Island Universe Story Two, out now, is the second in an ongoing series of EPs from Roberto Lange, a.k.a. Helado Negro. Not designed to “tease” or “build up to” or kill time between the Helado Negro albums, these releases shadow the LPs, moving darkly alongside them—and, like a shadow, may be more easily described by what they aren’t than what they are.

They aren’t outtakes or afterthoughts or byproducts or B-sides. These are fully filtered, distilled, unified recordings, chapters in a continuous narrative. They’re less like the flipside of a record than they are like the dark side of the moon: always present but (until now) just out of sight. “It’s a parallel to the continuum of the album,” explains Lange. They’re “something next to the albums, on kind of their own timeline,” a second stream, offering an alternate glimpse into Helado Negro’s ongoing process. Says Lange, “This is more of what I do. I’m really making music every day.”

But they aren’t exactly about that process, either. Two is underpinned by collaborations—the orchestral sound on the opening “Stop Living Dead,” for instance, was created with composer Trey Pollard and a double string quartet, and “Mitad del Mundo” features the talents of Wilco’s Mikael Jorgenson—but the Helado Negro project has never operated in a vacuum. From his headquarters in Brooklyn, Lange has always quick to point out the importance of other people, sometimes in other places, who have contributed to his music, and of the collaborative dynamic itself: some aspects of his process, says Lange, “are wildly free, and some of them are very structured and have a large amount of direction. It’s widely variable in terms of what freedoms are given and what control is taken.”

Ultimately, “I like the idea of process,” says Lange, “and then what happens on the other side, too. Both are important to me”—aesthetically satisfying product, as well as experimental process—and like any Helado Negro release, this latest chapter in the Island Universe Story delivers on both counts.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-Av_SVRmtg[/youtube]

Like truth, beauty resides in simplicity. When it manifests itself, it doesn’t require elaborate arguments or proofs; you can’t debate someone into apprehending it. It’s apparent and all it requires is appreciation, or perhaps even love. Such are the songs of Lily & Madeleine.

Our favorite songs from some recent releases, just for summer. Hope you enjoy!

Album art by David Stith!

Love,
AKR

Psychic Temple II is a labor of love envisioned by Chris Schlarb to bring his most far-ranging inspirations to life – as he puts it, “a dream ensemble that could never actually exist.”

Fol Chen make the soundtrack to a future that never was. To listen is to leave the comfort of nostalgia and land with both feet in a bolder 21st century. The False Alarms continues the band’s electro-pop odyssey with a honed character and a distinct palette of sounds. Fol Chen has also traded its cloak of anonymity for defiant confidence featuring Sinosa Loa as its new front voice.

[bandcamp album=1047942745 bgcol=FFFFFF linkcol=4285BB size=grande]

Since 2009, the Los Angeles-area collective has created their signature sound from field recordings and an electronic junk drawer, splicing compound beats and sending warped vocal transmissions. Led by producers Samuel Bing and Julian Wass, Fol Chen’s first two records, PART I: John Shade, Your Fortune’s Made (Asthmatic Kitty, 2009) and PART II: The New December (Asthmatic Kitty, 2010), cemented the band’s place as peddlers of dark pop in the alleys of independent music. Their live entity has a wide artistic reach with a propensity for interactive projects like the Tetrafol, a motion-based sound toy developed with musical interface pioneers Monome. Band events have been presented at sites such as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Annenberg Space for Photography, and the Walker Art Center.

The False Alarms is electronic music with rich chords, progressive beats, and addictive melodies. The band calls their genre “Opera House,” a name lifted from Malcolm McLaren but recoined as beat-driven electronica with grand, operatic gestures and lyrically-dense storytelling. The songs, written by Bing and Sinosa, play together as a surreal journey with a human core, created in a year marked by the physical and emotional loss of family and friends. Fol Chen are obsessively precise engineers of electronic and organic sounds, and the results are songs that move and are moving. On the dance floor or in the bedroom, The False Alarms is a set of pop symphonies that are chopped, screwed, mangled, and beautiful.

Asthmatic Kitty presents The False Alarms: songs of uncertainty, identity, part-time love, loss, and mistaken reality. It’s pop music for people who aren’t sure where or when they are, but who know it’s nowhere they’ve been before.

01. The False Alarms
02. I.O.U.
03. A Tourist Town
04. Hemispheres
05. The Fifth Season
06. Boys in the Woods
07. 200 Words
08. You Took the Train
09. Doubles
10. This Place is on TV

Album credits

Denison’s own peculiar art in making music means going against the grain, and trusting in forces beyond his control. A composer of subtle, deeply sincere albums in the era of instant mp3s, he wrote this self-titled album partly about learning to accept the person, and the artist, he finds himself becoming.

-Book: a lavishly illustrated and exhaustively researched hard cover

64 page book encasing the discs brimming with encyclopedic information

on the opto-sonical world of ‘Queen of the Wave‘. In the words of Paul

Malmström: “It looks so crazy. It looks as the album sounds.  Too much

of everything, in a good way.”

-CD1: The original ‘Queen of the Wave’ album

-CD2:  Other music from the QotW sessions: 6 unreleased tunes,

interludes, outtakes + Easy Listening Queen of the Wave bonus EP by

Yol Gorro (the Sonic Sorcerer featured on the ‘A Night & A Day‘ video)

– Over 40 minutes of music.

-DVD: Packed with videos including…Album Trailer, A Night And A Day,

Go Supersonic, In The Cave, The Storm (Guitar Cobra Version), Salami

Fever, Girl!, Pussy Cat Rock, Go For Blue, The Mischief of Cloud Six,

PLUS QotW instrumentals, 10 minutes of session samples, drum breaks

(free for non-commercial projects), artwork and wallpapers.

[vimeo]https://vimeo.com/47734827[/vimeo]