DAY TICKETS + SPLITS ANNOUNCED
We’re thrilled to present the Day Splits for Forever Is A Long Time
SATURDAY 29th August
TRISTWCH Y FENYWOD
THE SPACE LADY
MARYJANE DUNPHE
CUCINA POVERA
GICHARD
GUTTERSNIPE
LADY NEPTUNE
KARL D’SILVA
SUNDAY 30th August
MOLLY NILSSON
FREE LOVE
WHAIT
SUSANNAH STARK BAND
AMOR
YU CHING
SUPPRESSION FIELD
FAIRFIELD SOCIAL CLUB
GLASGOW
“Hila. A record about loss. What persists beyond the range of ordinary perception? The place mourning keeps returning to — not quite transcendence, not quite doubt. The edge of what we can see.”
In partnership with Born Losers in USA, are thrilled to present the new album by Frankie Rose, Hila.
Self-produced at her home studio featuring collaborations with drummer Justin Welch (Elastica/Lush), Hila was recorded following extensive touring with The Jesus & Mary Chain and Swervedriver. The result is the most confident, searching music Rose has produced; muscular in its production yet emotionally vulnerable in its diffracted neon glow. A record informed by loss and the way grief mutates our senses, it’s fitting that Rose channels the nuanced darkness of later Coil, at times the pounding EBM-production of Skinny Puppy and the near-spiritual alien-ness of Cocteau Twins. On Hila, the doors of perception are constantly melting, revealing the porous nature of the seen and unseen. The result is a synesthesia that flips the senses.
Here it is, the big one.
Forever Is A Long Time: 15 Years Of Night School Records FULL LINE UP.
Molly Nilsson
Maryjane Dunphe
The Space Lady
Tristwch Y Fenywod
Cucina Povera
Guttersnipe
Free Love
Susannah Stark Band
Yu Ching
AMOR
Whait (Wendy Eisenberg & more eaze)
Lady Neptune
Suppression Field
Gichard
Karl D’Silva
AUG 29/30
Fairfield Club, Govan, Glasgow
Day tickets go on sale soon, in the meantime weekend tickets are here.
When will this happen again?
Prophetic Justice Ministry’s Key To World Peace is out digitally.
Swirling, subterranean psyche drift from Melbourne’s Sam Perry, PJM’s doomed-on-the-surface balladry is actually charged with the otherside, like a bard probing the membrane between what’s here and what’s beyond. There are moments of earthiness, songs about physical things that beam with a psychedelic strangeness. There’s also a straight up Lana Del Rey cover, because it’s a great song and Prophetic Justice Ministry does it justice.
Welcome to the world, Key To World Peace.
Vinyl is shipping now in mid-July.
One night only, the London leg of Night School’s 15th year celebrations welcomes 6 luminaries from the underground. We’re SO HAPPY to be back in the capital, where the label first started, to continue our celebrations from Glasgow’s Forever Is A Long Time festival.
MOLLY NILSSON needs no introduction. A guiding light for underground pop music, Molly Nilsson is a bona fide force of nature now into the 3rd decade of her career. Beginning with hand-burnt CDrs in Berlin in 2008 to reaching millions of souls through the years, Nilsson’s modus operandi has never changed. A radical, politicaly engaged songwriter who can write for the heart as well as the revolution, her live performances are celebratory, minimal masterclasses in charisma and togetherness.
THE SPACE LADY‘s earthly mission – to bring about world peace – always feels achievable during her performances, such is the magic she brings. First beaming down to earth in the early 80s, The Space Lady’s legend transcended the obscurist crannies of the internet following the release of The Space Lady’s Greatest Hits, in 2013. The Space Lady’s reinterpretations of 60s and 70s classics, a kind of alchemy in which she transmutes machismo into a cosmic spirituality, might have created the legend but it’s her blissed out originals that echo out through the ages. A Space Lady performance is like nothing else you’ll see.
YU CHING is a Taiwanese artist who began recording solo music whilst living in Berlin. A deeply evocative blend of melting, shoegaze balladry and yearning drones, her music conjures up heat haze on horizons, dry ice on summer nights, wistful dreams of impossible loves. Yu Ching will be performing from her Night School album The Crystal Hum, plus new material yet to be released. This is her London debut.
WHAIT are a new duo comprising musicians Wendy Eisenberg and more eaze. Separately, they have been amassing individual catalogues that weave dovetailing narratives in the experimental song underground. Both artists work across disciplines ranging from abstract, air-y ambience to baroque songsmithery to drone rock. Together they bring all these elements into a new form as Whait, with moments of vulnerability and melody swimming in space and exploration. This is their London debut.
MARYJANE DUNPHE has blazed a path through underground music since her first group VEXX redefined hardcore’s parameters in the 2010s. A mercurial presence with ecstatic, electric stage performances, her music has gone through several mutations in Pinocchio, The Country Liners and on Night School, CC DUST’s synth pop-punk melange. Since then, with her debut album Stage Of Love, she continues this trajectory into anthemic, pulsing pop music. Her performances are mini plays that tear through the emotional spectrum.
We have ONE MORE secret guest to be announced. Stay tuned.
After decades of bootlegs, we’re collaborating with Strawberry Switchblade for the first official merchandise in 40 years.
If you know this label, or me specifically, you’ll know this group are my all time fave and that I get to collaborate with them is a dream. They’re all just the best people. Meet your heroes, sometimes.
We’ve priced them as low as we can get away with while still paying everyone fairly and shipping from UK + USA to try and keep costs low in this environment.
There are 3 designs. Since Yesterday 12″ sleeve, “4 Piece Posing” and “Band In The Snow” the latter two in homage to the original 4 piece version of the group immortalised on the 1982 4 Piece Demo.
USA shirts are Comfort Colors, screenprinted by Magic Circle in Martinez, CA
UK shirts are Stanley/Stella, screenprinted by T-Shirt Cat in Glasgow, Scotland
LISTEN TO PROPHETIC JUSTICE MINISTRY – Life’s A Party here.
So excited to help spread the gospel of Melbourne’s Prophetic Justice Ministry. On a trip with Molly Nilsson last year in Australia, one group of musicians kept getting referenced by almost everyone I met. Prophetic Justice Ministry, Who Cares? and the Melbourne micro-scene they’re blooming is something special. Prophetic Justice Ministry’s debut vinyl recording Key To World Peace is a gorgeous, mysterious mini album swirling in psychedelic fog and understated, affecting, melodic songwriting.
Recorded in home studios in Belgrade (Serbia), Christchurch (New Zealand) and Melbourne (Australia) over the course of three years, Key To World Peace offers a dichotomy in approach. Shifting on a dime between ambient, filmic washes of sound and more traditional song structures, the approach feels natural, casually acid-tipped and emotionally revealing. While Perry’s distinctive guitar chords and grasp of understated melody is evidenced in Melbourne group Who Cares?, as Prophetic Justice Ministry there’s a heightened sense of mystery and space being used.
Key To World Peace will be available soon via our comrades Hobbies Galore on CD in Australia
Today we’re excited to announce Chins For Lefty, the debut album from Glasgow duo Gichard. A duo formed of Lisa Jones and Chas Lalli, the group synthesize a wonky, homespun post-punk aesthetic with a surreal, blackly comic lyrical focal point.
Your Private Hell is the first single taken from the album is out now. The video, filmed by Harrison Reid in Glasgow, is streaming now on YouTube.
Chins For Lefty is the debut album and first recording by Gichard, a new duo chronicling the absurdities of end-stage capitalism and mouldering social rituals from their vantage point in Glasgow, Scotland. Recorded primarily in the band’s home studio straight to tape, Chins For Lefty combines gorgeous, ramshackle melody, DIY kosmische punk, drum machine + synth and, in vocalist/lyricist Lisa Jones, an absurdist commentator on the human condition as it navigates the anxieties of the modern world.
Instrumentalist Chas Lalli’s swirling music accompaniment stitches an evocative mix of musical styles, the ragged wind beneath the lyrics’ wings. Although the duo first collaborated in their previous group Dragged Up, their disparate musical and artistic backgrounds make for an alluring mix in Gichard. Lalli has spent the last 20 years in the Glasgow underground, most notably in the noise rock group VOM, while Lisa Jones’s practice was in poetry and spoken word. Beginning as co-vocalist in her previous band, in Gichard her lyrics are centre stage; the vision concocted alongside Lalli amounts to a total world-build.
Chins For Lefty scans almost like a novel, with each track elucidating a skewed universe that bears only some resemblance to the one you and I partake in. Like all works of fiction Gichard’s songs are rooted in reality and the lived experiences of its authors, but here characters are exaggerated, social mores and habits are pulled apart to reveal their inherent alienness. Universal emotions are laid bare, the bright light of anxious examination searching out every hairline fracture in our relationships. Distorted and cracked, the mirror that Gichard hold up to our world is also pretty damn funny.
Opener Cholesterol Test launches an expansive, cosmic guitar and synth intro that belies the Tascam-tape recorder it was recorded onto, like a Chromatics cut substituting anxiety for overt sexuality. Here Jones intones an apology to a non-responsive recipient, in the medium of a long voice note forensically deconstructing an interaction from the night before. Over punk guitars and shuffling, lo-fi drum machine splutters, the narrator in Asking The Apes “prefers things to people” before being taken hostage in the city zoo to confess an obsession which consumes the protagonist, ending with the immortal two liner
“I sleep in a cocoon of old newspapers at the end of your street / And I think I have been fired from my job,” On album standout Posthumous Hologram, the narrator is faced with a human simulacra, in this case an undead pop star; the face of the encroaching technological singularity. Yes, it does requests, it can do My Way in 200 different language options. But what are the implications? While you’re left pondering, the alternating deadpan verse delivery and undeniably catchy chorus keep
you company.
By the time Break Up With Johnny Dogbirth rattles into view, the band are satirising a suburban inanity blown up to cartoon proportions, soundtracked with a drawled musicality that recalls Rowland S. Howard’s post-Birthday Party balladeering. This approach is furthered on Human Resources: over an angular guitar+bass track, Jones’s short story recalls Dry Cleaning’s erudite lyrical post punk. On Soft Face, Lalli’s guitar and drum machine are swathed in echo and delay, as Jones dissects dating rituals with a west of Scotland drollness. Hamming It Up brings a porcine perspective in a short story that begins with the line “I was breastfeeding discreetly in the service station. She didn’t mind.” What follows is a passage punctured with canned laughter and a narrative involving tribute acts, modern farming techniques.
Brilliant first single Your Private Hell closes the album, the closest the group get to earnest perhaps, filtered through a surreal central Scottishness. While Your Private Hell might seem like a sardonic take down of romance, perhaps it’s the very distillation of love in all its awkwardness, selflessness and weirdness. Here there’s a distinctive Glasgow-ness to this doomed romance: the protagonist falls for an outsider, offers them cheap jarred hot dogs and carbolic soap (the infamous, excoriating soap dished
out in schools and government buildings throughout Scotland), offers to cover up a murder, stalks them in the all-night Spar. It’s a short story of intrigue, murder and the irresistible pull of self-sacrifice to share in someone else’s suffering. If that’s not love, what is it? You can see this vision mapped out in black and white on their video for Your Private Hell here.
This is it, then: the world as narrated by Gichard. Absurd, laugh-out-loud-funny and maybe even with a little earnestness mixed in, just don’t look too hard.
We’re beyond ecstatic, kind of in a state of non-belief, that we are able to present a weekend of our favourite music ever from a selection of artists from across Night School’s history.
The first artists to be announced are Rose McDowall, Tristwch Y Fenywod, Guttersnipe, Cucina Povera, Amor, Yu Ching, Karl D’Silva and Free Love.
The festival will take place at Fairfield Social Club in Govan, an historic social club with roots in Govan’s shipbuilding history. The club is an active social hub and contains 3 spaces, one of which will be for live music + DJs for the festival, so there’s plenty of space to dance, take a breather, mingle.
We will be revealing more of the line up as we go. For this first announcement, we are making cheaper weekend tickets available, individual day tickets will come later.
I really hope to see you there and thank every single person who’s ever bought anything, said a nice thing, been to a show or shown up in anyway to support the label and each other.
This year, Night School Records turns fifteen.
To celebrate we have something very special planned.
Keep 29th & 30th August free, ok?
More info very soon 👀