Dinner Music #163: The weekly lineup
jazz-funk, chanson synth-pop, R&B with Sam Valenti of Ghostly International
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This week we’re listening to albums and songs selected by Sam Valenti IV, who runs the (excellent) newsletter Herb Sundays. He’s the founder of Ghostly International, a company that is home a beloved labels like Ghostly and Spectral Sound and is massive force in the American independent music scene.
But Ghostly is a lot more than that to a lot of people. To me, the label feels like it continues to push against the trends that are suffocating other areas of the music industry. They don’t put out music they don’t believe in and you can feel the energy that goes into each record when you listen, like Kate Bollinger’s Songs From A Thousand Frames Of Mind or Mary Lattimore’s Goodbye, Hotel Arkada. Sam, and the rest of the staff at Ghostly, aren’t chasing trends, they’re releasing really good music.
Sam grew up in the suburbs of Detroit and fell into music perhaps by osmosis, being so close to a city rich with musical history, and was especially interested in the city’s transition from Motown to techno. He started DJing at the age of 15 and played under the moniker DJ Spaceghost. Quickly, he started noticing the dearth of American electronic music and dreamed up “a genre-less label that would respect the freedom and intellect of both its audience and its artists.” And thus, in 1999, Sam founded Ghostly in his college dorm room.
For the music this week, Sam says:
“Music at dinner needs some gentle velocity, some tonal shifts, and textural mouthfeel, but here are some faves this year (new and old) that somehow hang together for me.”
Enjoy.