After a long winter hiatus, label personnel are back on the case of delivering intergalactic sounds straight to your listening device. For starters, follow this link or the one up above this to subscribe to our new podcast, featuring music from Festival Youth Orchestra, Josh Carrigan, Cuddle Magic, and a rare, archival Robador recording. We’ve spent a lot of time getting everything just right with these mixes, so we hope you enjoy it. Oh, and that’s our very own Christopher McDonald, engineer and producer of many of these recordings, introducing the program at his most urbane. We’re going to keep putting these out on the regular.

In other news, Cuddle Magic has finished mastering their new record and it sounds beautiful, lush, and very detailed. Awesome. You can hear some of the new tracks on Cuddle Magic’s artist page as well as on their MySpace page. They’ll be releasing the record through iTunes as well as through this here website, and they’re going to be on tour this December throughout the east coast and the midwest. There are some dates up right now on our Tour page, but there’ll be more quite soon. And they’re already getting ready to record their third album! The picture above is from a recent Cuddle Magic performance at Williamsburg’s Public Assembly.

Lake Street Dive is, as always, busy busy busy and playing in Boston and New York City pretty much every other day. They just completed a tour of the south and are looking forward to recording their next record in Boston and making sounds as sweet and unhealthy as chess pie. In the meantime, come out and see the band in New York or Boston for a real treat.

Finally, Festival Youth Orchestra’s reedman Drew Ceccato is exploring the improvising culture of northern California and picking Roscoe Mitchell’s brain, while Josh Carrigan, former frontman of American Hornets and Robador, is cooking up a cassette storm in the FYO Records studio in the prospect of releasing an aural rotoscoping of Sam Cooke in the form of a towering tape epic. There’s a lot going on here.

Finally, we’re happy to announce an addition to the FYO roster: Chris Ryan & Chicken, from Pittsburgh, have actually been with us for a little while now, but the next couple of weeks will mark their debut on the website (and hopefully a little touring is in their future). Their debut record, The City Has Teeth, is really good, and it will be available here shortly.