Selwa Abd (originally from Morocco, currently residing in Brooklyn) uses the fictional character Bergsonist, from Brooklyn, Slovakia, as her musical guise. Derived from Deleuze’s Bergsonism, Bergsonist uses intuition as a method to deliver her/his instinctive psychoanalytic theories. A blend of different audio sources and samples are used as a way to capture the essence of the ‘present’ moment, manipulating found sounds along with self-concocted digital fragments to combine in in the span of a set, given time.

Bergsonist allows inspiration to come from anywhere, yet she/he limits themselves by the gear/tools that are used. The approach consists of inhaling all the energy of the city — influenced by trips to museums, galleries, shows, talking to people and sensing nature — and exhaling it sonically. Bergsonist reacts to this energy and inspiration without any specific rules, styles or genres — extending the array of possibilities by always pushing preconceived uses of the tools.

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With an array of aged, battered machines, Kevin Palmer aka Best Available Technology orchestrates live improvisations in a dub-controlled environment. Over the last three decades, Palmer has been experimenting with how to express a deep affection for a sound that was always thousands of miles away growing up, and this is his distinctive vision of the golden age of New York hip hop. Palmer's abiding love for a specific moment in New York's musical history is also riven with a looming anxiousness, as if he's unsure of how best to act as a conduit for a time he experienced by proxy.

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S O C I A L :

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SoundCloud
Bandcamp
 

Certain Creatures is multi-instrumentalist and producer Oliver Chapoy. Drenched deep in the murk of Miami's underground electronic & hardcore scene in the late 90's, Chapoy has become New York City's best kept secret for modular techno experiments, live and otherwise.

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S O C I A L :
Website
Facebook
Twitter
Soundcloud
Instagram

Before Clay Wilson started making techno, he studied improvisation at music school in upstate New York. Wilson played bass, studying with noted jazz musicians who had worked with Ornette Coleman, Alice Coltrane, Herbie Hancock, and many artists who recorded for the ECM label. He counts Coleman, Coltrane, and Art Ensemble of Chicago among his major inspirations. You can sense the subtle traces of Wilson’s avant-garde jazz training in his techno. You can hear the shifting layers of intriguing textures in the music, his deep understanding of the low end, of arranging and composition, of form. “Understanding the foundation of form has allowed me to not worry so much about putting loops into a full ‘song’, which seems to be a common thing with electronic music,” he says. “I think the textures kind of come from trying to get away from standard musical ideas.” 

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Bangers and Ash is back. The rough & ready series of homespun records that spawned the wider Styles Upon Styles imprint has always challenged artists to work their sonics for both the club (Bangers) and the clouds (Ash), juxtaposing their sound across one plate of wax with hand-made artwork. BASH releases have included artists from Best Available Technology and King Garbage to Clay Wilson and Certain Creatures, and we're ecstatic to welcome the inimitable Contakt to the family in 2018.

Contakt is a native of Michigan and was baptized on the Detroit dance floor by hometown icons like Robert Hood, Mike Clark, and Ectomorph. A frequent attendee at Detroit’s most notorious—and not necessarily legal—parties, Contakt funneled the sound of his native scene onto the dance floors of New York City where he cofounded the boundary-pushing Brooklyn club night TURRBOTAX®. He’s spent years shaping the modern foundations of NYC's music scene from the inside out through legendary labels, era-defining magazines and renegade radio broadcasts, but it's as a prolific producer that he showcases his talents on BASH007.

Contakt's Bangers and Ash entry has been long in the works, as the artist experimented with blending his Detroit roots with the sounds of his adopted home in New York. “Second Shift” open the Ash side with a spacious wash of analog synth constructs, ducking and weaving across an atmospheric track that rolls like distant thunder."Detritus" continues the side with an immersive, layered approach to the producer's hardware explorations, drifting the Ash side ever further skyward. “Shut Off Notice,” on the other hand, divebombs deep into classic Detroit techno with a sweat-soaked groove that wouldn’t have been out of place in a Michigan warehouse circa 1998 while simultaneously sounding fresh for 2018.Closing on a tracky excursion that barrels down the M-1 with relentless abandon, "NDO" ends the side in propulsive style.

Each record has been screen-printed, stamped and stickered by Contakt and SUS, with mixing by Phil Moffa and mastering by Josh Bonati.

Denitia Odigie is a singer, songwriter, producer, and musician based in New York City. She has gained critical acclaim as a solo artist (Denitia, ADESUWA) as well as for her work with her indie R&B duo, denitia and sene. Rolling Stone has described her as having “ice-cutting vocal skills…an evocative range of emotion…” while The Fader has insisted "her music is something everyone needs right now."

Born and raised in Texas, Denitia stumbled upon the opportunity to move in and join an artist collective residence, shortly after arriving in NYC. The Clubhouse, a 4-story Victorian house in the Ditmas Park neighborhood of South Brooklyn, was home to anywhere from 8-11 musical and visual artists, and Denitia fit right in. It was in the The Clubhouse that she learned new methods of self-production and it's also where she met future collaborator Sene. The meeting of denitia and sene was an understated one; both had a mutual admiration for each other's music. Rapper, sene, invited Denitia to sing a hook on a track for LP to be leased on Plug Records. They both were happy with the results, so they continued to collaborate. One song led to another, and what seemed like overnight, their debut EP, blah blah blah was featured on Okayplayer, The Fader, and Indie Shuffle, amongst many other tastemaker blogs. In the spring of 2013, denitia and sene.'s first LP, his and hers, debuted in the Top #10 on the iTunes R&B charts. A swift sensation, the effort was a pleasantly unexpected success. The years that followed found the indie R&B duo headlining a tour in Western Europe, touring a great part of the states, and supporting artists such as HAIM, Jessie Ware, Mikky Ekko, Chet Faker, Jessie Boykins III, Lianne La Havas, Big Freedia, and Earl Sweatshirt, amongst others. The denitia and sene project has since been covered by press outlets such as Vogue, New York Times, Rolling Stone, Spin, Fader, Nylon, NPR, Interview. Their videos have enjoyed heavy rotation on MTV2, MTVu, BET, and Revolt TV. After dropping a handful of singles, and then aligning with first Red Bull Music and then Rinse FM (UK) for successful releases, d&s has established themselves as early pioneers of what may now be considered in the realm of future-soul and new-wave pop.

In early 2016, Denitia created ADESUWA, a solo alias co-produced by Brad Williams (Jose James, Cory Henry). Combining flavors of dream-rock, retro soul, drum-machine driven R&B, ADESUWA has been compared to the likes of Beach House, Sade, Blood Orange, Little Dragon, and Cocteau Twins. The debut EP under this moniker has been hailed by mags and tastemakers, with Earmilk quoting "Adesuwa's strengths lie in her angelic vocal harmonies and how her croons interplay with her band's hazy arrangements."

In late 2016, denitia and sene. followed up their debut success with sophomore LP, love and noir.  A darker, more abstract effort, love and noir. was called by The New York Times, “a tightly edited collection of bedroom jams, dialed up by Odigie’s soulful vocals and the duo’s perfectionist production values.”

Denitia’s Ceilings (SUS023) is a portrait of an artist awakened. After moving to the Rockaways, an isolated, beach-side Queens community, Odigie found herself turning inward for inspiration. She set out to shed the protective layers her career had imposed and rediscover what songs and sounds came naturally to her. She also wanted this story to have her name on it: no more aliases, no more hiding. 

R E L E A S E S :

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S O C I A L :

Facebook
Twitter
Snapchat
Instagram
YouTube
Bandsintown
iTunes
Spotify
Tidal
Google Play
SoundCloud
Bandcamp

Diamond Terrifier Cipher is the brainchild of Sam Hillmer, a NYC impresario responsible for countless mind-bending evenings, leading the Zs charge, and bridging saxophone and electronics solo incarnations under the moniker Diamond Terrifier. Hillmer’s new bandit crew, the Cipher, assembles four global- and generational-spanning tricksters: the scene’s best kept secret, Michael Beharie, on guitar, synths and effects; Cibo Matto co-founder, Miho Hatori, on vocals; and studio wizard / guitar deviant, Don Devore, of Collapsing Scenery.

The Cipher spent the past two years improvising, jamming, and melting throughout New York’s venues before settling into Don’s studio to record four conjurings for their self-titled debut, Chapel Master. Cipher maestro Hillmer fingerprints the EP with echoes of free-jazz and drone, conducting space for Miho’s alien vocals, Beharie’s textures and Don’s riffs to birth a distinct, warped, New York now-wave recording resistant to any singular form. Chapel Master rules a place of impermanence made quantifiable for the first time care of Styles Upon Styles.

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Introducing singer, composer, multi-instrumentalist and native New Yorker Gabriel Garzón-Montano. Born to a Colombian father and a French mother, Gabriel spent his early years mastering the violin, guitar, and drums, before turning to the piano and bass guitar to better complete his compositions. By the time he graduated from Purchase College's Conservatory of Music, the foundations for his debut EP, Bishouné: Alma del Huila, were already laid. 

A heartfelt tribute to the role of family, love, and the City's unavoidable lifestyle, Bishouné: Alma del Huila collects six songs performed and recorded at Henry Hirsch's Waterfront Studios. Renovated from an old church, Henry's home provided Gabriel with the right tools and environs needed to realize his demos to the songs included on this EP.  

R E L E A S E S :

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S E E   L I V E :

Strut World Tour with Lenny Kravitz October 22—December 14, 2014

An out the box New York native, Gut Nose been making electronic music since he was a young, voracious lad. A hardware obsessive and crate digging fanatic whose been sampling fuzzy disco and freestyle records from his parents' giant collection as long as he can remember.

Manipulating & molding sampled sounds grew not a love for machines, channeling the various mediums into live renditions of tracks until a bona fide, gutter groove emerges. There's plenty of painstaking, waveform-drawing music that takes place these days, and so instead of obsessing about perfection, Gut Nose just run with what gets recorded: live jams implanted to cassette through an ancient, '80s Sony mixer and various old effect boxes. 

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King Garbage are the new crop of American soul players, the Muscle Shoals Swampers of the file-sharing generation. Zach Cooper and Vic DiMotsis compose freewheeling and heartbreakingly endearing soul, embracing the roots of American music with Cheshire grins and a sound that's all their own.

Imagining the rhythm sections of Pino Palladino and Questlove amongst the vocals of Beth Gibbons or Sam Cooke will put you in the right headspace for King Garbage. Vic and Zach melt influence and experience with sheer joy, good humor and hearts full of friendship to burnish gems of dusted pop. The flexibility on display is maddening - from croon to four-top harmonization, from breaks full of grit to heavenly horn sections, Vic and Zach push themselves into new territory with each release, grinning and improvising their way from one corner of the country to the next. After twelve years of friendship and collaboration, the duo have learned to lean on each other and encourage forward motion no matter the outcome.

Styles have had the pleasure to grow with these two friends over the years. Though both have left the city for greener pastures in Asheville and Black Mountain, NC, they remain integral to our NY experience. Zach’s smile greeted us upon landing back in the city when Styles' was only just beginning, leading us down some life-changing sonic roads to eye-opening discoveries; Vic’s vocals on BASH003 changed our perspective on the range of music Styles should support. It is our distinct honor to share a snapshot of King Garbage’s vibe.

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A recent graduate of Red Bull Music Academy New York and British ex-pat marooned in Melbourne for the past decade, Andy Donnelly distills the urban groove and bucolic mood of his heritage through the vibrancy of his new environs into a wholly unique soundscape. 

Following a narrative of apocalyptic tides and the oceanic sublime, Sea Levels, his first release with Styles Upon Styles, sinks into the ambient, house, and techno realms with flashes of two-step, hip hop and dub. It's an idiosyncratic take on British electronic music viewed through the lens of relocation, aided by an arsenal of analog synthesizers, drum machines, and psychotropic effects.

R E L E A S E S

Sea Levels (SUS004)

Ohal is a pianist, a collaborator, an activist, a writer and engineer. Her music is a collage of synthesized sounds, field recordings and voice. Fusing the logic of contemporary composition with the sensibilities of pop songs, Ohal builds narrative and pathos out of soundscape and abstraction. 

Born and raised in Ashkelon, Israel, a seaside town tucked amongst sand dunes, Ohal left Israel for the dune-less landscapes of Omaha, Nebraska and New York City in the summer of 2001. An accidental train ride to Williamsburg spurned a decade of collaborations and friendships. She worked on music and film with Tunde Adebimpe of TV On The Radio, collaborated with Tyondai Braxton and toured in Kyp Malone’s Rain Machine.  As her collaborations in the indie world flourished, she became more interested in electronic music and noise, eventually leaving King’s County for Tel Aviv to recharge and refocus.

On returning to her native Israel, Ohal joined a direct action group called Anarchists Against the Wall to protest the systematic oppression of Palestinians and reactionary Israeli culture that grows with it. She later moved to London to pursue an MA in Anthropology, where she contributed to and edited a book about Anarchism in Israel for AK Press. She remains involved with the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel, recently collaborating with Brian Eno on an article urging musicians to boycott Israel.

Her music has been a constant throughout these various moves. During her time in Brooklyn, Tel Aviv and London, Ohal built a plethora of her own theremins and synthesizers. She accumulated an unique sound library from these instruments, a library tapped extensively for her solo recordings. Her first solo pieces were born out of a collaboration with Berlin-based filmmaker Lior Shamriz on his feature, Cancelled Faces. 

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Brooklyn's Quincy Vidal boasts two unique personalities behind the mic: Le'Asha Julius and Caleb "CE" Eberhardt. The duo met in the acting department at Purchase College before descending on Brooklyn with the intention of composing day-in-the-life odysseys through a fiercely modern take on Golden Age hip hop.

Following three self-released albums since 2010, QV set forth in 2016 with a different kind of release: the wolf boy hoodie with accompanying download of their new EP, Chi'ren. The pairing of Chi'ren's playful artwork and intentional lyricism blazes through each song, as Le and CE weave through tales of love, anger, sex, betrayal and ultimately, the loss of childhood innocence.

Chi'ren features productions from both CE and Space People, whose beat tape, SHMM (SUS012), dropped in December 2015. Their work draws from 90’s and 10’s inspiration with crucial abandon - no style is more present than the singular, alive and confident voices of Quincy Vidal. Brooklyn, stand up.

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SOCIAL
Website
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Caleb Eberhardt is Rosehardt – a self-produced R&B / hip hop artist from San Francisco, CA, currently residing in Brooklyn, NY.

Coping with the slow and painful loss of his father to Alzheimer's while subsequently ending a longterm romantic relationship, Rosehardt weaves a harrowing, humble narrative on his debut LP, Songs in the Key of Solitude, through dynamic productions that bend genre borders at will. A spell-binding lyricist equally capable of visceral verses and soaring, pleading hooks, his progressive compositions reveal an emotional sophistication rarely found amongst contemporaries.

Rosehardt has been writing and producing music for upwards of 10 years, most prominently as one-half of Quincy Vidal, a New York-based hip hop / jazz group heralded for their live performances. Their 2016 release Chi'ren attracted critical acclaim from Billboard, Boiler Room, and Impose Magazine, and helped secure opening slots for Lion Babe, Gabriel Garzón- Montano, and Noname.

Rosehardt's solo material offers an intimate exploration of his personal history. His music is rooted in gospel and black folk music, echoes of which coat his recent singles, "Fall Into You" and "Bad Song", with a weathered rawness. Creating soul music for a generation burdened by the weight of history and a depressingly unchanged present, Rosehardt's songs are earnest treatises on life in America as a young black artist navigating the throes of modernity.

"My audience is my therapist", says Rosehardt. But the reverse is also true; while traveling with him, we travel within ourselves.”

A capable multi-instrumentalist and native New Yorker, Space People builds frenetic, funk-laden tracks using digital and analog synthesizers, drum machines, and an expansive sample library. His two releases for Styles, SHMM (2015) and Wet (forthcoming, October 2016), showcase a signature sound that is just as likely to recall Charles Stepney's cinematic arranging or Giorgio Moroder's harmonic palette, as it is J Dilla's poltergeist trying to skype you through your home appliances. His career as a collaborator has been unusually fruitful. He's maintained a decade-long partnership with songwriter Gabriel Garzón-Montano with several releases to date, most recently the official remix of Mayer Hawthorne's "Lingerie & Candlewax." He has garnered critical acclaim for his production work on Chi'ren, the 2016 EP from fellow Styles artists Quincy Vidal, and remains an indispensable part of their live performances. Most recently, he served as music director for the debut live performance of Latasha Alcindor’s B(LA)K at National Sawdust.

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Thaddeus Nelson Jr conjures memories from samples to dress his compositions in a dusted glow. His first release, “Out Of The Night”, emanated dusk in hip hop constructions and dubby house for Other People Records in 2014, Issue #17. Thaddeus co-wrote “CF01” as Soul Project on the compilation disc, Furnace Series 1, from Montreal’s Booma Collective. A year on, he returned to Other People for an ambient piece entitled, "Nah", as Issue #156, before completing Dance Record, a three track 12” that bounces stereo light across disco shadowplays for Styles Upon Styles.

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Vorhees is the nom de guerre of New York City-based audio engineer and composer Dana Wachs. Vorhees embraces ambient form and pop structure in equal measure within her compositions. Live, her guitar tones are processed and extracted through a haze of vintage gear, conjuring dulcet riffs to aggressive, sneering fuzz over muted electronic beats. Her lyrics explore intimate observations with vocals alternating from alien to heartbreakingly human.

Dana studied cello and electric bass from an early age. At nineteen, she joined the Holy Rollers (Dischord) and dove deep into a world of touring and live sound. Audio engineering would define the following twenty years of her life while working at Greene Street Recording NYC and touring the world with St. Vincent, Grizzly Bear, and many others. In 2009, she debuted her solo compositions at Death By Audio on the evening of Alice Coltrane’s passing, a continuing musical influence. From that performance, Dana continued to work on her own music, releasing her debut 7" The Orchard (Peoples Club, 2012), composing for modern dance, film, and commissioned performances and recordings for fashion designer Rachel Comey. Live performances during this time included support for Cat Power, Matmos, and Dum Dum Girls, invitations to perform at Basilica Soundscape 2013 and Iceland Airwaves 2014.  Her methods have always relied on improvisation, whether in studio or on stage, forsaking formal education for a natural and visceral response to what inspires her.

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S O C I A L:
Website
Facebook
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Bandcamp

Hailing from Mexico City with a sharply-defined approach to techno and house music, Nicolas Guerrero's sinuous tapestries as White Visitation first attracted our attention with his deft use of acoustic samples and patient, innately focused style. WV joins Styles Upon Styles for his debut vinyl release, Ancestors.

R E L E A S E S 

Ancestors (SUS003)

Born in Illinois and based in Sacramento, Zac Nelson cultivates a daunting discography of pop experiments across a myriad of personas, collaborations and solo affairs.  A feral drummer, versatile vocalist and multi-instrumentalist, Zac performs with ALAK and Biosexual, recorded as CHLL PLL w/ Zach Hill of Death Grips and maintains a steady output of solo material. His past excursions in leftfield rock (Charbroile [Debacle, 2012]) and blasted sound design (Exis [Further, 2013]), meld into one beautiful orgy of sound in his most idiosyncratic album to date, 2015's New Once. 

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After escaping the the savage clutches of his native NYC, Zach Cooper retreated to the warm slopes of the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina like so many New Yorkers before him. While he continues to develop his primary musical projects, among them King Garbage and kuxxan SUUM, Cooper has been keenly focusing the aperture of intention behind his music.  

Cooper has performed in various capacities with bands King Garbage, (the) Mel Gibson, Mr. Shopping, SNOUT, STENCIL / MAGIC and other ensembles and orchestras. His music has been featured by XLR8R Magazine, The Fader, Ibiza Space Magazine, The 405, and more; and released on Styles Upon Styles, South Fork Sound, Last Night On Earth and Slanted Black. In 2010, Mr. Cooper launched end fence, an all-digital free-label specializing in undiscovered high-quality electronic music. End Fence has featured such artists as Archie Pelago, Doctor Jeep, Create Her and Mr. Cooper's own kuxxan SUUM moniker. 

R E L E A S E S

SUS011: The Sentence

BASH003

Daniel McClung In Memoriam (FOAM001)

M O R E  I N F O

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