dyvnzmbr

I'm a bit late to this, but one of my absolute favourite music blogs out there, DAYVAN ZOMBEAR, has started up a Kickstarter to fund DZ TAPES, the record label that's soon-to-be-a-thing. I can't tell you how much great, great stuff I've gotten from that page; it's an absolute goldmine of everything falling under the umbrella of "Experimental", from noise to pyschedelia to lo-fi pop with a whole lot of made-up genres that sound like exactly the sort of thing you want to hear. So with your contributions, DZ TAPES is going to be releasing original up-and-coming artists (oh god, "up and coming", did I really...) which, if the rest of the blog is any measure of taste, will all be fantastic.

Don't think I'd ask you to donate for nothing, though. For your donation of $8[US]/$10[CAN/MEX]/$12[THERE ARE OTHER PLACES?], you'll get a tape (and MP3s) full of ~exclusive~ tracks by a bunch of artists that fall into the (vast) DYVNZMBR vibe, including some big[ger] hitters like Foxes in Fiction, Sleep In, and Chris Rehm (who recently put out a killer record called Worries, etc which I have yet to write about and yes, I do hate myself for being so slow on it). The real cool part is that your donation also buys a tape for one of the contributing artists, so they have something to cherish/sell/show off for their efforts. And you're helping launch what's sure to be an incredible label. Win/win/win.

PUT YOUR MONEY HERE

Carnival

Sleep In - Steady
Sleep In - Amorous
Sleep In - January

I really want to hate Sleep In. Not because I don't like the music - I do - and not because Hamish Duncan is a jerk - he isn't, at least, in my experience - but because he has accomplished so much with his music despite being only 19, thus making me look like a lazy, untalented jerk for also not putting out 4 full-length albums of shoegazey psychedelic meandering. Well, shoot.


And really, the whole discography is pretty grand. Incredibly solid. Unprecedentedly solid. It's a whole mess (in a good way) of genre-hopping/defying denies your (read: my) best attempts at pidgeonholing. It's noisy, it's trippy, it's vaguely catchy, it's expansive when it's not being minimal, it's straightforward when it's not being obtuse, and its the sort of thing that will take more than one listen to grasp (which is my excuse for not posting this much, much sooner after I said I would). From my experience, the whole Sleep In project is just a vast outpouring of ideas, the sort of project that really couldn't have existed, say, 10, even 5 years ago. Truly a product of the digital age, and certainly a musician who understands what it takes to be a musician in this era and, furthermore, knows how to take advantage of it. You can grab Sleep In albums for $1.75 from his own label, Nightgull Records (oh, yeah, he runs a record label, too. At this rate, the next Sleep In release is going to be "the cure for cancer") or get a digital double-album from Enemies List Home Recordings for $5. I literally spent more on bus fare this morning.

I've posted some tracks from Carnival - available with Pyramid from Enemies List - to give you the best 'snapshot' of the Sleep In M.O. From the spacey, wintery jams of "January" to the straight-ahead psych-rocker "Steady" (Magic Lantern would be proud (and also look for a disarmingly spot-on Thurston Moore impression), it's incredibly diverse but smartly unified. You know, they way they used to make albums.