Tom Vourtsis – Ghost Doze
When a new Music Ruins Lives release comes out, I tell myself that I’m gonna review it. Because MRL are my pals, because sometimes they offer it up to me ahead of time for (p)reviewing, but mostly because every release is balls to the wall AWESOME. Taking a quick inventory, I’ve only written about one of their 7 releases (or 10+, depending how you count). That’s a pretty shitty ratio when every album is top fucking notch.
Since I’m 9 deep in MRL reviews and would never have time for all of them, I decided to do the next best thing. Mash ’em up in a big MRL dedication post.
So Music Ruins Lives is run by two dudes, one of which is Thom Wasluck of Planning For Burial. The other is Michael Britten, who I only know from his coolness on Twitter/Facebook. MRL kinda started as an outlet for a physical release of the Have A Nice Life demos, Voids, but also for getting devastating shit out there like the killer PFB/Lonesummer Split, unheard of weirdo metalgazer Airs, and the mysteriously strange droney Greys. The last two releases have gone soft, with Bad Braids‘ tape of psych folkness and a new Tom Vourtsis CD that’s even better than his free gorgeous static ambient album The Driver. But the two upcoming albums are shifting gears again, with the dark n droney Sequences/Isolated Existence split and Life In The Dark‘s double disc of glorious gloom.
There is so much to love about MRL, not including the fact that they’re one of the most consistently kickass labels running right now, but everything they do is made by hands of fury, limited and hand numbered. They’re even amazing enough to post the sold out albums for free downloading, or nice hi-fi tracks if you want to chip in a few bucks. That’s including the HANL demos, the PFB/Lonesummer split, Airs, Greys, and the PFB single, all for you. There’s the “Negative Series” which is unofficial stuff, like the bonus Lonesummer live set that came with the PFB/Lonesummer split if you were one of the first 30 pre-orders, which you can now download for free. And you can preview the tunes before you jump in.
They’re doing it so right. They’re doing exactly what you would want from a label and they do it while releasing the BEST fucking music. Everyone throw money at them, please, I want them to stick around.