slow moves is a mood
Slow Moves is a label that began in 2021 with Christina Vantzou’s ‘Releasing Spores.’ In the fall of 2023, they released their second album, a restoration of a 1986/87 collaboration between Kathy Acker and the French group Nox.
When reflecting on their origins and what drives the imprint forward, they note:
“Slow Moves is young, and it’s still figuring out what it can be. But low-key concept albums are one way of describing us. Albums made with intent, as the result of conversations around an idea. Releases that record the reason why they are there, re-enacting points of time when something new was created.
We are composed of two people named Emilie Lauriola and Zin Taylor. We do things individually, and have for a while. Slow Moves is a way for us to collaborate with one another, to produce forms created with others, slowly.
The selections here describe a certain kind of interrelated world; one where writing, genre, sound, and image overlap like the emotions in a day.”
X.Y.R. – El Dorado
Meditations is the name of a record store that is located on the second floor of a little building in Kyoto. Christina Vantzou recommended we visit during our first trip to Japan. Meditations is a dangerous place, everything is amazing and you can only bring so much home. This was the one record I purchased. It was a discovery of both the musician X.Y.R. and 12th Isle Records from Glasgow, a label where everything they release seems unbelievably related and absolutely perfect. The album is a voyage, sounding like you woke up in a tropical forest on some moon and the plants and fauna sing stories using their unique sounds while the ground slowly breathes a rhythm connecting everything together.
Les Ondes éphémères – Zin Taylor: Ambient Visions of a dot 下田市
A radio play that begins with music by Aki Tsuyuko, leading to the description of a photo book about a coastal surf town in Japan, evolving into a reading of said book’s text with field recordings added for ambient drama, and finally concluding with a track from Michael Stearns. It’s mellow, meditative, and hallucinatory.
Exploring Creativity with Ursula K. Leguin
A beautifully holistic talk about creativity, life, and the relationships needed to allow family and art to flourish. The cadence and elegant complexity of this interview is inspiring.
Cate Le Bon – Chairs in the Dark
Welsh musician Cate Le Bon performs an acoustic, slowed down, transcendent re-arrangement of a song from White Fence.
Lizzie Mercier Descloux – Hard-Boiled Babe
I first heard this track on Flo Dill’s NTS breakfast show and I had to immediately read everything I could find online on genius Lizzie Mercier Descloux. Anyway, this is my go-to song when I need to cosmically realign myself with the stars.
Christina Vantzou – Live performance at Le Bal, Paris
A show of the sound with Christina Vantzou that I programmed in the exhibition space of Le Bal in Paris a few years ago. We decided to film the concert as this was high peak covid time and we were only allowed to have a few people inside the space. I’m selecting it because Christina’s performance was brilliant and it also felt like a special and connecting moment in one the strangest and loneliest times.
Suoni Immaginari – Agostino Nirodh Fortini
Zin bought this album made by the excellent Black Sweat records and I have probably listened to it more than 200 times. It’s a reissue of a 1988 private press cassette of music therapist and musician Agostino Nirodh Fortini and listening to it always feels like the beginning of a great astral projection trip.
Kathy Acker documentary by Alan Benson (1984)
Again, not a music track but something I have been watching once a year to remind myself what intellectual fierceness can sound and look like. The depiction of the very DIY and cutthroat New York music and art scene of that era combined with the clarity of her speech on literature, politics, gender make it fun and still relevant to watch. Reissuing her sound performance with Nox last year on vinyl for Slow Moves was definitely the highlight of that year for me.
