★Modern Love
Southside Girl
Jonnine Standish of HTRK returns with a gorgeous fourth solo album, a psychedelic conjuring of a childhood summer spent by the sea. Threading field recordings through impromptu songs captured on a portable 6 track, the album plays like a series of scent memories that flip the mood in a heartbeat - quite impossible not to fall under their spell.
Jonnine has soundtracked our lives for 15 years at this point, her songs - solo and for HTRK - some of the most evocative in recent memory. HTRK’s last a…
Out (Version) / Love (Version)
Modern Love with a new 7” series reserved for asymmetric bangers and pop diversions, opening with a double A-side from Andy Stott, his first single in 11 years. Inna bare, dancehall style ‘Out (Version)’ on the A side feels out skeletal drums and stabs for a pure adrenaline rush in the dance. On the AA, ’Love (Version)’ cranks martial drums for propulsion; a euphoric rhythm searching for a vocal. Aye it’s a special one. Some heat coming in this series, keep it locked.
Le Grand Passage
Big Tip! *300 copies limited edition* Delphine Dora was nearing the end of a three-day prepared piano residency when a technician stepped in to tune her grand piano for her final performance. He removed the objects from the strings and fixed the pitch, leaving Dora with a freshly tuned instrument. Mesmerised by its new sound, she proceeded to switch on her recorder and pour out her soul, channeling, in her own words, “something greater than myself”. The result is some of the most unusual but ele…
Young Gods Run Free
For 46 minutes Alex Zhang Hungtai punctures our perception of linearity, working like a conductor, encouraging percussive flurries to trip and fall over each other, sometimes tempered by contact mic feedback to help skewer the chronology. He’s assisted by three additional percussionists - Wet Hair’s Ryan Garbes and Shawn Reed, and Leonard King - while Signal Decay’s Nick Yeck-Stauffer plays trumpet, with each extra voice blurred into the middle distance, curling like pipe smoke into convulsive w…
Corner Dancer
Tip! Lucy Railton trusts in the nuance of her own creative instincts on an intensely modern, quietly radical new album, her second for Modern Love. Following her 2018 solo debut Paradise 94 (LOVE 108LP), and countless collaborations in the time since, Railton's diverse musical circles here bleed into each other, creating an insoluble testament to a lifelong pursuit of sound. The multi-instrumentalist further articulates her own tonal register, embracing her solo strengths and trusting the proces…
Cold Reading
"Flora Yin Wong’s ravishing interiority finds lucid expression on an absorbing second album for Modern Love, manifesting her instrumental storytelling in a syncretic bind of supernatural themes with hyperrealist, concrète sound design. Through ten parts, Flora crystallises the ennui that followed an uncanny, disorienting trip to East and Southeast Asia. “On an unexpected stopover in Hong Kong after five years away, my friends took me to a Bazi reader one night - something I was curious about, bu…
Woodwind Multiples
Biggest Tip! Mary Jane Leach is a composer focussed on the physicality of sound, its acoustic properties and how they interact with space. She has played an instrumental role in NYC’s pioneering Downtown scene alongside Arthur Russell, Ellen Fullman, Peter Zummo, Philip Corner and Arnold Dreyblatt, as well as devoting years to the preservation and reappraisal of Julius Eastman’s work since his death in 1990, compiling the ‘Unjust Malaise’ 3CD set in 2005 and editing the 2015 book ‘Gay Guerrilla:…
Luxury Problems
** 2023 Pressing, deluxe gatefold violet vinyl 2LP ** Following on from a pair of Extended Players released in 2011 ("Passed Me By" / "We Stay Together") Andy Stott returns to Modern Love with 'Luxury Problems', an 8 track album of new material recorded over the last 12 months.
Five of the tracks on the album feature Alison Skidmore, Andy's onetime Piano teacher whom he hadnt seen since he was a teenager back in 1996. There was no grand gesture in mind, it just sort of happened - but after almos…
Faith In Strangers
2023 pressing on gold vinyl, edition of 500 copies. Double LP version. Faith in Strangers was written and recorded between January 2013 and June 2014, and was edited and sequenced in late July of 2014. Making use of on an array of instruments, field recordings, found sounds and vocal treatments, it's a largely analog variant of hi-tech production styles arcing from the dissonant to the sublime. The first two tracks recorded during these early sessions bookend the release, the opener "Time Away" …
Paloma
*In process of stocking. Limited edition of 500 copies.* Laila Sakini's new album 'Paloma' arrives via Modern Love and is her most striking and ambiguous to date - a pointed and timely meditation on hope and hierarchies that riffs on Zbigniew Preisner's magical "The Double Life of Veronique" score and enduring outsider music tome "The Langley Schools Music Project". Subtly transcendent, fathoms-deep music that's had us in cold sweats for months - highly recommended if you’re into Dominique Lawal…
Passed Me By
*2022 re-press* Andy Stott's radical 2011 bonecrusher returns on its first new pressing for almost a decade, still screwing the dance and heads like nothing else with its lo-sprung suspended takes on boogie dub and claggiest rhythmic thumpers.
The sludgy, slow-motion slug of ‘Passed Me By’ marked a pivotal point when Stott swam against the grain of prevailing currents of the post-dubstep era’s turn toward garage-techno and UKF-inspired percussive house. Working loosely adjacent to a then emergen…
We Stay Together (2LP)
* 700 copies. Pressed on clear vinyl in a plain sleeve, sticker on the shrink-wrap * Andy Stott’s ultra-classic bout of screwed, knackered House is a shapeshifting, hardy perennial whose crushing traction and atmospheric grip has only deepened in the decade (+1) since it was first issued, as part of a now notorious one-two in 2011 beside ‘Passed Me By’. Out of print for almost a decade, it’s now finally available again in a new edition that’s still sounding unlike pretty much anything else we’ve…
The Long Count
Modern Love debut from Delia Beatriz aka Debit; a study of Mayan wind instruments from the late post classical period, rebuilt as synth instruments and deployed with ultimate heft and wooooze.
Like Weather
* 22nd Anniversay Re-Mastered Reissue. Includes a bonus 7" and a download of the album * When you make a record that doesn’t conform, expect to divide opinion. ‘Like Weather’ was released in 1998, on Rephlex - run by Grant Wilson Claridge and Richard D James - an often great label that had a following that couldn't quite deal with electronic music made by a girl - let alone one that used vocals. Everything those lads couldn’t fathom about ‘Like Weather’ is essentially what makes it untouchable; …
Holy Palm
**Deluxe green vinyl edition of 500 copies housed in a gatefold sleeve** Holy Palm is the debut album by Flora Yin-Wong, an artist, writer, DJ and journalist, summoning the ghosts of her life in a masterful meditation on metaphysics, superstition and memory. It’s part collage, part audio diary, part reflection; a sort of private ritual purification that comes highly recommended if you’re into works by Mark Gergis, Philip Corner, Mark Leckey and Hildegard Westerkamp. Following her mesmerising tu…
Louange à l’Éternité de Jésus (from Quatuor pour la fin du temps) - 10"
Louange à l'éternité de Jésus is the fifth movement for cello and piano from Olivier Messiaen's Quatuor pour la fin du temps (Quartet for the End of Time), adapted here for cello and organ. It was composed while Messiaen was a prisoner of war in Stalag VIII-A, Görlitz, Germany, and first performed with other detained musicians inside the Nazi camp in January 1941. Inspired by the Book of Revelation, this music invokes the composers vision of "immutable peace", in its infinitely slow, ecstatic pa…
It Should Be Us
**2020 small repress** Andy Stott’s first release since 2016 and first EP since 2011, It Should Be Us is a double EP of slow and raw productions for the club, recorded this year and following a series of EPs that started with Passed Me By and We Stay Together early this decade. Recorded fast and loose over the summer, these 8 tracks harness a pure and bare-boned energy, melodies subsumed by drum machines and synths; slow, rugged hedonism. It’s all about rhythmic heat and disorientation, pure dan…
Passion
Demdike Stare land a new 9-track doublepack for Modern Love; a delirious odyssey from UKG to angular and freakish rhythmic jackers, highly recommended if yr into their Testpressing series or anything from Errorsmith to Príncipe, Dem 2, Jon E Cash, Wiley to Joy Division, DJ Scud, Equiknoxx, Anthony ‘Shake’ Shakir or Bernard Parmegiani...Since the release of their album Wonderland a couple of years ago, Demdike Stare have been recording material for this new doublepack Passion; an asymmetric re-im…
(F)lute Songs
Four pieces for flute and voice composed between 1985-2018 by Mary Jane Leach, a pivotal part of NYC’s pioneering avant-garde community since the 1970s and an active member of the legendary DownTown Ensemble, working alongside peers including Arthur Russell, Ellen Fullman, Peter Zummo, Philip Corner and Arnold Dreyblatt, as well as devoting years to the preservation of Julius Eastman’s legacy since his death in 1990. Mary Jane's vinyl debut 'Pipe Dreams' arrived last year via the Blume imprint a…
Paradise 94
Astonishing solo debut by acclaimed cellist and composer Lucy Railton. A daring, non-conformist and deviant approach to composition and instrumentation. One side of filigree, multi-layered autobiographical collage-work, the other of raw and phased cello glissandi. RIYL: Mark Leckey, Alvin Lucier, Beatrice Dillon, Nate Young, Valerio Tricoli, Popol Vuh Lucy Railton is a prolific performer who has appeared on countless recordings and collaborations with many important figures in contempora…