Japancakes

Japancakes formed in Athens, Georgia in 1996, and since then have garnered national and international attention for their unique and woozy brand of spaced-out instrumental music. The band has never been one to shy away from plumbing the depths nor scaling the upper ethers of melody and beauty. The creation of their singular soundscapes encompasses widely varied approaches: whether they employ a singing-sword pedal steel, a throaty cello, a sparkling wash of precision-aligned synthesizers, or even a well and wisely-placed moment of silence. Japancakes are intent on emerging from their forays into musical space cloaked in pure sound. The music is direct. Whereas the listener might suspect that the absence of vocals would leave some sort of void, Japancakes deftly negate that suspicion by turning that same so-called absence into an unlimited mesh of listener interface; every moment of a Japancakes song is an opportunity for true listener interactivity. In other words, each Japancakes recording invites you INWARD to engage in a dialectic with its own particular cosmos, and furthermore, invites you to project what you please into it.

Japancake's recorded output comprises 7 releases. Engineering on all titles was handled by Athens’ own Andy Baker, and recorded at Athens’ Chase Park Transduction or at Andy Baker’s Bakery studio. The band’s first three efforts were released via the Kindercore imprint: “If I Could See Dallas”(1999), the “Down the Elements” EP(2000), and “The Sleepy Strange” (2001). An “extended EP”, “Belmondo,” was released on the band’s current label, Darla Records, in 2002. 2004 saw the release of “Waking Hours” on the Athens-based WARM Recordings label. Japancakes would realign themselves with Darla Records in 2007 for that year’s back-to-back full-lengths, “Giving Machines”, and a song-by-song interpretation/re-interpretation of My Bloody Valentine’s “Loveless.” The band’s highly acclaimed first three records, long out of print, were reissued on Darla in February 2008.

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