high aura’d “sanguine futures” long playing record

• mercy brown
  
• the northern sky, ablaze
  
• river runs like jewels
  
  
• sleep like the dead
  
• la chasse-galerie
  
• methodist bells

bathetic press release...

high aura'd sanguine futures 33 rpm 12'' ''river runs like jewels'' sanguine futures opens with a slow crawl ; the burden of winter crawling across your back, reaching around your throat, grayed hands with frayed nails grip tight and pull you into an isolated realm of blissful purgatory. you're only 2 and a half minutes in and creatures are crawling out of shadows and your breath is hanging heavy. john kolodij has crafted an auditory trip into territories that feel untouched, unmoved by a human hand, packed with ethereal and earthly blackness; a deep and dense wood, a coal-black night, tarry centers where you find the solitude of 100 year old weeping willows. this is not an album crafted to simply listen and reflect, this is heavy slabs of flesh and blood, moaning, bending, warbling to life, groaning out and sucking you in. shades of scelsi and penderecki collage and wind into spacious suites, built atop a foundation of heavy köner-styled concrete. it's beautiful, but there's a lingering fear of the unknown, and you could lose your leg at your next step. it's breathtaking and beautiful, but you're always careful not to trip too far into these skeletal treescapes. there's deep, rusty veins running to the heart of sanguine futures, pumping a dark crimson fluid, driving the machine to keep humming. there's a clicking film projector casting images onto a sheet of ice. we feel it, it's thrust into the very energy that motivates us; a feeling of love, of life, of solace, of hope and pain and fear and joy and sorrow. this is a span of sounds and tones and textures, woven together as a lifeforce. an album this isn't, an entire affair, spanning our first to dying breaths. heavy, spacious, frightening, and welcoming; all at once. on sanguine futures, kolodij was aided in arranging by type records' john twells, who also produced and mixed the record at seventh door studios in massachusetts. trumpet by the renown greg kelley. james plotkin mastered. simon fowler did the beautiful artwork.

john twells / matt christensen “coasts” long playing record

• the crate
  
  
• burning bridges together

jefre cantu-ledesma “love is a stream” compact disc

• stained glass body (5:28)
  
• star garden (1:24)
  
• loving love (4:49)
  
• when i end & you begin (3:15)
  
• body within body (2:28)
  
• where you end & i begin (5:14)
  
• orbiting love (1:05)
  
• white dwarf butterfly (5:21)
  
• womb night (1:05)
  
• river like spine (4:53)
  
• wild moon and sea (5:00)
  
• mirrors death (4:39)

type press release...

“love is a stream” by jefre cantu-ledesma shoegazing ambience for the noise generation. as a member of san francisco legends tarentel and type’s premier astral travellers the alps, jefre cantu-ledesma is hardly a new addition to the label, so it’s hard to believe that ‘love is a stream’ is his first type solo album. previously releasing on arbor, spekk and his own root strata imprint, this latest album marks his journey into the beautifully cacophonous world of dream pop. shoegaze music has been much maligned in recent years, probably due to its rebirth and subsequent explosion of popularity (which gave rise to hundreds of young bands aping the over twenty-year-old sound). however it was only a fragment of the genre that these bands attempted to re-create, and on ‘love is a stream’ cantu, instead of focusing on tired weeping melancholy ballads, focuses solely on expansive, almost noise-ridden hopefulness. this is the kind of noise we fell in love with when my bloody valentine blew our ear drums performing ‘loveless’, or the kind of harmonic excess we heard on hundredth listen to catherine wheel’s ‘ferment’, but taken into deeper, more abstract realms. ‘love is a stream’ is dedicated to love itself, and the dreamy, shimmering blown-out textures might at first sound like white noise before they ultimately give way to blissful harmony and hidden melody. underneath the grit and growl are hidden guitar parts, synthesizer drones and even vocals (provided by lisa mcgee, john twells and maxwell august croy) that succeed in swelling the dense, tape-saturated songs to heady new heights and belie any influences they might have. on each listen the mind strips away another layer of dust and bones to reveal haunting and deeply moving beauty. the world might be spiralling into despair, but jefre cantu-ledesma has brought us a record that isn’t afraid to share the love. all that’s left to do is drown in it.