American Dreams 29 Items

Livsgaranti, Orkan’s long awaited second album, is finally ready to meet the world! Livsgaranti, roughly translated as “guarantee of life”,
is Orkan’s reminder that everyone deserves a dignified life without the constant struggle against the patriarchal structure of society, and that every life should be safe without fear of the carelessness of humanity.
While listening to this album you will hear influences from the early 60’s to the late 70’s rock era, from the wild west and the Swedish political progg movement. Not only in the lyrics, the guitar sounds and the harmonies but also in the true analogue sound - in fact, this album is recorded, mixed and mastered all analogue. Still this album isn’t written in nostalgia, it’s right in time.

Bringing together ambient music, impressionism, sound poetry, and jazz, Dog Dreams is a rumination on the doublesidedness of trauma and love, on how one does not undercut the other, but are rather interlocked in an affective dialectic. Although its name comes from the literal translation of the Korean term "개​꿈" - which could mean anything from fanciful daydreams to nightmarish terrors, but always alluding to the idea that they are nonsensical, unrealistic, or simply silly - Lucy Liyou's sophomore album instead takes seriously these questions of why we dream what we dream, what slumber offers us that sober reality fails to, and which forgotten desires dare only emerge as our bodies go to rest. RIYL: Elysia Crampton, Eiko Ishibashi, Mariah Carey, Valerio Tricoli, 여행스케치 (Tour Sketch), Perfume Genius

On their first album, Me:You—a new collaboration between Mourning [A] BLKstar co-founders RA Washington and LaToya Kent—presents a simmering, enigmatic brew full of groove, distortion and haze. In contrast to the pointed lyrics and wide-ranging genre blend of Mourning [A] BLKstar, Me:You dunks music in a swirling brew of drum beats, guitars, bass, synth, and tape loops, revealing an immersive world that spotlights a woman who loves hard, with nods to punk, jazz and R&B. Along with Washington’s production and Kent’s vocals, Field Tapes in Der Trash features contributions from Jah Nada (of Obnox and Bloody Show, who released a winning collaboration with Washington on Astral Spirits last year) and Laura B.

At its core, Mute Duo’s music is expansive. It blows past preconceived notions of “genre”—and never more so than on Migrant Flocks. Their second LP with American Dreams and first recorded with Cooper Crain (Ty Segall, Circuit des Yeux, Bitchin Bajas), Migrant Flocks synthesizes the band’s wide-ranging influences and techniques into a striking document of singular music. It’s sharp, dynamic, understated, inventive, and their first album to bring the power of their concerts onto record. The result blends the band’s preexisting musical touchstones—beauty, joy, groove, ambience, abrasion—into a seamless whole. You might notice connections to krautrock, Dirty Three, or Talk Talk; traces of King Crimson, Sonny Sharrock; music called “post-punk,” “post-rock” or “prog”; jazz, dub, and ambient inflections. There’s something for everyone, longtime or first-time listeners alike. With Migrant Flocks, a unique band soars to new heights.

Marvin Tate's D-Settlement were Chicago's best-kept secret: a trailblazing, diverse band mixing R&B, soul, punk and funk with biting wit and political commentary. Led by Marvin Tate - a poet, artist, playwright and raconteur who wore pipe cleaners in his hair - and backed up by a dynamic cast of characters, their concerts were the stuff of legend. They stole the show from acts like Antibalas and Bernie Worrell. They addressed transgender rights, gentrification and gun violence before they were trendy. But if you wanted to hear their music, you were out of luck. Until now. American Dreams Records presents Marvin Tate's D-Settlement: a deluxe 4xLP/3xCD box set, designed by Field of Grass (Numero Group, Paradise of Bachelors), collecting their three albums with an oral history of the band. If you like Angel Bat Dawid, Theaster Gates, avery r. young - here's the blueprint.

Murder In The Temple is both a continuation and departure from Zohra’s past. The fourth daughter of a family of Afghan refugees, Zohra proudly sings and speaks her history, her family’s Muslim heritage, her own black-clad weirdo-ness, and unashamed Stevie-esque, shawl-spinning femininity (after all, one person’s Stevie-esque shawl is another’s chador). She dives deep into the kinds of dark pop and synth that she’s explored in Azar Swan, flowing seamlessly from bubblegum radio to batcave goth club, while at the same time, the South Asian/Middle Eastern melodies, modal tones and harmonies in her bones emerge. With a like-minded openness to chaos provided by producer Ben Greenberg, Zohra takes the sort of off-kilter chances that can only come when one has nothing left to lose.

Here lies a reissue of the first release from legendary long-running Chicago group ONO, Kate Cincinnati. ONO originally self-released the music in an edition of 300 tapes, and it shares several traits with the music of today's ONO. travis's singing moves effortlessly between gospel, blues, opera and noise registers; Shannon Rose Riley plays a maelstrom of music on her horn of choice, here saxophone; bandleader P. Michael Grego quietly orchestrates bass, guitar and lap guitar, creating a musical Jenga tower. If this is your first time with ONO, hop on board and see why Moor Mother, Black Midi, Algiers and countless other acts love them so. If you're already a fan: don't walk - run.

Wretch shows mysterious black metal band Anti-God Hand at the height of its powers. Anti-God Hand are reportedly based in Vancouver and connected to “brutal electronica /// progressive Industrial /// ritualistic ecstatic ambient musician” City, though we can neither confirm nor deny such circumstances. We can tell you that Wretch is positively cosmic and toys readily with established black metal tropes, pushing so-called genre conventions in directions atmospheric, experimental and electronic. Recorded in Vancouver, Andrew Weathers (claire rousay, Threshing Spirit, Hayden Pedigo, More Eaze) mastered and Sebastian Ruslan provided album art.

RIYL: Krallice, Deafheaven, Spectral Wound, Wolves In The Throne Room, Liturgy

File under: Metal, Black Metal

Passing presents Matthew J. Rolin at his most refined. With a slew of full-length releases on some of the Western hemisphere's sharpest labels for out, experimental or psychedelic music, Rolin has quietly established himself as one of America's higher purveyors of guitar music. Recorded and mixed by Jeff Zeigler (The War on Drugs, Kurt Vile, Rosali) and mastered by Mikey Young (Ty Segall, Parquet Courts, Ava Mendoza, ONO), the audio is crisp, the compositions tight, the music unpretentious and moving.

"Give this to anyone as a gift, they will thank you. If they like guitars they will thank you twice." - Matt Sweeney

Jordan Reyes is one of the busiest musicians in experimental music today, and here he takes a bold turn with the metal-inflected Everything Is Always, touching on death, Zen and science fiction. Reyes’ previous collaborators include ONO, Eli Winter and Robert Stokowy, and here he brings in a large and expert cast: Steve Hauschildt (Emeralds) at the mixing board, and Heba Kadry (Slowdive, Big Thief, Alex G, Lower Dens) mastering, plus instrumentalists including Lia Kohl (Whitney, Steve Gunn), Jon Mueller (Volcano Choir, Death Blues), Patrick Shiroishi and Sam Wagster (Fruit Bats, Eli Winter). The result is conceptual yet refined, and distinctively American Dreams.

claire rousay's a heavenly touch blends piano, percussion and field recordings into a hushed, transgressive mix. Originally issued on cassette in April 2020 by Already Dead Tapes, this marks its first appearance on vinyl, mastered by Andrew Weathers (Lucy Liyou, Hayden Pedigo, More Eaze). Coming on the heels of last year's breakout album, a softer focus (American Dreams), or her 2022 LP everything perfect is already here (Shelter Press), a heavenly touch foreshadows rousay's future releases and serves as a North Star in her acclaimed discography. It's crucial to understanding her development as an artist.

Now That You've Found It, the first full-length album from Aaron Turner and Jon Mueller, is a delightfully weird foray that shows the pair of highly acclaimed musicians stretching out. Past projects include Isis, SUMAC, and a host of album art (Turner), plus Volcano Choir with Justin Vernon, Death Blues, Mind Over Mirrors, and last year's American Dreams-released Family Secret (Mueller). Turner released their first collaboration, In the Falls, on his SIGE label last year. Like that release, Matt Bayles (Mastodon, Caspian, Pelican) recorded, James Plotkin (Merzbow, Jack Rose, Oneohtrix Point Never) mixed and mastered, and Turner himself provided album art.

RIYL: Sunn))) O, SUMAC, Nurse with Wound

“This album is a snapshot of my early-to-mid twenties — formative, sometimes confusing years.” That’s Chicago singer-songwriter Claudia Ferme, AKA Claude, on her debut album a lot’s gonna change. For years she’s tinkered away, self-releasing a 12” EP titled Enactor in 2021, and playing shows across the city. Her first full-length has been a long time in the making, with sketches of ditties happening as early as 2017. Since then, she’s refined her craft - words, melodies, and sound - crystallizing in this collection, buttressed by Windy City Wunderkind Michael Mac’s (Tasha, Devin Shaffer, Mia Joy) woozy, lush production. It’s an evocative, relatable assemblage, detailing the peaks and pitfalls of early adult life, all the while maintaining a sense of humor, a bit of hope, and piles of earworms.

"I'm trying to document emotions, more than specific events and memories. I mean...that's what my music is at the end of the day - I'm just documenting."

This is Lucy Liyou, the Philadelphia-based experimental musician behind cinematic sister LPs Welfare and Practice. Working in their Korean-American lineage and pulling from childhood memories, Liyou takes inspiration from Pansori (Korean Folk Opera), a style of Korean musical storytelling; and Korean drama soundtracks. Collaging text-to-speech (TTS) with their own voice, personal field recordings, audio samples from memes, Tumblr, and YouTube videos, synthesizers, and lush acoustic piano, Liyou creates their own distinct narrative.

Though synthesizers are the backbone of Shen’s music, while performing live, she plays self-made synths, invented instruments, and even acoustic objects like a bull whip. Her live show vacillates between moments of restraint and swells of frenetic and confrontational movement. Her sound is dynamic with a sensitivity to texture and structure throughout. This sensitivity is maintained in her debut LP Hair Birth, the result of several weekends locked in a studio creating cacophonous, wondrous synth noise with Harvard’s Buchla 100 and Serge modular systems. She tracked hours of stems before cloistering herself in a painstaking editing process. Songs like “Under The Stall Door” sound like a cybernetic rollercoaster with rumbles and shrieks that hurtle the listener through virtual space. Others, like “Bolete,” are tense, dense mood pieces that move from the queasy to the tranquil to the surreal.

Responding to a comment that the foreground of his Western photographs feels like a stage set, the photographer and auteur Wim Wenders suggests, “that impression is basic to the American West. Everything people have built there has a highly theatrical air.” This animates Places of Consequence, the second album and first solo LP from Cameron Knowler, which deploys guitar and banjo as cinematic tools to soundtrack and investigate the region. “Despite the fact that the lightheartedness of youth lifts and the problematic components of the West reveal themselves over time,” Knowler says, “there are still ways of harnessing the space to richly creative ends.” Single “Puerto Suelo,” which features acoustic and electric guitars playing in unison and a small orchestra of kitchen utensils, shows Knowler's knack for gorgeous melodies, and nods to LA session wizards like Blake Mills or Sam Gendel. Places of Consequence is testament to making the effort, and a document of Knowler’s clear talent.

Put a clean pedal steel guitar on any recording and the final result is going to sound at least a little country. Chicago’s Mute Duo is comprised of Sam Wagster on the pedal steel guitar (Cairo Gang, Anatomy of Habit) and Skyler Rowe on drums and percussion (Rash, Anatomy of Habit) who occasionally add other instruments as supportive layers, drawing from influences like late-era Talk Talk, The Dirty Three, and the instrumental soundtrack tradition, landing somewhere in between ambient country and free jazz. Their sophomore LP Lapse in Passage shows the duo excavating new territory - while their debut album landed them an opening slot on Ryley Walker’s December 2018 tour, the second is a step up in instrumentation, layering, and production. Beginning with the tightly-constructed, cinematic opener “Derived from Retinas,” Mute Duo make it clear their twang-encrusted soundscapes are as structured as they are sublime.

Experimental musician Claire Rousay and visual artist Dani Toral have been in each others’ orbit since young adulthood in San Antonio, but it took a decade for them to find A Softer Focus. Before Rousay had put her compositional gray matter to task for the album’s music, she knew she wanted to work with Toral- being familiar with her past work centering her Mexican heritage. Toral’s vibrant color palette and reinterpretations of comfort in oneself and the natural, vegetative world connected easily with her explorations in communication and intimacy. Historically, Rousay primarily operated in non-melodic experimental music, sculpting compositions from obsessive field recordings, inserting voice-to-text, percussion played via text message sounds, conversations, and daily life. By contrast, the six-song collection and collaborative project A Softer Focus is lush and almost entirely melodic, even veering into pop at a couple points.

Though Rousay created the album’s recordings, Toral created the artwork and visual narrative for the album - the recurring floral motifs and designs, the photography, the video work, and the ceramic whistles that accompany a special edition of the vinyl record. She also assisted in crafting the linguistic framework, assisting with song titles, and coming up with the name of the album - “A Softer Focus” became the album’s central motif, alluding to the meditative or recollective-dream state of creating. Toral, being primarily a painter and ceramicist, took on this challenge of working digitally to create a visual language accompanying the music. She wanted to explore the feelings of present familiarity she felt with Rousay, through warm light and glow while mimicking the flow of the music using her organic soft shapes melding together and creating a portal-like entry to the album. Fittingly, the songs gently amble from one to the next, creating a syrupy, hypnagogic narrative that uses string sections, field recordings, and vocals to touch upon love, friendship, endurance, and transcendence - sounding like what living inside a brain must feel like, oscillating on how far to let its guest in.

Songs like “Peak Chroma” and “Stoned Gesture” are the closest Rousay’s gotten to pop, and are signposts of her growing compositional prowess. It’s on the third track “Peak Chroma” that the first and most wonderful surprise of A Softer Focus arises. The song begins with an airy drone that cuts out right as Rousay’s tastefully autotuned voice emerges alongside cello from Chicago musician Lia Kohl. “Stoned Gesture” also boasts autotuned vocals, though it is a more overtly melancholy composition, perhaps even dirge-like while Rousay brings in field recordings of percussive fireworks that dart around another of clinking ice in a glass.

A Softer Focus is an exciting next step for both Rousay’s compositional practice and Toral’s visual work, showcasing both artists venturing into new territories, and coming out the other side with strengthened friendship and impactful creation. It’s a testament to their trust, playfulness, and candor that we’re allowed to come along for the ride.

ONO began Red Summer in 2015 and finished three years later. It is a record about Chicago, racial violence, and the long arm of history, starting with events as distant - and relevant - as 1619, the year the Dutch ship Pearl filled with African slaves appeared on the American East Coast. This is where the record begins - the unsettling, carnivalesque overture “20th August 1619.” Frontperson Travis begins “SOLD! 23 ‘Negars!’ N-E-G-A-R-S!! FIELD ‘Negars’ good as Gold! Money down!” It’s a jarring moment, but what’s not jarring about the arrival of slavery? Ono frequently packages disturbing lyrics or content into absurd, even catchy songs. Take the groovy funk track “I Dream of Sodomy,” an ONO live staple for nearly six years. P Michel’s earworm bassline is a persuasive siren, so much so that when the chorus - “I Dream of Sodomy” repeated multiple times - hits, somehow it’s hard

Here lies a reissue of the first release from legendary long-running Chicago group ONO, Kate Cincinnati. ONO originally self-released the music in an edition of 300 tapes, and it shares several traits with the music of today's ONO. travis's singing moves effortlessly between gospel, blues, opera and noise registers; Shannon Rose Riley plays a maelstrom of music on her horn of choice, here saxophone; bandleader P. Michael Grego quietly orchestrates bass, guitar and lap guitar, creating a musical Jenga tower. If this is your first time with ONO, hop on board and see why Moor Mother, Black Midi, Algiers and countless other acts love them so. If you're already a fan: don't walk - run.

On Hindsight, Nick Zanca's first album as a singer-songwriter, Zanca leads a crack band of musicians from all over New York's musical map. After nearly a decade making electronic music under the name Mister Lies, Zanca began focusing his energies as a producer, working with adventurous up-and-coming artists such as Wendy Eisenberg and Lucy Liyou and sculpting songs of his own. Hindsight moves boldly beyond the synthetic textures of his early career, blending AOR, jazz fusion, electroacoustic improv, and even musical theater into wholly organic music. He examines age-old quandaris from his own unique viewpoint: the dehumanizing effects of industry and capitalism, a childhood developmental diagnosis, a difficult romantic situation. It's unapologetically itself, honest - and relatable. It doesn't equivocate: Zanca's world is ours, too.

In Horror Vacui, Paris-based, Iran-born 9T Antiope use a sparse palette of octave mandolin, violin and octave violin, synthesizer and vocals, to build a dynamic world that seems to exist outside of the bounds of time and place. Cinematic, spare, heavy, gossamer, and informed by the band’s work as sound designers and composers for theatre, film and performance art, Horror Vacui is a concept album that explores what sounds have been, what they’ll become, and the nature of memory, dementia and decay. As 9T Antiope attempt to reconcile different worlds, they create the sound of arriving in a new world all your own.

Devon Welsh roars back with a powerful new album. Recorded at Welsh’ home in rural Wisconsin, Come With Me If You Want To Live has all the immediacy of his past work, chock-full of grand slam choruses, and slam dunk singing. The production is tight, spare and cinematic, in the classic pop (or Majical Cloudz) mold. “I wanna grow and I will change,” Welsh sings. Here’s proof. It’s his sharpest solo statement to date, his first album since 2019’s True Love, and his first widely distributed solo LP.

Over the past decade, Siavash Amini’s compelling electronic music has quietly garnered praise from Pitchfork, The Guardian and AllMusic. From his home base in Tehran, Iran, Amini has collaborated with artists like Rafael Anton Irisarri and 9T Antiope, and regularly uses literature, film, mysticism, and medieval Iranian culture as musical launchpads. Amini’s new album, Eremos, illustrates a passage from Avicenna, the preeminent philosopher and physician of the Islamic Golden Age: one can move out of darkness, he writes, by confronting the darkness within. The results are - even for Amini - uniquely immersive, cinematic and moving: a landmark.

Fresh off a tour with The Armed, and on the heels of countless releases and collaborations, Patrick Shiroishi’s music is as vital and stirring as ever on I Was Too Young To Hear Silence. Where his breakout release, 2021’s Hidemi, used choruses of saxophones and vocals to memorialize his grandfather, I Was Too Young To Hear Silence expands the scope of his remembrance. Shiroishi’s chosen instruments are alto saxophone, glockenspiel, and a cavernous parking garage through which the former’s melodies reverberate. It’s an apt setting for Shiroishi’s continuing confrontation of the legacy of Japanese concentration camps.

Blight Year is a cosmic black metal bulldozer, On Anti-God Hand’s second album, frontman Will Ballantyne enlists engineer Colin Marston (Krallice, Indricothere, Gorguts, etc.) and powerhouse drummer Greg Fox (Liturgy, Ben Frost, Colin Stetson). Together, they veer from pummelling odd time signatures and downtuned riffs into ascendant, widescreen climaxes that subvert tired black metal tropes. Ballantyne is an in-demand performer, playing guitar for DEBBY FRIDAY’s breakout album GOOD LUCK (Sub Pop), writing and performing electronic music as City, and performing endurance performance art with Chinese collective TRANCE. The result is an ideological and sonic crystallization that pushes Anti-God Hand’s cosmic black metal into something still more emphatic, distinctive, dynamic.

Acclaimed experimentalists Lawrence English (AUS) and Lea Bertucci (NYC) travel the world on Chthonic, a shape-shifting ambient collaboration. The pair have impressive resumes. In the last five years alone, English has collaborated with William Basinski, Loscii and Merzbow, and Bertucci has, over a decade-plus, released numerous wide-ranging, innovative releases and presented her music at prestigious museums around the world (MOMA, Walker Museum, ReWire, Unsound). Here they branch out into new approaches (trans-hemispheric collaboration) and instruments (Bertucci plays cello, flute, violin and lap steel). The results are deeply compelling and rooted in vastness of geological scale and time. It’s all here – the emotion, the scale, the density, the fear, the wonder, the dirt. Chthonic is for everyone, but if you’re a head, you already know this is a special release. Get in quick while there’s enough wax to go around. This version of Chthonic comes as a 1xLP. The vinyl is pressed as a opaque disc.

If We Stayed Alive is the first LP from legendary Minneapolis band 12 Rods - and presents their first new music in twenty-two years. It’s an excellent introduction to one of the most acclaimed, talked-about bands of the turn of the century, and what some have called one
of the best indie bands of the ‘90s. Pitchfork raved about Gay? and Split Personalities, and a collaboration with Todd Rundgren, 2000’s Separation Anxieties, followed. Bandleader Ryan Olcott wrote, recorded and played everything you hear on If We Stayed Alive. “To be honest,” he says, “I think it’s the best material I’ve had to offer so far.” Its sound, themes, mood are evergreen. It’s 12 Rods. It’s new. It’s everything we’ve waited for.

A stunning arrangement of visionary, symphonic songs overflowing with moments of bliss, wonder, and profundity, augmented by contributions from members of Dirty Three. From the teenage 4-track tapes she made as Greenpot Bluepot to the recent albums under her own name, Natalie Rose LeBrecht’s recordings have been fascinating dispatches from her progressively deeper dives into her gorgeous, weird, wildly idiomatic aesthetic. Holy Prana Open Game is a jewel of intensely personal cosmic music, created through a remarkable process of openness, craftiness, addition and subtraction. It belongs to a tradition of albums that document a rich, meditative sound as it rises up to join the world outside its creators’ minds: Alice Coltrane’s Universal Consciousness, Harmonia’s Musik von Harmonia, Philip Glass’s North Star, Talk Talk’s Laughing Stock.