Releases

Museum of Love is the musical project of Pat Mahoney (Founding member of LCD Soundsystem) and Dennis McNany (Jee Day).

The return of DFA Veterans Prinzhorn Dance School. Single LP features many fine songs, including "I Want You", "Your Fire Has Gone Out", and (my personal favorite) "Crisis Team", which you may listen to below. Includes an instant digital download.

Tracklisting:

1. Happy In Bits
2. Usurper
3. Seed, Crop, Harvest
4. I Want You
5. Your Fire Has Gone Out
6. Crisis Team
7. The Flora and the Fauna of Britain In Bloom
8. Turn Up the Light
9. Sing Orderly
10. Right Night Kay West
11. Shake the Jar

This is a pre-order. Records will ship the week of June 2.

Proper Monday Number is Suzi Horn (of Prinzhorn Dance School) and Christoph. Their Deep clean your house EP clocks in at 5 tracks, 15 minutes — no flab, no faff, no second guessing, many phrases that belong on the front of t-shirts.

Musically, it’s stuff you know, done in a way you sorely miss. The sounds of late 90s/early 2000s electro may be familiar again, but the delivery here is all heart and self-honesty pushed through cracked plugins and budget speakers.

Play it loud. Lose your bits. Hug a friend.

“No Cigar” is a track that didn’t make it onto 2023’s 5 Songs, which was, technically, five songs, so there wasn’t room. It’s a pokey, plonky bit of dance music from Shit Robot (aka Marcus Lambkin), made with Joe Goddard and Al Doyle at their RAE Studios in London.

It sounded… dubby. Like “what if Adrian Sherwood got his hands on this?” dubby. So we asked. And he said yes!

The b-side is classic Sherwood at the controls—a version that’s not fully exploded, but submerged, warped, a little demented. We’re honored and still hearing crazy new sounds every time we play it.

*

Written and produced by Marcus lambkin, Al Doyle, and Joe Goddard
An RAE production recorded at Relax And Enjoy (London)
Engineered by James Crump
Mixed by Korey Richey at DFA (NYC)
Mastered by Bob Weston at Chicago Mastering Service

The Weeks Island project began in 2018 when, itching for something during a break from his gig playing guitar for the Grammy-winning Cajun group Lost Bayou Ramblers, Jonny Campos ventured to his bandmate’s house and recorded a series of deep, amoebic, ambient pedal steel passages across two afternoons. It wasn’t all heavy, though: he paid that bandmate, Kirkland Middleton, in Cane’s chicken strips.

The tracks on Droste are named for bodies of water that no longer exist, their names wiped from maps thanks to the disintegrating shorelines of Southern Louisiana. That feeling of impermanence hangs over this record - the tracks don’t so much begin and end as slip in and out of your consciousness. It can be a serene passive listen or a deep one that marinates long after the runout.

Droste originally appeared in 2020 on a local label named Nouveau Electric Records. We heard about it through LCD’s Korey Richey, an erstwhile Lost Bayou member, and began a years-long process to cut the record to vinyl, a task made difficult by the sharp crests of harmonic distortion that dot the record. After more than a few tries and the addition of three brand new tracks, Bob Weston, as he does, sank a beautiful sounding cut, and then passed it to the gentle hands at Furnace Record Pressing in Alexandria, VA. (Always sweat the details.)

Please welcome back to the program Museum Of Love, the erstwhile duo of Pat Mahoney and Dennis McNany who have returned to the DFA fold with a perfect 7”, two songs like two sides of a coin.

"After Us" is a simple, buoyant pop song heavily tempered by warnings of a bleak future. The old "sugar with the medicine" approach. 

"Look Of Disgust" is its perfect foil. A notty, almost industrial sounding wind up that ends just like a slap in the face.

Both songs were mixed by Nick Millhiser and mastered by Bob Weston. Purple vinyl pressed at Third Man Pressing in Detroit, MI.

Two DFA classics, one great price.

The only way to get a 45RPM version of killing.

A. The Rapture - Killing

B. The Juan Maclean - Give Me Every Little Thing

1. Brinna ut (feat. Loopsel)
2. Etiopisk hallucination (feat. Julia Bjernelind)
3. Letar efter nya plågor
4. Köpa saker (feat. Clara Flygare)
5. Verkligheten och jag
6. Balladen om elpriset i Augusti 2022 (feat. Loopsel)
7. Coral bass strings (feat. Loopsel, Nathan Roche)
8. Dödsdisco (feat. Clara Flygare)
9. Ringer å ringer
10. Välkommen på intervju (feat. Nathan Roche)

In the discourse around new albums from singular, world-building artists, the phrase “a big step forward” can often be a blinking red warning sign. You know you’re about to be pulled somewhere new against your will. Inertia is a hell of a thing. It’s nice here. Surely, the party’s not over yet?

JJULIUS’ Vol. 3 album is a big step forward, or a step up, out of the murky basement of the preceding two volumes. There’s no time to acclimate. A spindly violin grabs you by the hand and pulls you into the pastoral bounce of “Brinna ut,” which, in spite of its meaning (“Burn out”), creates the kind of blind positivity and warm stomach feeling less cynical people might find in self-help seminars. For us, we have records like this. And, inertia be damned, Vol. 3 has charm like a balm.

JJULIUS records have always arrived like meteors from another planet, an impression hammered home by the fact that they’re titled like compendiums of artifacts. And while Vols. 1 and 2 carried that notable tinge of darkness, Vol. 3 has (almost!) cast that shadow, adding elements of disco (“Dödsdisco”) and dream-pop (“Etopisk hallucination”) to his forever favorites Arthur Russell, African Head Charge, and The Fall.

Some of that new car smell could be attributed to a change in process. Each song was written over beats played by Tor Sjödén of the wild-eyed Stockholm group Viagra Boys, beats that were themselves inspired by tracks from the likes of Patrick Cowley, CAN, Count Ossie, Black Devil Disco Club and others that Julius would send to him as inspiration.

Unless you're Mark E. Smith, fervor fades. Eventually we all crave a lie down in some nice grass, a few minutes to gaze at the sky and wonder if everything is actually all that bad. Vol. 3 gives you 35 of those respiting minutes. “No looking back, no misery, no talking trash, no enemies.”

Produced by JJULIUS with invaluable help from Petter Granberg


Mixed by Petter Granberg


Mastered and cut by Bob Weston


Graphic design by William Jokijärvi Andersson

Pressed at Furnace Record Pressing in Alexandria, VA

Both Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 LPs, together as one (bundled package).

Yellow jacket + Black vinyl edition. 

At long last, Factory Floor presents their highly anticipated self-titled debut album. A vivid snapshot of a progressive band smashing through yet another ceiling, it’s the first full-length statement from the group that earned a powerful reputation on the strength of the “Fall Back” and “Two Different Ways” singles for DFA—not to mention early releases for Optimo Music and Blast First Petite. Leading up to the release of Factory Floor, the band will play select European festival dates this summer.  

Produced and recorded by the group in their North London warehouse space on a vintage mixing desk originally used by Dave Stewart three decades ago to record all the Eurythmics’ early hits, Factory Floor is a visceral trip through the band’s repertoire. The record opens with “Turn It Up,” their most minimal track to date, mixed in astonishing detail by Timothy “Q” Wiles (VCMG, Afrika Bambaataa). “Here Again” is almost (but not quite) their pop song, replete with cascading arpeggios counterbalanced by bubbly synth melody lines and plaintive vocals. 

Factory Floor also contains the definitive version of “Two Different Ways,” followed by the muscular and sleek “Fall Back.” “How You Say” finds the band channelling New York’s dance underground—think ESG and Delta Five. “Work Out” is anything but; despite the desultory title, it is in fact sinister street-sound electro. The album closes out with “Breathe In,” a funkified acid disco classic. 

Perhaps the most unlikely aspect of Factory Floor’s rise to notoriety is their versatility. Even their most ardent of fans describe their sound as punishing, yet they are equally at home playing raves, alternative festivals, art galleries, cinemas, nightclubs and rock shows; on top of that they’re as likely to collaborate with members of Throbbing Gristle and New Order (not to mention Richard H. Kirk of Cabaret Voltaire, Simon Fisher Turner and Peter Gordon) as they are with contemporary artists such as Haroon Mirza and Hannah Sawtell.

Tracklisting:

1. Turn It Up
2. Here Again
3. One
4. Fall Back
5. Two
6. How You Say
7. Two Different Ways
8. Three
9. Work Out
10. Breathe In

DFA Records is proud to present We Got a Love, the sophomore full-length by Shit Robot a.k.a. Dublin native Marcus Lambkin. Recorded in Germany and New York, the nine-track album includes the killer recent singles, “Feels Real” and “We Got a Love.” 

Like Lambkin’s 2010 debut From the Cradle to the Rave, We Got a Love sports an array of guests that include DFA veterans Nancy Whang, Museum of Love and Luke Jenner (The Rapture), plus hip-house hero Lidell Townsell and Australian singer Holly Backler. The album’s distinctive artwork was created in collaboration with Irish graffiti artist Maser.

 Track List:

1. The Secret (Feat. Reggie Watts)
2. Dingbat (Feat. Museum Of Love)
3. Do That Dance (Feat. Nancy Whang)
4. Do It (Right) [Feat. Lidell Townsell]
5. Feels Real (Feat. Luke Jenner)
6. Space Race
7. Feels Like (Feat. Holly Backler)
8. We Got A Love (Feat. Reggie Watts)
9. Tempest

With his Familiar Five EP, London-based producer Marcus Marr has taken his darkest and most thrillingly outré turn yet. Recorded through the long dark nights in the splendid isolation of his Brixton studio, lead single “Familiar Five” is a tale of bizarre transformation that points up the fragile boundaries between dreams and reality. 

“Familiar Five” feels like an outsider anthem. “It’s about being a freak and accepting it – being happy to be a freak,” notes Marr. He narrates the song with his finest deadpan lip-curl, managing to make the lyrics sound suggestive, malevolent and wildly empowering all at once. “It was sounding quite sinister as I was making it, and I thought a voice would sound good on it,” recalls Marr. “I was reading Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Kafka’s Metamorphosis as well,” he remembers. Other diverse influences setting the track’s fabulously unnerving tone include Marr’s readings about “familiar spirits” – the occult animals believed to assist medieval witches in their nefarious deeds. 

The other songs featured on the Familiar Five EP include “Love Release,” which taps into the energy and live power of his DJ sets; “High Times,” a track that’s influenced by his love of early 80’s dance music (“I was definitely thinking of Nile Rodgers in 1979, 1980, there... I have a bit of a thing for that period at the beginning of the ‘80s before drum machines took control of dance music.”); and previous single “Rocketship.” 

Marr is no stranger to collaboration, working with Australian musician Chet Faker on 2015’s Work EP. Work yielded two hit singles, “Birthday Card” (Annie Mac’s BBC Radio 1 first play, #1 Hype Machine) and “The Trouble with Us” (#1 Hype Machine). The Familiar Five EP, however, shows him in his individual element, an artist and performer who understands just how to make superb music for both man and machine. 

A regular at Berlin’s famed nightclub Berghain/Panorama Bar since 2014, Marcus Marr recently toured in North America with The Juan Maclean. He has previously toured with the likes of Hot Chip, Floating Points, Jacques Greene and Optimo, and has performed at the highly-regarded MoMa PS1 Warm Up series, Day For Night Festival, and Art Basel Miami. Marcus has also contributed mixes to Beats in Space and Boiler Room. 

Tracklist:

1) Familiar Five
2) Love Release
3) High Times
4) Rocketship

Like a dream foggily remembered, Loopsel’s Öga for Öga is tempting in its beauty yet slightly menacing in its depth. These songs, like paths in the forest forest, are heavily, almost treacherously, reverberated, with finger-plucked guitars acting as your signposts amongst the flora and fauna of field recordings, pads, and the cool, calm voice of Elin Engström.

The album is the second from Engström as Loopsel. She is a Gothenburg-based musician and one-half of both the group Monokultur and the team behind the tiny Mamma’s Mystersika Jukebox label with her partner JJULIUS.

During what seemed like the nadir of the pandemic, the blurry, otherworldly sounds emanating from their living room snaked into the DFA office, where the otherwise dutifully DIY pair found the scale of worldwide release and distribution.

Öga for Öga is the second release from that partnership (following JJULIUS’ VOL. 2 in 2022). 

DFA is thrilled to now offer releases from Voluminous Arts, the new label from Gavilán Rayna Russom, in our online store. Rayna has released a ton of music on DFA under aliases like Gavin Russom, Delia and Gavin, Black Meteoric Star and The Crystal Ark, and she's also been a member of LCD Soundsystem. She's since released music on a bunch of other labels (all of it very good!) and started Voluminous Arts in 2017.
Disco, the four Black Meteoric Star full-length, has been burning a hole in our turntable since we bought it.

Learn more about Voluminous Arts here.

Official blurb below...

Triple, multi-colored LP (LP1 is orange, LP2 is mint and LP3 is plum) with xeroxed cover. Digital download codes to be provided after purchase.

**

Voluminous Arts happily announces its third official release, a 12 track digital album and accompanying 3xLP limited 3 color vinyl edition entitled Disco by Gavilán Rayna Russom’s elusive alias Black Meteoric Star. This is not a Disco record. The title deliberately troubles the music biz’s incessant tendency to hierarchize genre classification over the experience of listening. If you must categorize these mutant sounds think of them as a proposed alternate score for those long, caffeinated sessions in Abby Sciuto’s forensics lab, the soundtrack to a heavy workout in the Westchester Danger Room or perhaps the musical accompaniment to deep body investigations of your own ancestral memories.

What this record really is, and why it’s called Disco has to do with the layering of time and life energy present in the spaces where we have traditionally danced to music which are sometimes called Discos. From the pounding urgency of “Muscle Machine” through the unbridled night vision romp that is “Fluid Feline Forms” and the shimmering investigations of “Whispers Between Worlds” to the extended lazer pointer focus of “I’m Unmelting” this record lays out a broad slab of practice-based research into the ghosts we connect with on the dance floor. Whether it be through partying in former industrial buildings, contested spaces of labor built on lands violently appropriated from indigenous people, uncomfortably inhabiting vacuums in queerness left by the AIDS epidemic, lifting lineages through sampling, or the relentless cycle of whitening that accompanies dance music’s march into the market, our experiences in the Disco have been permeated by the spectral and the haunted. Through rhythm and frequency, organized over time, this music blurs the veil between the living and the dead inviting those who move to it to connect with experiences beyond that false binary.

What you have here is another fantastic Black Meteoric Star record, as always made without multitracking or overdubbing, recorded directly from single live takes. It is is utterly consistent with all that name has come to mean, but on Disco Black Meteoric Star’s vision has been allowed to expand into an almost mythologically epic space. Ancestral time works differently. Settle in and absorb the frequencies. As the closing track suggests, the virtual Disco these sounds evoke is for “Freaks Only”.

Tracklist:

1) Les Aphides
2) Futur Parlé
3) Complet Brouillé
4) Les agents des stups
5) Substance M
6) New Path

Essaie Pas always seek out fresh challenges. Emerging from Montreal’s sprawling electronic scene, the duo - Marie Davidson and Pierre Guerineau – feel completely free to express themselves, to sketch out hitherto unmapped musical regions.

“Essaie Pas has always been about exploring new territories” explains Pierre. “From the very first tapes, to the last one. We don’t want to do the same thing over and over again, – we just need to keep it exciting and to challenge ourselves. Take those experiences, open new boxes and see what happens.”

Forthcoming album ‘New Path’ takes this one step further. The duo’s fifth album to date – and second on powerhouse label DFA Records –is loosely based on Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly, a classic of dystopian science fiction.

“I read the book a long time ago, maybe 15 years ago, and it had a strong impression on me,” explains Pierre. “In our previous work we always looked to music as inspiration in our lives, but this time we felt the desire to try something different, that’s not based on ourselves but on someone else’s universe. It was going to be more conceptual, more political.”

‘New Path’ touches on personal ground, on addiction, loss, and the lingering strength of identity within late capitalism’s mass media paranoia. It pins down the central character’s destructive addiction, using this as a metaphor to explore the dichotomous rupture between our inner lives and our social environment, one that is often fed and soothed by drug abuse, social media, or any kind of dependence.

“I think it touches us on many levels,” Pierre continues. “We can talk about drug addiction issues, we can talk about the mass surveillance world we live in, but there’s also the experience of loss, of grief. I was surprised by how the book felt so modern and accurate to the time we live in right now. Dick’s visions of surveillance are the reality of social control today.”

It’s a record that continually ties itself in knots, a puzzle that is outwardly beguiling while the solutions remain inherently allusive. As Pierre points out, it’s even present in the title. “I like the fact that it sounds optimistic, but in the book it’s actually an illusion,” he explains. “This new path is actually going nowhere.”

But it’s a challenge met with humour, picking up on the wry elements of Philip K. Dick’s own writing – witness the subtle wit of songs such as ‘Complet Brouillé’, ‘Les Agents Des Stups’ or as in ‘Futur Parlé’s tripped-out lyrics, offsetting intense themes with something a little more playful. 

The conceptual nature of ‘New Path’ belies the subtle personal shifts within the band. A husband and wife duo, Essaie Pas thrive on freedom, on parting to focus on outside projects in Montreal and Berlin before returning renewed, flushed with fresh inspiration.

“Both personally and for Essaie Pas it’s good that both of us have separate projects,” he explains. “Marie has been constantly touring solo for the last year. On my side I’ve been producing other people’s music (Bernardino Femminielli, Pelada or Sleazy to name a few). Collaborating in the studio with talented people with unique aesthetics and different creative processes is always refreshing as an artist.”

The complexity of the project mirrors the complexities within Essaie Pas’ career to date – forever unpredictable, their wiry, individual sound offers a tangled vision of tomorrow’s aesthetics. “I think this was the main challenge,” muses Pierre. “To adapt what we’ve been doing live thru the last 2 years, which before was always changing, and corner it, make it cohesive”.

Although the duo is continually reinventing themselves, exploring new concepts or addressing political issues, emotions stays the essential aspect of their work. This is cold music for cold times, yet beneath this lies a continual search for the humane.

As they conclude “Ultimately we hope we can reach out to people, in a compassionate way, this is what we aim for with this album."

Needle drop and a floaty, child-like piano sucks you into the post-punk papier-mâché world of JJULIUS, where everyone speaks Swedish, listens to Young Marble Giants and eats nothing but Twizzlers.

Vol. 2 is, perhaps obviously, a continuation of the world-building JJULIUS did on Vol. 1, which is a little more raw, a little wilder in spirit and sold out at both source and every record store that managed to get its hand on a copy. It will also re-arrive this summer on DFA this summer alongside its successor. (Order here.)

JJULIUS is Gotebörg’s Julius Pierstorff, who, with his partner Elin Engström aka Loopsel, also records as Monokultur and runs the tiny label Mamma’s Mysterious Jukebox.

The music they make both together and separately is entirely their own, with its own rules of what instruments come and go; when a song begins and ends or swells like a marshmallow. And yet! It’s also referencing all the records we love and know - Young Marble Giants, Postcard Records, early Cabaret Voltaire, and even contemporary local peers like Mathaverskan.

Buy the ticket, take the trip.

After a banner year playing shows with LCD Soundsystem in the US and a string of wigged-out festivals through the UK and Europe, Mermaid Chunky close things out with a proper double A-side remix 12” for DJs who still believe in records.

Up first, New York legend Justin Strauss and W. Andrew Raposo of Midnight Magic drag “céilí” indoors, trading barefoot fields for Big Apple sweatboxes, major chords ringing, everyone slightly feral.

Flip it and there’s Peach’s version of “chaperone,” a burst of rhythm that turns the original’s messy euphoria into house music manna: cold machinery, warm hearts, no sleep.

Mastered by Bob Weston

Lacquer cut by Josh Bonati

Pressed at Furnace Record Pressing in Alexandria, VA

A CD digipak of ALL of the 45:33 remixes.

1. 45:33 (Runaway Remix)

2. 45:33 (Prince Language Remix

3. 45:33 (Prins Thomas Diskomiks Remix)

4. 45:33 (Theo Parrish's Space Cadet Remix)

5. 45:33 (Trus'Me Remix)6. 45:33 (Padded Cell Remix)

7. 45:33 (Pilooski Remix)

8. 45:33 (Riley Reinhold Remix)

dfa 2179 / 2007

Still Going are Eric Duncan (Dr Dunks / Rub N Tug) and Liv Spencer

A. Still Going Theme

B. On And On

For just over a decade, EXEK has very quietly become one of the most hypnotic bands on the planet, mutating and growing from record to record, gradually opening themselves up without ever losing that strange, inscrutable, altogether essential quality that’s made them so great—so EXEK-y.

On 27 February, the Melbourne post-punk outfit—vocalist and chief architect Albert Wolski, guitarist Jai Morris-Smith, drummer Chris Stephenson, synth specialist Andrew Brocchi, trumpet-brandishing vocalist Valya YL Hooi, and bassist Ben Hepworth—will release Prove The Mountains Move, their seventh album and first for DFA. It is, as Wolski says, “a bit more 'epic’” than anything he’s recorded to date, a lush and unabashedly melodic set of surrealist pop that luxuriates in contradiction. “This record is experimental in its craft,” Wolski says, “but it may not necessarily sound experimental.”

There’s good reason for that. Work began on a cold afternoon in June of 2023, as Wolski and Stephenson came together at Pelican Refill Studios in Melbourne to track drums—the first thing they always do. From there, Wolski went home on his own and began sifting through the beats and breaks they’d captured, letting the drum sounds guide him towards melodies and basslines, looping and layering and laying foundation for what would become Prove The Mountains Move. “I feel comfortable tinkering away alone like a mad scientist,” he says. “I also enjoyed pressing record with no clear intention. More often than not, that would steer me towards an interesting direction that my conscious mind probably wouldn't have sought out.”

And yet, somehow Wolski arrived at his most direct work since he launched the project, newly inspired by the clarity and concision of mainstream pop, the strong and undeniable pull of a simple vocal melody. After Melbourne’s famously stringent COVID lockdowns ended, he found himself wanting to stay out. “Working on new music took a distant backseat to raging with friends,” he says. “And those parties were filled with big bangers as the soundtrack—stuff I didn’t really listen to on my own, stuff I hadn't really encountered since my adolescence. But in the early hours of Sunday morning, ‘Alive’ by Pearl Jam sounds like you’re talking to God. And so does “All I Wanna Do”by Sheryl Crow, and so does “Feel” by Robbie Williams. Krautrock and dub were still in my DNA, but the music that I started to make was perhaps a little more lighthearted, and perhaps a bit more emotional.”

Which isn’t to say you should expect to hear traces of Eddie Vedder in Wolski’s vocal delivery here, but the stakes feel similar in their own way—this is what it sounds like when EXEK are really going for it. Take, for instance, the levitating synths of opener “Sidestepping” or the mountainous guitars of “Arriverderci Back Pain,” the piano bench pyrotechnics of “Don’t Answer (When They Call)” or the Bowie-like melancholy of “You Have Been Blessed.” The arrangements feel more open, the sonics more focused, the colors more brightly rendered. It’s not hard to believe him when Wolski says he spent time earnestly A-B’ing his mixes of Prove The Mountains Move against some of the most important albums ever recorded, Abbey Road among them.

But everything is relative. And lyrically, Wolski remains oblique. ”Each song is a vignette into an abstract milieu, whether it’s an experimental chiropractic business at an airport, or scantily clad creatures made from dust at a food court. No matter how wacky, there's themes and motifs throughout the record, both lyrical and musical, that mirror up and reflect each other throughout different songs.” That dissonance—between the direct and indirect, smooth and textured, shadowed and incandescent, zany and deadpan—is the animating force at the heart of these songs, his best yet.

Peter Gordon and his Love of Life Orchestra--as a new audience discovered upon hearing the FabricLive.36 compilation, a handpicked mix from LCD Soundsystem's James Murphy and Pat Mahoney that opened and closed with Gordon's "Beginning of the Heartbreak / Don't Don't"--are testament to the incredible musical innovations happening in New York City in the late 1970s. Those two compositions, underpinned with disco and gilded with noisy guitar bursts, hanging piano chords and saxophone wails, exhibit not only Gordon's kaleidoscopic vision as a musician, but his precision as a producer and composer. Featuring avant-experimentalists and downtown legends David Byrne and Arto Lindsay as well as Love of Life Orchestra cofounders Gordon and David Van Tieghem, the tracks shine a light on the work of an artist whose influence on dance music is recognizable more than three decades later. 

Gordon's hefty contribution to music is given an up-close look with Love of Life Orchestra, a retrospective of the composer's work. Compiled here are the aforementioned singles and songs that show the breadth and quality of Gordon's output. "Extended Niceties" unfurls a dizzying call-and-response between blaring sax and synths, while the expansive "Roses on the Disco Floor" builds in intensity, size and tempo as it nears its epic end. "Still You" and "Beautiful Dreamer" by Justine & The Victorian Punks (a collaborative project with New York-based visual artist Colette) feature disco grooves and sweetly voiced melodies. "Iago's Escape," which begins with dramatic strings and quasi-operatic vocals, unexpectedly incorporates klezmer-influenced clarinet. "That Hat" is a quirky experiment incorporating early hip-hop beats and featuring vocals from pioneer Arthur Russell, New York Doll David Johansen and Rebecca Armstrong.

The album is rounded out with "Another Heartbreak / Don't Don't Redux," Gordon's own reworking of the seminal opening medley, which freshly reinterprets the original's sax lead and adds new synthesizer parts. Throughout this impressive catalog, harmoniously interwoven strains of jazz, rock and neoclassical, add texture and color to these wonderful songs. Love of Life Orchestra, taken as a whole, serves as ample testimony to the far-reaching scope of Gordon's musical sensibilities and a reminder of his enduring musical legacy.

Tracklisting:

1. Beginning of the Heartbreak / Don't Don't
2. Extended Niceties
3. Don't Don't (Reprise)
4. Roses On The Disco Floor
5. Still You
6. Beautiful Dreamer
7. Iago's Escape
8. That Hat
9. Another Heartbreak / Don't Don't (Redux)
   
   

A understated and yet epic remix we left to the digital wilderness got pressed up by our good friend Damian Harris and his new label Vicious Charm. Only a handful (seriously, just a handful) of copies available here for our North American contingent.

Here's what he says...

"Originally releases in 2009 Happy House by The Juan Maclean had a lot of remixes…
The Matthew Dear v Audion Remix was number 10.
This is the only explanation I can find of why it slipped under the radar
For me it is one of the finest 10:29 of mid tempo club music ever.
The joyous vocals of Nancy Whang with added funk, edge & euphoria…

Rathe than get ANOTHER remix I asked Mark E to rework it. He delivered a stunning soulful version already championed by Gilles Peterson & Erol Alkan."

Marcus Lambkin aka Shit Robot returns with his third full length album for DFA Records, entitled What Follows. The 11-track album was conceived and recorded at Marcus’ home studio in a small town outside Stuttgart; worked on in various New York studios and then mixed over the course of 11 intense & coffee-fueled days in DFA label mate Juan Maclean’s New Hampshire studio.

The album follows Lambkin’s previous long-players, From The Cradle To The Rave (2010) and We Got A Love (2014), which drew plaudits from the likes of The Guardian and Pitchfork, and featured Reggie Watts and James Murphy among the array of contributors.

The Dublin-born producer has enlisted the help of a stellar cast of guests for What Follows, with previous collaborators Alexis Taylor (Hot Chip) and DFA stablemates Museum of Love & Nancy Whang returning, alongside new faces Jay Green and leftfield fellow Dubliner New Jackson.

What Follows marks a departure in Lambkin’s process – a simple, but fundamental one: getting away from the computer. He said: “This record is a lot more analog than We Got A Love, almost all of it comes from connecting machines together and playing around.” What began in Stuttgart was followed up on in New York, before being finished in an 11-day blitz in New Hampshire with Juan Maclean.

Lambkin: “This is the first time that I actually sat down and said, ‘I'm going to make an album now and I'm going to finish it by a specific date and time.’ I wanted to make a record that was more cohesive, that sounded like it all came from the one session. I wanted it to reflect my DJing style a bit more, less pop, less disco, more machines. There's no live bass and barring a few hi-hats, there's no live drums.”

“I began in Stuttgart – simply by creating about 12 drum loops. I then synched these up to some gear and created some bass lines so I had some solid grooves to start with. Then I went to NY and spent a couple of days at Holy Ghost's studio playing around with Nick and his modular synth coming up with different sequences and sounds.”

“I took all this back home and started to fool around with it and knock it into shape before sending it out for vocals. With the song I did with Museum Of Love, ‘What Follows’, Dennis and Pat were actually in Europe and they came by and stayed with me for a few days, so we made that one in Stuttgart over a few nights once I got the kids to bed.”

“Then I brought it all to Juan's World in New Hampshire where we drank a LOT of coffee and did some additional production and mixed everything. Finishing the record with Juan was a game changer for me. We finished eleven songs in eleven days, no joke.”

The results are convincing – What Follows is definitely an album dedicated to dance music, but one that retains hallmarks of his previous LPs: good songs. Alexis Taylor turns in two memorable performances on lead single ‘End Of The Trail’ and album opener ‘In Love’; Museum of Love – Pat Mahoney and Dennis McNany – lend the album title track an air of something mined from the two months in between the death of Joy Division and the birth of New Order; and Nancy Whang gave such a strong vocal for ‘Lose Control’ that Lambkin and Maclean threw out the existing track and recorded the backing along with the vocal in one take.

Newbies Jay Green and New Jackson hit their marks too – Green narrates ‘Is There No End’ as though it were sibling to From The Cradle To The Rave’s single ‘Simple Things’. New Jackson makes two appearances, on both ‘Phase Out’ and ‘OB-8 (Winter Version)’, adding oddball vocals and spaced-out Krautrock guitar arrangements.

How did the guests come about? Lambkin: “I didn't have a big plan, I just knew that I wanted to work with friends.”

Tracklist:

1. Meet Me At The End
2. Relay
3. Slow Listen
4. 25 25
5. Dial Me In
6. Wave
7. Ya
8. Upper Left

Factory Floor return in 2016 with 25 25, their second album and the follow up to their acclaimed 2013 self-titled debut. With their music stripped to a mesmerising dance of percussion, fragmented voice and melody, it captures the next vital stage in the evolution of one of the UK’s most restless and exploratory groups.

The dazzlingly sharp, dubbed-out acid disco of ‘Meet Me At The End’ opens 25 25 in a surge of raw momentum. Both Factory Floor’s sparsest and most overtly club-centred track to date, it sets the tone for the rest of the album. Written and recorded by Gabriel Gurnsey and Nik Colk Void in late 2015 and early 2016, it’s the product of the last three years of intensive musical activity — non-stop live performances, artistic collaborations, writing new music and reconfiguring the limits of their sound.

Inspired by playing a growing number of late night club shows, the pair’s music gradually evolved into the sound captured on their second album and in their current live incarnation: a stark, ultra-minimalist and eerily soulful dancefloor pulse, yet one that still bears Factory Floor’s unmistakable hallmarks of hypnotic repetition and jagged, punkish intensity.

That their second album is as distinct from its predecessor as their debut was from their earliest singles is unsurprising — a desire to explore, to push their own boundaries, is hardwired into Factory Floor at DNA level. Emerging in 2009 the group gained a reputation for their stunning live shows, which pummeled audiences with waves of electro-shocked rhythm. From the death-rattle of early single ‘A Wooden Box’ through their debut’s convulsive singles ‘Two Different Ways’ and ‘Fall Back’ and into 25 25’s skeletal ‘Wave’ and ‘Dial Me In’, their music has continued to forge links between industrial, post-punk and the UK’s post-acid house dance lineages.

The close friendships and collaborations they’ve established along the way attest to those connections, among them Chris Carter and Cosey Fanni Tutti of Throbbing Gristle/Chris & Cosey, Perc, Optimo, New Order and Simon Fisher Turner.

Mixed with razor precision by David Wrench (FKA twigs, Caribou), the results are all the more forceful for that newfound space. ‘Relay’ is a spooked vocal house anthem, with Void’s voice processed into a thrillingly metallic chant. ‘Wave’ and ‘Slow Listen’ are deadly, perpetual motion machine dance tracks infused with the frontier spirit of Sheffield bleep and industrial techno. And the title track itself sums up the duo in 2016; its jarring repetitions and disorienting melodic motifs are somehow classic Factory Floor, yet shot into sparse, strangely moving new spaces. “You get into your own world and use your own vision,” says Void of the process of writing 25 25. “This really is probably the most ‘me’ record that I’ve ever done.

Black Bubblegum is on black vinyl

Black Bubblegum is the newest LP from Eric Copeland, and we are not kidding when we emphasize it sounds like nothing he has done in the past. The title of the record says it all: chewy, sticky pop that doesn’t taste quite like any chewy, sticky pop you’ve had before.

 
Recorded at Copeland’s old practice space in South Williamsburg, Black Bubblegumcontains songs with more conventional sounds and songwriting than any of his previous releases. While there are similarities with Copeland’s earlier work in the drum patterns, major scales and vocals, Black Bubblegum moves away from his trademark psychedelic dub towards strange and fantastical pop. Wanting to take a more “hands-on” approach to these recordings, Copeland exchanged sample-driven tech and hardware for keyboards, guitars and effect pedals, creating a new sound that is oddly easy to digest despite its rejection of melody in favour of discord and dissonance. While there are similarities with Copeland’s earlier work in the drum patterns, major scales and vocals, Black Bubblegum moves away from his trademark psychedelic dub towards strange and fantastical pop; imagine Arthur Russell going into the studio with The Ramones.
 
For a long time, Copeland considered this collection of songs to be recordings which would never be heard. This invariably influenced certain decisions made during the creation of Black Bubblegum, blessing Copeland with the unique freedom that comes from making music never intended to be heard, let alone released.
 
When asked to please jot down what influenced this new album and sound, Eric replied”glam holes, glitter dreams, money troubles, apocalypse paranoia, one hit wonders, manifest destiny, my family's westward migration, body troubles (was passing kidney stones almost the entire time), LGBT disco parties, Jonathan Richman, Missing Foundation, Neil Diamond, New Orleans, poverty, getting pushed out of another Brooklyn neighbourhood... No Beach Boys, no Beatles, no Buddha...  More Bad News Bears.”
 
Eric Copeland has been sound clashing at full volume for over twenty years, first carving out a named for himself as one third of the legendary NY-via-Providence band Black Dice. A wildly prolific solo artist, Copeland has played shit houses, party palaces and seemingly everything in between all over the world.
 
A long time Brooklyn, resident, Eric recently relocated to where the L Train does not run - Palma de Mallorca, Spain. While maintaining a relatively humble and low key presence in a highly competitive musical world, he has releases a prolific amount of music every year through indie labels such as L.I.E.S., Escho (Iceage), PPM (No Age), Paw Tracks (Animal Collective) and DFA.

Tracklist:

1. Kids In A Coma
2. Rip It
3. Fuck It Up
4. Honorable Mentions
5. Blue Honey
6. On
7. Cannibal World
8. Don't Beat Your Baby
9. Radio Weapons
10. Get My Own

Tracklist:
1) Scirocco
2) Automatic (feat. Peaches)
3) Graffiti In Tehran
4) My Love Is For Real (feat. Haddaway) [Dance Mix]
5) What Is It Like (feat. Pamela Anderson)
6) Rein (feat. Yung Hurn & Egyptian Lover) 
7) Put Me In Your Mobile Phone
8) Catalyst
9) My Love Is For Real (feat. Haddaway) [Live At The Cathedral]

Wolfram makes his triumphant return to DFA with Amadeus, a newly refined take on the Euro-disco pop he’s become known for over the past several years. Released by Public Possession overseas, the record takes the spirit of his 2011 debut full-length and focuses it more specifically towards the dance floor, helped as always by a variety of collaborators: Peaches, Haddaway, Egyptian Lover, Yung Hurn, Pamela Anderson, and more. A singular producer and entertainer, but coexisting in many worlds, Wolfram embeds a good sense of humor throughout his music. From the artists he works with, to his distinctively gleaming melodies, as well as his DJ sets at the likes of Robert Johnson, Wilden Renate, and Griessmuehle, Wolfram is a presence like no other. 

On Amadeus, Wolfram zeroes in on the most earworm-y aspects of his past work, concentrating it down until we’re left with succinct, dopamine-inducing bangers. Tracks like “Graffiti in Tehran” and “Rein” recall the hi-octane crunch of artists like Daft Punk, while “Automatic” and “My Love Is For Real” both make use of soaring disco piano, taking the listener on a dance floor odyssey. The world he creates is one of high-gloss and high spirits – low brow, high concept with an Italo tinge, creating a unique brand of anthemic futuristic disco. The album begs one to come along for an irresistible ride in a beat-up vintage Ferrari, faux fur-lined bucket seats not included.

Eric Copeland (Black Dice) returns to DFA with a brand-new set of hyper & hectic leftfield club music. Goofballs places its emphasis on playful melodies, ear worm hooks & vocals mixed with trademark machine funk rhythms that hit hard and land off-balance. Any other way would be too obvious for an artist like Eric. Perhaps he even invented a new dance genre: ‘Goofstep’. We’ll see if that one sticks…

Eric explained the creation of this new LP to us via email from his home on an island in lovely Balearic Palma Spain:

“i made it here in Palma at my studio, this is the first full record i’ve made entirely here since moving. some of this material was road tested September 2016 on tour supporting Animal Collective. This album was the result of real isolation here, countless hours, focused only on this. The whole recording & writing was a fast process. I focused most on the bass groove. I had a very minimal gear setup: 90’s drum machine, cheap bass machine and a sampler. But most important was a homemade ‘drum brain’ that Barry’s London custom made for me. Barry was in the Van Pelt Soldiers of Fortune & Oneida. That piece of gear was a big part of this record and informed the direction it took the most.”

Eric Copeland is a founding member of Black Dice as well as a prolific solo artist. Besides DFA, he has released albums on L.I.E.S., Post Present Medium & Paw Tracks.

Goofballs was mixed by Rusty Santos (who has mixed everyone from DJ Rashad to Panda Bear to Owen Pallett) and mastered by Joe Lambert. It is Eric’s third solo album for DFA Records.

Tracklist: 
1) Boogieman
2) Neckbone
3) Disco Ball
4) Bibbidi Bobbidi Boo
5) Mixer Shredder
6) Close Encounters
7) Smearjob
8) Do Whatcha Wah Wah

COMPACT DISC AVAILABLE ON DFA BANDCAMP

Back in our store for the first time in years. Confusing both critics and fans upon initial release, The Juan's first 12" is backed by "The more raucous" 41 Small Stars (aka Ad Rock!) version and rare instrumental TG-3X. 

A1: By The Time I Get To Venus

A2:  By The Time I Get To Venus (41 Small Stars Version)

B: TG-3X

Black Meteoric Star was written, recorded and produced by Gavin Russom between September of 2006 and December of 2008.

This CD contains the entire 12" series.

Excluding "Dawn" the tracks have been edited for album length.

The original digital transfers of tracks 1-4 were done in Berlin.

This recording was achieved using specialized electronic circuits designed and built by Gavin Russom.

Tracklist:
1) Death Tunnel
2) World Eater
3) Domination
4) Anthem
5) Dream Catcher
6) Dawn

Angelic Ascent is a new collection of recordings from Infinity Machine, the ever-wandering psychedelic duo from Juan MacLean and Gee Dee. It’s not quite a proper album (their “debut” will come next year) and more of a side quest in major key new age - it really does sound like its title. We mean this completely sincerely: grab an eye mask and prepare to ascend.

DFA / REKIDS 12" / DFA2204 / 2008

A. Brooklyn Club Jam

B. Brooklyn Club Jam (Brennan Green's Version)

See that man on a far off hill, working his dog while attempting to find shelter from the howling wind and driving rain? That’s the Crooked Man, the very antithesis of the modern dance music producer. He lives a simple life, dragging his world‐weary soul across the moors in an endless bid to escape the fallout from 30 years spent at the forefront of Sheffield’s electronic music scene. Once regarded as one of the Steel City’s greatest selectors, he now admits to being gripped by fear at the idea of DJing, and refuses to spend any time in nightclubs. 

He may be ill at ease with the darkroom throb of 21st century clubs, but the house music the Crooked Man produces is as weighty, alien, raw and left of‐centre as anything you’d get from many a hyped young producer. He’s assisted in his studio endeavours by two other Sheffield survivors: former Clock DVA man Michael Ward, and David Lewin, once the other half of Bleep & Booster with former ABC and Vice Versa man Stephen Singleton.

The Crooked Man’s music blends wonky electronic rhythms, heavy bass and razor sharp, politically aware lyrics, often delivered by the honeyed tonsils of Pete Simpson. For proof, check out the banker‐baiting “Scum (Always Rises The Top)”, or the bittersweet social commentary of “Fools & Fanatics”. The Crooked Man may be world weary, but he’s still brimming with rage. Few could have foreseen a link between this jaded recluse and New York’s militantly forward‐looking DFA Records. But then again, the Crooked Man does have history.

Raised a farm boy, his life changed when he first heard the industrial funk and futurist electronic pop of local bands Cabaret Voltaire and the Human League. Bored of having no decent parties to go to, he became DJ Parrot and began promoting the soon to be legendary Jive Turkey events in 1985. Alongside his DJ partner Winston Hazel, he united Sheffield’s disparate dancers by joining the dots between Northern Soul, disco, hip‐hop, electro and the emerging underground dance sounds of Chicago, Detroit and New York.

In 1987, an early foray into music production accidentally created a hit record, the major label‐signed “Hustle (To The Music)” by Funky Worm. The commercial desires of a large, conservative label proved hugely frustrating, and he soon yearned to break free and head back underground. Salvation came from within Sheffield, with the launch of Warp Records. He teamed up with Cabaret Voltaire’s Richard H Kirk under the Sweet Exorcist alias, delivering the peerless “Testone” in 1990, one of the landmark records of the bleep era. The pair went on to release the first album on Warp, C.C.E.P., in 1991.

Many records under different aliases followed, for both independent and major labels, before Parrot once again found himself chart‐bound as part of eccentric Steel City trio All Seeing I. Their debut album, 1999’s Pickled Eggs & Sherbet, featured contributions from some of Sheffield’s finest, including Jarvis Cocker and The Human League’s Phil Oakey.

Since then, Parrot has kept a low profile. When not working his sheepdogs, he’s quietly produced for Roisin Murphy, Add N To (X), Richard Hawley and Toddla T, amongst others. His decision, some years back, to revisit his love of raw, bass‐heavy house music merely marks another twist in the winding path of the Crooked Man.

Tracklist:

1. Coming Up For Air
2. This Machine (Kills Me)
3. The Girl With Better Clothes
4. Scum (Always Rises To The Top)
5. Preset
6. Fools And Fanatics
7. Try Me
8. I'll Be Loving You
9. Happiness

1. Can You Ever Really Know Somebody (Original)
2. Can You Ever Really Know Somebody (Instrumental)
3. Can You Ever Really Know Somebody (LA-4A Remix)
4. Can You Ever Really Know Somebody (LA-4A Dub)

A1. The Brighter The Light
A2. The Brighter The Light (DJ Tennis Remix)
B1. The Brighter The Light (Len Leise Remix)
B2. The Brighter The Light (Octo Octa Remix)

Hand stamped white label in plain sleeve. Numbered xxx/100. 
(dfa 2461 / 2015)

Featuring Pat Mahoney (LCD Soundsystem) and Dennis McNany

1. Monotronic (Baldelli & Dionigi Remix)

2. Who's Who Of Who Cares (Baldelli & Dionigi Remix)

Another slamming version of Simple Things (Work It Out) featuring a remix from Mr. Todd Terje. The credits say "More Cowbell by Todd Terje", need we say more?

A) Simple Things (Work It Out) (Main Mix)
B) Simple Things (Work It Out) (Todd Terje Version) 

Tyler's newest EP on his own Interference Pattern Records, mixed by the mighty Dennis Bovell.

We got a box for the North Americans looking to avoid insane per-item shipping.

Special die cut sleeve designed by Lenny Vigden.

Four tracks of percussive madness.

Double LP pressed at 45RPM.

Comes with a free glossy 28.5" x 25.75"promo poster shipped separately.

2x12" single of Juan's breakout classic "Tito's Way", featuring a massive 11-plus minute remix from Linstrøm + Prins Thomas, plus additional edits from Reverso 68, and Booka Shade.

UK version comes in a die-cut sleeve.

Tracklist

Tito's Way (Album Version)

Titos Way (Lindstrom & Prins Thomas Remix)

Tito's Way (Booka Shade Remix)

Tito's Way (Reverso 68 Remix)

The debut LP by The Crystal Ark.

The limited edition 2xLP comes in a silk screened sleeve printed inside & out and is an edition of 400 total.

The Crystal Ark is the child of Gavin Rayna Russom and Viva Ruiz, and features contributions from LCD Soundsystem members Matt Thornley and Tyler Pope, among a cast of other DFA-related musicians like Alberto Lopez and Jaiko Suzuki. 

Track List: 

1. Ascension
2. We Came To
3. Morir Soñando
4. Crossing
5. Paradise
6. Rhodes
7. Rain
8. Silver Cord

Initial pressing is on pink vinyl! Move quick!

Delia Gonzalez is a name immediately familiar to DFA fanatics. As the story goes, Delia transplanted from Miami to New York City in the mid-1990s, working in various dance and guerrilla theatre troupes. It was around this time that she met synth wizard Gavin Russom, beginning a series of multi-disciplinary collaborations. Their first release for the label, 2003’s El Monte, was an early demonstration of the fledgling label’s ability to bridge the gap between the avant-garde and the rapidly exploding indie rock world.

In Remembrance is the next landmark in Delia’s artistic pursuits. The project originated as a 2010 solo show of the same name at Galleria Fonti in Naples, Italy, and was further realized in 2012, with additional work, as part of the exhibition I Must Not Stop To Rest Here in Cologne, Germany. The project was further exhibited in Zurich. Both exhibitions were built around four 16mm ballet dance films, accompanied by the music composed by Gonzalez. In her words, “The film is meant to re-create the fleeting sensation of inspiration - that sacred feeling when suddenly your mind clears and you know exactly what you’re meant to create and become.”

The films were exhibited in their third incarnation at the Clocktower Gallery in New York City in 2013. Delia enlisted New York underground musicians Bryce Hackford and Alice Cohen to perform a live, electronic adaption of the original piano score. Bryce later contributed four remixes, which are included on this album. Delia explains; “When I lived in Berlin I became good friends with the artist and musician Viktor Timofeev, who kept telling me about his best friend Bryce, who he played music with. In 2012 we were all in Vienna participating in a show entitled You Are Free. There I met Bryce and I instantly loved him. In 2013 I moved to NYC temporarily and ran into him at the New Museum and he said, “we should get together and play”. I took him up on it.”

The original piano score was initially inspired by a text by Henry Miller as well as a theory by spiritual teacher George Gurdjieff, which states that “to play scales is to become more in tune with your inner self.” This coincided conceptually with the music that Delia had been making at the time.

Musically, In Remembrance finds Delia Gonzalez again straddling the lines drawn between the fine art and pop worlds. This time, instead of the cosmic, arpeggiated synths of The Days of Mars , we are presented with something even more immediately beautiful. The music is immediately soothing and hypnotic, yet it also maintains a sinister undertone. Suspense and tension are expressed in a deceptively simple fashion, providing a soundtrack both mesmerizing and melancholy for the dancers in the film. Delicate layers of piano wind around each other, reflected in the mirrored motions of the dancers, filmed in leering close-ups. The four compositions combine to create a 30 minute avant-classical suite, bringing to mind Satie, or something plucked from Italy’s iconic Cramps Records in the seventies (John Cage’s Cheap Imitation is an reasonable comparison), or perhaps an alternate score to the arthouse horror film Don’t Look Back by Nicolas Roeg.

The second disc features remixes by previously mentioned live collabator Bryce Hackford. Bryce takes Delia’s exquisite piano score and loops, stretches, and consolidates it. There’s a range of treatments at play here - some pieces are layered with gauzy left-field electronic pulses while Track IV get a 4/4 dancefloor makeover, recommended to fans of both classic Detroit techno and newer left-field stars such as Actress. Asked to briefly discuss his mission statement in creating these remixes, Bryce simply stated that he wished that his remixes “maintain the hypnotic and simple beauty of the originals while opening them up to new spaces.”.

In Remembrance will be released by DFA Records and [PIAS] Cooperative on April 28, 2015.  

Tracklist

A1 - Delia Gonzalez (I)
A2 - Delia Gonzalez (II)
B1 - Delia Gonzalez (III)
B2 - Delia Gonzalez (IV)
C1 - Bryce Hackford (Remix I)
C2 - Bryce Hackford (Remix II)
D1 - Bryce Hackford (Remix III)
D2 - Bryce Hackford (Remix IV)

Tracklist: 
1) (Downtown) Dancing
2) Hey Hey
3) SCATTERHEAD
4) Loud Light
5) Blue On Blue
6) DEATH
7) Sad Money
8) California Dali
9) Stick it to the Station
10) Little Instant 

“We wanted to find a way to interrogate technology more deeply,” explains Claire L. Evans, one-third of the pop group YACHT. “From the ground up,” adds her partner and YACHT founder Jona Bechtolt. The group—rounded out by longtime collaborator Rob Kieswetter—would know: their seventeen-year career has been marked by a series of conceptual stunts, experiments, and attempts to use technology “sideways.” Even the band’s name speaks to this: YACHT is an acronym for Young Americans Challenging High Technology. 

Chain Tripping is their seventh album and third with DFA Records. Recorded between the band’s home in Los Angeles and Marfa, Texas, the ten-song collection marks a shift in the group’s relationship with technology. Rather than trying to comment on existing platforms from within their own filter bubble, the band stripped their process down and rebuilt it using a technology entirely new to them—Artificial Intelligence, and more specifically, machine learning. 

In order to compose Chain Tripping, YACHT invented their own AI songwriting process, a journey of nearly three years. They first tried to discover any existing YACHT formulas by collaborating with engineers and creative technologists to explore their own back catalogue of 82 songs using machine learning tools. Eventually they created their own working method, painstakingly stitching meaningful fragments of plausible nonsense together from extensive, seemingly endless fields of machine-generated music and lyrics, themselves emerging from custom models created with the help of generous experts in neural networks, deep learning, and AI.

The band’s characteristically frenetic pop sound is toned down on songs like “(Downtown) Dancing,” a scotch-tape disco track that marries an anxious, funky bass groove with the lo-fi sound of the NSynth, a neural synthesizer that uses a machine learning process called latent space interpolation to imagine new sounds in between traditional instrumentation. The NSynth appears all over Chain Tripping, notably on the jewel-like “Blue on Blue,” a euphoric love song wound with surprisingly omnidirectional melodies. The generative composition process “broke us out of a mold of concise, formal, four-bar patterns and let us accept longer, meandering riffs,” explains Kieswetter; like most of Chain Tripping’s standout tracks, the song contains lyrical fragments that coalesce, collapse, and reform with fluid ease. The process also surfaced surreal idioms, like “Loud Light’s” anthemic “I’m so in love / I can feel it in my car,” or the lovely phrase “palm of your eye,” which pins the lilting chorus of the driving “SCATTERHEAD” into place, a song that splits the difference between postmodern rock and no-wave dance music with wiggly ease.

“We saw this album as an opportunity to teach the machine our values, our history, our community, and our influences,“ adds Evans. “This record is a product of a technological moment that is rapidly evolving. It taught us everything we wanted to know about ourselves: how we work, what moves us, and which ambiguities are worth leaning into. We didn’t set out to produce algorithmically-generated music that could ‘pass’ as human. We set out to make something meaningful. Something entirely our own.”

 THIS IS JUST A SINGLE CASSETTE IN THE SERIES.

VIEW ALL INFINITY MACHINE RELEASES HERE.

Infinity Machine is a duo comprised of Juan MacLean - as in the Juan MacLean, longtime DFA traveler - and Gee Dee, also known as Greg Droggitis, a producer and DJ based in Brooklyn and 1/3 of the Earth Beat DJ troupe.

The project name stems from a series of gatherings the two began hosting in various private spaces around New York City shortly after lockdown, though that description is a bit innocuous for the journeys traveled by its attendees.

These events, billed as “psychedelic dance ceremonies” lasting 8 or 9 hours, began with a sound meditation to vibrational and acoustic instruments before eventually segueing into a “dance” soundtracked by a DJ set from Juan and Greg. Something clicked - that ceremonial tea! - and so Juan and Greg began playing and recording in their studio using the same approach: improvisation with equal attention placed on traditional acoustic (flute, guitar, gong) and more contemporary electronic (Yamaha DX-7) sounds.

After awhile, there was literally three albums worth of material, each of them a voyage into the warm space between new age, ambient, drone and psychedelia. None of those genres quite fully describe what’s across 001, 002, and 003 - available from DFA digitally and on a very limited run of cassettes (150 each!) - but if you’ve read this far then you’re either the right kind of curious or just forgot what you were doing.

INFINITY MACHINE - 003 TRACK LIST:

Side A

Free From The Bad Paths
Mother Earth
Hummingbird Spirit
The Black Flute
Luminous Body

Side B

Desert Sky
Demons Will Fear Me
Red River, Blue Mountain
Magicians Of The Gods


Manufactured at National Audio Company in Springfield, MO

DFA EMI UK 7" / dfaemi  2176 / 2007 / Picture sleeve with promo sticker

PINK Vinyl!

A. End Of The World

B. Go To Sleep