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Free Energy - Free Energy (White Label 7")

$6.98

Eric Copeland - Masterbater 12"

$14.98

The Juan Maclean - The Brighter The Light

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The Juan Maclean - The Brighter The Light

$5.00

album artwork by Bráulio Amado.

1. The Brighter The Light
2. Zone Non Linear
3. You Are My Destiny
4. Get Down (With My Love)
5. Feel Like Movin'
6. Quiet Magician
7. Pressure Danger
8. Can You Ever Really Know Somebody
9. The Brighter The Light

The Juan Maclean return to DFA with a compilation LP of 12-inch singles they’ve amassed over the past six years – re-edited, re-mastered, and ready for fans who may have missed the tracks the first time around. From the dub house sway of 2013’s “You Are My Destiny” to the high-energy stomp of this May’s “Zone Non Linear,” and featuring two never-before-released tracks, “Quiet Magician” and “Pressure Danger,” The Juan Maclean once again justify their longevity as a musical force that is more than capable of repurposing club tracks for every setting.

The Brighter The Light is put together in a way that lends itself to appreciating the sheer banging quality of the songs while simultaneously being able to dance to them in your living room. For example, take “Feel Like Movin,’” which Pitchfork called “gloriously beatific” and “pure DFA gold.” In the new remastered version, the fullness of the keys and the kicks takes over, unfurling across the listener. Deep house rhythms, sparkling synths and a certain spaciousness are what’s emphasized across the record. Gone is the slow-motion melancholy disco from their recent full-lengths – The Brighter The Light is all fierce enthusiasm and dance floor missives, perfect for those who aren’t quite ready to let go of summer.

Juan Maclean is a DJ and producer who has been a mainstay of the New York club scene, as well as maintaining a rigorous international touring schedule, since the release of his first records on DFA in 2002. Vocalist Nancy Whang is his longtime collaborator, best known as a founding member of LCD Soundsystem and a busy touring DJ. Together, the two artists have released an extensive catalogue of 12” singles and full-length albums for DFA, including 2014’s seminal In A Dream LP. The proper follow-up studio album will follow in 2020.

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Factory Floor Album Bundle

$39.98

YACHT - Chain Tripping

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YACHT - Chain Tripping

$5.00

Tracklist:
1) (Downtown) Dancing
2) Hey Hey
3) SCATTERHEAD
4) Loud Light
5) Blue On Blue
6) DEATH
7) Sad Money
8) California Dali
9) Stick it to the Station
10) Little Instant

“We wanted to find a way to interrogate technology more deeply,” explains Claire L. Evans, one-third of the pop group YACHT. “From the ground up,” adds her partner and YACHT founder Jona Bechtolt. The group—rounded out by longtime collaborator Rob Kieswetter—would know: their seventeen-year career has been marked by a series of conceptual stunts, experiments, and attempts to use technology “sideways.” Even the band’s name speaks to this: YACHT is an acronym for Young Americans Challenging High Technology.

Chain Tripping is their seventh album and third with DFA Records. Recorded between the band’s home in Los Angeles and Marfa, Texas, the ten-song collection marks a shift in the group’s relationship with technology. Rather than trying to comment on existing platforms from within their own filter bubble, the band stripped their process down and rebuilt it using a technology entirely new to them—Artificial Intelligence, and more specifically, machine learning.

In order to compose Chain Tripping, YACHT invented their own AI songwriting process, a journey of nearly three years. They first tried to discover any existing YACHT formulas by collaborating with engineers and creative technologists to explore their own back catalogue of 82 songs using machine learning tools. Eventually they created their own working method, painstakingly stitching meaningful fragments of plausible nonsense together from extensive, seemingly endless fields of machine-generated music and lyrics, themselves emerging from custom models created with the help of generous experts in neural networks, deep learning, and AI.

The band’s characteristically frenetic pop sound is toned down on songs like “(Downtown) Dancing,” a scotch-tape disco track that marries an anxious, funky bass groove with the lo-fi sound of the NSynth, a neural synthesizer that uses a machine learning process called latent space interpolation to imagine new sounds in between traditional instrumentation. The NSynth appears all over Chain Tripping, notably on the jewel-like “Blue on Blue,” a euphoric love song wound with surprisingly omnidirectional melodies. The generative composition process “broke us out of a mold of concise, formal, four-bar patterns and let us accept longer, meandering riffs,” explains Kieswetter; like most of Chain Tripping’s standout tracks, the song contains lyrical fragments that coalesce, collapse, and reform with fluid ease. The process also surfaced surreal idioms, like “Loud Light’s” anthemic “I’m so in love / I can feel it in my car,” or the lovely phrase “palm of your eye,” which pins the lilting chorus of the driving “SCATTERHEAD” into place, a song that splits the difference between postmodern rock and no-wave dance music with wiggly ease.

“We saw this album as an opportunity to teach the machine our values, our history, our community, and our influences,“ adds Evans. “This record is a product of a technological moment that is rapidly evolving. It taught us everything we wanted to know about ourselves: how we work, what moves us, and which ambiguities are worth leaning into. We didn’t set out to produce algorithmically-generated music that could ‘pass’ as human. We set out to make something meaningful. Something entirely our own.”

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Altair Nouveau - Space Fortress 12" Vinyl

$9.99

Shit Robot - Wrong Galaxy 12"

$14.98

Shit Robot - Tuff Enuff? 12"

$14.98

LCD Soundsystem - Yeah 12"

$14.98

Wolfram - Amadeus

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Wolfram - Amadeus

$5.00

Tracklist:
1) Scirocco
2) Automatic (feat. Peaches)
3) Graffiti In Tehran
4) My Love Is For Real (feat. Haddaway) [Dance Mix]
5) What Is It Like (feat. Pamela Anderson)
6) Rein (feat. Yung Hurn & Egyptian Lover)
7) Put Me In Your Mobile Phone
8) Catalyst
9) My Love Is For Real (feat. Haddaway) [Live At The Cathedral]

Wolfram makes his triumphant return to DFA with Amadeus, a newly refined take on the Euro-disco pop he’s become known for over the past several years. Released by Public Possession overseas, the record takes the spirit of his 2011 debut full-length and focuses it more specifically towards the dance floor, helped as always by a variety of collaborators: Peaches, Haddaway, Egyptian Lover, Yung Hurn, Pamela Anderson, and more. A singular producer and entertainer, but coexisting in many worlds, Wolfram embeds a good sense of humor throughout his music. From the artists he works with, to his distinctively gleaming melodies, as well as his DJ sets at the likes of Robert Johnson, Wilden Renate, and Griessmuehle, Wolfram is a presence like no other.

On Amadeus, Wolfram zeroes in on the most earworm-y aspects of his past work, concentrating it down until we’re left with succinct, dopamine-inducing bangers. Tracks like “Graffiti in Tehran” and “Rein” recall the hi-octane crunch of artists like Daft Punk, while “Automatic” and “My Love Is For Real” both make use of soaring disco piano, taking the listener on a dance floor odyssey. The world he creates is one of high-gloss and high spirits – low brow, high concept with an Italo tinge, creating a unique brand of anthemic futuristic disco. The album begs one to come along for an irresistible ride in a beat-up vintage Ferrari, faux fur-lined bucket seats not included.

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XLNT - High Tide 12"

$14.98

XLNT - High Tide 12"

$14.98

Tracklist:
1) High Tide
2) High Tide (Secret Circuit)
3) High Tide (Dr. Dunks)

Christened High Tide after the sudden rising of the LA River basin during a particularly epic and rare rainfall, this cosmic slop funk jam was born from the minds of Devin Flynn (Pixeltan) and Eddie Ruscha (Secret Circuit), two individuals with a deep connection to Los Angeles tap water sources. While traipsing through the aisles of an Atwater Village bodega, the two mustered up a plan to create a rhythmic piece so delectable as to turn peoples’ heads inside out and pummel the senses with a wobbly Jah Wobble bass sound and a toy drum machine “no toy” style back beat. They figured if they laced it up with enough electronic scuzz, the masses would be sure to want to sip from its nectar.

When DFA got wind, it was all systems go, and from then on, all relevant parties knew that they should sit on the track for at least five years before it was released, otherwise the world at large would not be ready for it. The remixes are by Eddie himself, as Secret Circuit, and Dr. Dunks, AKA Eric Duncan, a fellow Angeleno (at least at heart). Eric and Devin rolled through the streets as small children, shredding curbs and tagging local ice cream trucks, so it was inevitable they would reconnect and jam on High Tide.

Devin Flynn is an animator, musician and teacher who has worked on projects like Gary Panter's web series Pink Donkey and the Fly and MTV2’s Wonder Showzen. He has previously released on DFA with Pixeltan, a trio—Flynn, Hisham Bharoocha of Black Dice, and singer Mika Yoneta—that recorded with The DFA at the label’s inception, creating two seminal singles. Eddie Ruscha is another DFA veteran, having remixed artists including Wolfram and Museum of Love. He has been making music for decades, as Secret Circuit and with a myriad of other aliases and collaborators, in addition to recording under his own name. He has released on labels like Beats in Space and Emotional Response, among others.

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Larry Gus - Subservient

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Larry Gus - Subservient

$5.00

Tracklist:

1) Total Diseases (Subservience)
2) A Likely Projection
3) Text of Intent
4) Taped Hands Here
5) In This Position
6) Ayler The Pilot
7) The Sun Sections

8) Readers & Authors
9) Classifying A Disease

10) Bare Concrete (Itea 97-09)

Larry Gus (real name Panagiotis Melidis) returns to DFA with Subservient, his fourth release for the label. More pop-oriented than his previous albums, Subservient is a lush combination of “crisis funk pop and trad Mediterranean grooves.” Lyrics sung in Greek and English address Larry’s overwhelming struggles with being a father, husband, artist, and human in 2019. In the artist’s own words, this album is about “trying to understand empathy and act with it on everyday life,” as well as “the imperative of empathy above everything else.”

Subservient is sample-free, a first for Larry, who plays every instrument himself: a drum kit, an SM57 microphone, a guitar, a bass, a TE OP-1 synthesizer, and a Roland JV-1010 synth module. This is fourth-world power pop, as if Alex Chilton was produced by Eno and Hassell. The thoughtful, upbeat arrangements and gentle vocals are spacious and warm, and tend to offset whatever darker tone the lyrics might imply. Larry confronts more acute tensions, such as being a father in Greece during the crisis, and the parallels of a child’s sicknesses and adult ailments, as well as larger, more existential pressures – the grasp of nostalgia, the weight and meaning of making decisions, and the desire to move from hermeticism towards sociability.

The record graciously explores the nuance that can be found within delineated lines: pop and folk music, rooted in Greek tradition; internal anxieties and empathy expressed outward; the tightrope struggle of living in the present and wallowing in the past.

Larry will also be releasing a 7-inch single alongside the album, which features two A-sides, “Kerkis (Judas-Tree)” and “Foreign Steps,” from the same recording sessions as Subservient. The lyrics to “Kerkis (Judas-Tree)” were written by Efthimis Filippou, an award-winning screenwriter known for his work with director Yorgos Lanthimos on films like Dogtooth, The Lobster, and The Killing of a Sacred Deer. The 7-inch precedes an upcoming audio play, written by Efthimis and scored by Larry, to be produced with the Onassis Stegi (AKA Cultural Center) sometime next year. The audio play will be released on DFA in 2020.

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