A Number Of Small Things/Labels/Paw Tracks products

Animal Collective - Hollinndagain 9,99 €

Available again for the first time since 2002 is Animal Collective’s rare live album Hollinndagain. Originally released in a limited edition of 300 hand-painted LPs, this album documents live performances by the group during the first half of 2001.

Following the completion of their Danse Manatee record, Animal Collective (in this incarnation—Avey Tare, Panda Bear, and Geologist) played a series of shows in their then hometown of New York, and in late spring, went on their first US tour with friends Black Dice. Since most of the attendees at these early shows were from a small circle of local friends who regularly saw the group perform, Animal Collective felt it was important to present a new set of material for each show rather than make their friends pay to hear the same jams every time.

This resulted in a whole new album’s worth of songs. No studio versions were ever made and live recordings are all that remain from this brief and unique era. Sad that the songs were never made available to the public, the band agreed in 2002 to release the live versions with Secretly Canadian on their St. Ives imprint (a label that focused on limited edition releases with hand-made cover art by the bands).

For Hollinndagain, Animal Collective chose seven songs. The first three are taken from a performance on Scott Williams’ radio show on WFMU. The final four songs are from performances in New York, Nashville, and Austin (these latter two shows occurring on their tour with Black Dice).

Sonically this record mixes the familiar sounds and melodies of older Animal Collective records like Spirit They’re Gone or Campfire Songs and blends them with unknown territory that somehow finds a niche between Arnold Dreyblatt, Jay-Z, and the Boredoms. The looseness and almost out of control aspect of the songs betray the fact that Animal Collective were very new to playing live at this time. However right when everything seems without center or about to fall apart, something explodes or peeks through and a change in direction allows a brief glimpse at the unique songwriting Animal Collective have always worked hard at. A sweet document of a band that always does it a little differently.

Avey Tare - Down There from 13,99 €

Down There is a world of nine new songs from Animal Collective's Avey Tare. His first official solo full length carries you through a murky world of sound, an alien death world of soul grooves that is both honest and otherworldly. Wait for sundown and turn it up loud. Take a ride on this haunted boat and let yourself be guided through deep sloshy rhythms, waterlogged bass, and moonlit breaks in the canopy that reveal a crisp crystalline pop buzz. Down There was recorded in the month of June by old friend Josh Dibb (Deakin) at the Good House, an old church in upstate New York, surrounded by The Great Swamp and visited regularly by monks, white widows, and groan toads.

Panda Bear - Tomboy from 13,99 €

Recorded at his studio in Lisbon, Tomboy sees the Animal Collective member Noah Lennox stepping away from the sample-based parameters of his previous record and incorporating more guitar and synthesiser. Still prevalent though, is the interest in texture that made Person Pitch such a dense record; crashing waves and cheering crowds bounce against the gurgling arpeggios and give the tracks an immense sense of space. Soaked in reverb and punctuated with inflections of delay, the album’s drums reveal a dub influence which gives them a visceral punch that lingers after each hit. Lennox’s lofty, self-harmonising vocals smooth out the songs, and Sonic Boom’s mixing gives the work a large dynamic range.

Prince Rama - Trust Now from 13,99 €

Trust Now is the keystone album of Brooklyn’s Prince Rama. The album takes the kaleidoscopic mysticism of ancient devotional music and focuses it through the fierce urgency and archetypal language of pop, forming an environment that is both accessible and impenetra¬ble. Deep synths rise from a sparkling sea of gamelans and prayer bells as tribal drums pound the earth with the hypnotic power to heal or destroy. Voices carry captivat¬ing and haunting melodies that shine like the diamond jewels of old Bollywood soundtracks spilling over dark wave dance floors.

First conceived as a ritual to be performed live, the songs were fittingly recorded inside a 19th century church in Seattle by Scott Colburn (Sun City Girls, Animal Collective, Arcade Fire). As their 5th full-length album, and first as a duo, Trust Now is perhaps Prince Rama’s most focused, cohesive and powerful album to date.

Panda Bear - Tomboy Expanded Boxset 39,99 €

Can’t get enough Tomboy? Lucky for you, Panda Bear’s fourth opus has been expanded into a massive 4xLP set, adding one new tune and letting the original album heave and breathe over 2 LPs; then bolstering that with another LP featuring the single mixes and yet another LP featuring unreleased a cappellas and instrumentals for all of the sick DJs out there dropping Panda Bear into their bro-step sets. All profits from the sale of Tomboy Expanded will go to the American Cancer Society so have fun trying to think of reasons not to buy this. It is limited to a whopping 5000! There will be no CD or digital release for this set.

TRACKLISTING

LP1 (Expanded Album):
You Can Count On Me
Tomboy
Slow Motion
Surfer’s Hymn
Last Night At The Jetty
Drone

LP2 (Expanded Album):
The Preakness
Alsatian Darn
Scheherazade
Friendship Bracelet
Afterburner
Benfica

LP3 (Single Mixes):
Drone
Tomboy
Last Night At The Jetty
Surfers Hymn
Scheherazade
Benfica
Slow Motion
Friendship Bracelet
Alsatian Darn
Bullseye
You Can Count On Me

LP4 (A Cappellas and Instrumentals):
Alsatian Darn (Instrumental)
Slow Motion (Instrumental)
Friendship Bracelet (Instrumental)
Drone (Instrumental)
Last Night At The Jetty (Instrumental)
You Can Count On Me (A Cappella)
Alsatian Darn (A Cappella)
Slow Motion (A Cappella)
Afterburner (A Cappella)
Drone (A Cappella)

Ariel Pink's Haunted Griffiti - The Doldrums 9,99 €

After years of recording in relative seclusion in the hills of Los Angeles, Ariel Pink (the first non-Animal Collective member on the Paw Tracks roster) makes his official Paw Tracks debut with “The Doldrums.” Originally a handmade CD-R release a couple years back, “The Doldrums” by Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti was discovered by the Animal Collective during one of their west coast tours and became an immediate favorite. Recording at home with a guitar, bass, keyboard, and 8-track (the drum sounds are all unbelievably created with his mouth), Ariel Pink blends Lite FM and warped lo-fi pop into something beautiful and confusing, yet highly addictive.

Ariel Pink's Haunted Griffiti - House Arrest 9,99 €

Think you’ve heard enough Ariel Pink? Well our favorite omnivorous media junkie from LA still has a few tricks left up his sleeve… like the left-of-center “House Arrest.” Sure “The Doldrums” and “Worn Copy” had some hits and humdingers on them, but “House Arrest” never lets up. It’s hit after hit after hit. Sorta like if you listened to your friend’s boom box mix tape from Top 40 radio around 1985. Some people might think that sounds like a recipe for disaster. We say bring on the Doritos.

Ariel Pink's Haunted Griffiti - Worn Copy 9,99 €

Ariel Pink's Worn Copy is a piece of work. Epic and grand in scale (seventeen songs clocking in over 70 minutes), Worn Copy is the history of popular music as revealed through the eyes and ears of Ariel Pink. It’s an impassioned combinatory view of popular and unpopular culture that takes in everything from The Cure, R. Stevie Moore and Amon Duul to forgotten episodes of The Gong Show, It's Your Move, and What's Happening? Originally released in 2003 by the Rhystop label and now featuring a bonus video of “For Kate I Wait,”Worn Copy is re-seeing the light of day on the Animal Collective's Paw Tracks imprint.

Panda Bear - Young Prayer 9,99 €

In the midst of 2002, with much of his attention focused on his work with the Brooklyn-based ANIMAL COLLECTIVE, PANDA BEAR stepped aside to a more intimate space to reflect upon the death of his father. The resulting Young Prayer, often coming much closer to classical composition than to the noise/pop experimentations of the ANIMAL COLLECTIVE, is a collection of beautifully personal and introspective songs. Young Prayer, recorded in Panda Bear's childhood home by ANIMAL COLLECTIVE member DEAKIN and further produced by the mysterious ANIMAL COLLECTIVE brothers known as COME WINTER, guarantees a listening experience as interesting as any ANIMAL COLLECTIVE release thus far. A truly soulful album, Young Prayer is both sonically gorgeous and spiritually uplifting.

Panda Bear - Person Pitch from 9,99 €

Animal Collective member Panda Bear (a.k.a. Noah Lennox) boldly returns with his long-awaited third solo record Person Pitch. Years in the making, Person Pitch marks a dramatic departure from Panda Bear’s previous solo record Young Prayer. The acoustic instruments of Young Prayer have been replaced with samplers and electronics.

Fusing Panda’s dramatic life changes over the past few years (marriage, moving to Lisbon, becoming a father) with his ever-increasing sonic palette (standouts include Caetano Veloso, Berlin Techno, Scott Walker, and Kylie Minogue), Person Pitch is suffused with the kind of feel good modern toe-tapping pop that seems harder and harder to find these days.

Paw Tracks feels that the passing of time will show Panda Bear’s Person Pitch sitting alongside the great solo albums of Paul McCartney, George Michael, and Ghostface Killah. Luckily we don’t have to wait.

Prince Rama - Shadow Temple from 13,99 €

Raised on a Hare Krishna commune in Florida, educated at art school in Boston, and now making noise and living in Brooklyn, Prince Rama are the latest addition to the Paw Tracks roster. Their new album Shadow Temple is an epic shrine of swirling synths, pulsing guitars, and thunder drums. An ethereal chorus of voices and anthemic melodies create a reverb-washed mine of sonic artifacts drawing from southeast Asian rituals, krautrock legacies, chopped and screwed homages, hallucinatory operas, and dance hall psychedelia. Recorded in Kurt Vonnegut’s grandson’s cabin and a 135-year-old haunted church with the help of Rusty Santos and Animal Collective members Avey Tare and Deakin, Shadow Temple offers itself as a sincere porthole into a mysterious realm that defies material understanding.

Excepter - Presidence 15,99 €

PRESIDENCE is the eighth album in as many years by EXCEPTER. A double compact disc, PRESIDENCE explores the long-format side of EXCEPTER, focusing on continuous live performance and extended compositions. Over the course of more than two hours, PRESIDENCE spans the full spectrum of the EXCEPTER sound, from street-level electro to cosmic synth infinity and beyond. This is the sound of the band leaving Earth behind.

Excepter - Debt Dept. 9,99 €

Excepter is an electronic performance group devoted to the destruction of boundaries between the psychic friends network and reality television. DEBT DEPT is an album of protest songs played in anti-commercial style with a timeless message for today’s election-year consumer:

“VOTE NO” … or … “MAKE ONE MISTAKE, MAKE IT TWICE”

DEBT DEPT was recorded in FIVE days, in THREE intervals, over the course of NINE months. Of SEVENTEEN tracks recorded, EIGHT tracks remain, molded by FOUR successive layers of building and erasing, TWO bands in ONE.

Black Dice - Repo from 13,99 €

REPO is the fifth album by Black Dice. The Brooklyn, NY-based trio has never worked harder at crafting a set of concise, sonically battering, or flat-out bizarre tunes than on this collection of fringe-surfing tone bombs. Yet a new roadhouse blues-band philosophy has simultaneously emerged, allowing the group to loosen up and toss off a record packed with blurry hooks and zoomed-in riffs as casually as a grizzled denizen of roadside dives might spew out aural alchemy in-between a few brews.

Brothers Eric and Bjorn Copeland and Aaron Warren have spent the better part of 10 years in daily contact, touring the world over, and sculpting their saw-toothed sound balloons under circumstances most reasonable people would wretch at. The resultant hive mind occupied by the three is an inevitable consequence of so much shared experience, both musical and simply day-to-day. Their communal consciousness is as packed with garbage as much as it is concerned with making catchy tunes, and often the songs pouring out of it contain equal parts bombastic infectious rhythm and chaotic detritus.

REPO is the sound of a disciplined group of cosmic jokers setting out to reclaim the landscape popular culture would have us believe we cannot afford. The record irreverently mulches the sounds and images of radio, TV and internet into a fertile compost pile squirming with new, raw life.

Animal Collective - Campfire Songs 9,99 €

Paw Tracks is proud to present the reissue of Animal Collective’s 2003 album Campfire Songs. Since the CD's original issue on Catsup Plate recently went out of print it is our intention to simply keep the cd in print for as long as possible.

An idea originally thought up by Dave Portner and Noah Lennox while in college, Campfire Songs is not a record of songs sung around a campfire but a record that hints at songs emerging from the fire itself: "We wanted to give the music the feeling and atmosphere of the outdoors and the warmth of a fire, so people could bring it indoors."

A collection of five songs written over a period of four to five years, Campfire Songs is an escape from the clutter and electronic assault of the group's 2001 release Danse Manatee and the tour that preceded it. However, the tapestry quality of the songs and the lines that blur endings from beginnings and jams from compositions highlight a style that the boys had become comfortable with from touring and would continue to work on in the years that followed on records like Here Comes The Indian and Feels.

While the songs were completed in the apartment that three of the members shared (Geologist does not play on this album) they chose to record the music on a screened-in porch in Maryland using portable mini disc players so as to allow the ambience of trees blowing in the wind, the birds chirping and the insects in the area to become an integral part of the sound flow. What remains intact are the melodies that have always been a part of the AC sound—though here they have been stripped away of any electronic accompaniment and stretched and slowed to a calmer place than anywhere AC had been before and perhaps has gone since.

Rings - Black Habit 9,99 €

First Nation has become Rings. Rings is the new First Nation. This is their new record. It is called Black Habit.

New York’s First Nation was Nina Mehta, Kate Rosko, and Melissa Livaudais. Melissa left; Abby Portner (sister of Animal Collective’s Dave Portner) joined. The new trio decided to make a clean break and rename the band.

Black Habit delivers in a major way. Rings have clearly developed their own style: a loose tribal pop sound that thrives on vocal harmonies and pulsating drum rhythms. Black Habit’s energy is full of beauty, elegance and simplicity. The new name represents the group in many ways: the group’s circular compositions, the bonds between them, their decision-making processes, and their feminine beliefs, interlocking, connected, whole, and continuous.

Black Dice - Load Blown 9,99 €

Load Blown is the fourth album by Brooklyn's Black Dice. The beats drip and roll, tar-pit voices sing into an oil can, and the guitars crank like calliope. Some tunes crackle and burble like submerged television, others bump and click along like a Summer Jam concert series from another dimension.

While a noticeable change in tone encompasses Load Blown (some tunes veer close to pop songs), this is a work of over-stimulation, a product of frenzied media culture, a sonic sifting of the gratuitous amount of "stuff" out there.

The span of time (nearly 18 months of on-again/off-again work) encompassing the composition and recording of the album accounts for a sprawling variety of sounds and songs. Strange and abrasive, yet somehow more familiar, accessible, and celebratory than ever, this is Black Dice at their most palatable yet.

Load Blown is a compilation of three 12" vinyl EPs that have been released with special edition posters plus exclusive unreleased tracks. The final EP release (released at the same time as the Load Blown cd) will be the remaining five tracks not previously released on vinyl.

Eric Copeland - Hermaphrodite 9,99 €

Eric Copeland is a prominent member of New York’s Black Dice and Terrestrial Tones. For the past two years, he has amassed and twisted a variety of music and sounds, resulting in Hermaphrodite, his first proper solo album. Hopscotching a free range of structures, sources, and styles, this album is unlike any other, crossing the wires of foreign radio, space transmissions, artificial vocal ensembles, electronic street conversations and lost pop music. But these compositions don’t highlight the sound dynamics as much as they let each song shake and unfold into a very open world, continually broadening. Like a good mix tape, Hermaphrodite flips the listener with each new song, engaging them to keep up, make the connections, and, ultimately, enjoy.

Avey Tare & Kría Brekkan - Pullhair Rubeye 9,99 €

Avey Tare is Dave Portner of Animal Collective and Kria Brekkan is Kristin Anna Valtysdottir formerly of the band múm. The two met a few years back and started playing music together in the summer of 2005. Recently they married and now live together in New York City.

Avey Tare and Kria Brekkan recorded their debut collaboration Pullhair Rubeye with guitars and piano on an eight track in their practice space in Brooklyn. Then they traveled to upstate New York where the record was mixed down onto a two track borrowed from a friend who bought it at a garage sale for a dollar. Just as the two were completing the mix, the two track broke down and Avey and Kria didn’t hear the mixes until two months later when they obtained another two track. After this short vacation, they were surprised by the sounds they had made.

Regardless of HOW they made their sounds, Avey Tare and Kria Brekkan’s Pullhair Rubeye is a motley collection of fun and somber songs. Some of the tracks are instrumental, textured, and trancelike. They sound like they could come from another world. Other songs are lyrically based, calmer, more introspective. These sound like direct transmissions from within.

Tickley Feather - Tickley Feather 13,99 €

TICKLEY FEATHER, the self-titled debut by Philadelphia's Annie Sachs, is a collection of Late Night path-finding sounds, gingerly home recorded using budget electronics. Selected from the past four years, these songs are washed in effects and demonstrate a barbaric yet meticulous instrumentation, along with a paradoxically, otherworldly and natural vocal style. The resulting sounds tell a secret that feels serendipitous.

Tickley Feather is Annie Sachs. She grew up in rural Virginia but has been living in Philadelphia for 5 years now. She has been using her time learning to write and record her own music as part of her nights spent at home, adapting to being the single mother of a young child. Sachs is a four tracking hobbyist who's musical spirit dwells in the realm of her own natural inclinations. She is a firm believer in doing what feels right, and in her recordings she really uses her solo status to great advantage. It adds up a very personal sound which involves all sorts of sensations from serendipity to silliness, and even the sweet and eerie sound of her little boy's voice as he tells her his ideas. Her recordings have been praised by critics from the start, with comparisons to work by artists such as Syd Barrett, Kate Bush, and Gilli Smith, and all the while being given credit for having a sound that is completely its own. Now she's coming in from the outside to share her songs and it's precious beyond value.