Mansions & Millions HHV Records 16 Items

Limited Edition of 150 copies, coming with a hologram sticker.

Quantum Web is the new album from Discovery Zone, the experimental pop project of musician and multimedia artist JJ Weihl. Dipping into a pool of musically stylistic depth and flipping themes of omnipresence in advertising and corporate culture sterility into aesthetic guideposts for her omnivorous compositions, Quantum Web represents the next evolutionary phase of Discovery Zone while arranging the past, present, and future across the infinite, invisible web that interconnects us all. First edition vinyl includes a printed inner sleeve with album lyrics. Music and lyrics performed and written by JJ Weihl Produced and arranged by JJ Weihl and E.T. Recorded and mixed by E.T. at Phantom Studios, Berlin, Germany Additional music written and recorded at The Loft, New York City, NY, at home in Berlin, Germany and at Trixx Studios, Berlin, Germany (Thanks Tim!) Mastered by Heba Kadry, New York City, NY Lacquers cut by Josh Bonati, Bonati Mastering, Brooklyn, NY

Release Date is March 8th, International Women's Day.

"What we're talking about now, is now. How long is now?" New York born, Berlin based musician and film maker JJ Weihl is set to release her debut solo record as Discovery Zone on June 5th via cult Berlin label Mansions and Millions. Her album Remote Control, with its palette of chimes, chirps and shimmers, is a glowing meditation on our contradictory moment in history. In her hands, the limitations of the default setting form a territory of unbounded experimentation, from the system-notification synth funk of "Dance II" to the trance incantations of "Blissful Morning Dream Interpretation Melody." There are bits of sound collage and a lot of operatic robot choirs woven through tight emotional electronic pop. Weihl implements drum machines, vocoder, sound collage, theremin and electric guitar, creating a small laboratory both in the studio and on stage. The experimental aspects of Weihl's music are reflected in the spectrum of playful aesthetics, maintaining a strong focus on emotional and accessible pop melodies. Nostalgia is mixed into more synthetic sound worlds, each song dipping into past and future sonic landscapes.

HHV and the VUT label award 2020 winning label Mansions and Millions come together for the second time to offer you a run of 100 white vinyl copies of a new release. „The Great Design“, the third album by Berlin based indie musician John Moods will be out November 11th on Mansions and Millions. The record was produced by ET and mastered by Heba Kadry.

NALAN, that means quite literally "the screaming one" and "the wailing one". Perhaps also the one who can give suffering a fleeting form through the vibration of her vocal cords. And it is also both the civil name and the new pseudonym under which Nalan Karacagil will release her (at least technically speaking) debut album "I'm Good. The Crying Tape."

The record is conceived, it couldn't be otherwise, as a kind of modern siren song that should literally make you cry. But all this can be interpreted positively, especially on the musical side. The album also sounds like skating on Tempelhofer Feld in Berlin, warm summer wind and breaking into the swimming pool as a distant memory of youth. A time machine to the teenage years, when the world seemed to consist only of pain and joy.
Accordingly, the record is composed of melancholy-tinged and cheerful songs, electronic synth surfaces, Timbaland-esque and 90-jungle inspired drum machine beats on one side of the spectrum, guitars and drums on the other.

So why technically the debut album? Well, in recent years, Nalan appeared mostly as part of the group Gaddafi Gals. But besides that, she also released her first solo EP “ugly” in December 2018, at that time still under her moniker slimgirl fat, under which she continues to DJ, while two EPs had already been released under the name Nalan381 before Gaddafi Gals. So far, so complicated. Anyway, for her upcoming first solo album she is now working for the first time with the Berlin label Mansions and Millions.

“I'm Good. The Crying Tape”: this is also the most personal phase in the work of the musician and writer so far. Right on the first day of the first lockdown, when it was feared that she would really only be able to go out on the street to shop, to spend months in quarantine, she began work, and indeed the first single “I'm Good” was born on that first evening. In the end, it turned into eleven songs.

On the producer side, the musician worked with walter p99 arkestra, who also served as executive producer and is also part of Gaddafi Gals, keyboardist Kiara Bo, and David Tobias of Dürerstuben.
"The album has a bit of a script, each song is like a single chapter for me, in which I highlight themes from different perspectives and moods," says Nalan himself.
"I'm Good," for example, is about the question "How are you?" to which one can almost only answer with a phrase. “Good. what else could it be?”. The single accordingly sounds very cheerful at first, but it quickly becomes clear that much of this is only happening on the surface. As "good" as one was promised, it does not end, that much can be revealed.

In "Only Birds Can Tell" this surface is also broken sound-technically, the piano chords sound melancholic, the 808 hums gloomily. In addition, the artist sings about the tragic loss of her grandmother, with whom she had grown up for a time and about strategies to remain positive and strong despite everything.
The story takes its course. "Bed of Tears" describes a feeling of powerlessness, the doubt about one's own existence, told like an abstract, fantastic film. Nothing seems real, everything like a dream from which you do not wake up, once again fueled by the apparent contradiction between poppy sounds and plaintive vocals.
The bonus track "Son Kez" (English "one last time") in turn is the only song in Turkish. It was inspired by covers songs she published on her Instagram channel, where for once she did not sing in English. The track, as Nalan, who grew up bilingually, describes it herself, could only be written and thought in Turkish. It ironically describes the despair of unrequited love, in which the main character unintentionally turns out to be a stalker in the end.
The slow-building "Crush," the last song on the album, feels like catharsis for everything that came before it. Everything is shouted out, the positive as well as the tragic, for now at least.

Quantum Web is the new album from Discovery Zone, the experimental pop project of musician and multimedia artist JJ Weihl. Dipping into a pool of musically stylistic depth and flipping themes of omnipresence in advertising and corporate culture sterility into aesthetic guideposts for her omnivorous compositions, Quantum Web represents the next evolutionary phase of Discovery Zone while arranging the past, present, and future across the infinite, invisible web that interconnects us all. First edition vinyl includes a printed inner sleeve with album lyrics. Music and lyrics performed and written by JJ Weihl Produced and arranged by JJ Weihl and E.T. Recorded and mixed by E.T. at Phantom Studios, Berlin, Germany Additional music written and recorded at The Loft, New York City, NY, at home in Berlin, Germany and at Trixx Studios, Berlin, Germany (Thanks Tim!) Mastered by Heba Kadry, New York City, NY Lacquers cut by Josh Bonati, Bonati Mastering, Brooklyn, NY
Release Date is March 8th, International Women's Day.

„The Great Design“, the third album by Berlin based indie musician John Moods will be out November 11th on Mansions and Millions. The record was produced by ET and mastered by Heba Kadry.

Available exclusively at HHV: The album in gold! Limited to 100 pieces.

Second album by Magic Island from Berlin-Neukölln. Co-produced by hiphop producer Phong. A fragmented, multimedia album about your neighborhood

The uncanny is Helen Fry’s birthright: both of her parents have a twin sibling. For her, the absence of a genetic double is felt as a lack. When nature reveals itself as a master of eerie duplication, how does one draw a line between organic and mechanical reproduction? Thus, Fry’s plea to her mother for a “Twin” becomes a technological proposal: “so this is the future….if we have the possibility to create functional 3D-printed human organs, why don’t we just print my twin?” If nature is in the business of cloning, why wouldn’t your mother have a 3D printer?

In this world, where it is hard to trace the boundaries of the artificial, a love song becomes a matter of materials science. Feelings can be confused with industrial processes. An emotion might have not only texture but extension; a sentiment might be a membrane, becoming impossibly thin. The prospect of lost passion shades into the promise of a technological miracle. It’s hard to tell whether the request to “turn me on” in “Maybe Not” is a come-on or a friendly computer instruction, robotically repeated. It’s not made any easier by the dispassionate phrases spoken between the choruses: “a sensible desire, a vulnerable reflection.” Is a lover another kind of twin? If yours was 3D-printed, could you tell?

What does all of this actually sound like? Well, beautiful. (The arpeggios of “Plasticine,” a standout on the second volume of the Mansions and Millions label mixtape, might make one teary-eyed.) Technological alienation is an easy theme to find in music today; Future Light Cone distinguishes itself as music for technological domestication, music of the cyborg hearth. Fry’s Classical background comes through in her organ and harpsichord-invoking synth pads, but the tones don’t aspire to an organic realism; nor are they self-evidently artificial. They simply are themselves, comfortable and elegant like a worn-in but finely-crafted set of furniture. On “PCNC 310,” a fantasy about an unstopping milling machine, with Fry (who is also an industrial designer) repeating a priestly intonation of the device’s name and MS-DOS entry code, one can imagine the heavy-duty machine tool positioned in a living room, next to an antique sofa and a loom. That domestic feel likely has a lot to do with how the EP came about. Fry and her collaborator Rémi Letournelle, (of the band Slow Steve) who played on the record as well as producing and mixing it, retreated to a rural east German home to work on Fry’s demos. There they incorporated the setting’s prosaic elements into the recordings, using baskets, cotton swabs, and a neighbor’s cat.

The term ‘future light cone’ refers to the region of space and time that a beam of light will travel through in its lifetime. It’s a nice metaphor for an EP which sees the future unfolding in front of it and takes in all its strangeness with equanimity and poise.

Alone in the world, we find ourselves. Inside ourselves, we find something to share with the world.

The Essential John Moods, a solo album in all senses of the word, is what Jonathan Jarzyna of Fenster found in himself during a summer spent hiking along the Iberian coast, and he now wants to share it with you. A mini-guitar on his back and a copy of GarageBand on his phone allowed Jarzyna to record songs each evening as he arrived in a new town after a long day traveling by foot. (He did, admittedly, add live drum tracks and some additional instrumentation back in Berlin.) The album preserves this peripatetic feeling, each song relating to the next as one city or village relates to its neighbor, its unique situation contrasting with the shared architectural vernacular. Blipping instrumental interludes (“Trainride,” “Pontevedra,” “Coastal Way”) even capture the disordered, delirious feeling of transit hubs and the sleep-bleared mystery of waking on an unfamiliar road.

“I just came alive completely” are the first words Jarzyna murmurs on “New Spring,” invoking the spirit of the album. He speaks not of the liveliness of manic activity, but the heightened, tender sensitivity of presence. It’s a fullness of living captured by the transition from the lush, jangling groove of “The Weight” to the spacious contemplation of “Pawns.” The dreamy echo of the 60s’ and 70s’ soft rock and folk troubadours suffuses the album, and the organ-soaked “Where In The World” even has a psychedelic tinge. But the overall effect is quite contemporary, from the back-of-the-nightbus lounge funk of “Take It Home” (featuring an amazing turn from arch-crooner Sean Nicholas Savage) to the mournful cupboard jazz of “Almost Gone.” “Dark Wall” sounds like a honkytonk ramble alongside a robot tentatively learning to play lap steel. “Leap of Love,” an early album highlight, passes over the listener in shimmering waves, a love song which remains a mystery even to its creator.

In the meditation tape coda “Relax Your Foot,” Jarzyna selects the perfect sample to encapsulate The Essential John Moods’ hopeful receptivity: the late Professor Carl Sagan reminding us that “despite our limitations and fallibilities, we humans are capable of greatness.”

"If it’s written in the stars", says a Bulgarian proverb. In a time shaped by uncertainty and disintegrating securities, trusting in the stars doesn’t seem too far fetched. "Last year, every conversation I had ended with this sentence ", Dena explains, "before I had the album, I already had the title. It’s about believing and trusting in universal connections, trusting that everything will fall into place, eventually."

And all has indeed fallen into place: Four years after her début Flash, If It’s Written marks a new chapter in Dena’s musical and personal development. The product of major transformations in her life and work, If It’s Written is the work of a grown-up woman who has taken matters into her own hands. The record is a celebration of individuality and independence, for the first time Dena has taken over producing the majority of the tracks herself. "For me, this is major progress", she says, "from writing the first song for this album to this point, it’s been such a journey." It took two different versions and four mixes, but now that circle came to a closing and If It’s Written is ready to be released unto the world.

Inviting friends to collaborate on her very own terms, Dena created her own universe: features include the laid back So Wrong, a duet with Canadian indie-crooner par excellence Sean Nicholas Savage, or the serene Things That Mean A Lot, recorded with Filipino cool cats Eyedress & Rhxanders, beautifully describing the emptiness just before a relationship falls apart. Other guests include Berlin-based Argentinian singer Pictorial Candi on the outro If It’s Written or longtime collaborator and friend Erlend Øye on the minimal and bone-dry Speculations.

Chillwave never died. It just made some new friends. "Track Your Mind" the first track on the Yeehai EP, from the laconic Jack Chosef opens with a manipulated vocal sample that could intro an experimental club track à la Night Slugs or a towering Kanyeeseque hip-hop construction. Instead, in drops the half-tempo bass kicks and portentous synths favored by meticulous 80s revivalists, the sorts that dream of a neon video-game Miami or are aficionados of Italian giallo soundtracks and John Carpenter's self-penned scores. But "Track Your Mind" could also be the sound of, for example, Pye Corner Audio's alternate history technological fantasies.

The modernist Dreampop of Magic Island’s Wasted Dawn was catalyzed and nurtured by Berlin. The predominant Casio keyboard was found in the street, the project itself developed under the influence of a close circle of Berlin-based artists and friends, including Touchy Mob and Montreal’s Sean Nicholas Savage, while the compositions strongly reflect both the complex and most simplistic day-to-day emotions, events and surrounding environment. That particular magic has proven charming to many, as this year Magic Island has played at Fusion Festival, Torstraßen festival, C/O Pop Festival, at The Lab Magazine’s Regenerate event series, as well as opening for Fenster (Morr Music), Ballet School (Bella Union), Hundred Waters (OWSLA), Soft Metals (Captured Tracks) and Teen Daze.

Alone in the world, we find ourselves. Inside ourselves, we find something to share with the world.

The Essential John Moods, a solo album in all senses of the word, is what Jonathan Jarzyna of Fenster found in himself during a summer spent hiking along the Iberian coast, and he now wants to share it with you. A mini-guitar on his back and a copy of GarageBand on his phone allowed Jarzyna to record songs each evening as he arrived in a new town after a long day traveling by foot. (He did, admittedly, add live drum tracks and some additional instrumentation back in Berlin.) The album preserves this peripatetic feeling, each song relating to the next as one city or village relates to its neighbor, its unique situation contrasting with the shared architectural vernacular. Blipping instrumental interludes (“Trainride,” “Pontevedra,” “Coastal Way”) even capture the disordered, delirious feeling of transit hubs and the sleep-bleared mystery of waking on an unfamiliar road.

“I just came alive completely” are the first words Jarzyna murmurs on “New Spring,” invoking the spirit of the album. He speaks not of the liveliness of manic activity, but the heightened, tender sensitivity of presence. It’s a fullness of living captured by the transition from the lush, jangling groove of “The Weight” to the spacious contemplation of “Pawns.” The dreamy echo of the 60s’ and 70s’ soft rock and folk troubadours suffuses the album, and the organ-soaked “Where In The World” even has a psychedelic tinge. But the overall effect is quite contemporary, from the back-of-the-nightbus lounge funk of “Take It Home” (featuring an amazing turn from arch-crooner Sean Nicholas Savage) to the mournful cupboard jazz of “Almost Gone.” “Dark Wall” sounds like a honkytonk ramble alongside a robot tentatively learning to play lap steel. “Leap of Love,” an early album highlight, passes over the listener in shimmering waves, a love song which remains a mystery even to its creator.

In the meditation tape coda “Relax Your Foot,” Jarzyna selects the perfect sample to encapsulate The Essential John Moods’ hopeful receptivity: the late Professor Carl Sagan reminding us that “despite our limitations and fallibilities, we humans are capable of greatness.”

Better Person's smoke machine pop over the course of 6 tracks marks his longest release, encompassing the critically acclaimed singles "Sentiment" and "I Wake Up Tired." While the EP's sonic touchstones – torch songs, Sade, Arthur Russell, synthed-up European and Japanese pop from the 80s, French and Italian movie soundtracks – are all unimpeachably romantic, there's a more Romantic undercurrent of isolation that begins from the way It's Only You was made – all recorded on a computer at home.