FPELV by FPE Records

FPE Records presents FPELV: a collection of sixteen singles, gathering amazing, innovative, bold, genre-defiant musicians from around the world, to bathe in shared light. Sixteen banging bops, dropping in four groups of four throughout August and September, representing the present of music, a vision of community, strands that stand alone and tug at each other in complex ways, across time and space. FPELV is playing by new rules.

In late 2022, I began reaching out to artists to ask if they wanted to contribute a track to a compilation to be released in summer 2023. When the musical heroes I asked started saying yes, the epicness of the project blew all the way up. South African gqom sensation Phelimuncasi. Bay Area ambient juke innovator Tomu DJ. Ritual pop iconoclast Francine Thirteen. Genre-destroying genius Psyclo. What started as a compilation album became a new template for how to understand music.

Logic and structure emerged, unimposed, rather, discerned. Francine's textile work juiced the metaphor. Many of the pieces rely on internally interlocking polyrhythms, complex percussive patterns adorned with pretty colors. (Others... don't.) Relationships figure: love, living it, lacking it, feeling its presence or absence. Engagement with transcendence or like, deity, comes up a bunch of times.

Designing a compilation feels a bit like how it felt in olden times, making a mixtape. But the stakes are higher. Each piece demands autonomy. Each level of structure requires independent coherence. Each track slays. The singles are dropped in batches, styled as Textiles. Four singles to a Textile, each with its own arc. Then the four Textiles come together. It's not a mosaic. The fibers blend, echo within and throughout each other.

Hence, FPELV, sixteen singles, a door to a new reality, seachange, paradigm shift. When you hear Textile1 (August 4) you'll be floored in eager anticipation of the next cache (August 18) and so on, until the final drop September 22. It's a summer of constantly evolving musical delight from FPE.

FPE Records is an eclectic independent label based in Oak Park, IL, USA

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