Sooper Vinyl, CD & Tape 10 Items

Written and recorded in three days during the tumultuous summer of 2020, the Black Plight EP is Chicago multi-instrumentalist NNAMDI's response to the police murder of George Floyd and the subsequent ignition of protests and demands for racial justice that swept the globe.In three explosive post-punk tracks, NNAMDI leans into the heavier noise-rock tendencies of his musical language to explore fundamental political questions of justice for Black Lives in "My life" ("My life / What's it worth to you?"); his mounting anger against racist police violence in "Rage" ("They kill us dead in the street / Outside so everyone sees / They stand and watch while we bleed / Black with a capital B"); and an internalization and reverberation of a call to action in "Heartless" ("Can't sit around and wait for something to change").The EP was Released as a Digital-only project exclusive to Bandcamp on Friday June 5, 2020 in order to raise money for racial justice organizations and community members in immediate need of financial support. It went on to become the Best-Selling album on that Bandcamp Friday, raising over $10,000.00 in 24-hours. The Chicago Tribune named NNAMDI Chicagoan of the Year in 2020, citing_amongst other things_ his public leadership role in raising money for racial justice movements in his hometown of Chicago via the Black Plight EP.NNAMDI wrote, performed, and recorded the Black Plight EP by himself in 3 days.

Pop Matters said that "Nnamdï's sounds are a testament tothe continual melting away of genre distinctions in thecurrent era of (particularly Black) music." His extensivecatalog includes covers significant ground in hip-hop, pop,rock, punk, orchestral, and experimental music. In 2021,NNAMDI expanded his freewheeling sonic explorations for anentrée into the world of pop-infused dance and electronicawith the release of the Are You Happy EP on November 12,2021.Notably, Are You Happy is the only NNAMDI project to datethat he did not produce, perform, and record by himself. Tothe surprise of his fans, NNAMDI bucked that self-imposedprecedent to work with Chicago producer Lynyn. Lynyn is thealias of composer Conor Mackey, NNAMDI's longtimebandmate in the jazz-fusion quintet Monobody. Are YouHappy released shortly before Lynyn's 2022 debut electronicLP lexicon (Sooper Records), which went on to garnersignificant acclaim. DJ Magazine said that "lexicon is likely toset him apart as one of IDM's next visionaries".

160-gram heavyweight Vinyl LP with gatefold jacket displaying the painting series that inspired the music, and the story of Newtok.Newtok is a remote Alaska Native village situated on the Ningliq River, near the west coast of Alaska. Although a very remote and quiet place, Newtok has come face-to-face with climate change. Due to a combination of thawing permafrost, low levels of sea ice, and strong storms, the coastal land of Newtok is eroding dramatically. In 2016, Chicago visual artist Jennifer Cronin embarked on a trip to Newtok to document this changing environment. Upon returning, she spent the next several years developing a series of paintings and screen prints titled Seen and Unseen that captured this eroding landscape. In 2019, Cronin and musical Artist Patrick Mitchell (a/k/a Dusty Patches) began discussing the project after Cronin asked him to perform at the Gallery opening for the series. As a result, Mitchell created this album, Newtok - inspired by Cronin's Seen and Unseen series and the story of Newtok, Alaska. Mitchell is a multi-instrumentalist songwriter and producer from Chicago who has led numerous past projects in the Chicago DIY community including De Triomphe, New Color, and Whiskey Wise. He dove headfirst into synths in 2017 and adopted the electronic alias Dusty Patches. Dusty Patches released his debut project Filthy Four Track Machine: Volumes I & II (2018, Sooper Records), largely made with the Teenage Engineering Pocket Operators and OP-1. In 2020, he released Nocturnal Emissions from the Dablatory, his first project fully realized with modular synthesis.In approaching Newtok, Mitchell composed all of the constituent musical elements of the work and then recorded and live mixed the album during a single live performance on modular synthesizer. The album draws heavily on sprawling ambient synths, electric and acoustic post-punk guitar motifs, cryptic vocal sampling, vintage drum machines, and modular patches that often sound like birds or the sea. The subject matter...

lynyn sounds like if Aphex Twin or Autechre could compose for symphony and shred jazz. Though lynyn is a new Artist, his debut LP lexicon is essential listening for anyone interested in the compositional heights of electronic, synth, and modular music. So, who is lynyn? lynyn is the moniker of Chicago artist Conor Mackey, a working symphonic composer who has scored for institutions including the Illinois Philharmonic Orchestra and Brain.fm (the neuroscience driven musical platform where he is currently lead composer on staff). He is also a guitarist / composer in the Chicago jazz fusion quintet Monobody. After years of quietly mastering the creation of electronic music in his home, Mackey first introduced his electronic alias lynyn as producer of NNAMDI's Are You Happy EP in the Fall of 2021 (Pitchfork described his production on that project as "a novel intersection of Idm" and contemporary pop). lynyn now offers up his debut electronic oevure lexicon via Chicago label Sooper Records. lexicon displays a mastery of both musical composition and sound design, as well as a deep appreciation of the vocabulary and history of the electronic genre_ with particular emphasis on the 90s IDM movement. Throughout lexicon we are propelled through the sounds of musique concrete, footwork, hip-hop, ambience, glitch-core, IDM, drum and bass, dub, break beats, and so much more. These influences work in tandem to produce a linear experience that can be spellbinding, euphoric, and sometimes destabilizing, but without ever feeling listless or wandering. The dense arrangements of lexicon are intentionally constructed with a painstaking attention to the most minute detail, and also with a masterful awareness of the macroscopic sound design profile of the entire work. Synth sequences and modular tones merge with sounds that seem wholly organic to create a series of purposeful movements from start to finish. Mackey is particularly adept at taking disparate, often difficult to control elements and introducing them harmoniously. He is a fastidious architect and designer of sound tinkering away in his modular laboratory. lexicon is an innovative entrant into the history of IDM and electronica with all the makings of an essential contribution. What Mackey accomplishes with lexicon is a progression; he's taking the sum articulation of a genre and attempting to carry it forward by imbuing it with his own unique language as a symphonic composer. His melting together of genres and techniques is a gateway into a more wide-ranging expression of the artform, particularly with respect to the sophistication of melodic composition. The result is arguably a landmark. While rightfully positioning the lynyn moniker as an electronic alias, lexicon leaves no doubt that Mackey is a composer above all else.

Some Things Take Time is an album for the Beat Junkies and the Hip-Hop Headz, the Sample Lords, Crate Diggers, and Arm-Chair Rap Historians. And the Jazz snobs_ perhaps them most of all. A chance introduction led NYC's Cisco Swank and Chicago's Luke Titus into a collaboration where each brought their sophisticated multi-instrumentalist production chops to bear upon something fresh and exciting at the crossroads of Jazz and Hip-Hop. The resulting album is one-part beat tape, one-part Blue Note jazz session. A series of evolving vignettes with their constituent parts transported seamlessly from both the traditionalist past and the unwritten future. Eleven tracks glued together by caffeinated off-kilter beats, holy chord progressions, dusty bebop motifs, and a palette of revealed sonic flourishes_ sometimes acting in service to the occasional vocal performance by Swank or Titus. The album also includes features by some of the freshest talents operating in the overlapping worlds where this project exists: jazz, R&B, and rap. A 24-minute whirlwind sweeps the listener through full-track vocal features by rappers Saba and Femdot, guest production and vocals by Phoelix, vocals by NYC singer-song-writer Malaya, and a pair of cosmic anchor performances from NYC saxophonist Braxton Cook (who Fader called a "jazz prodigy"). It's like On The Corner meets J Dilla's Donuts.

I Am Alicia, The Debut Lp From The Former Leader Of Chicago-Based Art-Rock Outfit Oshwa, Is A Bold Retelling Of Walter's Self-Discovery That Encourages The Listener's Own Story To Take Root In Its Universal Truths; A Soundtrack To Get You Up And Over Life's Hurdles When Feeling Like You Are Your Only Cheerleader. Embracing Influences Spanning...

The Line of Best Fit once said, "Jodi has left us broken, bereft but in awe of a talent that can take a couple of seconds and make it your whole world." On their debut LP Blue Heron, Chicago-based multi-instrumentalist and songwriter Nick Levine's self-described "queer country" delivers a series of soft-spoken intimate moments capable of turning your inner world upside down with a whisper. It is a type of gentle yet deeply powerful songwriting for fans of artists like Jason Molina, Mount Eerie, Karen Dalton, Julie Doiron, and Duster. For Levine, Jodi is tentatively described as an alter-ego, a lens in which they can ask questions, push boundaries and step outside of their inner world. Debut full length Blue Heron captures Levine's continued search for meaning; a search where a couple of chance encounters with a bird-a great blue heron- taught them to embrace the fortuity of creative expression and surrender to its symbolism as a metaphor for understanding their own work, and the world. Levine encountered the blue heron first while writing the project, and again while recording it. In the first encounter, "It pulled me out of a spiral," they say. "Maybe you're not in the amount of control that you think and that's actually a good thing. There's so much life happening outside of your head and that's really grounding to remember." It was this initial chance encounter that urged Levine to get outside of their own head and breathe the bigger picture more deeply into their writing. Later, during their final days of recording those songs, Levine was visited by a second blue heron. For them, it was a sure sign. Committing fully to the symbolism, Levine had a large blue heron tattooed on their back and submerged themself in a freezing Chicago pond as a means to forever memorialize the Blue Heron as both the album cover and title. Marking the dedication to their art - with wings wide open, ready to take flight - it also signifies the power of music, nature and friendship. While Blue Heron claws at the strands of meaning, and tries to make sense of the world, it's a work that ultimately only finds closure in the complete surrender to forces greater than oneself. It embraces chance, coincidence, and fate with a sublime curiosity, ultimately finding meaning in the randomness of it all.

During the past decade, the Chicago-based multiinstrumentalist and producer, NNAMDI, has quietly become one of the most prolific musicians of the modern era. Whether under his own name or one of the many bands he's spent time in, either as a full-on member or merely a touring partner, there's been an endless stream of music that NNAMDI has had his hands in. Pair that with the fact he co-owns his label, Sooper Records (KAINA, Sen Morimoto), and it'd be easy to wonder how he finds time to do anything other than make music. On BRAT, the follow-up to 2017's critically acclaimed DROOL, NNAMDI removes the veil to show just how much effort and energy it takes to work at such a high level without any breaks. That process of finding a balance between NNAMDI the performer and Nnamdi Ogbonnaya the person is what fuels BRAT, an introspective record that's still as dexterous and exciting as anything that's come before, but is intimate and hushed, commanding a listener's full attention from the very start. Like all things he's done before, BRAT proves that genre classifications don't really work here. BRAT is part hip-hop, part indie-rock, part gospel, and part West African music, and in NNAMDI's hands, these seemingly disparate pieces fit together snuggly, as if there was never a question of their compatibility. NNAMDI wrote, performed, and recorded BRAT by himself.

Born in Beirut, Lebanon, Rami Gabriel has been a motive force in rock n' roll, jazz, Arabic, and experimental music communities across North America for over twenty years. In that time, he has released numerous projects across genres and under many names. On his debut LP for Sooper Records, Rami trips all the breakers. In his own name and voice for the first time, That's what I been sayin' is not so much a debut as a conflagration in Rami Gabriel's worldly underground. Drawing on Punk, Krautrock, Dub, No Wave, and lo- fi, the territory occupied by That's what I been sayin' is astringent, minimal, and buzzing with the sound of machines dancing in the wind."I'm used to putting out records based on genre," says Rami of his multiple endeavors. "I was listening to one of the `70s Brian Eno records where he took his experimental work and his songs and put it all together, and I was thinking, `Why don't I try to put all the different ways I've been working for the last couple years onto one record?'" That's what I been sayin' ignites this vision with an album that ranges from the motorik-driven krautrock of "Like a monk" to the unexpected trance-like pairing of "Buzuq synth." That's what I been sayin' is a furnace of Rami's insuppressible impulses, where he undertakes to ask and answer: what is left of punk but making do with what is at hand? At times direct and scorching, at others meditative and wandering, That's what I been sayin' compresses Rami's understanding as a composer, musician, and singer into a restless, 11-track love letter to the underground. For Fans of The Fall, Haruomi Hosono, Brian Eno, and Scientist.