It's that time again, compadres! The stack is real this week, and there's a new zine in store too! Check out these little diamonds...
More in store, perennially...
BLACK DOG ISSUE II: THE DANSE MACABRE
As some of you will be aware, here at VH, we're great lovers of local zines. This is a particularly fine example and available on a limited basis both in-store and online!
If you like folklore, horror, history, photography, mushrooms, poetry and natty stickers (all with that crucial East Anglian flavour), check this tasty little fellow out! More information below!
Thelonius Monk was one of the truly great piano geniuses on the international jazz scene. Esbjörn Svensson was one of the truly great piano talents on the Scandinavian jazz scene. In some way you knew that they had to meet sooner or later. At last spiritually. And musically. “Plays Monk” is the telling title of the CD from 1996 by Esbjörn Svensson Trio (EST), now released on ACT. Ten of the most beloved songs by Monk, from nocturnal, lovingly caressing “`Round Midnight” to the gay and sprightly “Rhythm-A-Ning”, gets here a becomingly shining new colour.
Monument released through Play It Again Sam is Keaton’s first album since 2016’s Kindly Now. Keaton Henson’s new album Monument is a rare thing. It is an album about loss, and dealing with losing the ones we love, but told, in incredibly candid detail, through the aspects of our lives that surround the trauma itself, about love, ageing, recovery, life, seen through the prism of grief. With the posting of an enigmatic and cryptic goodbye in 2016; Epilogue, Henson’s next project ended up becoming Six Lethargies, a complex and ambitious symphony for string orchestra, dealing with the minutiae of mental illness. He put away the guitar and retreated to his home for three years to compose it. Monument now finds Keaton re-emerging with an album of songs about grief, and how it permeates our lives. The record began when, having recovered from both Six Lethargies and the circumstances that inspired it, Henson moved from London to the wilds of the English countryside, spending long days outside chopping wood, tending to the grounds, and watching birds of prey soaring above. It was from this remote outpost that he finally felt ready to look at a subject he had been avoiding for his entire songwriting career; the decades long illness, and imminent death of his father, who passed two days before he finished recording the album.
Gratien Midonet - A Cosmic Poet From Martinique 1979-1989
Creole poetry, folk mysticism and heavy-grooving cosmic synths combine on this unprecedented survey of spiritual Martinique polymath Gratien Midonet’s first four albums.
Oneohtrix Point Never - Magic Oneohtrix Point Never
The end of 2019 was soundtracked by one of the most unanimously critically acclaimed film scores of recent history, an anxiety-driven joyride paired to the Safdie Brothers’ noir thriller Uncut Gems. Unknowingly, Lopatin captured a universal feeling of dread that cuts even deeper in the current state of world affairs. And now, just as many artists are leaning into a newly discovered darkness as this year closes, Lopatin turns his dial towards a frequency of profound self-awareness on an even deeper journey inwards towards peace. With the backdrop of re-imagined programming for a soft rock-era format that symbolically spans from morning drive into late night hours, Magic Oneohtrix Point Never, the name a reference to a misheard play on words of Boston’s Magic 106.7, is a nostalgic and self-referential career defining body of work, collaging maximalist baroque within atmospheric glitter. Here Lopatin has mastered his own autobiography; an ornate musical double entendre from an artist making the most enlightened music of his career.
Atticus Ross, Leopold Ross, Claudia Sarne - Dispatches From Elsewhere: Music From The Elsewhere Society
Dispatches From Elsewhere (Music From The Jejune Institute) is a meticulously crafted electronic score, composed for the AMC show by Atticus Ross, Leopold Ross and Claudia Sarne. Music From The Jejune Institute and Music From The Elsewhere Society both represent opposing factions in the series.·The score is pressed on black vinyl and housed in a deluxe spined sleeve with printed insert and download card included.·
First time on vinyl. Newly expanded and remastered. A mystifying work of Japanese avant-garde shamanism, Toho Sara’s 1995 debut introduced a radical new sound from Asahito Nanjo (High Rise), Makoto Kawabata (Acid Mothers Temple) and Hisashi Yasuda – playing an array of ancient instruments including tabla, piri, harmonium, biwa, shakujo and hansho the group evokes otherworldly ritual music, meditative and haunting.
On the first of March, 2020, John Darnielle, Peter Hughes, Matt Douglas, and Jon Wurster, aka the Mountain Goats band, visited legendary studio Sam Phillips Recording in Memphis, TN. Darnielle armed his band with new songs and reunited with producer Matt Ross-Spang who engineered last year’s In League with Dragons. In the same room where the Cramps tracked their 1980 debut album, the Mountain Goats spent a week capturing the magic of a band at the top of its game. The result is Getting Into Knives, the perfect album for the millions of us who have spent many idle hours contemplating whether we ought to be honest with ourselves and just get massively into knives.
One night in 1975, a successful tax lawyer named Rafael Machuca had his mind blown in Barranquilla’s Plaza de los Musicos. Overnight he went from a high ranking position in the Columbian revenue authority to visionary production guru of the newly formed record label that bore his name, Discos Machuca, and for the next six years he devoted his life to releasing some of the strangest, most experimental Afro Psychedelia Cumbia and Champeta ever produced.
The 5Rhythms movement practice founder Gabrielle Roth’s dance meditation soundtrack from 1996. Previously only available on CD, first release on audiophile 45rpm double heavy-weight vinyl.
Action keeps Only for Dolphins among family, working with producers and rappers he’s known for years. The Alchemist, Harry Fraud, Budgie, DJ Muggs, Samiyam, Daringer, and Tommy Mas provide crackling psychedelic soundscapes for Bronson’s unique tales.