✨ IC Community Weekly #36
ft. IC heading to Redeye Label Hang, A2IM Libera Awards submissions, Sun June, Dawn Richard, Allegra Krieger, a new Ducks Ltd. single, a Weird Sister party tonight, events & more!
Hey and welcome to a new edition of IC Community Weekly!
In the week where Taylor Swift’s concert film earned an estimated $126 million in theaters globally in the first days of its release, the IC community, as usual, released lots of great music.
Keep scrolling for that, but first, some general community news…
We’re going to be at next week’s Redeye Label Hang and would love to see you if you are too! Let us know by hitting reply and we’ll meet up. Our co-founder Hunter is on the Mining Other Sources of Income panel, which features AtoZ, Bandcamp (maybe), Set.Live and Yep Roc - we’d love to see you there.
A2IM opened up submissions to the 2024 A2IM Libera Awards! Submit your music for consideration ahead of Monday December 4th by following the instructions here. They also announced that the next event has three new categories - Publisher of the Year, Distributor of the Year and Best Record from Games & Interactive Media.
A2IM also released a handy guide that we mentioned last week to help support the independent music community by highlighting submissions from independent labels. First round voting closes at the end of today - Recording Academy members can log in and vote here.
Former Associate Composer at nonclassical, Simon Knighton, has received an Ivors Classical Awards nomination for Sound Sculpture No. 7, a work commissioned by nonclassical and Southbank Sinfonia. Big congrats to them on that + check out all the other nominees here.
Double Double Whammy have dropped their new fall merch line, featuring designs by Enne Goldstein.
👋 If you’re an IC catalog and you’ve got news, releases, or other fun stuff you want us to include, just reply and let us know - this goes out to 2000+ inboxes every week!
NEW IC CATALOGS
A very warm 🤝 to…
Never Not Now, an artist run label, founded by a group of friends in Berlin that, “inspired by lifetimes of centering music… seeks less to define a particular sound, existing instead as a generative outlet and a cooperative platform to support each other’s ideas.”
Acrobat Unstable, a South Carolina based label, established in 2018, who have so far released music by the likes of Stars Hollow, summerbruise, Stress Fractures and Good Looking Friends amongst many others.
Superbloom Records, a new label based in Florida that was started this year by Matt Bullard
NEW RELEASES
ALBUMS
🎧 Run For Cover released Bad Dream Jaguar, the new album by Sun June. An album that’s “…hazy like a long Texas summer day, cast in blue like nighttime is just setting in” (Stereogum).
🎧 Merge released The Architect, the new three song EP by the ever-evolving musician, multimedia artist, dancer, director and entrepreneur Dawn Richard, as well as a new video for third track Babe Ruth. She says of the release, “I’ve always had a fascination with the concept of a ʻtraditional single release.ʼ How the industry tells you, in order to have a successful single, it has to be a certain amount of minutes to be played on radio, or streamed, or on a chart… I say fuck that. I never agreed with that construct. I wanted to create a single that was similar to a conceptual album. If you take away the idea that it has to be for radio, that it has to be a clean edit, that it has to be a specific thing in order to be successful, what would be the outcome? Epoch 1.”
🎧 Double Double Whammy released Fragile Plane: B-Sides, an EP featuring a collection of Allegra Krieger outtakes from I Keep My Feet on the Fragile Plane, the album she released in July this year. The b-sides, like the album, “exist in transition, a space capturing moments of delicateness and strength, awareness and invisibility, belief and skepticism, all covered in a shroud of inherent beauty.”
🎧 Earth Libraries released the self-titled debut record from Vancouver Island-based psych pop/indie rock band Neighbourly.
🎧 INNI released the score for Emmy nominated Netflix documentary Harley & Katya by Melbourne-based artist Rose Riebl.
SINGLES
🎧 Carpark released The Main Thing, the new Ducks Ltd. single, which features Julia Steiner from Ratboys on backing vocals, alongside Jason Balla from Dehd and Margaret McCarthy from Moontype. The song concerns “…growing apart from a person whose views you once shared” and “…may be the first jangle-pop single to make reference to both professional baseball and ritual magick.”
🎧 Chapter Music released Thurum Voi (Look There), the latest single from Brisbane, Australia duo Yirinda, taken from their upcoming self-titled debut album, which will be released on February 16th 2024. The record combines ancient Aboriginal language with modern production, invoking “…thousands of generations of story and culture, while emerging as something entirely new.”
🎧 nonclassical released the first single from Outside the Lines, Vol. 6. It’s called Ufie, Igbo Dance (sound-collage rework) and is by Rebeca Omordia ft. Gabriel Prokofiev.
🎧 Pack Records released Brown Eyes, the latest single from Swansea Skag, the project of Mansfield, OH based musician Mason Stover.
🎧 Never Not Now released Coming Home, the title track from the upcoming album by Berlin-based musician Key Ratio.
🎧 Get Better released just fine, the new single from Minneapolis band VIAL, alongside another short track, therapy pt. iii.
RE-ISSUES
🎧 Joyful Noise re-released OHMME by Finom (fka OHMME), a project started in 2014 by multi-instrumentalists/songwriters Macie Stewart and Sima Cunningham. The album was self-recorded by the band and is “…an exploratory journey filled with gritty guitar madness, experimental vocal harmonies, and some pure, heartfelt songwriting.”
🎧 Suicide Squeeze released These Are Not Fall Colors, a reissue of the solo record by unsung innovators of the Washington rock scene Lync. In their 8.7 review, Pitchfork said the record is “…a personal statement, the sound of a fistful of wrinkled notebook pages covered in blurry blue ballpoint… a simple bloodletting, wild and joyous and pure."
PRE-ORDERS
🎧 Joyful Noise announced SOURCEHEIRESS, the sophomore record by enigmatic pop maximalist jess joy, “…part friendly space visitor, part swamp witch, and part stage panther on the scent of something new… think of a transistor radio falling through a dream vortex. Think the Aurora borealis or the appearance of a whale’s tale in a calm sea. Jess is a fairy, an explosion, a figment. A model for how to live in this curious universe.”
VIDEOS
🖥️ M.C. Taylor of the Merge band Hiss Golden Messenger visited their HQ to pick some records from their catalog for their Digging For Something feature. They also have a special offer where you can save $5 by bundling any two of his picks on the Merge webstore.
INTERVIEWS
🎙️Lead vocalist Laura Colwell and guitarist Stephen Salisbury of the band Sun June (Run For Cover) talked to Stereogum about writing the album while in a romantic relationship (and 1,300 miles apart), the crossovers between creative minds as musician versus filmmakers and where they see themselves going from here
FROM THE ARCHIVE
🖥️ The latest outing of a new section where I'll choose a video I love from YouTube’s treasure trove of music videos, live performances and curiosities.
This week as we approach Halloween, there’s no better time to resurface one of most famous videos by The Cure and a mainstay of late night MTV of old.
The video was directed by Tim Pope, who ultimately directed over 37 videos for the group, including many of their well known songs like Close To Me, Just Like Heaven and Friday I’m In Love. He also shot videos for many other artists, including Hall & Oates, Iggy Pop, David Bowie, Men Without Hats, Talk Talk, Paul Weller, Siouxsie and the Banshees, as well as directing the 1996 film The Crow: City of Angels.
SHOWS, TOURS + EVENTS
🦇 Weird Sister are hosting a Halloween party tonight in Brooklyn to launch the new single by musician and tarot reader Syd Sylvair, who “conjures up a world where disco meets modern witchcraft” | TICKETS
🦇 As you can probably tell from their name, they’re big fans of Halloween over at Weird Sister and are also throwing a Halloween Happy Hour in LA on October 30th:
🚌 Elephant Gym (Topshelf), the Taiwanese math-rock trio, are heading on tour next year | TICKETS
📆 UPCOMING INDUSTRY EVENTS
+ check out the 🎟 Events Directory for more conferences, festivals, record fairs, webinars, etc!
Oct 18th - 22nd ‣ Amsterdam Dance Event (ADE) (Amsterdam, Netherlands)
Oct 21st ‣ IMSTA Festa Toronto (Toronto, Canada)
Oct 23rd - 27th ‣ Redeye Label Hang* (Durham, NC, US)
Oct 24th - 26th ‣ Music Tectonics Conference (Santa Monica, CA, US)
Oct 25th - 29th ‣ Womex (Galicia, Spain)
Oct 26th - 29th ‣ Levitation Music Festival (Austin, TX, US)
Nov 2nd - 4th ‣ Iceland Airwaves (Reykjavik, Iceland)
Nov 6th - 11th ‣ Indie Week: Online Music Biz (Online + London, Canada)
Nov 7th - 13th ‣ Pitchfork Music Festival London (London, UK)
Nov 9th - 11th ‣ACCES (Dar es Salaam, Tanzania)
*we’ll be there
That’s all for this one! Stay safe and we’ll catch you next week for more.
- Adam & the Infinite Catalog crew