Window: 10 Years of Lily Tapes & Discs

by Lily Tapes & Discs

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gzxr wow how much lily tapes & dics has done over these past 10 years. always such a huge form of comfort to check the releases done by the label and the amount of love and dedication put into everything by Ben. this is beautiful. Favorite track: My Friend Wavey.

TheSlowMusicMovement Happy Birthday Lily Tapes, "purveyors of good shit". It's the sort of underground community building label for alternative musical expression, outsider artists & welcome antidote to anodyne mainstream music that TSMM is here for, & which propels me to the computer every morning. Every release notification raises an eyebrow & usually a smile. So take a walk on the weird side, dig into this epic label showcase of ambient wonder, deviant joys, electroacoustic oddness & even the odd singer of songs.

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Cassette + Digital Album
Edition of 125 pro-dubbed double cassettes, blue and violet tinted. Packaged with full-color embossed O-card, insert, and stamped vellum obi-strip. Numbered and assembled by hand at LTD Headquarters.

Includes unlimited streaming of Window: 10 Years of Lily Tapes & Discs via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.

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edition of 125

$24 USD or more
One copy each of Other Nothing's "Not Songs" (2nd edition) and "Window: 10 Years of Lily Tapes & Discs." Both tapes include download codes.

Includes unlimited streaming of Window: 10 Years of Lily Tapes & Discs via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.

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$32 USD or more
Full Digital Discography

14

releases

Get all 14 Lily Tapes & Discs releases available on Bandcamp and save 50%.

Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality downloads of Window: 10 Years of Lily Tapes & Discs, The Other One, Sarasota Half in Dream 🐝 Music From and Inspired By the Film, 2019/08/16, Lung cycles, naps / lung cycles, Cla-ras / Lung cycles, On Being Lumpy (2016 Edition), and 6 more. , and , .

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	1.	(morning) - (2020) 03:12
	2.	Adeline Hotel - How Did I Get So Lucky? 04:14
	3.	naps - bbi 01:00
	4.	Hour - Danger Zone (demo) 03:28
	5.	ylayali + jason calhoun - floral 03:15
	6.	Lung cycles - Asbury 03:58
	7.	Ocean Charter of Values - Vandal Hearts 02:24
	8.	Other Nothing - Oh 01:35
	9.	(morning) - (1991) 00:23
	10.	(afternoon) - (2016) 01:17
	11.	ylayali - he needs me (live) 03:33
	12.	Lung cycles - Field 04:27
	13.	Cla-ras - C is for Cricket 06:30
	14.	Distant Reader - "turning himself over and over" 05:37
	15.	The National Park Service - My Friend Wavey 03:13
	16.	Other Nothing - Nm 01:55
	17.	(afternoon) - (2014) 01:48
	18.	(evening) - (2020) 02:24
	19.	German Error Message - Door Held Open 03:25
	20.	Foresteppe - Fineland 05:04
	21.	Michael Cormier O'Leary - You've Been Saying What I've Been Thinking (demo) 03:07
	22.	Jason Calhoun - swift 07:12
	23.	Other Nothing - All Will Come 01:52
	24.	(evening) - (2008) 02:16
	25.	(night) - (2012) 01:40
	26.	G.M. Cowing - Metropolis 04:25
	27.	Greyon Greene - Rec Trail Reasoning 05:06
	28.	The Spookfish - Falling Star 04:42
	29.	ylayali - push 01:49
	30.	Vierzig Skizzen - Half Cold 04:28
	31.	Other Nothing - Resting Place (Traditional) 02:24
	32.	(night) - (2012) 02:04

about

Some artists make work to communicate solid, pre-existing ideas—to give voice to thoughts contemplated extensively ahead of time. Others create to reveal something to themselves—to learn through the process and let the listener in on it. The artists that have released music on the Rochester-based label Lily Tapes & Discs during its decade of existence tend toward the latter approach. Their catalogs are littered with experiments, weird imperfections, and happy accidents; their compositions define their own hermetic internal logic. Labelhead Ben Lovell cites Phil Elverum as an artist of this type, whose self-determination spoke to him during his formative years.

“I realized that you can work outside of conventions to try to achieve something that’s personally desirable—that isn’t dictated by some larger directive or system,” Lovell explained. “It’s freeing to realize that I can mess with a tape recorder and it can sound broken. That isn’t just okay—that’s part of what makes it mine.”

Lovell’s own music as Lung Cycles exemplifies this polyglottish, unselfconscious ideal, vacillating between experimental instrumental work, manipulated field recordings, and more traditional song-based projects. When he began to release other people’s projects under the Lily Tapes & Discs name in 2012, he hoped to build a label that would embody this ethos as well.

Since its inception, Lily has yielded an interconnected network of releases that function as a kind of personal musical lexicon for Lovell. Operating out of his home, Lily specializes in hand-assembled cassettes that frequently feature Lovell’s own art or design, and its discography includes everything from electroacoustic collages, experimental folk and country, to emo-informed indie rock. However, the lovingly curated anniversary compilation Window: 10 Years of Lily Tapes & Discs reveals a curious kind of aesthetic unity to Lily’s disparate crew of alums. The near-two-hour long compendium features new and unreleased material from nearly everyone who has released music on Lily—including Adeline Hotel, Jason Calhoun, The National Park Service, Michael Cormier-O’Leary, and Lovell himself—coalescing into a dream-like, immersive longform listening experience.

Rather accepting a specific release based on its suitability for some kind of label house sound, Lovell has always viewed Lily as a platform for friends to showcase whatever mode they were working in at the time. (This could be anything from a labor-of-love full-length, a smaller split release, or a stray experiment outside of their normal wheelhouse.) With Window, then, Lovell wanted to see where each member of LT&D’s roster has ended up artistically in 2023, instead of providing a scrapbook of their past work on the label. By his own account, Lily has always been a way for Lovell to connect with people he respected and got along with on a deeper level; therefore, it was also an excuse to catch up with collaborators he hadn’t talked to in years.

Many Lily Tapes & Discs releases sound like happening into the middle of a private musical conversation, or observing a ritual that has been going unobserved for some time. Lovell’s recordings on the compilation as Lung Cycles exemplify this feeling—patiently sketching a restless chord progression over rustling natural sounds in “Field” and luxuriating in distortion and percolating synth harmonies on “Asbury.” On his contributions, Philly-based ambient music vet Jason Calhoun thrusts us into a vortex of downsampled noise, with shards of melody sporadically cutting through. Reminiscent of the serrated sounds of Low and William Basinski, Cla-ras’ “C is for Cricket”—the handiwork of Jeremy Ferris, an illustrator and printmaker who has helped define Lily’s visual language—compellingly draws attention to its means of production. Wind shudders into a mic; synths and samples accumulate speed and density, culminating in patches of blown-out static that cause the entire track to short out.

Out of these soundscapes, solid edifices of song emerge. Adeline Hotel’s entry “How Did I Get So Lucky?” combines the methodology of bandleader Dan Knishkowy’s elliptical ambient instrumental LPs with his psych-folk songwriting in one four-minute piece. It serves as a fitting opening for the compilation, touching on the stylistic modes that Lily Tapes & Discs encompasses within one piece, from small, barely perceptible sonic rustlings to fully-fledged singer-songwriter exegeses. (Window features a slew of stark, impassioned rock tracks in the latter category, courtesy of Ocean Charter of Values, Ylayali, and others.)

“Lily's motto is ‘purveyors of good shit’, and I think that sums it up,” Adeline’s Dan Knishkowy, who has known and collaborated with Lovell for over a decade, has of the label. “Ben has given artists a home to experiment and grow within their expanding community.”

Michael Cormier-O’Leary—solo artist, Friendship drummer, and Dear Life Records co-founder—appears twice here, with some carefully constructed non-ambient instrumental compositions. One is a slowly generative demo from his instrumental collective Hour; the other, a catchy tropicalia-informed instrumental under his own name. “[Ben releases] music for nesting in small spaces,” Cormier-O’Leary says, characterizing the quintessential LT&D sound. “It’s defined by a hushed, unwavering intensity that encourages us to hear the sounds between the warble as the tape degrades.”

In the economically tenuous modern musical landscape, a small label putting a stamp of approval on an artist’s release is, as much as anything, a way of dignifying it as being worth music fans’ attention. In Lovell’s mind, if making the music felt meaningful for the artist—whether it was improvised or crafted laboriously for years—then it is worth an audience’s time. Lily Tapes & Discs artists’ releases snapshot a moment in an ongoing process—capturing them in the midst of refining their craft and pushing themselves. Far from an odds-and-ends collection, Window provides an impressive and exhaustive document of a loosely interconnected crew of iconoclastic musical minds, each functioning at their highest level, and exemplifies everything Lily Tapes & Discs does best: expert curation done with taste and humility.

-Winston Cook-Wilson

credits

released December 1, 2023

music by everyone as credited
mastered by m deetz
art and packaging by benjamin lovell

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