Silk For Sale
MICHAEL CLAUS “LAVENDER PALACE” CS (SILK139) $9
Lavender Palace is a portrait of a process more than a place – the result of a creative headspace San Francisco producer (and Silva Electronics boss) Michael Claus describes as “dropping out of the world and entering a flow state.” That heightened sense of spatial focus, dilated and dialed in, colors the collection in subtle shades of dream house, dub techno, and liquid downtempo.
Recorded before and during the strangest days of peak lockdown, Claus found himself drawn to sci-fi notions of fantastical cities and mythic landscapes, hazy realms in the horizon of the mind’s eye. Further inspired by a new and improved studio arrangement in the city, the sessions unspooled in long, low-slung voyages of texture and pulse, restlessness and reverie, “yearning for a better tomorrow.” It’s music of empty streets and guarded hope, percolating at the precipice of futures too real to recognize.
STAGHORNS “EATING FEELINGS” CS (SILK138) $9
Lavender Palace is a portrait of a process more than a place – the result of a creative headspace The latest by Tel Aviv producer Shlomi Zvi aka Staghorns is an eight-track emotional response of moodswing techno and sidewinder house, equal parts anxiety trip and rhythm therapy: Eating Feelings. Recorded across last winter in his city studio, the songs began as bass lines then flowered outward into nuanced dimensions of tension and release, outsider acid and active listening – facing down demons on dance floors and beyond.
Prior collections for Teel and Infinity.Trax (a collaboration with L.A.’s Choopsie) hinted at his gift for low-slung, liberated kinetics but here he cruises through a deeper house of mirrors, from jittery jack and dusty disco to piano stab dubs and endorphin electronica. It’s club music as coping mechanism, alternately spiraling and centered, escapist and psychodynamic. Sound as sonar, leading us back to our truest selves.
MALASSO “GOOD, YOU’RE HERE, IT’S TIME” CS (SILK135) $9
Rogue romantic Maltese producer Salvatore Munzone describes his debut in terms both scenic and star-crossed: “Love songs and heartaches conceived under the year-round Mediterranean sun, to be heard in a beach parking lot, sitting in the car watching the movement of the sea while the music pumps from JBL speakers.”
Good, You’re Here, It’s Time collects 10 tracks of mood system house, proto-techno, and refracted poetics recorded and mixed in fits and starts across the past three years, accruing complexities and contradictions along the way. Lean rhythms trace sunset coasts of club bass, seagull synths, and twilit pads, laced with vocal samples of rapture, doubt, and the need to dance. Munzone cites UK revisionists from Actress to Swayzak to Burial as oblique touchstones but his own sound inhabits a woozy world all its own, attuned to asymmetries, subcurrents, and the sand in the hourglass slipping softly past: “All good things come to an end.”
Boiling Rooms
New + unreleased 2015 trax from SILK HQ for Boiler Room
SILK: The Film
SILK: THE FILM – DIGITAL RENTAL & PURCHASE
(via VHX) $1.99 / $6.99 / $7.99
SILK, the 100% Silk documentary and dance film, is available through VHX and Amazon Instant Video. Shot over two years, the film follows four acts from the label – LA Vampires, Ital, Magic Touch and Maria Minerva – across a lengthy 2012 tour of the UK, Europe and Russia. SILK chronicles the performances, environments, and scenes they passed through: congested underground Parisian clubs, motorcycle showrooms in Bristol, abandoned industrial lots in Moscow, afterhours Berlin compounds, re-purposed World War II gun towers in Hamburg, plus large international festivals (Distortion in Copenhagen, Sonar in Barcelona). The film is punctuated by staged dance sequences conceived, choreographed, and performed by Mecca Vazie Andrews and the Los Angeles Contemporary Dance Company. SILK premiered in 2013 at CPH:DOX in Copenhagen and subsequently screened at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark, as well as la Gaîte Lyrique in Paris. SILK was an official selection at the 2014 Amsterdam Dance Event, Melbourne International Film Festival, and Planete + Doc Film Festival in Poland. The SILK: DELUXE package includes the film as well as four exclusive live sets from the tour by each of the featured acts.