Toronto-based artist and co-boss of Parallel Minds, Ciel, known for her distinctive, precise, playful, and intricately crafted electronic productions, delivers a vibrant new EP on SUZI titled "Sada’s Dream". Originally performed during a live set at MUTEK Montreal, Ciel has refined these initial ideas into a five-track journey that showcases her unique sound palette, marked by meticulous attention to rhythmic and melodic interplay.

The EP opens with "Be That As It May," setting a contemplative tone with complex rhythms and a haunting flute-like melody that gradually unfolds into a brighter, expansive atmosphere.
Following this, the second track "Viral Load" shifts towards a tougher sound, featuring digital bleeps and arpeggiators that swirl around modern dubstep elements, creating a dense auditory texture.

The third piece, "Divide and Conquer," blends airy textures with a robust, infectious bassline and glitchy, compelling melodies, demonstrating Ciel's ability to balance delicacy with power.
Moving forward, "Bubble Gum Pop," the fourth track, adopts a clubbier vibe with its vigorous house vocals and lively breakbeat drums, offering a sharp contrast to the preceding tracks.

Concluding the EP is "Sada's Dream," the title track. This fast-paced, playful composition marries minimalist rhythms with whimsical bleeps and snippets of vocals, ending the EP on a note that feels both conclusive and invitingly open-ended. "Sada's Dream" is a sonic tapestry that weaves together the subtle complexities of Ciel's signature style with a narrative that is both intimate and expansive, capturing the essence of her artistic vision. More

Parallel Minds’ fifth label release is a major landmark for the Toronto-based label. Not only is it their first full length LP, it is also the debut album from co-founder Ciel, who is also making her first solo appearance on the label since its inception.

In 2021, spurred on by a productive creative streak and the economic austerity of pandemic lockdowns, the Xi’an-born and Toronto-based DJ Ciel (real name Cindy Li) applied for grant funding from the government of Canada to write her debut album. Self-proclaimed “DJ first, producer second”, Ciel never thought she would have the self-confidence and desire to write an album. It wasn’t until after spending prolonged time away from clubs & festivals whilst dedicating herself to daily sessions in her studio that she gained the motivation and aspiration to make a musical statement that only an album could express.

Since the start of the covid19 outbreak, Ciel, like many other Chinese diaspora people in the West, had felt a great deal of anxiety and pain at the rise of anti-Chinese sentiment and racism in the media — even in her corner of the dance music industry. Tired of expressing her frustrations fruitlessly online, she felt inspired to channel that into her music, to turn something that was filled with hate into a thing of joy and beauty. It was within this context that Homesick began to take shape.

After researching the rich history of Chinese instruments, a concept began to form around the album in which she could marry her love of sampling and analogue instruments. Using the eight types of traditional Chinese instruments (silk, bamboo, wood, stone, metal, clay, gourd, and hide) as a guideline, Li began writing each track with a focus on one of the eight. She hired traditional Chinese instrumentalists to play the guzheng and the xiao, whilst purchasing and teaching herself the smaller hand drum instruments like the kuaiban (bamboo clappers), and muyu (temple blocks). With the news that she had successfully been granted funding from Canada Arts Council, she wrote, recorded, arranged, and mixed all nine tracks of her album over the first three months of 2022. More than just highlighting Chinese instruments, the music on this album encapsulates so many musical influences from Ciel’s childhood when she began her lifelong love affair with music. True to her style as a DJ, the LP incorporates a diversity of genres she loves, from drum & bass to house, electro to breaks - even downtempo.

What has come out of these sessions is a deeply personal dancefloor record, a true expression of love for Cindy’s culture that came out of a time of relentless chaos, negativity, and uncertainty. Ciel sees her compositions as a distillation of herself — her life experiences, her wide interests and passions, and her often-turbulent emotions. Immersing oneself in the LP feels like listening to the musical confessions of an artist heading towards the peak of their career, who is finally starting to make sense of her artistic identity. What a joy to witness it. More

Toronto-based producer and DJ Ciel is renowned for a style of dancefloor material that’s as heady as it is visceral. The Xi’an-born artist’s ascendant profile has seen her cutting- edge and club-ready EPs released on UK labels Peach Discs and Coastal Haze, as well as Stateside imprints Spectral Sound and Mister Saturday Night.

As a member of the renowned collective Discwoman and the creator of femme-forward party Work in Progress Ciel’s thoughtful narratives are clear, running in parallel to the perception-altering sounds that are consistently woven deeply into her wide-ranging sets, beloved mixes and inventive collaborations. Now the Parallel Minds label co- founder is crystallising her imaginative and omnivorous sound with her !K7 Records debut, ORLANDO.

Written during her emergence from an uncharacteristic bout of writers’ block, the three original tracks of Orlando chart a return to the musical self, spurred along by a cinephile’s embrace of film, a love of classic literature, and a curiosity for the oddest corners of popular culture. “SCENES FROM A MARRIAGE” might share a name with the episodic series, but is rather a nuanced critique of the modern rite of union, moving through structured chapters, and mirroring the un-static nature of longtime love.Inspired by Virginia Woolf’s radical novel, and its superphysical protagonist, “ORLANDO” considers the cult literary figure who lived from the renaissance to the modern age, and embodies both sides of the sex binary. The thrown sounds and aural illusions of “EL CALIFA” create the effect of a beckoning, beguiling psychedelic experience. To complete the EP, Ali Berger, Ciel’s recent collaborator on the Jacktone Records’ release Damn Skippy! repurposes the mind-bending flourishes of “El Califa” into a noodly and spacious deep house production, replete with pillowy, gauzy pads. More

Ecstatic Editions is the new label by Eris Drew. Due to changes in the industry, the cost of production, and the wait times for manufacturing, the renowned vinyl-only deejay laments not having more of her favorite producers’ music on vinyl, so she decided to start a label for special vinyl editions, as well as archival releases. The first volume of Ecstatic Editions is an anthology of work previously unavailable on vinyl by the Xi’an-born and Toronto-based musician, Ciel. Her work was the impetus of the label because many of her amazing productions, collaborations and remixes have never been pressed to vinyl. As a producer, DJ, pianist and radio presenter, Ciel’s work is not only prolific and compelling, it involves an international network of individuals, labels, projects and artists; a musical meeting-place of positive intentions and creative interactions. This volume is needed not only because it makes these incredible original productions and remixes available to vinyl DJs, enthusiasts and collectors for the first time, but also because it tells a cohesive story, in a physical object, of an artist with a truly unique rhythmic, melodic and psychedelic style. Included here are three tracks from The Trojan Horse EP, a track from Naive’s “No Justice No Peace” compilation and fund-raising effort, Ciel’s remix for the Stockholm-based band Off the Meds, a track by Psychedelic Budz (a collaboration between Ciel and fellow Canadian D. Tiffany), a track from the Montreal Bass Coast Music festival’s annual digital-only compilation titled 12 Days, a remix of Toronto's downtempo soul saviors, the electronic duo LAL, and Ciel’s remix for Japanese artist Cuushe, which originally came out digitally on Tokyo’s FLAU. More

Throughout her much-lauded career as a DJ and producer, Ciel has worked hard to build community through events and DJ workshops in her home city of Toronto and on a larger scale with podcasts and projects meant to elevate women artists. The title of her latest EP, “All We Have Is Each Other,” reflects her history of mutual support, and in these times when so many of our connections seem broken by the pandemic, it offers a reminder that music still has the power to unite us.

Ciel has never been an artist who lets genres define or constrain her, so it seems only fitting that this release lands on Mister Saturday Night Records, a New York City label with a similar ethos. It’s in this refusal to restrict her sound to narrow definitions that something magical happens.

This 5-track EP spanning dance floor fillers and home listening pieces builds on a frame of tough footwork-paced kick drums, the skip and swing of 2-step garage, broken house, and slow, meditative beats. Woven throughout are hopeful melodies, dappled with sunlight tones and layered with organic percussion. The connective tissue is a deep feeling of joy and hopefulness in the power of music and collective humanity.

When the world goes up in flames, all we have is each other. Music connects us with like-minded communities that both shelter and empower us. With this emotive collection of diverse songs, Ciel reaches out a hand and invites us to be a part of something beautiful and authentic. More

Under the alias Ciel, Xi'an-born/Toronto-based producer, pianist, DJ, and Discwoman affiliate Cindy Li embodies the social conscience of progressive electronic music. She is at once a local and global artist, having flourished at the fringe of cutting-edge club culture since 2015, firmly rooted in her adopted city while reaching increasingly outward, her sets echoing from Berlin’s Berghain to Chicago’s Smartbar to Lisbon’s Lux Fragil. Back in Toronto, she co-runs the label Parallel Minds and event initiative Work In Progress, an extension of her radio show in both name and M.O. to improve female representation in the scene. She’s helped write safe space policies, hosted DJ workshops, and applied activist pressure on promoters through varying methods with a single-minded resolve. Those efforts have evoked responses, which Li has spent time reckoning with over the past two years. Now, manifesting as a self-guided reaction to her experiences as an artist and activist is Ciel’s Spectral Sound debut, Why Me?, a deeply personal and physical work More

Ciel - "when I played it for my mom, she said it made her feel like she was flying in the night sky to the moon." More

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As Peach Discs hits 20 releases, they celebrate than with an EP from our dear friend Saoirse, who delivers five techy rollers in her signature tough but sensual style.

In her own words: “Vampire Heart and Catfished were written in the midst of lockdown - I was spending so much time in the studio (even sleeping there some nights) and was really able to explore different sounds and vibes. Vampire Heart still gives me a strange feeling as it was written the day the government announced that we had passed the peak of Covid and might be able to go outside again, something I tried to convey with the pads and break - that positive feeling of opening up. Conversely, Catfished was written during Covid’s peak - it felt like we were on this haunting loop that just kept going round and round, not knowing when it would end.

Mangomouse and Heated Cloud were written more recently and tie into what I’m calling “my tribal era.” I was a drummer for years but put the sticks and djembe down once I found electronic music… this is a path I think I’ll keep following as the rhythm comes naturally to me.” More

The first Peach Discs release of 2024 comes from the Cloudsteppers dream team of Dan Only and returning label favourite Ciel. The increasingly prolific Toronto-based duo have blessed us with four tracks of floor-focused, 4x4 garage tunes drenched in their singular melodic sensibilities.

In their own words: “For our second record as Cloudsteppers, we went back into the studio with the intent of making functional garage tunes aimed at the dancefloor. Leaning into what created the distinct sound of our first record, we relied on Ciel’s Korg ESX-1 and Dan Only’s MPC 2000XL to lay down the foundations of each of these tunes. Skippy and bass-heavy, these 4 tracks are the result of our UK-leaning sonic experiments. Whether it’s the bubbling bass of Aqua Hotel, the tech-leaning grooves of Control ft. Eden Samara, the M1 organ in Duckstep, or the skippy drums of TDG, this is Cloudsteppers' twist on UKG.”

Couldn’t have said it better ourselves – hope you like the record. More

Shanti Celeste & Hodge team up again for Peach Discs... More

The turbocharged Boosted EP from Washington DC's Jackson Ryland drops in Peach Discs. Inspired by the multi-faceted work of hyper-prolific producers such as Paul Johnson, Heiko Laux, K-Hand, Aubrey & Cari Lekebusch, Boosted's four tracks highlight the various layers that make up Jackson's sound, and confirm him as a thrilling and versatile producer whose deep understanding of dance music's history informs his firmly present approach to production.

Recorded between 2018 and 2022, Boosted splits the difference between the booming drums and trippy synth patterns of "Glass Cut" and "Hyp Gruuv," and the complex, evolving textures of "Boosted" and "Lip," the latter representing a side not often heard in Jackson's output to date. Taken as a whole, the EP fits into the long lineage of DC-based music - one defined by an effortless flexibility to flip between emotions while never forsaking the groove.

This is the 2nd release of the year on Shanti Celeste and Gramrcy's Peach Discs. More

info soon... More

Parris lands a dreamy one two on Peach Discs and it's all LOVE!
**limited copies of this one!**
Full info soon.. More

Peach Discs is delighted to kick-off a busy 2022 with a five-track EP from one of our favourite new artists. buen clima’s Transferencia Electrónica is an exploration into pared-down dance music, where interlocking rhythms, percussive synthesis and quasi-looping delays meet to form smooth, efficient and pointed club tracks.

In his own words:
“Stylistically the tracks on this EP owe a lot to the great Black musicians from Chicago and Detroit, namely Herbie Hancock, Mr. De', DJ Rashad, Lil' Louis, Frankie Knuckles, James Stinson and Gerald Donald. I feel like the EP is kind of a love letter to the styles they pioneered, done in my own way, which in turn has been influenced by my background in classical music and improvised music but also so, so heavily by my friends and teachers: I've learned so much just from interacting, working and just plain witnessing eggglub, Lorelei, Maxi Cat, il sentimento, Hola Papá/Annunaki, Lavina Yelb, Jorge Pepi, and the whole music scene I belong to in Santiago.” More

‘Tangerine serves as a coda to the qualities that have established Celeste as one of the most instinctive and generous underground DJs in the current landscape of dance music. Beginning as a record store assistant at Idle Hands in Bristol and now a fixture of some of the world’s most acclaimed clubs and festivals, Celeste’s instincts and curiosity have forged a musical space that is very much her own. Here, whether in sweat-drenched basements or to vast numbers, she strikes a common cause between the melodic richness of the legacy of the music of Detroit, alongside the natural ease with which she carries across tempos that embody UK Soundsystem traditions. Tangerine is Celeste’s most fully-realised contribution thus far to this continuum of musical culture.
More than that, Tangerine is an innate extension of Shanti’s self, telling stories beyond her record box and delving into her personal history. There is her manipulated voice serving as a bedrock in tracks. There's a kalimba, recorded at her father's home in Chile.
There are, of course, her rich synthesizers that wrap her tracks like velvet cloaks, providing the familiar warmth and colour we know from her work so far on labels such as Idle Hands and Future Times. There’s even her characteristic paintings on the cover. Here, on her very own Peach Discs, the label she co-runs with goodfriend Gramrcy, Celeste naturally delivers her most impressive and wholly personal work.
Creating Tangerine has been a space for Celeste to explore all of this with a freedom that has come with the easing of expectations that an artist earns with the passing of time. Striking a balance between deeper, understated sounds and building gradually towards the fleet-footed bursts of rave energy that Celeste is known for, Tangerine peels back layersof dreamy textures to reveal an optimistic afterglow, reflecting a life devoted to club culture.
“When I made music for EPs, sometimes I felt restricted,” shesays. “I would think too much about creating the moments on the dancefloor I love - seeing visions of ecstatic people hugging, I didn’t give myself free reign to express all of myself. Writing an album made me feel free of all this because it seemed like an open-ended project. I could just keep creating until I felt like stopping”. More

"Following 2017’s Rotlicht EP (PEACH003), Shanti Celeste & Gramrcy are very happy to welcome back Chekov for the first Peach release of 2020. The Aerated EP (PEACH009) collects four tracks built from the heart, made for the head and body." More

Next up on Peach Discs is the debut 12� from newcomer Videopath. The A-side piles up the melodies over some box-banging drums, while the B-side goes full-on 90s with pumping organ riffs and wailing diva vocals. 2 jacking tracks for the clubs!
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Shanti say 'For the third release on Peach Discs, a wicked new producer from Leeds steps up! his name is Chekov, his Rotlicht EP is the first 3 tracker on the label and very different from the previous two with some tension building sleazy cuts. ENJOY!'
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