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Too Pure are excited to get Moonshake’s debut album, ‘Eva Luna’, back in
print, releasing a deluxe edition, re-mastered from analogue 1Ú2” tape, on
blue double vinyl.
 The reissue contains 19 tracks - the album’s original 10, the non-LP threesong single ‘Secondhand Clothes’, the two B-sides from the ‘Beautiful
Pigeon’ single and four tracks from a November 1992 John Peel session.
The release also includes an 8-page full-colour booklet.
 Moonshake were formed in 1991 by David Callahan (vocals, guitars,
samplers), formerly of The Wolfhounds, and New York musician Margaret
Fiedler (vocals, guitars, samplers). Callahan and Fiedler recorded a demo for
Creation Records, and were joined by John Frenett (bass) and Miguel
Morland (‘Mig’, drums) to record and release the ‘First EP’ for Creation in
1991.
 They took their name from a 1973 single by Can. Both Fiedler and Callahan
wrote songs, and they would (generally) sing on the songs that they wrote.
Their output of shared inspiration produced wildly different results - Can, PIL,
Kraftwerk, MBV and Erik B & Rakim were a melting pot that made
Moonshake somewhat uncategorizable, and as Margaret noted in an
interview, “Moonshake was a collision - it was supposed to be a collision.”
 Their debut album, ‘Eva Luna’, took its name from a novel by Chilean author
Isabel Allende, and the tracks on it are split evenly between the two
songwriters. Callahan’s songs are somewhat angry, dissonant, post-punk
affairs, while Fiedler’s are just as angular, but her quieter sometimes near
whispered vocals compliment her writing partner’s equally. Producer /
engineer Guy Fixsen, fresh from his work on My Bloody Valentine’s
‘Loveless’, was instrumental in making the album cohesive.
 This album has been critically revisited often since its original release, with
Tiny Mix Tapes describing their sound as “an updated take on Can and
Public Image Limited’s rhythmic propulsion with noisier guitar work and a
predilection for sampling influenced by The Young Gods.” Last year, in a
wonderfully long piece to celebrate the album’s 30th anniversary, Louder
Than War wrote that they were blown away by the album’s “utterly
spellbinding, dizzyingly genre-defying approach at articulating explicitly the
sound of a city in the throes of urban psychosis and derangement... ‘Eva
Luna’ really is one hell of a ground-breaking record, and it stands resolutely
alone among all of the albums released in 1992 as no other band has
managed to create anything remotely similar before or since. It really is a
unique album with few equals.”
 In 1993, the original incarnation of the band split up, and Margaret Fiedler
and John Frenett went on to form Laika with Guy Fixsen. Callahan and
Morland continued on with guest musicians, with Callahan ultimately
remaining the band’s sole original member. Moonshake ended in 1997 but
their legacy is indisputable.

2024 Repress

You remember that kung fu kid movie, where he had to wash the motorcycles for years and then...whatever, constant dripping wears away the stone. Dublin-Manchester-NYC'S finest Krystal Klear (Cold Tonic, All City, Tooth Pick) has been honing his skills as a dress man for years and also made a name for himself as an expert in all things (electronic) boogie. 'The Division' is his dapper debut EP for Running Back. Custom-made club studies shifting between sound factories, hot haciendas, heavenly lagoons and chrome-plated dance floors: fast, slow, hard and soft. A love letter to dance music written with pink ink. Oh, and there is 'Neutron Dance' on it as well...yes, the euphoric fun one. once again: dance!

Als sich The Damned 1989 erstmalig trennten, gründete Leadsänger David Vanian die Phantom Chords. Ihre erste Single, ein Cover der John Leyton-Nummer 'Johnny Remember Me' erschien 1990 und ihre Version von 'Town Without Pity' folgte 1992. Erst 1995 wurde schließlich von Big Beat ein Phantom Chords-Album veröffentlicht, das gekonnt die Genres Rockabilly und Gothic Rock miteinander verschmolz. Zu den Tracks gehörten u.a. mit 'Voodoo Doll', 'Big Town', 'Fever In My Blood', 'Jezebel', 'Chase The Wild Wind' und 'Swamp Thing' eine Mischung aus Covern und Originalmaterial, die aufgrund zu geringer Verkaufserwartung der LP eine reine CD-Veröffentlichung war. Jetzt, fast drei Jahrzehnte später, wird dieser Fehler korrigiert und 'David Vanian And The Phantom Chords' endlich auf Vinyl als 2LP-Set (Black Vinyl) veröffentlicht - natürlich auf Ace Records!

We love nothing more than belated success, from the Nightingales' rise to top cult band, to the string of five marvelous Blue Orchids LPs in six years (as much as Martin Bramah had managed in the previous four decades) . . . so give us more. Like David Westlake. The release of NME's C86 cassette heralded a new generation of artists who'd emerged since the preceding C81 assembled a set of acts who'd coaxed new dialects out of punk, rhythms, reggae and the avant-garde. Though variable, C86 became a phenomenon, making a bigger splash and enduring longer than anyone could have predicted. The evolution by 1986 of "independent" or "alternative" music into "indie" brought a modified focus. From C81's post-punk negotiations of politics and cross-cultural influence to C86's compact blasts of, on the one hand, effervescent melodic pop and, on the other, jagged Beefheart-esque racket. Tiny Global Productions has proudly presented already one of the best from C86. The Wolfhounds' leader David Callahan's talent evolved masterfully into Moonshake, and more recently to a strain of blistering raga-folk psychedelia which deals with sociopolitical issues in brilliantly idiosyncratic fashion. And what of another of the best from C86 - the Servants, David Westlake's band? Ambivalent about the invitation to be on C86, Westlake gave the NME a wrong-footing b-side, before keeping a distance from the noise around the compilation. Subsequent releases from Westlake and The Servants and Westlake attracted fine reviews but settled quietly into relative obscurity, despite musical involvement from various Housemartins, Go-Betweens and Triffids, a quest by Stuart from Belle & Sebastian to find Westlake and form a band; not to mention Luke Haines' own five-year presence in the Servants before forming The Auteurs, Baader Meinhof and Black Box Recorder. Westlake went first into the law, then spent years in literary academia. Now the surprise arrival of My Beautiful England. The album is a masterpiece of concept, composition and performance, a conceptual work of truths and reflections of difficult but deft and unflinching expression. "It is not only fashionable now to denigrate England and its past; it is heresy to recognise good in it. The place that made me is disappearing. Its values and traditions. Among them: good manners, humility and clemency, resilience and perseverance, good humour. History is being refashioned – in spirit and material fact – by ideologues unshakeably certain they are in the right, and people are being distanced from their pasts. Some find themselves forced into passive acceptance of new distortions of the past, out of imitativeness or cowardice. I resist. This album is a memorial. Intentionally, a museum piece. It is a personal tribute to the England I knew."

West Mineral return with a followup to Mister Water Wet’s 2019's subtropical ambient slow-burn debut ‘Bought the Farm’, expanding Iggy Romeu's horizons to contrast feverish Afro-Caribbean ambient jazz with jaunty illbient and atmospheric freakouts. Low-lit heat that’s highly recommended if yr into Nick León, Carlos Niño, Kelman Duran, Gonçalo F. Cardoso.

Mister Water Wet continues to excavate the tropical soundscapes that simmer the producer's Kansas City home with his Puerto Rican roots, on a new album of extended vignettes and mood pieces that cross a late 90’s Mo Wax instrumentals vibe with present day feelings of displacement and ennui.

LP opener ‘Bory’ tunes us into Water Wet’s weirdly fuzzed frequencies, where tremeloed strings and found sounds resemble what might have been a lost dean blunt x dean hurley sound design concept for Inland Empire, while ‘I Saw the Green Flash' opens a swirl of strings and traditional rhythms caught in a reflecting pool of canned classical orchestrals and 1950s theremin wails. 'Good Apple’, meanwhile, cranks up the mood with aged x looped piano paired with an undulating, bass-heavy shuffle that wouldn't sound out of place on a Kelman Duran x Martin Denny mixtape.

'When Kennybrook Burned to the Ground' leans into heady jazz vapours, spreading crackle over pitch-fucked horn samples, but it’s the producer's weird use of percussion that keeps us gripped: scattering his arrangements across the grid, mimicking an ensemble of players deployed in irregular formations. Romeu embraces trip-hop on 'Any Other Time', blending Afro-Caribbean percussion with a swung downtempo beat, while ‘Isthmus’ reminds us of the clatterbox plunder of Moonshake’s PJ Harvey hookup ‘Just a Working Girl’ - with all its asymmetric hooks.

The extended closing track 'Losing Blood' takes a leaf out of Fennesz's glitched rulebook, stretching and folding disintegrating loops through an 11 minute descent into the elegiac aether.