You All Want It But You're Not Getting It From Us - Va Va Records Compilation Album & Book

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A 48 page compendium and compilation album from Va Va Records including a full colour A-Z of the label, selected artwork and illustrations along with a download code to a collection of recordings from the labels roster throughout it’s inception in 2013. Includes previously unreleased tracks and forthcoming releases from Erskine Lynas, Collision Music, DLX ADV, Willis Ellmore, Blackledge Falling, The Predatory Bird and more.

Let’s start with that ‘not’. The new Va Va Records compilation is not a CD, it’s a book (though it’s not shaped like a book so much as like a CD). It’s a collection of slogans and images, a kind of anti-manifesto or advertisement for itself, so that you only know you want it, that you need to own it, when you already have it. It looks good enough to leave on a coffee table, but it would need to be a very small table.

The music it contains isn’t inside. There’s a URL. You are downloading a bunch of ones and a heap of zeroes which, due to the magical power of the algorithm, become harmony, melody and rhythm. There’s no needle in a groove, no crackle, not even a lazer embodying our sci-fi fantasies. Nor can Va Va be said to have a house style. The music runs from off-kilter folk to off-kilter jazz to off-kilter rock to off-kilter techno. Or maybe off-kilt? Because the man behind Va Va is an Aberdonian, then again, this is an Aberdeen of the mind, twinned with a Detroit of the soul, wild camping on a slag heap of dreams, in an unloved banlieue of a city that never existed. Then again, it isn’t.

There’s something interesting going on here which is all about peripheries, about feeling peripheral and finding in that only freedom. Because if nobody cares what you do then you can do what you like. You do not have to be part of any club to belong here and you still won’t belong and that’s what makes it exciting. You do not have to like all the music or hate all the music, or even understand it, and this is your own responsibility. Whatever you do, though, you’re going to lose, that’s the lesson. And that means, it turns out, that you also win.

- Will Ashon

TRACK LIST::

Reasonable Man - Erskine Lynas

Off World - Collision Music

New Man Model - Blackledge Falling

Everybody’s Bent - DLX ADV

Wendigo - Zubuntu

Feb. 4 ‘99 (For All Those Killed By Cops) - Mike Ladd

Care Home - Jacob Yates and the Pearly Gate Lock Pickers

Myth - Keith K. Hopewell

Avoid Television - A La Fu

Alice - Tut Vu Vu