lung cycles

ben, new york I run a small label called lily tapes & discs you can ask me stupid things if you want

[lilytapesanddiscs]

2019-07-20 - rochester, ny - friendship, lina tullgren, kinloch nelson, and lung cycles at small world books

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brewster mccloud (1970, dir. robert altman)

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Visit Original Link

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made a mix last week with some stuff I’ve been listening to and a weird recording I found of my grandma talking to my great uncle about me on the phone from when I was a baby

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buffalo, ny, november 3, 2018

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my new album is now available to preorder and will be released next month. this is my first album as “lung cycles” and the first proper album I’ve released in 5 years, recorded over the past few months with a 7-piece band made up of other people whose music I’ve released on my label, lily tapes & discs. the download costs a few bucks but I have plenty of download codes to spare, so let me know if you’d like one. here’s the release blurb, written by my friend emmerich (aka distant reader)

I want to say this is Lung Cycles' first full-length collection of songs in five years, but the word "song" feels out of place. A song implies a singer at center stage, a voice that plays ruler of the song's little kingdom. There's something deist about these new songs, as if the musicians are setting them up and then sneaking away quietly while the music continues to play. Lung Cycles aren't erasing themselves from the picture, but they're not imposing themselves on you either. They're giving themselves the freedom to move into the background and observe the play of light and color and shadow, savoring the loose embrace of a warm night, making their richly textured collective dreams responsive to the outside world's serendipity. Even though Ben Lovell says few words on this album, his delivery is composed and deliberate, and even his silences are articulate. He sings about anxiety and frustration, but he does it in the voice of hard-won calm. It's like he's speaking softly to a confidant late at night, recounting the strains of the day while acknowledging the need to let them go. Perhaps he's just talking to himself while he's on a mind-clearing walk, the kind he mentions in "Blue Rochester moon." Even if he is, the outlook here is profoundly sane. Underneath the shallowness of our modern perpetual stress complex, we can find verdant nooks like this, as long as we can slow ourselves enough to notice them. This is a nook worth noticing.

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I’ve never been a huge low fan before but this new album fucking rules omg

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dunno who still uses this site anymore but since I barely do I figured I’d check in with a quick update - I’ve been working for the past few months on a new album, my first in 5 years and first under the name lung cycles. last month I accidentally knocked my hard drive off my desk while I was working on it and was horrified that it would be lost but thankfully I was able to get all my data back and I’ll be finishing up the album over the next few days. planning to release it on lily tapes in early november, alongside a new album called anemone red by hour, a band from philadelphia. my album will be self-titled and there’s 5 tracks:

As the sun stayed down Hottest day of the year so far (4pm version) Cammal Following me up the stairs Blue Rochester moon

most of them are around 10 minutes long. track 4 is a rewritten version of a track from my split tape with cla-ras, and track 2 is the fourth and final version of a track that has appeared on a few different split tapes, dating back to my 2015 split with ylayali. I recorded the entire album on a tascam 4 track and then sent it out to half a dozen friends and had them record additional parts for it, which I’m just finishing up editing and mixing now. I’m insanely excited about it, it is an extension and refinement of what I’ve been doing over the past few years with my split tapes but involving more people has left me with something that feels completely out of my hands in a very refreshing way. more info soon ;(

[ewkytpmv]

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best albums I heard for the first time this week

IN//VIA - Treading Water - it’s a lot less shadowy and glacial than Meditations and I sort of miss the dire dire docks keyboards but I think I might like it even more? more direct and emotional instead of atmospheric and suggestive. bandcamp.

Jon Hassell - Listening to Pictures (Pentimento Volume One) - surprised at how glitchy and active this is compared to Last Night the Moon Came Dropping Its Clothes in the Street, which I loved because of the way it felt huge and heavy but still managed to glide along without a trace. it’s great though, probably closer to his earlier fourth world stuff than the last album but it still feels like a big step forward. hope it isn’t another 9 years before he puts out another one. very jazzy and flowery, stirs up a weird sense of motion that isn’t quite danceable. youtube.

Pentangle - Solomon’s Seal - it’s Pentangle season!!! one of the few albums I hadn’t heard already from (in my opinion) one of the most underrated bands of the ‘60s/’70s. unsurprised about how electric and psych-tinged this one is considering when it came out but it’s still kind of weird, it still rules as much as anything they did though. youtube.

Nine Inch Nails - Bad Witch - been kind of passively curious about NIN for a while now, they seemed really scary and dangerous when I was a kid but I remember finding out in college that a good amount of people whose tastes I respected were big fans and it only took me another half a decade to get around to actually giving ‘em a listen. this is good. more bands with big discographies that I haven’t felt like digging through should put out 30 minute albums. youtube.

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allegany state park (beehunter trail/barton campground), june 15-16, 2018

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best albums I heard for the first time recently

I AM STARTING OVER FROM SCRATCH BECAUSE THERE’S TOO MUCH THAT I MISSED

Charli XCX - Pop 2/Number 1 Angel - I’m way late to the party here and I’ve definitely gone on record before saying that I can’t stand PC Music, but both of these totally rule, top to bottom. the only parts that don’t really do it for me are the parts where it gets a little too PCM for its own good, but I’ve still been blasting both of em nonstop. youtube / youtube

Haley Heynderickx - I Need to Start a Garden - I feel like I don’t listen to a whole lot of singer/songwriter stuff these days apart from friends who make that sort of music, but I think this is probably the best straightforward album of that kind of thing that I’ve heard all year so far? it’s great, beautiful summery guitar playing and cathartic lyrics. bandcamp.

King Crimson - Discipline - still working my way through King Crimson’s massive discography and surprised yet again at how this is so different from everything else I’ve heard but still amazing in a lot of the same ways. maybe the most consistent album I’ve heard from them yet in that it doesn’t have any obvious fuck-ups in the middle, also maybe their most “fun” album that I’ve heard.

Pusha T - DAYTONA - I’ve never really been invested in Kanye’s career or any of his music so I’m not gonna weigh in on that conversation but this is great - part of what’s kept a lot of classic rap and hip-hop at arm’s length for me is the tendency for rap albums to be 60+ minutes, so at the very least I think it’s kind of cool that this recent album-a-week campaign has been helping to normalize and encourage shorter albums from mainstream artists. it seemed like we were headed that way recently but I guess CD-length albums are back in style now because of the way streaming revenue works or whatever? anyway that all sucks, nobody should ever make an album longer than an hour. youtube.

Rob Noyes - The Feudal Spirit - powerful Fahey-esque solo guitar, but unlike most of the current batch of fingerpickers that people seem hyped up about there are actual tunes here, and they’re beautiful as hell. great summer driving music. bandcamp.

Sarah Davachi - Let Night Come On Bells End the Day - surprise, another great Sarah Davachi album. I think I still prefer All My Circles Run to this one, but it’s beautiful stuff as usual. the last track in particular is stunning. youtube.

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a few photos from tour with naps, 4/20-4/28. full photo album here

[lilytapesanddiscs]

LTD026: NAPS/LUNG CYCLES - SPLIT

With this release we bring the latest dispatch from stalwart LTD contributor naps, continuing a recent string of brilliant releases on labels like Patient Sounds and Tandem Tapes. It’s a continued development of the warm drones and soothing field recordings that have defined naps’ sound, but with a poignant clarity that was only hinted at before now cracked wide open. Lung cycles’ response, an improvised pipe organ performance to an empty cathedral recorded live to tape, plunges us back into the murk. Together, both sides speed across the rust belt toward the sunset, but it’s not getting any closer. Everything’s the same, no matter how much it changes. The world’s not ending, it’s already over.

The twenty-sixth official release from Lily Tapes & Discs. Released in an edition of 75 pro-dubbed goldenrod chrome tapes. Packaged in Brad Paks from Stumptown Printers with artwork designed by Benjamin Torrey and printed by Jeremy Ferris, numbered by hand at LTD Headquarters.

Click here or on the title to stream/purchase/download.

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new split tape out with my buddy naps, just got back from a tour where we sold a bunch of em so don’t wait too long to grab one!

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split tape + midwest tour with naps comin’ next month

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