Various Artists – Stones Throw Records, Stones Throw and Leaving Records Present: Dual Form
Featured Album
A no-brainer for those into the blurred lines between pop, psych, ambient and WTF music
As anyone who follows their beat head scene will tell you — including even casual fans of loop leaders like Flying Lotus and Madlib — L.A.’s had something in its bong water for a while now. And lurking on the very fringes of it all over the past couple years has been Leaving Records, the tape-dubbing imprint of producer Matthewdavid and art director Jesselisa Moretti. While they’re best known for a well-curated run of limited cassettes and CD-Rs (including a couple that were painstakingly packaged in hand-painted floppy disks), the label was also responsible for the original vinyl pressings of Julia Holter’s breakthrough album Tragedy.
They know their proverbial shit, in other words, which makes Dual Form a no-brainer if you’re even remotely into the warped, increasingly blurred lines between pop/psych/ambient/WTF music. The beginning of a no-doubt-beautiful relationship with Stones Throw, Dual Form is a carefully sequenced compilation that gathers previously unreleased cuts from a wide range of artists that have little in common beyond a tendency to leave your brain feeling like a pack of melted crayons. Some standouts, then: Holter shares a spellbound cover of Arthur Russell (“You & Me Both”), Sun Araw loses himself in a web of vaporized vocals and desecrated dub nods, and the appropriately named Run DMT drone on like a bath salt-snorting version of the Velvet Underground. And then there’s the many truly underground selections that feel like a survey of a world you’d otherwise not be privy to. A sampler on the right side of insane, really.
