Innovative Leisure Vinyl, CD & Tape 65 Items

Yeah, this is the 1st real album by Matthew Tavares (Keys), Chester Hansen (Bass) & Alex Sowinski (Drums).

Mystery-music from the strange and ancient-modern California fringe … thats what the press release says. Kinda fitting!

Limited edition of 500 copies, only available at HHV!

The title of the sixth album from Californian singer-songwriter Nick Waterhouse is more than just the name of one of its tracks. The Fooler is both a clue and a red herring. The Fooler is the observed and the observer, narrator and subject, truth and lie. The Fooler is the shadow and reflection of a city the artist knows sufficiently well to wander with his eyes closed, and a place which very possibly never even existed. The Fooler is not so much an unreliable narrator as a constantly shifting perspective.

The Fooler is the new album by Nick Waterhouse, and it’s a lot. Recorded by Mark Neill (Black Keys; Los Straightjackets; Dave Cobb) in Valdosta, Georgia, it’s a song-cycle of sorts, the arc of the album telling a tale of a city and its denizens.

The result is a record that offers up new riches and fresh perspectives with every spin. From the hidden corners of ‘Hide & Seek’ and the roadhouse soul of ‘Play To Win’ to the primitive, attitudinal, chugging two-chord thrill of ‘Late In The Garden’, it builds inexorably to the drama of the title track and pulsing roll-and-rock of the final pay off, ‘Unreal, Immaterial’. Play it once and it sounds immediately like a collection of great songs. Play it again – and you will – and it feels like a novel or film slowly unveiling its secrets, kaleidoscopic in its narrative complexity. “Especially during this record, I started just becoming what Allen Ginsberg called a pure breath,” says the artist. “I was becoming pure breath with my ideas.”

The boys are back with the new album IV, their most impressive and highly anticipated project yet. IV continues their forward thinking progression, sounding something like a jam session in space between
Can, John Coltrane, Herbie Hancock's Headhunters, Weather Report, Arthur Russell & MF DOOM.

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby was a work so filled with ambition, yearning, and inner contradictions that it came to represent the condition of a nation itself. Yet, at its core, the slim novel tells a story about people and, more often than not, their inability to communicate and connect with one another — forever running on parallel tracks until tragedy finally twines them together. The color green (often in the form of the faded sodium lit dock of Daisy Buchanan) comes to represent longing and unrequited love in an era (the Roaring Twenties) of decadence and spiritual vacuousness. Green is Gatsby’s North Star, simultaneously pointing backward and forward through time toward some unattainable, impossibly balanced version of his own life.

Nick Waterhouse, a century later but once again in the ’20s, takes the color blue as his hue of choice on Promenade Blue. In Nick’s musical and lyrical world, blue is a refraction of his life and memories — shadowing a deep, spiritual San Francisco that fostered his musical vocabulary but has now been stamped out irrevocably; evoking the endless tours, marathon recording sessions, and highs and lows of success he’s experienced in his decade-long career; conjuring romances that were doomed, loves that lingered, and hope for future days of parity and partnership; summoning spirits of people who have gone but permeate his mind forever. That’s the world of Promenade Blue — one that is vivid and magnetic, buoyed by both light and density due to Nick’s newfound collaboration with producer Paul Butler (Michael Kiwanuka, Devendra Banhart). It’s not Gatsby’s New York in the 1920s, it’s Waterhouse’s California in the 2020s. Nick makes that crystal clear throughout the record but particularly on “Santa Ana (1986),” where he wryly sings, “Not from New York / And I never was / I’m from California.” With that, he answers all questions about place and setting…but as anyone who’s ever listened to a Waterhouse record knows: time, though clearly pegged to the dawn of this new decade, is a more malleable concept. Where he is is clear. When he is varies.

We can try as hard as we can to make sense of Promenade Blue, but in reality, context isn’t really needed because the music on the album is so damn magnificent. In no uncertain terms, it represents Waterhouse’s finest hour as a writer and bandleader — leveraging the musical partnerships he has built over many years to put something forth that is so fully realized and felt that it sparkles beatifically, reverberating with energy, heart, creativity, and vibe from start to finish. Nowhere is this more evident than on the album’s opening track, “Place Names,” perhaps the most remarkable song in the Waterhouse catalogue.

The tune is a pocket symphony, à la Spector and Wilson, with winding piano lines locking puzzle-like into a whining, weeping string arrangement courtesy of musical blood brother J.B. Flatt. A small cadre of women backing vocalists shout “Never!” and Nick replies “I never cry on cold days / I never mind a trip on the freeway / Because it’s what I know / Never really set for the big change / Learn to let things go / And say blow wind, blow.” The freeways between LA and San Francisco; the memory of spending a teenaged evening in the Vesuvio Café, which looms over the entrance of City Lights Books; the wind ripping through you on a foggy Bay Area morning, cutting into your bones; the pride one takes in his hometown; the distinct life that he has made (or that has made him) — it’s all here in “Place Names” and, honestly, if the album were to end with this one song, Waterhouse would’ve done his service to the 2020s in terms of musical creativity and vitality. Thankfully for listeners, it’s just the beginning.

The album twists and turns from the opening to the close — from swinging, sashaying jazz and blues (“Spanish Look”) to jittering, crystalline doo wop (“Very Blue”) and pure, loose, languid mood music with just a hint of Mulatu Astatke’s Ethiopian modal magic (“Promène Blue”). Most striking, perhaps, is the use of men’s voices as a backing texture, bringing an unexpected thematic unity to many of the songs. Lower-than-low gospel chants and refrains lend both energy and emotional weight to these pieces, conjuring a whole new mythic world for Nick’s compositions. This is a statement album, one to get lost in and rediscover over and over again.

In the Waterhouse catalogue, “Promenade Blue” represents rebirth and reinvigoration as well as a clarity of purpose that elevates it and may one day set it apart as something resembling a magnum opus. It’s his ‘Gatsby’ and it’s also his way of reintroducing himself to a fanbase that has grown by leaps and bounds over the last couple of years. On this record, he paints a mythic picture of his own life — lost in confusion, grating against time, overheated by false memories, being baptized by nostalgia and a vision of the future that is paradoxically both dark and apocalyptic and sparkling with promise. Sounds a lot like America in the 20s to me. Which 20s though? Which color — green or blue? Which author? Try to figure it out for yourself:

“You were smiling at me / Hanging languidly / On your car door window / Very blue / Very green / The ocean breeze / And shuffling trees / Pacific seas.”

“And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby's wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy's dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter — tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning——

So, we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

Meet Jonah Yano, the Toronto based singer, songwriter, whose journey into
music began with recording music using his cellphone in 2016. Having played
piano and guitar as a child, it wasn’t until Yano moved from Vancouver to
Toronto in 2016 that he began putting his songs online, catching the eyes of
Toronto’s thriving local music scene. Spending the next couple of years obsessively songwriting and practicing vocals, and learning technical skills, he
collaborated with Toronto duo MONEYPHONE on the 2018 song “On Lock”
which became an underground success. Shortly after, Yano released his first
solo single “Rolex, the Ocean'' with producer Joseph L'etranger. Once he
began writing his full EP, he was introduced to frequent collaborators
BADBADNOTGOOD, who are featured on the EP’s title track, “nervous.” Yano’s
work has garnered praise in major music publications like The Fader,
Billboard, Complex, and Exclaim and the attention of Virgil Abloh and Gilles
Peterson along with millions of streams on Spotify and Apple Music. Most
recently, Yano released a highly praised cover of the Majestic’s “Key to Love
(Is Understanding)” also with BADBADNOTGOOD, finding himself in the
natural position of writing the feature length album, 2020’s souvenir.
Following a highly acclaimed 2019 which included the release of an EP
nervous, collaborations with BADBADNOTGOOD, MONEYPHONE, and Nono;
industry praise from The Fader, Billboard, High Snobiety, NME, KCRW and
Exclaim — it’s not a stretch to say Jonah Yano’s highly anticipated debut
feature album souvenir took a lifetime to make.
Yano’s souvenir, mixes his soulful, genre blurring vocals with searing, personal
lyrics. With collaborations from talents like producers Monsune ("strawberry!," "delicate"), Leland Whitty of BADBADNOTGOOD ("poor me," "monarch,"
"anywhere"), and Jacques Greene ("what i can do to help"), souvenir touches
on themes of family separation, healing, and reconciling with the past.
With each track delving into Yano’s personal history, the album tells the story
of his parents separation and absence of his father from his life through the
perspective of each of his family members. Following the separation of his
parents in 1998 in Hiroshima and subsequent move to Vancouver, Yano spent
years with very little connection to his father beyond occasional calls and
birthday presents.
Having not seen each other in 15 years, Yano visited his father in Nagato in the
fall of 2019 with the goal of making sense of their complicated relationship
through music. Both being avid musicians, Yano then incorporated some of
his father’s earlier recordings into his own, while making peace with their
past. The result — the album’s final track, “shoes,” featuring his father Tatsuya
Muraoka and written by him about a pair of shoes he purchased for Yano as a
child. Most of the track was recorded live at some point in the 1990’s in
Hiroshima, with Yano’s own vocals filling gaps between his father’s vocals.
Recording the album in Tokyo’s Red Bull studios, a log cabin in Nagato, Toronto’s Studio 69, and his own home — the intensely personal album incorporates
Yano’s unique sound with a deeply relatable concept, making it the natural
follow-up to an already impressive catalogue.

"His style is all his own"
NPR

"The second coming of soul"
VOGUE

"Brisk, self-contained, a little mysterious, and catchy enough to revisit again and again"
PASTE

"Swedish electronic band Little Dragon and Toronto jazz outfit BADBADNOTGOOD create the type of lush, ambient ear worms that loop in your brain for days on end"
NPR

The final chapter of BADBADNOTGOOD's IV Studio Sessions features a stunning collaboration with Swedish outfit Little Dragon. Yukimi's lush vocals over BADBADNOTGOOD's instrumentation prove yet again that the possibilities & discovery in their musical quest are infinite.

First, let’s meet back up with the Molochs—you remember them, right? Their America’s
Velvet Glory was the earliest burst of light and energy to hit in 2017, an album of electrified
rock ‘n’ roll like Dylan and Lou Reed by a band named after the Ginsberg-ian glutton god
who demanded the sacrifice of all things good and pure. But now it’s 2018 and Moloch
himself is fatter and happier than ever, so the Molochs couldn’t just make another record.
After Glory showed the world who they were, they needed to make an album that showed
what they could do. So Flowers In The Spring is where the Molochs worked harder, thought
harder and fought harder to be the kind of band that the times demand: “I like to think the
world just needs some good solid songs out there,” founder Lucas Fitzsimons says. “It’s
simple. It’s not easy … but it’s simple.”
America’s Velvet Glory, their first-ever record for L.A.’s Innovative Leisure label, had sparked
their first-ever U.S and European tours, first-ever festival sets, first-ever international press
and more. (Top music mag Mojo even said they’d made one of the year’s best albums—“Any
year!”) Follow-up Flowers bloomed almost exactly a year later at Long Beach’s Jazzcats
studio between December of 2017 and January of 2018, where Fitzsimons and longtime
band member Ryan Foster had recorded Glory. By the time they’d returned, they had a slate
of songs that had come to Fitzsimons in flash moments, written on nerve-wracking
transcontinental flights or on isolated nights in an L.A. apartment, captured at once in bursts
of insight or rescued from almost-abandonment in discarded notebooks.
As on Glory, inspiration from Syd Barrett, Dylan, Nikki Sudden and kindred spirit Peter Perrett
of the Only Ones was at work, but the Molochs are endlessly (appropriately?) ravenous when
it comes to things to read and listen to and learn from. On Flowers they’d refine and
recombine their sound, working in that long tradition of poets who cover (or discover)
themselves in pop songs. “To Kick In A Lover’s Door” blows Flowers open with the wit and
precision of the Go-Betweens, and “I Wanna Say To You” draws more from some of
Creation Records’ dreamiest dreamers than it does from any esoteric 60s howlers. “Flowers
In The Spring” and “Pages Of Your Journal” could be two lost Kinks singles from two
different Kinks eras—that Ray Davies-ian venom stays the same, of course—and the
charming/disarming “Too Lost In Love” makes feeling down sound like cheering up, just like
the Clean did.
Yes, they do have their first-ever string section here, and that could confuse some people.
(“People go, ‘Wow, it sounds more mature.’” says Fitzsimons. “What kind of boring shit is
that?”) But Flowers isn’t a grown-up album or a show-off album or a break-up album or a
just-had-to-make-another-album album because the Molochs don’t pick targets that tiny.
Love and disgrace and life and death blur and bleed into each other, but at the core of
Flowers is a story about standing against the inhuman by being more human, however
messily honest that needs to be. (Or like Fitzsimons sings at the end of the record: beware
that “determination by a whole / to destroy the human soul.” Funny how that comes in a
song where he claims he can’t explain everything that happens to him, because he sort of
just did.) So consider their new Flowers In The Spring a meticulously plotted counterattack
against all things Moloch-ian, with clear, concise, immediate, undeniable, simple, direct pop
songs, says Fitzsimons, each sharpened enough to cut through anything it touched. That’s
what he needed to do, he says, because that’s what felt most true. Maybe it really was that
simple, even if it wasn’t easy. Like he’d explain in a song with just seven words: “There’s
something I wanna say to you.”

"Parallels" is the fourth full album released under Jason Chung’s distinctive moniker, Nosaj Thing. Masterfully dimensional, "Parallels" represents the acclaimed Los Angeles-based electronic producer/ composer/ performer’s most diverse, vital work yet. As such, Chung sees "Parallels" represents a kind of redemptive rebirth. The album’s compellingly elusive,
uncategorizable sonics developed out of what he terms a personal & musical “identity crisis.”
According to Chung, working with a group of collaborators on "Parallels" that combined both
longtime friends and new creative partners added “new energy which pushed me not to limit myself. Everything felt fresh and alive.”

Chung is known specifically for his innovative, unexpected musical pairings: Kid Cudi hit up on Nosaj Thing via his MySpace page in 2006, resulting in Chung producing Cudi’s autobiographical classic “The Man on the Moon.” Kendrick Lamar flowed over Nosaj’s ethereal boom bap to create the YouTube gem “Cloud 10”, Chance the Rapper, meanwhile, freaked a Nosaj beat for his 2013 breakout masterpiece “Paranoia” and appeared on Nosaj Thing’s previous LP, 2015’s Fated. Chung and Blonde Redhead vocalist Kazu Makino are also longtime creative partners on each other’s work, her voice appears on "Parallels" as an otherworldly spirit animating the icily ‘80s-synthetic “How We Do.”

Check out this limited edition 12-inch vinyl featuring etched B-side and artwork by longtime Snoop Dogg collaborator Joe Cool.

A-Side plays “Lavender (Nightfall Remix)” feat. Kaytranada & Snoop Dogg, “Lavender (Original Version)” feat. Kaytranada and “Lavender (Nightfall Acappella)” feat. Snoop Dogg.

Khun Narin’s Electric Phin Band initially caught the ears of music enthusiasts via a YouTube clip posted to the Dangerous
Minds blog in 2013 with the caption “Mindblowing psychedelia from Thailand”. Helped by some interpreters at his local Thai
restaurant, sound engineer Josh Marcy travelled to a small village near Lom Sak to record the band professionally. The
result was their eponymous 2014 debut.
The music Khun Narin’s Electric Phin Band plays is called phin prayuk. A phin is a 3-stringed lute, on which the band uses
a string of BOSS effects pedals, including a phaser, distortion and digital delay. The ever-rotating cast of members spans
several generations of musicians who play on hand-made instruments and take special pride in their custom mobile PA
system: an imposing tower of 8 loudspeaker horns atop a huge bass cabinet. A standard engagement sees them
performing during morning rituals, playing several low-key sets from the comfort of plastic lawn chairs. After a mid-day
banquet, they lead a parade through the community to the local temple, picking up more and more partiers along the way.
A fan of their casual yet participatory playing environment, Marcy returned to Lom Sak in early 2015 to record more. II
features covers of traditional Thai pop songs, introduces some new players including new phin players Aob and Bas while
retaining some members of the old guard

Maria Chiara Argirò's album "Closer" departs from her prior work, fueled by an indescribable, dreamlike feeling. The album's core duality of blurred lines and clarity reflects Argirò's philosophy. A philosophy encapsulated in the urgency of her production process and the unique lucidity with which she weaves ambient, dance, jazz, and experimental pop seamlessly together. The album defies easy definition, emphasising an inner self-discovery process, detached from external influences, not only breaking sonic ground but signifying a deeply personal journey, anchoring Argirò to her creation. Argirò has previously seen critical success with support from Pitchfork, The Fader, Flood, Brooklyn Vegan and Clash Magazine.

Dan Tyler and Conrad McDonnell, aka Idjut Boys, are an English duo whose dub-heavy home songs incorporate their playful love of life. The duo met in the late '80s in Cambridge discovering that they shared a passion for similar music. Soon after, both moved to London and established the U-Star parties. The Idjuts' fusion of dub, house, and techno soon caught on and landed them gigs DJing all over the world. McDonnell and Tyler established U-Star Records in 1993, releasing their debut 12" Idjut Boy. They continued releasing numerous 12"s throughout the 90's up to the current period consisting of original productions, along with remixes & re-edits of obscure and not-so-obscure material by other artists and a handful of DJ mixes. A proper Idjut Boys studio album, Cellar Door, was released on Smalltown Supersound in 2012. This was followed by Versions, an album of reworks of material from throughout the duo's career, in 2015. On this 12" vinyl, the Idjuts remix a single, "What's Life" from De Lux's most recent Do You Need A Release.

For RarelyAlways a sense of purpose is rarely far from the surface. That’s been true in everything he’s done, as a musician across a huge range of scenes & sounds, as a writer, as an entrepreneur & youth worker – but now, with his debut solo album Work on the horizon, it’s really coming into focus. With his already broad musical & life experience, he’s in a unique position to offer something entirely new to UK music. Previous support from Billboard, Fader, Wonderland, Pitchfork, Clash & more.

Jimmy EDGAR's latest release for Innovative Leisure, Liquids Heaven, is a psychedelic canvas of future R&B, euphoric bass, mutant tear-the-club-up rap, foundation-splintering noise, and gossamer soul. On a surface level, it is a starburst of avant-garde fusion, collecting a diverse cast of eccentric geniuses and re-configured into an anthology of nü-musique concrete. As with all of his work, there is a deeper and subversive intent. Do not mistakenly believe that Liquids Heaven is merely a technicolor dream of ethereal abstractions. It bangs as hard as anything to ever bump from a subwoofer. Over a polychromatic blast of crunk, 10KCaash and Zelooperz bounce on “Everybody” like a rap rave inside a 31st century space station. “Bite That 2” finds Trinidad James spitting flames over booty-shaking, wall-crumbling bass. On “Ya,” 645ar chirps over a metallic chassis of booming industrial funk. For all the high energy propulsion, there is a counter-balance of melancholic beauty. The album’s opener, “Euphoria” features a Liz Y2K vocal that levitates with plaintive longing. The Milk-aided “Dreams 1000000” sounds like the chimerical soundtrack to a manga utopia that needs to be imagined. Milk also appears on the finale, “Never Leave,” which captures a bittersweet sadness, the wistful emotion of the tide slipping away. Jimmy’s career has been a series of fascinating left-turns. Signed to Warp Records as a teenage electronic music prodigy, his work needs a scholarly bibliography to properly assess. He’s recorded for the world’s most respected imprints (Warp, K7, Hotflush, Innovative Leisure and his own New Reality Now). Raised in Detroit, there have been stints soaking up inspiration in Berlin, Atlanta, LA, and New York. His list of close collaborators includes the most innovative musicians of the millennium, including Hudson Mohawke, Danny Brown, Sophie, Dawn, Mykki Blanco, Vince Staples, and several full projects with Machinedrum as J-e-t-s.

‘Do You Need A Release?’ is De Lux at their poppiest, prettiest, danciest, and also their most abrasive. Built on a hotbed of tension, the songs give release in surprising yet immediately satisfying ways. The verses often pummel you with aggressive beats and grooves only to blossom into open, encouraging, and even angelic refrains. Recorded with their live band at Jonny Bell’s Jazzcat Studio, De Lux give us their firebrand danceable and quirky pop songs with a strong dose of wit, matching the quality and camaraderie of their intense and acclaimed live performances. Their funny and profound sound remains immensely groovy, but the band is more influenced by the fun ‘80s new wave of the Tom Tom Club and the experimentation and imagery of The Clash’s “Sandinista!”. De Lux matters because they make music to dance to and be inspired by.