Viking's Choice: Sound-Foraging Ambient, Dank Drone And Spanish Dance-Pop
M. Sage pours a bubble bath bog of komische bliss, Deathprod returns with his first album in 15 years and Madrid's Cristina Quesada channels Saint Etienne on this week's playlist.
Record labels can be generous, quiet friends. You trust their taste, argue (one-sidedly) about the stuff that sucks, spend hours with each other late at night without speaking, but sharing a language nonetheless. There are a handful of labels like this for me, where the disparate possibilities of music can align in unexpected geometries.
has been one of these friends to me. Matthew Sage, who runs the label, knows that, , , and can exist in the same space. The cassettes' J-cards share a similar aesthetic — mostly found images boxed within rectangles — and signal a solidarity in sound foraging. Aside from the odd vinyl or CD release, that semi-uniformity reminds me of a few labels — , , — that similarly draw me into every cassette.
