Over a span of 13 years, KITCHEN. LABEL has established itself as a vital outpost for forward-thinking artists who explore the ground between various strains of ambient and esoteric music. The independent record label was founded by Singapore-born Ricks Ang in 2008, and has since grown and extended its base to Japan where they are known for their carefully honed and distinctive aesthetics through records and printed publications.
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 new 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.
Despite its domestic-sounding name and penchant for delicate gestures and empty, impassive interiors, KITCHEN. LABEL (named after Banana Yoshimoto’s novel “Kitchen”) is a thoroughly metropolitan phenomenon. A bit like the roving eye of the flâneur in Baudelaire, who found solace in the bittersweet juxtapositions of urban life, KITCHEN. LABEL documents momentary flickers of melancholic beauty in unlikely environments. A wilful but passionate delusion of a sort, perhaps: one that tries to transmute city dross into pastoral romance, softly dissolving into the dwindling light of a late summer evening.
“A roving eye in search of the beauty of everyday life, KITCHEN. LABEL artists mimic the play of dappled sunlight through leaves, or even a certain strain of “lost” Japan memorialized in Tanizaki’s “In Praise of Shadows,” reinterpreted for modern life. They have been bridging Singapore and Japan, possibly wielding more influence than they realize.” – ArtAsiaPacific
KITCHEN. LABEL is distributed to over 40 cities and can be found in record stores in Japan and around the world. Our full label catalogue is also available on Bandcamp and across all digital formats.
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