3hive

Ambient

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(2-LP set) Now approaching it's 30th anniversary, Brian Eno and David Byrne's My Life in the Bush of Ghosts appears downright visionary. With it's "found" vocals, cut-and-paste arrangements, funked-up rhythms and embrace of influences from all around the globe, the duo's controversial work anticipated the creative cross-pollination and technological innovation of contemporary electronic dance music, world music, hip hop and alternative rock. This updated edition includes several tracks that had been considered for but never made it to the original LP and a smart, informative historical /critical essay by author-musicologist-recording artist David Toop. Also featured are various drum, vocal and ambient multitracks on Side 4.
Eno/Byrne - My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts [Remastered] [180 Gram]
$40.00
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The "Mixing Colours" story continues with "Luminous", adding to Roger Eno & Brian Eno's first duo album on Deutsche Grammophon. Includes "Pewter", formerly a Japan-only bonus track, as well as six brand new tracks. Available on vinyl September 25th.

Roger Eno and Brian Eno - Luminous [Indie Exclusive Limited Edition Yellow LP]
$30.01
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Matt Cutler, aka Lone, presents his 8th album - and first in 5 years - 'Always Inside Your Head'. It marks two major changes, with both a new label and new approach - featuring vocalists for the first time. This deeply textural and ethereal artwork is situated high above the clouds, amidst the heavens, occupying a stratospheric state where swathes of synthesized vapor and azure rays sound like a literal breath of fresh air. A varied selection of music influenced the record, but two main influences were Cocteau Twins and My Bloody Valentine. 'I wanted to approach a range of different styles, but attack them from their angle in a way, so for example on 'Inlove2' I tried to imagine what a Balearic / acid house tune might sound like if it were produced by Kevin Shields', comments Lone. Another key example of Cutler's strange but successful combination of elements is the halcyon bliss of 'Echo Paths', where his trademark fat drums and love for hip hop meet double-time pan pipes, dub effects and dream pop, mixed into a wonderfully lysergic concoction. This rarefied auditory stratus was previously evident in tracks like 'Alpha Wheel 4 (Ambient Mix)' from 'DJ Kicks', 'Under Cherry Blossoms (Minds Eye Reprise)' from 'Ambivert Tools, Vol. 2', 'Pulsar' (from 'Ambivert 4'), and 'How Can You Tell' (from 'Abraxas'), but is now more fully-fledged, broader in scope and even more celestial. In addition to the above, the LP exists somewhere between trip hop on Mo' Wax, 90s Warp, intelligent drum & bass and ambient house. There are heavier forays too, like 'Mouth Of God', where darker clouds emerge, but are pierced like acid lightning with fierce, tearing tech-step bass. Although still firmly rooted in club culture - here Lone shows a definite leaning towards a song-based sound, with several tracks edging towards the same crossover space as the nineties hits which also inspired him - particularly William Orbit's production on Madonna's 'Frozen', and Olive's 'You're Not Alone'. This is especially evident on the bright, spacious brilliance of 'Hidden By Horizons', where vocals and synths swirl around one another, with crisp breakbeats and reggae rolls pushing purposefully through the ether. Despite initially seeming almost entirely sunny of disposition, upon deeper immersion there's lot more beneath the album's surface, both in it's deep pools of immiscible layered elements, and also thematically. When recording Cutler kept in mind a loose narrative based on birth, death, and our existence in-between. He then extended this idea to reach what may happen after death, which is reflected in the sequencing: By penultimate track 'Undaunted' the life reflected in this long player has come to an end, which is then followed by 'Coming In To Being And Passing Away' - an afterlife epilogue, which evokes a transition from this world to the next.
Lone - Always Inside Your Head
$46.00
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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'snew 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.

**Comes with fully restored original booklet with new liner notes by Andy Beta (Pitchfork). All vinyl copies come with seed paper download card – plant it and watch it sprout!**

Mort Garson - Mother Earth's Plantasia [Limited Edition Green LP]
$24.00
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Seattle-based production duo Odesza (Harrison Mills & Clayton Knight) began their meteoric journey in 2012 with Summer's Gone. The following spring, they released the five-song EP My Friends Never Die - a harder-hitting complement to the lush sounds of their debut - and began to build their reputation as a ground-breaking live act. In 2014, they signed to Ninja Tune imprint Counter Records to release In Return, featuring the two gold-certified singles "Say My Name" and "Sun Models", and 2017's A Moment Apart, which would go on to garner two Grammy nominations. The popularity of Odesza's most recent albums has brought with it a newfound audience that is just now discovering Summer's Gone and My Friends Never Die and their standout songs like "How Did I Get Here" and "My Friends Never Die." Mills and Knight have also proved themselves as tastemakers with the launch of the Foreign Family Collective, which is reissuing Summer's Gone and My Friends Never Die back on vinyl.
ODESZA - Summer's Gone
$29.00
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Following it’s surprise digital release, Sigur Rós’ first new studio album in ten years, ÁTTA, is their most intimate and emotionally direct record to date. Few bands cut through the noise and distractions of the world to bring you a pure elemental truth or feeling like Sigur Rós. As you hear on ÁTTA, there’s a new compulsion and drive to the band that comes with the new formation of the line up. Multi-instrumentalist Kjartan Sveinsson is back in the fold – having left the band in 2012 – to join frontman Jónsi and bassist Georg Holm. Recorded across multiple continents - in the band’s Sundlaugin studio in Iceland, the legendary Abbey Road in the UK and a number of studios in the US - ÁTTA leans heavily towards the orchestral, and touches on everything that has made Sigur Rós one of the most ambitious and acclaimed bands of recent times, with close to ten million albums sold, whilst signposting an exciting and expansive possibility for their future. ÁTTA prominently features the London Contemporary Orchestra conducted by Robert Ames, alongside brass performed by longtime Icelandic collaborators Brassgat í bala. It is mixed and co-produced by another frequent collaborator Paul Corley, alongside the band."

Sigur Ros - Atta [Indie Exclusive Limited Edition Yellow 2LP]
$37.00 Video
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