*announcing* IARC0042 Dos Santos - City of Mirrors // album out October 15th
*announcing*
IARC0042
Dos Santos
City of Mirrors
LP/CD/Digital album out October 15th
preview & pre-order
via our Bandcamp page TODAY
((( photo by Victor Duarte )))
“If there is a refuge from the horrors outside of us, Dos Santos seem to suggest it is in the free and bountiful exchange of ideas and hopes and dreams among friends and fellow travelers, a joy—or at least a forcefulness—found in community.” - Noisey
City of Mirrors is a bold new collection of music from Chicago-based alt-Latinx band Dos Santos – a group comprised of drummer Daniel Villarreal, percussionist Peter “Maestro” Vale, bassist Jaime Garza, guitarist/multi-instrumentalist/vocalist Nathan Karagianis, and singer/guitarist/keyboardist/lyricist Alex Chavez.
Cinematic in its journey, the album was produced by multimedia artist and long-time friend of the band Elliot Bergman (NOMO, Wild Belle), and reflects sounds from across the Americas combined with Chavez’s compelling poetic narratives. Its 13 tracks consolidate the band’s unique identities, creative and cultural roots, and their penchant for honoring traditional Latin music with contemporary compositional expressions and production techniques. It achieves the band’s mission to push against their own musical boundaries while also exploring themes of social justice, migration, and contemporary human struggle.
Dos Santos' bandleader Chavez, a scholar who has produced albums for Smithsonian Folkways and conducted extensive ethnographic work on the music of the Texan US/Mexican borderlands (where he is from), articulates beautifully: “City of Mirrors is an assemblage… glimpses of tradition… reflections on our collective present… luminous echoes between love and solitude, hope and absurdity, euphoria and mourning. This album grapples with and transgresses these binaries because we have/and continue to cross borders. Yet, for us, the border is no metaphor — too much real staring back at us. We embody the border. We (our families) have crossed it. We (our stories) are coated with its residues. And so… we cross the border of self through our art – out of necessity.”
preview & pre-order City of Mirrors
"City of Mirrors" single & video
Along with today's announcement, the album's title track is available as a lead single, streaming on all digital music platforms, and is accompanied by a beautiful video directed by Osvaldo Cuevas.
“‘City of Mirrors" is a love song to Puerto Rico amid the aftershocks of disasters,” says Chavez. “Inspired by Gabriel García Marquez’s 100 Years of Solitude, Puerto Rico to us is like Macondo—the city of mirrors, a central character in that novel—a place of beauty and trauma, of struggle and triumph. Indeed, the Caribbean as a whole is ground zero for this dichotomy, borne of the legacy of colonialism in the ‘new world,’ much as Macondo. This song is a tribute to this place and its enduring story.”
Cuevas' video for "City of Mirrors" depicts Chicago-based Afro-Boricua mixed-media artist and activist Amara "Rebel Betty" Martín (who also created original artwork for the City of Mirrors album cover) traveling from Chicago to Puerto Rico in the wake of Hurricane María, as she encounters key figures on the island, including ex-political prisoner Oscar López Rivera.
Watch the "City of Mirrors" video here.
*Deluxe Vinyl Package*
Adobe Dust color vinyl
City of Mirrors comes on a 160-gram vinyl LP (pressed by Smashed Plastic in Chicago) inside a heavyweight matte jacket, with IARC obi strip and dome-patterned inner-sleeve.
And, as always, we have a limited edition color vinyl option for the first pressing only, available via our Bandcamp page only, which is 555 copies of *Adobe Dust* color vinyl.
Order a copy via our Bandcamp page today!
Distribution via RedEye for
US, Canada, North & South America
This album will also be available on Compact Disc (in a deluxe 4-panel digipack), on Classic Black Vinyl (same specs as above), and for independent retailers only, worldwide, an indie exclusive limited edition color vinyl variant.
Retailers in the United States or Canada or anywhere else inside of North, South and Central America... Please reach out to your sales rep at RedEye Worldwide if you are interested in making wholesale purchases of this album, or any other album in our catalog. Don't yet have a RedEye rep? Please just reach out to us and we'll get you hooked up!
Distribution via !K7 for
Europe, UK, Japan, Australia, and ROW
On all the same formats mentioned above, this album will be distributed by our good friends at !K7 and their various territory partners in Europe, UK, Japan, Australia, Asia, and everywhere else in the world outside of North & South America.
If you are a retailer or store with questions about wholesale or are just looking to get some of our records... we'd like to make things as easy for you as possible, please do not hesitate to reach out!!!
L>R Daniel Villarreal, Jaime Garza, Alex Chavez, Nathan Karagianis, and Peter "Maestro" Vale,
photographed by Victor Duarte.