Posts Tagged ‘Bella Union’

Watch: ‘Withholding’ by Divide and Dissolve

Posted: 15 April 2025 in Recommended Streams and Videos, Singles and EPs
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Helmed by Black and Cherokee composer and multi-instrumentalist Takiaya Reed, Divide and Dissolve release their new album Insatiable this Friday, April 18 via Bella Union.

Takiaya lent vocals to the first ever D//D song on recent single ‘Grief’ which showed her softer, contemplative side. Today’s new single ‘Withholding’ puts the project’s rib-rattling doom metal depths on full display.

“’Withholding’ is about a place where change can be perceived. Where it is felt materially spiritually emotionally physically. It is about navigating the dynamics and tensions of push and pull” – Takiaya Reed

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The album title Insatiable, came to Takiaya in a dream. She had a vision of a better world, one that gelled seamlessly with the optimism of her take on heavy music: “I saw and have felt the impact of people committing great acts of harm, causing pain in a never ending cycle. I have also seen and felt the strength and power of people committing great acts of love,” she says. For Takiaya, this is what it means to be “insatiable”; it’s the way we choose either a path of destruction or one of compassion, and experience it to its fullest. “It’s an album about love, and it feels important to experience this, now more than ever.”

Divide and Dissolve’s music is an acknowledgement of the dispossession that occurs due to colonial violence, it honours ancestors, opposes white supremacy and calls for indigenous sovereignty. Already legends on the international doom metal scene, the new album is an evolution of sound and intricacy. Strapped with thunderstorms of crashing cymbals, crunchy feedback, stomach-churning riffs and neo-classical inflections, the new collection delves into the idea of freedom through impermanence and destruction vs compassion, an urgent call to imagine a better world before it’s too late. Listen to it, digest it, and become insatiable.

Divide and Dissolve live dates (so far):

17-05-2025 – The Great Escape, Brighton, United Kingdom
18-05-2025 – Desertfest, London, United Kingdom
30-08-2025 – Supersonic Festival, Birmingham, United Kingdom
05-11-2025 – Pitchfork festival, London, United Kingdom w/ Unwound

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Photo credit: Brandon McClain @eathumans

Watch: ‘Grief’ by Divide and Dissolve

Posted: 25 March 2025 in Recommended Streams and Videos, Singles and EPs
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Helmed by Black and Cherokee composer and multi-instrumentalist Takiaya Reed, Divide and Dissolve will release their new album, Insatiable, on April 18 via Bella Union.

The 10 track album run the gamut of doom metal – from the ear-splitting depths of lead single ‘Monolithic’, to contemplative, softer moments on the aptly titled song ‘Grief’, released today. Like all of Divide and Dissolve’s music, Insatiable is almost entirely instrumental.

While the album’s sheer grandiosity represents an evolution in Divide and Dissolve’s sound, it also marks the very first time that Takiaya has ever lent vocals to a D//D song. On ’Grief’ her distorted voice echoes atop a vibrating bass tone, repeating the lyrics: “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do/ I’m so lonely without you.” Takiaya explains, “The voice is such a mysterious  instrument. This album feels different, and I wanted to honour that”.

The director of the music video, Sepi Mashiahof, adds; “The music video for ‘Grief’ is an ode to the feelings of empowerment, resistance, and sadness that Divide and Dissolve weaves into our bodies. It’s an expressionist diary made up of dissonant and revelatory memories. Grief eclipses everything around us, innocuously lingering in the functional movements of our daily lives, then aggressively literal in the reflective silence behind our eyes. Grief is inherent to our existence, knowing that a better world exists for all of us and its potential is boundless, yet we’re made to suffer the atrocities of greed and exploitation instead. We can honor Grief as a passage of life, but we must resist the forces that impose it as a numbness to injustice.”

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Divide and Dissolve live dates (so far):

18-05-2025 Desertfest London – London
30-08-2025 Supersonic Festival – Birmingham

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Photo credit: Brandon McClain @eathumans

Watch: ‘Provenance’ by Divide And Dissolve

Posted: 4 February 2025 in Recommended Streams and Videos, Singles and EPs
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Divide And Dissolve have announced a new album, Insatiable, arriving via Bella Union April 18th.

Helmed by Black and Cherokee composer and multi-instrumentalist Takiaya Reed, Divide and Dissolve has announced her new album, Insatiable, due out April 18 via Bella Union. Already legends on the international doom metal scene, the new album is an evolution of sound and intricacy. Over the 10 tracks, it runs the gamut of doom metal, building upon the genre’s trademark sludgy guitars and thundering drums with Takaiya’s deft and wondrous saxophone.

Today Divide and Dissolve share lead single ‘Provenance’, a powerful and dynamic composition that evokes the spirit of hope and possibility. Takiaya shares, “Provenance is an examination of where things begin and how they can end.”

Watch the video here:

The album title Insatiable, came to Takiaya in a dream. She had a vision of a better world, one that gelled seamlessly with the optimism of her take on heavy music: “I saw and have felt the impact of people committing great acts of harm, causing pain in a never ending cycle. I have also seen and felt the strength and power of people committing great acts of love,” she says. For Takiaya, this is what it means to be “insatiable”; it’s the way we choose either a path of destruction or one of compassion, and experience it to its fullest. “It’s an album about love, and it feels important to experience this, now more than ever.”

Divide and Dissolve’s music is an acknowledgement of the dispossession that occurs due to colonial violence, it honours ancestors, opposes white supremacy and calls for indigenous sovereignty. Strapped with thunderstorms of crashing cymbals, crunchy feedback, stomach-churning riffs and neo-classical inflections, the new collection delves into the idea of freedom through impermanence and destruction vs compassion, an urgent call to imagine a better world before it’s too late. Listen to it, digest it, and become insatiable.

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Photo credit: Abbey Raymonde

Watch: ‘Midwinter Swimmers’ by the innocence mission

Posted: 16 October 2024 in Recommended Streams and Videos, Singles and EPs
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The innocence mission is releasing ‘Midwinter Swimmers,’ the second single, video and title track from their first studio album from the innocence mission in four years. The album sounds immediately like an old friend. At the same time, it’s a new kind of adventure for the beloved Pennsylvania band of high school friends Karen Peris, Don Peris, and Mike Bitts, having both an expansive, cinematic quality and the strange, lo-fi beauty of a newly discovered vintage folk/pop album, brimming with melody. Midwinter Swimmers is being released November 29 by Therese Records in North America, Bella Union in the U.K. and PVine in Japan.

Watch the video here:

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‘Midwinter Swimmers’ is the second in a trio of songs on the new album (the second being the title song) about missing a loved one who is away, and of how love can transcend distance, Karen says. Piano melodies and high electric with strummed nylon string guitars make a glimmery soundtrack for this tune. Karen Peris thinks of this as ‘a small song of looking ahead to the arrival of a loved and dear person.’ In part of the landscape, swimmers are seen from a distance and are refracted through tears and made more beautiful that way. The contrast of swimmers in the winter is connected with early flowers that, though fragile in appearance are especially hardy, enough to appear when it is still snowing. And this connection in turn becomes linked with the bravery of the person who has been away and will soon return.

This attentiveness to small detail typifies the way the innocence mission’s songs look closely at everyday moments as miraculous worlds of their own. Karen’s words stand on their own as poetry, with a particular sense of place and color, of the visual, that communicate universal experiences of change and loss, and of love, hope, and gratitude.

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Listen: ‘Monolithic’ by Divide and Dissolve

Posted: 12 September 2024 in Recommended Streams and Videos, Singles and EPs
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Divide and Dissolve sign to Bella Union and share the brand new single "Monolithic" as their North American tour dates commence. A new album is expected in 2025.

Monolithic is a prayer for systems of liberation, freedom, Indigenous sovereignty, and for a Black future. This song is hope for the seemingly impossible and for things that have never been seen or experienced in many lifetimes. Where no memories have been created. – Takiaya Reed

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Divide and Dissolve’s music is an acknowledgement of the dispossession that occurs due to colonial violence, it honours ancestors, opposes white supremacy and calls for indigenous sovereignty.

Takiaya Reed’s dense sound is overwhelmingly heavy; a dissonant pounding of percussion, guitars, piano, synths and saxophone, interwoven with passages of orchestral beauty that give a feeling of respite.

Divide and Dissolve have released four full-length albums to date; Basic (2017, DERO), Abomination (2018, DERO), Gas Lit (2021, Invada) – which was hailed Mary Anne Hobbs’ Album of the Year, and was complimented by the Gas Lit remix EP, including reworkings by Moor Mother, Chelsea Wolfe and Bearcat. Most recently the band released Systemic (2023, Invada), and plan to follow up with their Bella Union debut in 2025.

Catch Divide and Dissolve supporting Systemic for the final time this year across North America – dates below.

Upcoming live dates:

9/12 Houston, TX @ White Oak Music Hall Upstairs

9/13 Austin, TX @ The Ballroom

9/14 Denton, TX @ Rubber Gloves

9/16 Albuquerque, NM @ Sister

9/17 Phoenix, AZ @ The Rebel Lounge

9/18 Santa Ana, CA @ Constellation Room

9/19 West Hollywood, CA @ Troubadour

9/20 San Francisco, CA @ Bottom of The Hill

9/21 – Sacramento, CA @ Goldfield Trading Post

9/23 Portland, OR @ Mississippi Studios

9/24 Seattle, WA @ The Sunset

9/26 Boise, ID @ Neurolux

9/27 Salt Lake City, UT @ The DLC

9/28 Englewood, CO @ Moes

10/1 Minneapolis, MN @ 7th St. Entry

10/2 Chicago, IL @ Cobra Lounge

10/3 Columbus, OH @ Rumba

10/4 New Kensington, PA @ Preserving Underground

10/5 Buffalo, NY @ Rec Room

10/6 Toronto, ON @ Lee’s Palace

10/9 Montreal, QC @ Bar le Ritz PDB

10/10 Cambridge, MA @ The Middle East Upstairs

10/11 Brooklyn, NY @ Elsewhere Zone One

10/12 Philadelphia, PA @ MilkBoy

10/15 Baltimore, MD @ Metro Gallery

10/16 Richmond, VA @ Richmond Music Hall

10/17 Chapel Hill, NC @ Local 506

10/18 Atlanta, GA @ The EARL

10/19 New Orleans, LA @ Siberia

Watch: ‘No Dreams of Fayres’ by Tallies

Posted: 8 November 2021 in Singles and EPs
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Bella Union Records are thrilled to announce the signing of Tallies. The Toronto-based band are today sharing their captivating new single, “No Dreams of Fayres”, which is released via Bella Union (UK/EU), Kanine Records (US) and Hand Drawn Dracula (Canada). The new single marks the first new music from the band since their acclaimed self-titled debut that found fans at Clash, NYLON, DIY, CRACK, MOJO, Exclaim, Under the Radar and more. Listen to “No Dreams of Fayres” here:

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Speaking about the new single, Cogan says: “’No Dreams of Fayres’ is a reflection of thoughts that I remember going through my mind when I stayed still in bed. Feeling as though staying still in bed was the only thing that would help the sadness – basically, disconnecting myself from family, friends, and having a life. Finding the way out of depression was hard but possible. ‘No Dreams of Fayres’ is also about the realization of letting yourself feel real feelings but not mistaking them for emotions. I had to learn to get a grip of what I wanted out of life and go for it with no self-sabotage – which was music, as clichéd as it sounds. It pulled me out of bed, physically and mentally.”

Tallies, who have previously opened for the likes of Mudhoney, Hatchie, Tim Burgess and Weaves, is made up of founding members guitarist Dylan Frankland and singer/guitarist Sarah Cogan, who are joined by drummer, Cian O’Neill. Tallies were recently announced to play at next year’s SXSW Festival in Austin and New Colossus Festival in New York.

Watch the video ere:

Explosions in the Sky – The Wilderness

Posted: 7 April 2016 in Albums
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Bella Union – 1st April 2016

Christopher Nosnibor

Explosions in the Sky have long been more than merely synonymous with post-millennium post-rock: their early albums effectively set the template for virtually every other band in the field with their delicate guitar work and epic crescendos. It’s been five years since their last album, and ‘The Wilderness’ finds Explosions in exploratory form.

It’s epic, for sure, and it’s also brooding, nuanced, detailed. The title track has all of the standard ingredients and gets the album off to a gentle start. So far, so much business as usual.

But the album as a while feels far from formulaic, and it would be a stretch to align many of the tracks here to any genre other than progressive. There are bold, rumbling pianos and drums that roll like thunder as vast sonic vistas unfurl. But instead of the storm of crescendos, there are expansive near-ambient passages, flickers and bubbles of electronica

Urgent drumming underpins the moody ‘Infinite Orbit’, which actually feels like an intro passage to a latter—day Swans track and is one of a number of shorter tracks that point to a relatively concise album – in fact, only three of the nine pieces here extend past six minutes, with the dark and sombre ‘Logic of a Dream’ proving to be one of the most expansive tracks both in terms of duration and sonic reach.

Perhaps ironically, then, while it does feel like Explosions are striving to tread new ground, in abandoning the trademark dynamics that defined the post-rock genre, they’ve produced an album that lacks any sense of action. It’s pleasant, mellow, even. It doesn’t make you feel anything (yes, when I write ‘you’ I’m projecting my own experience as a listener onto you, the reader, both individually and collectively), and ultimately it’s bland and inessential. It’s a proggy post-rock album in an endless desert of proggy post-rock albums. A wilderness indeed.

Explosions in the Sky - Wilderness

 

Explosions in the Sky Online