“When I first heard Isn’t Anything by MBV, that was probably 1989,” says Scott Cortez, the Chicago-based musician who’s half of Lovesliescrushing. “And I was like, ‘I know what that is! It’s this one patch on this one specific effect.’ I remember people freaking out—’Is there something wrong with my tape? Is there something wrong with my CD?’ And I was like, ‘No, this is amazing! What’s wrong with you? You don’t like warbling guitars?’”

To make the most of that reputation, Cortez has started to reissue old recordings on vinyl via his own Wavertone label. His only such release so far has been Lovesliescrushing’s first album, Bloweyelashwish, in 2016. But it did so well that it won’t be the last: he pressed 300 copies on vinyl, all of which sold out at the preorder stage, and they’re now fetching hundreds of dollars on the secondary market. “I saw it at Reckless Records for $250. And then it was gone,” Cortez says. “The next day, I was like, well, it’s not there anymore.” He’s planning to release more material from Lovesliescrushing and from his noise-pop project, Astrobrite, in the coming years. Next up is a reissue of Lovesliescrushing’s second album, Xuvetyn, due on CD from Projekt Records in August and on vinyl in November.

Not everything they worked on together was quite that easy, of course. “The only time we ever had an argument was over music,” Arpin Duimstra says. “Because I sometimes have an idea, like, ‘I think I really want to go this direction.’ And you’d be like, ‘No, we have to do this! Slow this down, or take this out!’”

“Silver (Fairy Threaded)” ended up alongside “Valerian” on 1996’s Xuvetyn (pronounced “zoo-vah-TEEN,” the band tell me). Like most of the material on that album, those songs were among Lovesliescrushing’s first recordings in Michigan—and some went back even further, to Cortez’s solo experiments. They wouldn’t release that music for several years, but Cortez and Arpin Duimstra brought the unfinished tapes along with them when they decided, impulsively, to move.

  • Girl Echo Suns Veils consists of reworked or previously unissued material created between 1990 and 2000.

Cortez wanted to send out the cassette as a demo, but he quickly realized it would be futile. “There were no labels to send stuff to that would have appreciated us at all,” he says. The only one he knew that released ambient music was Projekt Records in Portland, Oregon. Label owner Sam Rosenthal saw Lovesliescrushing play live in Phoenix, augmented by additional musicians who allowed them to approximate the sound of their recordings. (When I ask how they managed to translate their music to the stage, Arpin Duimstra laughs. “That’s a very good question,” she says. The band have only played about seven shows in 30 years.)

  • The first Lovesliescrushing album to see release, Bloweyelashwish is also the only one so far that Scott Cortez has reissued on vinyl.

In 1993, the same year Projekt put out Bloweyelashwish, Cortez and Arpin Duimstra had a child. They eventually decided to move back to Michigan to be closer to family. Right before they left in 1995, Cortez finally took a week to mix down the early recordings they’d made together before they’d come to Tucson. When Xuvetyn came out in 1996, it seemed like a second album—longer, more experimental, more fractured—rather than what it was, an exuberant chronicle of a new duo finding all their odd sounds together.