FLOWERTOWN
>> Flowertown is Karina Gill and Michael Ramos. The San Francisco duo first wrote a song together because their respective projects (Cindy + Tony Jay) were scheduled to play a show together in March 2020. The show didn't happen, but as shelter-in-place took effect they started trading song ideas and writing collaboratively, sending voice memos back and forth and eventually recording the songs in Karina’s basement on a 4 track. Flowertown released two EPs on cassette with Paisley Shirt Records, and here they are remastered and compiled on vinyl by Mt.St.Mtn.
“…Flowertown is indebted to the great works of post-Velvets indie: Galaxie 500’s trilogy, Cannanes A Love Affair with Nature, Low’s I Could Live in Hope, ’90-’93 Yo La Tengo, but thankfully they didn’t forget to write songs and find their own voices and charm inside that sound. If you wander the outer avenues out to Land’s End with this in your headphones, you may float away into oblivion. This feels like a band that is about to write a timeless album, and I am more than ready with my PayPal login info.” – Glenn Donaldson, Freeform Freakout
HECTORINE
A low dark voice carries this ethereal, atmospheric, & art pop-inspired album. “TEARS” follows up Hectorine’s 2019 debut with sketches of 70s soft rock production, folk melodies, and deeply lyrical songs that explore “love, loss, nature, and the cosmos.”
In 2016, San Francisco-based Sarah Gagnon formed Hectorine; naming it after her late paternal grandmother. The live band has gone through a few line-up changes over the years, but Sarah is now joined by Max Shanley on guitar, Matt Carney on bass, Betsy Gran on keyboards, and Laura Adkins on drums.
“TEARS was born one summer on the banks of the Yuba River, where Sarah would read Clarice Lispector’s Agua Viva aloud to her friends, and it’s also where it ends: in a cave across from their favorite swimming hole where one could hear her own footsteps if she listened hard enough. A ten-song meditation on the strange but not uncommon phenomenon of heartache.”
R.E. SERAPHIN
>> Tiny Shapes is the debut album of ex-Talkies frontman, Ray Seraphin. Recording under the almost-alias R.E. Seraphin for the first time, Seraphin’s Tiny Shapes is paisley pop meets guitar-centric post-punk. R.E. Seraphin’s lyrical point-of-view is both cynical and sentimental — falling somewhere between The Replacements and The Feelies circa The Good Earth. Musically, jangly yet sturdy instrumentation collide with hushed vocals. This approach is best heard in opening cut “Today Will Be Kind”: a tune that offers a hopeful view of love gone sour. Engineered and co-produced by Jasper Leach (Tony Molina) and mastered by Matt Bullimore (The Mantles), Tiny Shapes was written following a move from Austin to the Bay Area. While reacclimating to life back in his hometown, Seraphin enlisted original Talkies rhythm section, Owen Kelley (Sleepy Sun) and Phil Lantz (Neutrals, Cocktails) to help develop his songs.
“Seraphin’s music is often under the glow of a bright jangle, these tones more so color in the spaces rather than take center stage, accentuating the crunch and fuzz like light dancing on frosted glass.” - Counterzine
“Little guitar stabs and intricately pick notes set the landscape for Seraphin’s voice to deliver these smoky whispers.” - Austin Town Hall
TONY JAY
>> Mostly recorded between last Christmas and New Year's during a window of isolation at home, “Hey There Flower” preserves Tony Jay’s prowess at making beautifully eerie lo-fi pop; like a hazy memory where your favorite Sixties girl-group melody is perpetually slowed down.
Without a band to practice with, Tony Jay recorded the music alone, but recruited a slew of friends to remotely record backing vocals: Karina Gill (Cindy), Griffin Jones (Galore), Kati Mashikian (Mister Baby), Alexis Harper (Al Harper), & Hannah Lew (Cold Beat).
Karina says: "hey there flower", the most recent release from the prolific and mysterious Tony Jay delivers real melodies -- both lacey with vocal harmonies and dusty with layered guitars -- as fans have come to expect. This release also carries forward and elaborates on Tony Jay's tradition of songs that express a kind of naked honesty about things we all know -- love and loneliness and all that -- while communicating at the same time a wry edge of skepticism, so that the songs are like coins spinning on edge before landing heads, tails, or lost under the couch. Tony Jay brings us into a nostalgia where we recognize moods from music of the past -- Marc Boland definitely comes to mind, as well as Velvet Underground of the Nico era, and Tony Jay even covers Francoise Hardy on this collection -- but the songs create a three dimensional space with what feels like a thousand layers so that instead of being thrown back in time, it's like stepping into a little world with its own laws of nature, of which the listener gets just a few hints.