A guide to every VF label release of 2018

By VF Team in Features, Label News December 14, 2018

Written by

VF Team

Published on

December 14, 2018

Features

From Madlib-inspired jazz to AI-fuelled techno soundscapes.

With a back catalogue that spans major artists like Massive Attack, alongside avant garde innovators like Ryoji Ikeda (whose Music For Percussion was repressed this year), summarising the music that comes through The Vinyl Factory label is a difficult task at the best of times. Releasing close to forty records in the last twelve months, this task was made even harder in 2018.

One of the year’s most prominent projects was a four-part series with maverick artist Róisín Murphy, who teamed up with house producer Maurice Fulton for a quartet of elastic dance floor 12″s, each of which was given a unique visual identity by designer Braulio Amado and a hedonistic video, directed by Murphy herself.

It certainly wasn’t the only release that VF aimed at the dance floor, as Berlin collective African Acid Is The Future dropped a series of remix-backed live recordings of Ogoya Nengo and Stella Chiweshe on a double-pack 12″, Actress returned as AI sprite Young Paint, for an EP of deconstructed club music, Boyz Noise reworked Adamski & Seal’s acid classic ‘Killer’, and Chilean techno overload Ricardo Villalobos gave a moody, extended treatment to Soundwalk Collective’s adventures in Jean-Luc Godard’s archives.

The original album saw the duo explore the ephemera and incidental sounds of the iconic film-maker’s archives, and was one of six full-lengths released on VF this year. Among the others were debuts for dream-pop quartet Marine, and the pan-European La Stampa. There was also a stirring return for LAVASCAR, fronted by the inimitable fashion icon Michèle Lamy, while French producer Joakim dissembled his involvement in the 2017 French Pavilion work of Xavier Veilhan to create a stunning ambient album called The Studio Venezia Sessions.

Of the other releases to emerge from the art world this year, Theaster Gates’ collaboration with The Black Monks of Mississippi drew on Sun Ra’s afro-futurist verve, and was accompanied by a VF-published book Black Madonna. There was also new music from Rodney Graham and Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, while Eddie Peake accompanied his White Cube show alongside pirate radio survivors Kool London with the reissue of ’90s jungle classic ‘Information Centre’ by Gappa G & HyperHypa.

Another busy year at The Store X was reflected in the releases which emerged in 2018, starting with Arthur Jafa’s A Series of Utterly Improbable, Yet Extraordinary Renditions with the Serpentine gallery, an ambitious fold-out release for fashion designer Willy Vanderperre and a limited soundtrack edition for Wes Anderson’s Isle Of Dogs. As Strange Days: Memories of the Future took over the space in the autumn, there were soundtrack releases for Pipilotti Rist and Soap&Skin, and Kahlil Joseph’s Fly Paper, which featured Thundercat, Flying Lotus, Kelsey Lu and more. With a piece in Strange Days, there was also a much anticipated repress of Ragnar Kjartansson’s The Visitors, in its original 9-panel form. All these were joined in the soundtrack camp by a special release of a brace of Goblin classics for Dario Argento, released in conjunction with label Aries Arise.

On that jazzy tip, VF also released a stunning new EP from multi-instrumentalist Emma-Jean Thackray and the one-take Abbey Road recording ‘Love Is The Message’ by Yussef Dayes & Alfa Mist. Meanwhile, RZA lent verses to Jerome Hadey’s Never For Money Always For Love EP, released in conjunction with Villa Lena, and Jeremy Deller sent bat frequencies to legendary producer Adrian Sherwood, to craft a deep set of echo-location dubs .

Explore all the releases in more detail below.