Spend a few weeks exploring Minneapolis’s music scene and you’ll likely discover that indie tape labels are a thriving – or drowning, depending on who you ask – trade, with what feels like millions of labels and a handful of often great music stores peddling them, to boot. Pytch is one that might top my “most likely to succeed” list, if only for its uniqueness: though “lo-fi darkwave” has been done before (somewhere), it’s certainly not shoegaze or indie-surf-whatever, and that motivic, explicitly tailored “Pytch sound” is among the most refreshingly cohesive I’ve heard on a record label in years. Though Pytch is still in its relative infancy and currently releases only three artists, rest assured this trend will continue, as Ryan Olcott exclusively handles the means of production from a factory somewhere in St. Paul, probably between the hours of 3 and 8 a.m.
2016 has been a pretty big year for Pytch, what with releases like Garrison Grouse’s debut LP, With That Said, and the release of Devata Daun’s “Animal Instincts” music video. Fittingly, then, that the debut full length from Ryan Olcott’s bedroom-wave alter ego, c. Kostra, has finally arrived on Pytch. We were treated to three excellent singles