The Label

“By deathly pale light, silent is the night.”

Founded in 2008 by Ricks Ang, KITCHEN. LABEL is an independent record label dedicated to curating music with an emphasis on textural songcraft and aesthetics that blend subtlety, depth, and emotional resonance. Drawing from the cultural nexus of Tokyo and its origins in Singapore, the label draws inspiration from the magic realism of Banana Yoshimoto’s Kitchen, shaping its identity through an interplay of narrative, design, and sonic exploration. Over the years, KITCHEN. LABEL has been a home for artists like haruka nakamura, Meitei, ASPIDISTRAFLY, ironomi, sonicbrat, Kin Leonn, and Hiroshi Ebina, contributing to some of the most defining works in their musical journey.

The label’s artists share a similar obsession with sensuous, fleeting phenomena. They create painterly sound collages that mimic the shifting play of light and shadow fluttering across a wall, the surging and expiring of the sun’s resplendent rays at dusk, or the shimmer and drone of throngs of cicadas on a sultry afternoon. These deceptively simple metaphors, however, belie the feats of engineering that have gone into crafting them. KITCHEN. LABEL’s artists weave new instrumentation and musical forms together into sensitive arrangements that unravel languidly and deliberately through a time and space that seems to quiver more tremulously than our own.