Sacred Bones 278 Items

Repress!Breakthrough sophomore album by the rising Belarussian post-punk/synthpop band//The second LP by Belarussian trio Molchat Doma, Etazhi, meaning "Floors", was first released in 2018 on Berlin-based Detriti Records. It became a viral hit, garnering over one million views on YouTube and becoming a legitimate phenomenon on Bandcamp. The band may fly under the radar in their native Belarus, but they've reached huge audiences across Europe and beyond. Six separate vinyl pressings of the album have sold out in quick succession, and Sacred Bones Records is now thrilled to bring the record back in print for good. Molchat Doma (translated as "Houses Are Silent"), founded in 2017 in Minsk, Belarus, stands at the intersection of post-punk, new-wave and synth-pop. Dark yet danceable, and with a heavy dose of goth ethos, their music is reminiscent of the masters that predate them, but make no mistake: Molchat Doma creates a sound and meaning that is immediately recognizable as all their own. The band is comprised of Egor Shkutko, who sings the Russian lyrics in his deep monotone, Roman Komogortsev on guitar, synths, and drum machine, and Pavel Kozlov on bass and synths.RiYL: Depeche Mode, New Order, Drab Majesty, Black Marble

If you purchased a snake plant, asparagus fern, peace lily, or what have you from Mother Earth on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles (or bought a Simmons mattress from Sears), you also took home Plantasia, an album recorded especially for plants. Subtitled “warm earth music for plants…and the people that love them,” it was full of bucolic, charming, stoner-friendly, decidedly unscientific tunes enacted on the new-fangled device called the Moog. Plants date back to the dawn of time, but apparently, they loved the Moog, never mind that the synthesizer had been on the market for just a few years. Most of all, the plants loved the ditties made by composer Mort Garson.
Few characters in early electronic music can be both fearless pioneers and cheesy trend-chasers, but Garson embraced both extremes, and has been unheralded as a result. When one writer rhetorically asked: “How was Garson’s music so ubiquitous while the man remained so under the radar?” the answer was simple. Well before Brian Eno did it, Garson was making discreet music, both the man and his music as inconspicuous as a Chlorophytum comosum. Julliard-educated and active as a session player in the post-war era, Garson wrote lounge hits, scored plush arrangements for Doris Day, and garlanded weeping countrypolitan strings around Glen Campbell’s “By the Time I Get to Phoenix.” He could render the Beatles and Simon & Garfunkel alike into easy listening and also dreamed up his own ditties. “An idear” as Garson himself would drawl it out. “I live with it, I walk it, I sing it.”
But as his daughter Day Darmet recalls: “When my dad found the synthesizer, he realized he didn’t want to do pop music anymore.” Garson encountered Robert Moog and his new device at the Audio Engineering Society’s West Coast convention in 1967 and immediately began tinkering with the device. With the Moog, those idears could be transformed.
“My mom had a lot of plants,” Darmet says. “She didn’t believe in organized religion, she believed the earth was the best thing in the whole world. Whatever created us was incredible.” And she also knew when her husband had a good song, shouting from another room when she heard him humming a good idear. Novel as it might seem, Plantasia is simply full of good tunes.
Hearing Plantasia in the 21st century, it seems less an ode to our photosynthesizing friends by Garson and more an homage to his wife, the one with the green thumb that made everything flower around him. “My dad would be totally pleased to know that people are really interested in this music that had no popularity at the time,” Darmet says of Plantasia's new renaissance. “He would be fascinated by the fact that people are finally understanding and appreciating this part of his musical career that he got no admiration for back then.” Garson seems to be everywhere again, even if he’s not really noticed, just like a houseplant.

Red Vinyl. Jim Jarmusch's crypto-vampire love story film, "Only Lovers Left Alive" won the 2013 Cannes award for best soundtrack. The soundtrack, predominantly by Jozef Van Wissem and SQU"RL, also features Zola Jesus, Yasmin Hamdan and Madeline Follin (of Cults). "Only Lovers Left Alive" which is set against the romantic desolation of Detroit and Tangier, features an underground musician (Adam, played by Tom Hiddleston), who is deeply depressed by the direction of human activities. He reunites with his resilient and enigmatic lover (Eve, played by Tilda Swinton). Their love story has already endured several centuries at least, but their debauched idyll is soon disrupted by her wild and uncontrollable younger sister (Ava, performed by Mia Wasikowska). Can these wise but fragile outsiders continue to survive as the modern world collapses around them?The physical formats of the soundtrack have been out of print for years and the vinyl will cost you a pretty penny on Discogs. Sacred Bones is thrilled to bring this incredible soundtrack back in print on several variants including clear and red splatter vinyl.SQU"RL are: Carter Logan, Jim Jarmusch, and Shane Stoneback. An enthusiastically marginal rock band from New York City who like big drums & broken guitars, cassette recorders, loops, feedback, sad country songs, molten stoner core, chopped & screwed hip-hop, and imaginary movie scores. Jozef Van Wissem is a Dutch minimalist composer and lute player based in Brooklyn.

Soundtrack for the critically acclaimed Jim Jarmusch film Only Lovers Left Alive, starring Tom Hiddleston and Tilda Swinton. The score for Only Lovers Left Alive - a collaboration between Sqürl (Jim Jarmusch, Carter Logan and Shane Stoneback) and Dutch lutenist Jozef Van Wissem - serves as a reflection of the distinct textures of Detroit and Tangier, bridging ancient and modern sounds, entangled and timeless. Avant-Baroque lute weaves through twenty-first century guitar grit, heavy back beats, Moroccan percussion, synth bass, field recordings, and numerous sonic effects to create a cinematic tapestry. Guest vocalist Madeline Follin (Cults) appears on Sqürl's syrup soaked re-interpretation of the Wanda Jackson hit "Funnel of Love". Zola Jesus' commanding vocal soars through Van Wissem's "In Templum Dei". And Yasmine Hamdan's intimate and evocative "Hal", recorded on the set of the film and mixed by Sqürl. The film and soundtrack album were released worldwide in 2014, and quickly earned the group the Cannes Soundtrack Award from a consortium of film and music critics. In the years that have followed it has remained a favorite of critics and fans alike, who have continued to hunt down the limited vinyl copies in existence.

The last we heard from Marissa Nadler, she was soaring through The Path of the Clouds and it's companion EP, The Wrath of the Clouds. Now, on her tenth official full-length record, New Radiations, she returns with a raw, intimate, and breathtaking collection of eleven otherworldly songs. From the first note, Nadler's lush voice and intricate fingerpicking are front and center. She layers Everly Brothers-style harmonies over dreamlike, lonesome soundscapes-fuzzed-out distortion, Hammond organ, and ominous synthesizers-that elevate her warm vulnerability with texture and atmosphere. Each track unfolds like a vignette of a life lived, delivering emotional weight that resonates with quiet intensity. Lyrically, she shape-shifts through time and space-inhabiting characters in an airborne Cessna, a spaceship, a getaway car, and alternate dimensions. Her storytelling is cinematic in scope and deeply personal in impact and the contrast between sweet, catchy melodies and dark, visceral lyrics runs deep. Whether singing from the first-person narrative or channeling these other people, the album taps into the universality of love and loss with gravitas and empathy. Produced by Nadler herself and mixed by Randall Dunn (Earth, Sunn O)))), New Radiations features subtle arrangements from longtime collaborator Milky Burgess-woozy slide guitar, hypnagogic synthesizers, and gritty riffs. Genre-bending yet quintessentially her own, this album freezes the world's noise in a moment of beauty and solemnity. New Radiations is not just another album-it's a career highlight, a testament to Marissa Nadler's singular vision and artistry

Këkht Aräkh is the Ukrainian project founded in 2018 by Dmitry Marchenko. Originally released on the Finnish label Livor Mortis in 2021, Pale Swordsman goes to even greater extents in building a bold and atmospheric sonic palette, and it's now seeing a worldwide reissue via Brooklyn label Sacred Bones. For the sound design of the album, Dmitry was inspired by The Stooges' Raw Power to deliver a more soft sounding album, decisively less "metal". Traditional black metal song structures still persist in songs like "Night Descends" and "In The Garden". However, their rawness and fast tempos is quickly cut through by dark ambient passages in "Amor" and "Intro" and softly played desolate ballads like "Nocturne" and "Lily". The crown jewel is the album closer "Swordsman", a track that displays a superb gothic sensibility, a poem recited over a deeply melancholic piano melody. "The Christian concept of a person ridding themselves of evil to find inner peace or to be able to leave this world safely has become the core inspiration for the song." Dmitry explains "However, this is not the only reading possible. I purposely avoid specifics in my lyrics so that the listener can always give the song their own meaning." The inspiration for the concept of the album also came from David Bowie's The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. "I really enjoy it when an album tells a story about some character so I came up with one." says Dmitry when explaining the origin of the Pale Swordsman. The character is portrayed on the striking album cover art - a figure sitting aloof with a sword and a rose in each hand - and clearly symbolises the romantic juxtaposition of belligerence and fragile beauty that permeates the album's sound and atmosphere. Pale Swordsman delivers a foreboding yet bittersweet melancholy through poetic lyrics, soft interludes, raw and distorted guitars, eerie drums and harsh vocals - a fragile yet potent mix that successfully amplifies the ambience.

Limited Edition Purple with Black and White Splatter Vinyl. For almost everyone, the entry point for discovering the music of Q Lazzarus came via "Goodbye Horses." The song first appeared in 1988, via Jonathan Demme's Married to the Mob, but it would not become fully lodged into popular consciousness until it infamously materialised again in Demme's The Silence of the Lambs in 1991. "Goodbye Horses" felt like a self-contained universe - dreamlike and wholly unusual, an instant classic that left listeners captivated and curious about the mysterious voice behind it. That voice belonged to Diane Luckey, a uniquely talented artist whose music was ahead of it's time and who would ultimately remain largely unrecognised in her lifetime. In conjunction with the release of Aridjis Fuentes' documentary film GoodbyeHorses: The Many Lives of Q Lazzarus, Sacred Bones is releasing a collection of songs that span the entirety of Q's career, showcasing the different eras of her work and the full breadth of her personality. The first collection of music to be given the blessing of Q's remaining family, Goodbye Horses has the distinction of being her first and only full-length release. Recorded between 1985 and 1995, this trove of previously unreleased music reflects some of the most interesting facets of pop music from the past four decades in away that feels both savvy and wildly eclectic. The titular "Goodbye Horses" remains a singular piece of spooky new wave perfection and one might imagine an entire Q Lazzarus album coiled around this aesthetic, but much like singers such as Alison Moyet, Annie Lennox, or Lisa Gerrard, Q's chameleonic voice could lend itself perfectly to a variety of styles and settings. Her cover of Talking Heads' "Heaven" transforms the song into a full-throated power ballad complete with tinkly piano flourishes, while her take on Gershwin's "Summertime" sounds like the kind of dubby club redux that could have been a perfect companion to anything from Nightclubbing-era Grace Jones. Tracks like "My Mistake" and "Hellfire" flirt with house music and showcase just how brassy and belty Q's voice could be when shere ally let loose, while "Don't Let Go" sounds like the kind of bombastic radio single Cher might have released several decades ago. Elsewhere, songs like "Bang Bang" and "I See Your Eyes" espouse the kind of guitar-driven alt-rock sensibilities that, in a parallel universe, could have made them staples on 120 Minutes.

It was winter break at university in Madison, Wisconsin. There was a snowstorm that covered the city with a still white haze. Not a single person in the streets. I was sitting on my bed with a cheap keyboard and a computer, screaming into the void. I barely remember writing the songs. It was a chaotic point in my life. I had no time to think about process or intent. It was a purge. I do remember taking a break from recording, bundling up, and walking through the barren streets while listening to the demos I'd made. The world, at once, felt clear. These songs were a huge leap of faith back then. It was my first time singing without layers of distortion, echo, and reverb. It was the first time I peeled back the layers to find out what was at the core. I'm still on that path today, seeing how far I can push myself into unknown places, whether through clarification or destruction. It's like Stridulum's still here with me, underneath it all." -Nika Roza Danilova

In an effort to sublimate the negative energy surrounding everyone in 2020, legendary Japanese post-rock band Boris focused all of their energy creatively and turned out the most extreme album of their long and widely celebrated career, NO. The band self-released the album, desiring to get it out as quickly as possible but intentionally called the final track on the album "Interlude" with anticipation of a follow-up. The follow-up comes with W the band's debut album for their new label Sacred Bones Records. The record opens with the same melody as "Interlude" in a piece titled "I want to go to the side where you can touch..." and in contrast to the extreme sounds found on NO, this new album whispers into the listener's ear with a trembling hazy sound meant to awaken sensation. On all of W Wata carries the lead vocal duties. In general the styles on the album range from noise to new age, as is typical with one of our generation's most dynamic and adventurous bands, but there is thread of melodic deliberation through each song that successfully accomplishes the band's goal of eliciting deep sensation. Be it through epic sludgey riffs, angelic vocal reverberations or the seduction of their off-kilter percussion, Boris will have you fully under their spell. NO and W weave together to form NOW, a duo of releases that respond to one another. In following their hardest album with this sensuous thundering masterpiece they are creating a continuous circle of harshness and healing, one that seems more relevant now than ever and shows the band operating at an apex of their musical career.

Limited to 500 copies.

Six years before the release of his landmark Mother Earth's Plantasia LP, composer and arranger Mort Garson met experimental film director Skip Sherwood, who was interested in an electronic score for his new movie, Didn't You Hear? While not much is known now about the exact nature of their collaboration, we have Garson's magnificent score as a record of those heady, early days after his life-changing discovery of the Moog synthesizer. Notable for being one of the earliest screen appearances by a young Gary Busey, Didn't You Hear? also boasts one of the first-ever all-electronic movie scores. Though the score was first released in 1970, it sounds as adventurous and futuristic today as it must have then. Originally available only in the lobby of the theater at screenings of the movie in Seattle, the soundtrack LP went out of print shortly after the film's release. It has been a sought-after record for collectors of Mort Garson and early electronic music ever since. Sacred Bones is honored to reissue Didn't You Hear? as it was meant to be heard, taken from the original master tapes and given a pristine remaster by engineer Josh Bonati. Morton S. "Mort" Garson was a Canadian-born composer, arranger, songwriter, and pioneer of electronic music. He is best known for his albums in the 1960s and 1970s that were among the first to feature Moog synthesizers. His best-known album is Mother Earth's Plantasia, a 1976 Moog album designed to be played "for plants and the people who love them." Sacred Bones Records has undertaken the project of giving official, licensed reissues to key releases from Mort Garson's catalog, with the intention of bringing these bold masterpieces to a 21st century audience.

Written and recorded for the highly anticipated return of David Lynch’s cult television classic Twin Peaks, “Snake Eyes” effectively harkens a time when noir R&B was the de-facto soundtrack to hard liquor violence. The instrumental trio Trouble includes Lynch’s son Riley Lynch on guitar, longtime music supervisor for Lynch, Dean Hurley on drums and Alex Zhang Hungtai (Dirty Beaches, Last Lizard) on tenor saxophone. The B-side to the single consists of the bonus “Mother’s Gone;” a menacing companion track also recorded during the band’s only Twin Peaks recording session. There may never be any more music from Trouble, but this 45 serves as physical evidence of the group’s continued existence in a parallel cinematic universe, grinding out late night Roadhouse gigs in the fictitious town of Twin Peaks, Washington.

When it comes to following the beat of their own drum, New York's PSYCHIC ILLS have exemplified the phrase since their beginnings in 2003. The early years saw several releases for Social Registry, tons of time on the road, and collaborations with artists as diverse as Gibby Haynes (BUTTHOLE SURFERS) and Sonic Boom (SPACEMEN THREE/ SPECTRUM). In 2011, their 1st effort for Sacred Bones, ,Hazed Dream" traded in the synthesizer space-outs and raga rumbles, and delivered a record of sunburned psych pop, awash in warm tones and blues damaged songwriting. In 2012 they did two full US tours including a stop at Austin Psych Fest, and had their first trip to China. They recorded ,One Track Mind", their fourth full length, this fall. The album features collaborations with and production by Neil Michael Hagerty of ROYAL TRUX and THE HOWLING HEX. "One Track Mind" is perhaps the most straight-forward rock record the PSYCHIC ILLS have ever made. They will be touring in support of it heavily in both Europe and...

Sea Blue Vinyl. John Carpenter is a legend. As the director and composer behind dozens of classic movies, Carpenter has established a reputation as one of the greatest filmmakers in the history of modern cinema, as well as one of its most influential musicians. The minimal, synthesizer-driven themes to films like Halloween, Escape From New York, and Assault on Precinct 13 are as indelible as their images, and their timelessness was evident as Carpenter performed them live in a string of internationally sold-out concert dates in 2016. Anthology: Movie Themes 1974-1998 collects 13 classic themes from Carpenter's illustrious career together on one volume for the first time. Each theme has been newly recorded with the same collaborators that Carpenter worked with on his hit Lost Themes studio albums: his son, Cody Carpenter, and godson, Daniel Davies.

The last we heard from Marissa Nadler, she was soaring through The Path of the Clouds and it's companion EP, The Wrath of the Clouds. Now, on her tenth official full-length record, New Radiations, she returns with a raw, intimate, and breathtaking collection of eleven otherworldly songs. From the first note, Nadler's lush voice and intricate fingerpicking are front and center. She layers Everly Brothers-style harmonies over dreamlike, lonesome soundscapes-fuzzed-out distortion, Hammond organ, and ominous synthesizers-that elevate her warm vulnerability with texture and atmosphere. Each track unfolds like a vignette of a life lived, delivering emotional weight that resonates with quiet intensity. Lyrically, she shape-shifts through time and space-inhabiting characters in an airborne Cessna, a spaceship, a getaway car, and alternate dimensions. Her storytelling is cinematic in scope and deeply personal in impact and the contrast between sweet, catchy melodies and dark, visceral lyrics runs deep. Whether singing from the first-person narrative or channeling these other people, the album taps into the universality of love and loss with gravitas and empathy. Produced by Nadler herself and mixed by Randall Dunn (Earth, Sunn O)))), New Radiations features subtle arrangements from longtime collaborator Milky Burgess-woozy slide guitar, hypnagogic synthesizers, and gritty riffs. Genre-bending yet quintessentially her own, this album freezes the world's noise in a moment of beauty and solemnity. New Radiations is not just another album-it's a career highlight, a testament to Marissa Nadler's singular vision and artistry

If you purchased a snake plant, asparagus fern, peace lily, or what have you fromMother Earth on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles (or bought a Simmons mattressfrom Sears) in 1976, you also took home Plantasia, an album recorded especiallyfor plants. Subtitled "warm earth music for plants_and the people that lovethem," it was full of bucolic, charming, stoner-friendly, decidedly unscientifictunes enacted on the new-fangled device called the Moog.Before Brian Eno did it, Mort Garson was making discreet music. Julliardeducated and active as a session player in the post-war era, Garson wrote loungehits, scored the 1969 moon-landing and plush arrangements for Doris Day, andgarlanded weeping countrypolitan strings around Glen Campbell's "By theTime I Get to Phoenix."But as his daughter Day Darmet recalls: "When my dad found the synthesizer, herealized he didn't want to do pop music anymore." Garson encountered RobertMoog and his new device at the Audio Engineering Society's West Coast convention in 1967 and immediately began tinkering with the device."My mom had a lot of plants," Darmet says. "She didn't believe in organizedreligion, she believed the earth was the best thing in the whole world. Whatevercreated us was incredible." And she also knew when her husband had a good song.Novel as it might seem, Plantasia is simply full of good tunes.This release marks the first official re-issue of the long sought-after cult classic.Hearing Plantasia in the 21st century, it seems less an ode to our photosynthesizing friends by Garson and more an homage to his wife, the one with the greenthumb that made everything flower around him. "My dad would be totallypleased to know that people are really interested in this music that had nopopularity at the time," Darmet says of Plantasia's new renaissance. "He would befascinated by the fact that people are finally understanding and appreciating thispart of his musical career that he got no admiration for back then." Garson seemsto be every...

T-shirt with two color screenprinted design on tan Gildan soft style shirts. Taylor W. Rushing. Released in celebration of our 8-track label Sacred 8's!

The Sacred Bones Sacred 8's Tee is equipped with the following features:

• rib crew neck with interior tape
• Sacred Bones SBXV artwork screen-printed on front
• regular fit
• 100% cotton single jersey

In celebration of the label's 15th year anniversary Sacred Bones is now repressing this legendary debut on Colored Vinyl for the very first time. The vinyl colour is a mix of black, white & orange! Margaret Chardiet was born and raised in New York City. As a founding member of the Red Light District collective in Far Rockaway, NY she has been a figurehead in the underground experimental scene since the age of seventeen. She describes her drive to make noise music as something akin to an exorcism where she is able to express, her "deep-seated need/drive/urge/possession to reach other people and make them Feel something [specifically] in uncomfortable/confrontational ways." Engineered by Sean Ragon of Cult of Youth, Abandon is Pharmakon's first proper studio album and also her first widely distributed release. The songs on this album were all written and recorded during a turbulent three month time period during which several fundamental life changes forced her to begin living in a completely new way and in a new space. She describes the lyrical themes of this album as being about "Loss. Losing everything. Relinquishing control. Complete psychic abandon. Blind leaps of faith into the fire, walking out unscathed. Crawling out of the pit."

Sacred Bones Records celebrates its 15th year anniversary by repressing this incredible debut by the one and only master of horror on vortex blue vinyl. John Carpenter has been responsible for much of the horror genre's most striking soundtrack work in the fifteen movies he's both directed and scored. The themes can instantly flood his fans' musical memory with imagery of a menacing shape stalking a babysitter, a relentless wall of ghost-filled fog, lightning-fisted kungfu fighters, or a mirror holding the gateway to hell. The music on Lost Themes is there for Carpenter's acolytes to visualize their own nightmares. As is Carpenter's style, repetition is the key to the thundering power of these tracks, their energy swirling with shredding chords, soaring organs, unnerving pianos and captivating percussion. Horror fans will be reminded of Carpenter's past works, as well as ancestors like Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells and Goblin's Suspiria. "They're little moments of score from movies made in our imaginations," Carpenter says. "Now I hope it inspires people to create films that could be scored with this music."

Këkht Aräkh is the Ukrainian project founded in 2018 by Dmitry Marchenko. The debut album Night & Love was initially released on the Finnish label Livor Mortis in 2019 and it's now seeing a worldwide reissue via Brooklyn label Sacred Bones. Dmitry's intent to experiment with standard black metal canons previously seen at play in Through the Branches to Eternity EP (2018) solidify further on Night & Love, he mentions "back then I had an idea of combining Darkthrone's Transilvanian Hunger type of black metal with early Internazionale or Croatian Amor vibe." Described as ambient or atmospheric black metal, this debut presents Këkht Aräkh's signature dichotomy of harsh traditional early Norwegian black metal and the more ethereal and delicate melodies. On the other hand the lyrics are romantic and melancholic, clearly influenced by a stark Gothic imagery, and serve as an extra layer of mystery to the already suggestive body of work. The album beings with a soft acoustic intro in "As the Night Falls_" before descending into the raw and raucous "Elegy for the Memory of Me" and "Den Venstre Hånd På Den Hoyre", both songs that are drenched in the more traditional black metal style of raspy, high-pitched vocals, dense, tremolo- picked riffs and fast paced drums. It is however songs like "Night" and "Love" that really set this album apart. "Night" is a softly spoken word ambient track that with a beautiful piano synth work that permeates throughout it aids in the romantic delivery and conjuring of imagery of the night. "Love" is a spellbinding and melancholic song, equal in its romanticism but one that displays a deeper sorrow and tenderness supported by calming field recordings of trickling water. The intertwining of black metal, dark folk and ambient repeats itself, culminating in a quietly hummed outro "...And Never Ends (Eternal Love)" that alludes to and completes the album's first track.

Germany exclusive edition on White & Blue Galaxy Vinyl. Sacred Bones celebrates its 15th year label anniversary with this repress of the haunting and monolithic May Our Chambers Be Full. "The juxtaposition of Rundle's long distance melodies and Bryan Funck of Thou dredging up his guts to scream into the sky shows two sides working together to create something surprising and new." - The Fader // "The whole LP would be a great release for either artist, but it's the brilliant convergence of sensibilities that sets it apart in the landscape of alternative metal... an excellent entry point for any would-be Thou fans, and a potential game-changer for Rundle ones." - Loud & Quiet

Third album from Chris Stewar as Black Marble, back then newly living in Los Angeles, fresh off a move from New York. As with every Black Marble album, Stewart recorded, produced, and played everything you hear on Bigger Than Life using entirely analog gear, though the process was new. This time around, he wrote everything on his MPC and sequenced it live to his synths - only using the computer to record, not to create. He also approached his vocals in a new way this time, bringing them forward in the mix and retreating from the reverb-drenched affect he has utilized in the past. "Everything about this record from the album art to the title, to the themes to all the sounds on the record is my response to this particular time," Stewart says.

Stars Are the Light, the luminous seventh album by the American psych explorers Moon Duo, marks a progression into significantly new territory. From a preoccupation with the transcendental and occult that informed Ripley Johnson and Sanae Yamada's guitar-driven psych rock, and reached its apotheosis in the acclaimed Occult Architecture diptych, Stars Are the Light sees the band synthesize the abstract and metaphysical with the embodied and terrestrial.ÿ Branching out from Occult Architecture Vol. 2, the album has a sonic physicality that is at once propulsive and undulating; it puts dance at the heart of an expansive nexus that connects the body to the stars. Taking disco as its groove-oriented departure point, Stars Are the Light shimmers with elements of '70s funk and '90s rave. Johnson's signature guitar sound is at its most languid and refined, while Yamada's synths and oneiric vocals are foregrounded to create a spacious percussiveness that invites the body to move with its mesmeric rhythms. With Sonic Boom (Spacemen 3, Spectrum) at the mixing desk in Portugal's Serra de Sintra, the area's lush landscape and powerful lunar energies exerted a strong influence on the vibe and sonic texture of the album.

Shadow of the Sun is the result of a few months of Moon Duo wrangling with a new and unsettling way of being. Working both in a dark basement in Portland, and above ground in sunny San Francisco, these new sounds and songs veered dramatically from groove to groove, revealing sonic textures the duo had not previously explored. The song "Night Beat", with it's woozy dance rhythm, is an attempt at finding joy and acceptance on this new, shifting ground, while "Wilding" plays off the familiar Moon Duo sound, taking refuge in a repetitive, grounding riff-scape. Elsewhere the band gives itself entirely up to the trip, cruising along on the fuzzed rhythms of "Slow Down Low" and "Free the Skull", crashing into the clenched-teeth herky-jerk of Zero, and floating down, down, down, on the narcotic mist of "In a Cloud".

As humans, we are aware of our inner beast and should therefore be able to control it. We understand our hard-wired primal urges and why they exist in an evolutional sense. We understand the relationship between mind and body. Highly evolved and intelligent, we should be able to recognize these genetic hangovers and control them as a means to act positively and move forward as a compassionate species. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Recent global eve...

On Fast Idol, LA-based Black Marble reaches back through time to connect with the forgotten bedroom kids of the analogue era, the halcyon days of icy hooks and warbly synths. Harmonies are piped in across the expanse of space, and lyrics capture conversations that seem to come from another room, repeat an accusation overheard, or speak as if in sleep of interpersonal struggles distilled down to one subconscious phrase. At the same time, percussive elements feel forward and cut through the mix with toms counting off the measures like a lost tribe broadcasting through the bass and tops of a basement club soundsystem. Melodies roll with the fizz and charm of Jacno and phrases repeated are electric torchlight ballads sung after hours in William Gibson's San Francisco. `Somewhere' opens in sombre herald, before dropping into a fast freeway tempo; the glassy synths and crisp beats cut through the anxious moods on `Bodies' and `Try' sits in a lineage with cult bands like Asylum Party. `The Garden' is a journey through a post-apocalyptic cityscape, earthed by the pulse of a drum machine whereas `Ship To Shore' could be a lost Oppenheimer Analysis B-side, and the album's closer `Brighter and Bigger' catches a sentiment like The Dadacomputer has learned to feel emotions. He captures the loneliness of Ray Bradbury's atomic-era sci-fi and the apocalyptic but revolutionary spirit of Godard's Sympathy for the Devil, as in `Preoccupation', the beating heart of the album, which conjures ambivalent scenes of an empty world and the comfort to be found in a shared humanity. Emerging from the early 2000s New York synth scene, Black Marble carried on the tradition of early synthwave pioneers like Martin Dupont and Modern Art who repurposed synths once reserved for expensive studios and stadium rock superstars. Seeking to channel this spirit, Black Marble recalls the gauzy tape wow and flutter of The Membranes and the warbling VCO of Futurisk, carrying on a sound that seeks to channel the future while imprinting residue of the past.

Black Mass is an album of supernatural electronics from synth pioneer Mort Garson, the mastermind behind the cult classic Mother Earth's Plantasia. Originally released in 1971, it's his only release under the Lucifer moniker, and it taps into a profound darkness that may surprise fans of his sunnier work. These songs are Garson's synthesizer interpretations of occult and esoteric phenomena ranging from the Satanic black mass, to exorcism, to witchcraft, and beyond, and they've inspired artists from Coil to Oneohtrix Point Never. This deluxe remastered edition presents the album in full with all original liner notes. About Mort Garson: Morton S. "Mort" Garson was a Canadian-born composer, arranger, songwriter, and pioneer of electronic music. He is best known for his albums in the 1960s and 1970s that were among the first to feature Moog synthesizers. His best-known album is Mother Earth's Plantasia, a 1976 Moog album designed to be played "for plants and the people who love them." Sacred Bones Records has undertaken the project of giving official, licensed reissues to key releases from Mort Garson's catalog, with the intention of bringing these bold masterpieces to a 21st century audience.