First Listen: 100% Silk.

January 12, 2011, 1 comments

When Amanda and Britt Brown got interviewed by Samantha Cornwell back in early November for a profile of their label Not Not Fun for Altered Zones, Amanda was pretty eager to point out the couple’s rather different tastes in music, saying that if she ran NNF by herself it would probably be a label exclusively dropping hip-hop and dance records, while Britt was the more “esoteric” one of them. Of course primarily knowing her from the now defunct band Pocahaunted, the psyched-out project that surely wouldn’t be misdescribed using the attribution “esoteric”, and that probably was most responsible for building the label’s stellar reputation among America’s contemporary underground music scene, that blunt statement kinda surprised me back then. Sure, Amanda exemplified her passion for deranged synthesizer dance pop when she collaborated with Sam Meringue’s Matrix Metals under her new LA Vampires moniker on the stunning NNF release So Unreal, put out later that month, but it was not until word spread in early December that she had just launched her own label that I eventually understood what her statement ultimately had been about.

100% Silk. According to the imprint’s mission statement, it “makes 45 rpm 12 inch singles of diamond-life dance & bliss-disco & basement luxury grooves by friends and lovers from all over the world”. Until yesterday, we could only guess what this would really mean in the end (apart from a few video snippets Amanda had put up on Vimeo), but now the first two releases have been made available for order, Ital’s Theme by Ital and The Deeep’s Muddy Tracks, and Amanda kindly sent over one track of each 12 inch for me to put up on Soundcloud.

Ital is the new recording project by San Francisco’s Daniel Martin-McCormick of Mi Ami and Sex Worker, and here he finds the space to live out his secret dance obsession. The single’s b-side Queens is a straightforward yet very ambitious floor filler, based on a minimal house beat, heavily filtered congas, a more than captivating, classic bass line and some soothing synth parts to keep your head up. Party like it’s 1999, with delicious hints of two decades of disco before that date.

Toronto’s The Deeep have reworked Mudd, the dark, bass-heavy masterpiece from their Life Light cassette on NNF (listen to the original over at RSTB) and turned it into a light-colored, slowly burning dub, almost completely abandoning Isla Craig’s amazing vocal work but adding all kinds of synth chirps, flutes and chimes to get your body on the jungle of the dancefloor. Absolutely intriguing.

Both 12 inches come in an edition of 350, so don’t hesitate and get your hands on a copy now.