who would lay down their contributions in his apartment/studio before returning home to Norway. When the basics of the album were in place, he went back to Oslo to finish the record in the professional studios that the band had built and furnished over the years.
The result is a revelation — in itself no mean feat for a band with a twenty year history. After the more heavily scored work of One Armed Bandit and Live with the Britten Sinfonia, Starfire moves to a more experimental studio-led approach - "The idea was that we thought about the songs as both the original song and a remix in one" - morphing each song into a variety of sonic directions. With an increase in the use of electronics and the guitar work of Marcus Forsgren given new prominence, it’s probably the least straightforwardly “jazz” of their records. Instead, all the elements which have made them such an important band—the way their technical chops combine with the kind of mutual sympathy which comes from growing up together—are here melded into an utterly unique sound on what could turn out to be the group’s crowning achievement.
Centering around the Horntveth siblings (Lars, Martin and Line) the eight piece band Jaga formed in 1994, when Lars was still only fourteen. In their two decades of existence they've released five studio albums, one live album, five EPs (CD and vinyl), one live DVD and now a box set. Five of those eight original members are still in the group and all this has contributed to the group’s deep mutual understanding. Add in a guest like Leon Dewan, who plays his own Swarmatron on "Shinkansen" and Lars’ increasing use of a Pocket Piano synth as a tool for composition and you get the basis of a more hard-edged, electronic sound, perfectly melded with live musicianship.
Starfire is a beautiful, visceral, utterly exhilarating piece of work that keeps spiralling up and away, structurally complex, musically rigorous, but without ever losing touch with a certain earthy sensuality and human sympathy. It could just be Jaga's masterpiece.

Monterey is The Milk Carton Kids’ third album and the follow-up to their 2013 breakthrough The Ash & Clay. The two years since have been significant ones for the band, with recognition including a GRAMMY® nomination for Best Folk Album and winning Group of the Year at the 2014 Americana Music Awards. Their standout performances and interviews in the Coen Brothers’ and T Bone Burnett’s concert documentary “Another Day/Another Time” brought the duo its widest audience yet, and their 55-city North American tour last Spring sold out months in advance.
This time around, Kenneth Pattengale and Joey Ryan wrote and recorded Monterey not in studios but on stages - those concert halls, churches, and theaters across North America that have always coaxed the band’s most uninhibited expressions. Their methodology in making Monterey allowed The Milk Carton Kids, finally, to perform for the record with the same fearlessness and spontaneity usually only achieved in live concert. As writers, the two have merged so singularly that friends and family can no longer tell who has written which song. As singers on Monterey, their acclaimed harmonies move farther apart, so that the quirks and kinks of two individual identities emerge, all the while remaining lush and soaring, their beauty even more apparent for the showing of their scars.
Thematically, Monterey takes us on a road trip across a dream - perhaps a nightmare - through an America of blood and fire that is at once recognizably the land of our forefathers, and the product of our own making. While some of the questions asked on Monterey are political, increasingly the songs are purely personal, the narrator stopped along the road wondering aloud how he got there as in the lilting title track where the question becomes, “Monterey, how can I say I’ll always stay then slip away?”
This may be the central question of Monterey, this album forged literally and metaphorically “on the road”, which seems to ask how we can resolve the contradiction between the lightness of our footprint as we pass through, and the weight of those memories gathering behind us in the rearview mirror. Monterey asks these questions with grace, beauty and a sly humor.

1000 Palms marks a return to Surfer Blood's DIY ethos. Abandoning the big time studio, the band decided to head back home to self-record and self-produce their third full-length album. Free of major-label-influence, Surfer Blood have delivered a uniquely compelling album, unlike anything in their catalog.
The story of 1000 Palms began on January 1st 2014, after playing a New Year’s show in Portland, OR, the band decided to stick around for the rest of the month, renting a practice space and sorting through a backlog of ideas. By February, as their lease ran out, Surfer Blood had recorded demos for most of the tracks that now feature on their third LP.
After a frustrating time at previous home Warner Brothers, the quartet were beyond ready to return to a more DIY recording process, completely void of the middlemen scrutinizing every bar of previous LP Pythons. With the band self-recording it was in the glamorous setting of an attic studio above a doctor’s office where drums were committed to tape. Frontman John Paul Pitts states “fortunately none of us are strangers to DIY recording, so it was a challenge well-suited to our band”.
The making of 1000 Palms also owes a lot to the kindness of friends and family, with the remaining instrument sessions taking place at the home of drummer Tyler Schwartz’s parents while they were on vacation. Following a few days of very little sleep and after the band pooled resources and called in favors, the band had managed to craft everything you now hear on the upcoming record.

The lastest full-length effort from LA-based
synth mastermind JOHN TEJADA
· An unabashedly dreamy collection of 11 expertly crafted cuts that rank among the artist's best work to date
Following his much-acclaimed full-length "The Predicting Machine" (KOMPAKT 267 CD 102) and a slew of pop-infused 12" singles - "We Can Pretend" (KOMPAKT 286) and "Somewhere" (KOMPAKT 264) -, LA-based synth mastermind JOHN TEJADA returns with new album SIGNS UNDER TEST: comprised of all-new material, this latest effort sees the studio wizard digging deeper into his modules, unearthing particularly dreamy tracks that rank among John's most accomplished work to date.
From the get-go, SIGNS UNDER TEST presents itself as a whole new ball of wax, reaching even further into the depths of JOHN TEJADA's hot-wired synth machinery, while cranking up the already stunning levels of musicality on display in his oeuvre. Opener TWO 0 ONE serves as a prime example for the sonic aplomb in place, thanks to its beautifully rendered melodies and finely tuned textures – a perfect storm made of cosy melancholy and celestial bliss. This expertly wrought piece serves as a particularly strong entry point for the album, setting the bar high for its successors.
An unabashedly brilliant listen, the album continues its thrilling journey with existential bleepfest Y 0 WHY and the bass-heavy BEACHT, followed by the intricately arpeggiated R.U.R. and brooding electronica vignette VAALBARA. The second part is ringed in by the undulating CRYPTOCHROME - another proof for JOHN TEJADA's uncanny ability to craft tracks that operate as distinguished bouncers as well as introspective meditations. The deliberate vivacity of connecting cuts RUBRIC and PENUMBRA only confirms the growing suspicion that this might be a timeless masterpiece we're dealing with.
As gorgeous as it sounds, texture isn't the only star here: a surprisingly diverse set of rhythm patterns suffuses the mesmerizing synth licks - take for example the multilayered ENDORPHINS effortlessly switching between straight techno stylings and vintage breakbeat ornaments. Meanwhile, electronic landscape painting MEADOW purrs away on its road to redemption, priming the listener for closing cut HEAVE IN SIGHT, an atmospherically rich composition that marries abstract storytelling with a flurry of reversed synth sounds.
"There's a bit more dreamy tape wobble going on throughout", says the producer about his latest effort, "as I've gone quite analog tape with my delays and patches - on the verge of actually being broken, which gives them a nice character." It also might explain the air of
intimacy surrounding the album - a quite personal listening experience taking the listener up close with its details and idiosyncracies, "maybe even more than before, as I've tried to cut out distractions and really focus on the production."
The result is a record that is not meant to be trendy, even though it's a product of analog hardware connoisseurship: "Everything is built from the ground up using hardware synths - mostly analog, but that's a bit annoying to say nowadays. It's not a record that fits in with any current stuff, but something that hopefully holds up as it ages. Something that hopefully reveals more on repeated listens." In our humble opinion, this mission has been more than accomplished with SIGNS UNDER TEST.

II is the 2nd full-length from METZ.
To begin:
“I look at it like this,” METZ frontman Alex Edkins says. “You start a band, just as something to do, because music’s what makes you tick, the thing you dream about and think about and that’s it. You never think that you’ll be able to do it all the time. But then, for some inexplicable reason, people actually listen and latch on and the band begins to take on new meaning. All of a sudden there are expectations and pressure, real or imagined, to change who you are. It was important to us, when making this record, not to give in to that pressure.”
What happens when a seemingly irresistible force meets an immovable object is a serviceable metaphor for the music METZ creates, both live and on record. Now behold II, the concussive new full-length from what is arguably North America’s finest touring rock band. Written and recorded in 2014, after two years of constant touring behind their rightly adored self-titled debut, II is METZ at their most true to form—as pure an expression of what they do as can currently be committed to tape. The guitars are titanic, the drums ill-tempered, the vocals chilling, and the volume worrisome. Though they incorporated new instruments, (baritone guitar, tape loops, piano, synth, found sounds) and stretched out the arrangements, they still managed to “stay true to what made us tick in the first place: that immediacy,” Edkins calls it. “If it punches you in the gut.”
And does it ever. From the exhilarating grind of “Spit You Out” to the blunt-force thrills of “Landfill,” herein reside 10 songs as uncompromising in their ferocity and abrasiveness as any collection this record label has had the pleasure of releasing to date. To accomplish such a sound, the band forced itself to stay home and write for the better part of six months. Tracking was done in three different studios, in Toronto and elsewhere in Ontario, including the same barn where much of METZ had been painstakingly assembled. While said predecessor was often “clean and clinical,” II is what Edkins describes as a “much heavier, darker, and sloppier” affair, with many of its roughest edges and ugliest tones kept intact. Its lyrical matter, Edkins notes, stems from a year of loss and doubt, of contemplating our relationships with death and the planet. “I consider myself a pretty massive pessimist, but a pessimist who knows how lucky he is,” he says. “A lot of things in everyday life drive me crazy: how we relate to each other; how politics, media, technology, money and medication influence our lives. This band, in a lot of ways, is an outlet.”
What we’re left with is the sound of an already monstrous band improving in both subtle and terrifying ways.“We take our noise and our feedback very seriously,” Edkins says. “The more we do this, the more we realize there’s no such thing as right or wrong in music. It comes down to feel. And if it feels good, it works. This time we sorta said, ‘This is who we are. We are not going to clean up our sound, we are not going to hire a big producer, we are not going to try to write a radio song. We are going to be honest and leave the warts for all to see. We are really happy with how it turned out.”
As are we.

Moodmusic affiliate Dave DK is no stranger to Kompakt, having featured on several of their compilations over the years and done the odd remix. Their relationship is formalised here with the arrival of Val Maira, the Berlin producer's third album and a concerted attempt to go beyond the impressive production skills previously shown by Dave DK to offer "deeply personal expressiveness and emotional impact". Listening through the eleven tracks on this double LP edition, you'd have to say it's a success; Val Maira is rife with the kind of emotive electronics you expect from a Kompakt LP and is perfectly sequenced to run through a gamut of moods. A fine album from DDK.