Label: Protopost – PRPO 7743 Format: Vinyl, LP, Album, Stereo Country: France Released: 1 May 2026 Genre: Rock Style: Experimental, Post Rock, Slowcore
Brand new from Shelter's Protopost, own words to follow.. (Mint / New - 1 pp!!)
“Gritty guitars, lethargic bass, motoric rhythms, twisted voices and slowcorification : with their debut LP, Raya 13 offers a new reimagination of the stoner & post-rock lore, bathering in lethargic mutant sounds. A trio made up of Shelter, one third of improvised rock band HWYUIOD; and Brittanny Dubson & Mathieu Deschênes, both musicians in Montreal experimental music collective MOAB.
These captured moments of pure improvisations, infused with unclear spontaneity, evoke the French underground rock born in the aftermath of Mai 68 events; mostly Mahogany Brain, Red Noise, Fille Qui Mousse, or also Dashiell Hedayat at his most experimental moments. Those records that kept something special in their spontaneity, their exuberance and the unapologetic « let’s put this jam on a record » attitude.. Much of it thrived thanks to that cultural ferment of the time, nourised by the french hippies and first independant labels - Saravah, Futura, BYG, Shandar... or through self-publishing and local production.. Shelter extends that lineage today, producing this record on his own imprint Protopost.
But we’re no longer in a free-jazz, world-music influenced rock territory like the bands I mentioned earlier. Raya 13 leans instead toward a kind of naked-shoegaze without sustained notes, without drums and with only the faintest trace of distortion. A psychedelism distillied to its purest essence, and a fragile emotional sensitivity akin to the melancholy we found in Tanz Mein Herz’s pagan folk-rock or in Jemima’s hauntological rock. These brief fragments feel like found relics, always in danger of vanishing. Inevitably, we also hear echoes of infuence of early Sonic Youth, Sun City Girls or Young Marble Giants; and the great golden age post-rock bands like Labradford or Slint. Pure unpretentious and graceful stoner music : Raya 13 recalls to me as much the flickering beauty of Derek Jarman fragmentary super-8 films and the almost desolate atmosphere of early Werner Herzog's transposed in the damp French countryside in the 2025 summer. Timeless moonshine soundtrack for the grey skies days.”
Tracklist A1 Gashed 5:21 A2 Nightless Days 2:48 A3 The Merging Stars Of Love & Death 2:47 A4 Lullabied 4:06 A5 Twenty-6 Dream 3:02 B1 Bardo Rafting 5:20 B2 Neck Romance 2:18 B3 What A Great Place To Be 6:18 B4 Down The Gulley 3:48 B5 Molten 1:06
