★Kranky
Shards
Shards is a collection of pieces originally written for various film and TV soundtracks Tim Hecker has scored over the last half decade. These compositions were originally written for scoring projects including Infinity Pool, The North Water, Luzifer, and La Tou
Realistic IX
Realistic IX, the third full-length by the duo of Michael Jones and Turk Dietrich aka Belong, is both an expansion and excavation of their signature acid-washed songcraft. Bleached guitars, metronomic drums, and buried voices rev, swirl, and seethe across shifting gradients of haze and hypnosis, alternately driving and diffuse. Melodies surge closer to the surface, flexing their form before resubmerging into quickening currents of feedback. Elsewhere the elements dissipate into a dusk of murk an…
Recollection
Jacob Long’s fourth full-length for Kranky began as a notion to reimagine Earthen Sea as a “piano trio,” inspired by a year-long immersion in the ECM label catalog, but the compositions soon grew more complex. Elements were chopped and resampled, then layered with bass, drums, percussion, and additional keys. The result is a fusion of live band acoustics and downtempo loops, sculpted into nine smoke-and-mirror dubs of fractured jazz, soft-focus noir, and trip-hop dust: Recollection.
Like the tit…
Temple IV
This is the first vinyl issue of Temple IV, arguably Roy Montgomery's finest solo album, originally released in 1996 on CD. The original album has been enhanced with two newer tracks that constitute side four of the album. Montgomery states: "The two new tracks recorded in 2018 were about asking the question "Can you step into the same river twice?" Heraclitus said you cannot. I say you can ..."
Avec Laudenum
2023 repress. "The first vinyl release in the U.S. for this, the fifth Stars of the Lid album, originally released by Sub Rosa in 1999 and then reissued by Kranky in the fall of 2002. A pivotal album in their career, this marked the first time the duo completely stepped away from the more abstract sound pieces of earlier albums and engaged with the more symphonic and compositional approach that has become the forte of their more recent recordings."
A I A : Dream Loss
'This sound / synapse transposition is as haunting as it is beautiful -- surely Grouper's best.' --Tiny Mix Tapes. 'If past Grouper releases have inhabited abyssal trenches and damp backwoods, here Liz Harris takes us journeying across constellations and stars. Two of the most beguiling albums of the year, exquisitely realized and singularly evocative.' --The Quietus. 'This music feels both spacey and expansive and also oddly intimate and grounded, the work of someone who has mastered her tools …
Equivalents
Canadian composer Scott Morgan’s 12th long-player as Loscil takes its title from an influential series of early 20th century photographs by Alfred Stieglitz, abstracting clouds into miasmic, painterly canvases of smoke and shadowplay. It’s a deeply fitting analog for Morgan’s own musical process across the past two decades, fraying forms and tones into widescreen mirages of opaque texture and negative space. The name Equivalents referred to Stieglitz’s notion of the photographs as being equivale…
N 4
Christina Vantzou follows her role in the superb CV & JAB album for Shelter Press with the starkly haunting No.4 in her chrono-numeric series of albums for Kranky. No. 4 took shape across roughly two years, incorporating a diverse array of musical and conceptual collaborators, including fellow Kranky artists Steve Hauschildt and John Also Bennett (of Forma) as well as Angel Deradoorian (ex-Dirty Projectors), Clarice Jensen, Beatrijs De Klerck and members of Belgium’s Echo Collective. During the …
Grid of Points
Not long after recording her 10th album, Ruins, Grouper (Liz Harris) traveled to Wyoming to work on art and record music. She found herself drawn towards the pairing of skeletal piano phrasing with spare, rich bursts of vocal harmony. A series of stark songs emerged, minimal and vulnerable, woven with emotive silences. Inspired by the idea that something is missing or cold, the pieces float and fade like vignettes, implying as much as they reveal. She describes them as small texts hanging in spa…
Dragging A Dead Deer Up A Hill
2025 stock The third full-length release for Portland, Oregon-based Liz Harris. Harris might have achieved a significant fan base thanks to the whispering, near-ambient vocal crusades of her debut album Way Their Crept and its follow-up Wide, but those with a careful ear would have heard slightly more trapped beneath her fuzzy chain of effects. Dragging A Dead Deer Up A Hill marks a departure of sorts for Liz, which sees her turn down the fuzz boxes which caged (and to some degree defined) her s…
N°3
Gatefold double LP version. "Album No. 3 from Christina Vantzou is the result of a two-year process of composing, arranging, rearranging, experimenting, and melding classical instruments with synths and electronics. Recorded in Belgium with a 15-piece ensemble of strings, horns, woodwinds and micro-choir, the tracks vacillate between orchestral, ambient soundscapes and more structured works that the composer refers to as 'pillars.' The internal core of the record, however, is unwavering. All tra…
N°2
Developed over a four year period, and entirely funded by a part time job working as a SAT university entrance exam mathematics tutor, Nº2 was composed using synthesizers and a variety of unidentified samples that were manipulated beyond recognition. Christina Vantzou then collaborated with Minna Choi of the San Francisco based Magik Magik Orchestra. Vantzou and Choi worked on the notation and arrangements and recorded the compositions with a 15-piece ensemble at Tiny Telephone studios in San Fr…
Mutually Arising
Davis' second album for Kranky following 2004's Somnia. Features two tracks over 51 minutes, "Cosmic Mundra" is a subtle & slowly changing circle, a sun, the sun, the moon. Not the Arpeggio Minimalists, rather: the quiet time stretchers of long tones & long tones sustained & hyper-sustained until buzz value outweighs pitch, sounds seeming to fly around the screen, hyper-spiritual with hardly a word. "Hall of Pure Bliss" is a chord and all sorts of wonderful sounds which live to its left and righ…