Over a span of 14 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 beauties. The independent record label was founded by Singapore-born Ricks Ang in 2008, and has since extended its base to Japan where they are also known for their distinctive aesthetics through records and physical editions.
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.