Madlib
Shades Of Blue

Label resident Anton Kubikov comes with a classy slow dub-techno track incorporating sax from Egor Khz and a dreamy acapella by Ilya Abud.

Released in 1983, ‘Double Happiness’ was the second studio album from the art-pop project Deux Filles - which claimed to be made up of French teens Gemini Forque and Claudine Coule but was actually former The The members Simon Fisher Turner and Colin Lloyd Tucker. More stable in tone and composition than the previous year’s debut, it's one of the decade's most understated DIY triumphs.

Deux Filles was not, in fact, two girls despite what the group name and its elaborate hoax of a backstory suggest. No, they were not Gemini Forque and Claudine Coule, French women who met as teenagers under tragic circumstances and became fast friends, recording two albums together before disappearing into the ether. In reality, Deux Filles was Simon Fisher Turner and Colin Lloyd Tucker, a UK duo who first worked together in an early incarnation of The The. Straddling the line between experimental and pop, Turner was an actor and teen singing star who later composed soundtracks for the iconic queer filmmaker Derek Jarman while Tucker’s career began as an engineer for the famed UK library music studio, De Wolfe, before forming experimental wave group The Gadgets. In Deux Filles, the duo found an outlet for their least commercial tendencies, combining lo-fi proto-dream-pop instrumentals with samples, tape experiments, ambient textures, and drum machines. Even in the vibrant, seemingly endless well of UK DIY, Deux Filles stand out. Silence & Wisdom – the duo’s 1982 debut – is a series of musical vignettes, like the score of an unrealized arthouse film. Blending processed guitars, sheets of synthesizers, echoey pianos, and washed-out vocal snippets to surprisingly varied effect, the album is recommended for fans of Durutti Column and Virginia Astley’s From Gardens Where We Feel Secure.