Album Leaf

Following the projects with Frail and Pennikurvers, we are proud to announce the previously unreleased The Album Leaf's Lines In A Leaf as our third record of the Hand Screened editions series. This series has been a cool way for us to tap into our DIY roots and the DIY nature of the recordings featured. Hand-screened locally here in Chicago and assembled right here in our office.

Over the past two decades, The Album Leaf’s Jimmy LaValle has known music as a daily pursuit. Each morning he enters his studio with a disciplined work ethic, balancing concrete objectives with the open-ended intention of simply writing something. On top of six solo albums and myriad other releases, the routine has amassed a vast library of experiments; he gravitates back to some, tinkering, building, refining, and putting aside again in a cycle of constant production. He last released a full-length album in 2016; NPR praised Between Waves, noting the “cinematic sprawl… an evocation of drama, loss and fraught emotional atmosphere,” and it’s no surprise in the time since LaValle has become prolific in the film scoring space.

Nearly twenty years into a career that has seen Jimmy LaValle exercising his creativity across the realms of film scoring, sound collage, and electronic / rock music, via instrumental and vocal-driven compositions alike, LaValle and THE ALBUM LEAF are poised to deliver yet another sonic triumph with 2016’s Between Waves. Born out of a thorough reinvention of LaValle's creative process and approach, Between Waves is THE ALBUM LEAF's first proper full-length record in over six years and the first to be recorded and produced as a complete band, and was written with greater emphasis on the group dynamic.

Following their Lovecraftian modern cult classic SPRING, acclaimed filmmakers Moorhead and Benson return with this mind-bending thriller that follows two brothers who receive a cryptic video message inspiring them to revisit the UFO death cult they escaped a decade earlier. Hoping to find the closure that they couldn’t as young men, they’re forced to reconsider the cult’s beliefs when confronted with unexplainable phenomena surrounding the camp. As the members prepare for the coming of a mysterious event, the brothers race to unravel the seemingly impossible truth before their lives become permanently entangled with the cult.

Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy was a prominent composer, pianist, organist, conductor, teacher, altruistic and generous supporter of musicians and, according to Schumann, “the Mozart of the nineteenth century, the most brilliant musician, the one who most clearly sees through the contradictions of the age and for the first time reconciles them.”

This will be quite a discovery for those who know the music of Bedrich Smetana only through his grand and nationalistic cycle of tone-poems, Ma Vlast, even if they are yet familiar with his more painfully intimate string quartets or his folkloristic operas. For Smetana, like most composers, needed to eat; and to do so he was happy to make his own contribution towards satisfying the seemingly insatiable appetite of the bourgeois 19th-century public for piano music that they could perform at home. Music of no great difficulty but boundless charm, these miniatures are now seldom heard and even less often recorded, and this is a shame, for works such as the Op.3 Characteristic Pieces show how the pianistic extroversion of Brahms and Liszt (who was a great admirer and supporter of the young Smetana, giving him valuable introductions to publishers) could be adapted to a domestic context, and with the particular inflection of Czech and Bohemian character, derived not only from simple and song-like melodies but also irregularly stressed dance-rhythms that the young Italian pianist Roberto Plano relishes to the full on this welcome new survey.