Stories — Quick Updates
We launched as a blog in August 2010. Two months later, Instagram was created.
We’ve made it this far: 11 years later it’s 2021 and we recently opened a brick-and-mortar shop while surpassing 10k followers on Instagram. But, nothing is permanent. We want to take this moment to encourage you join our email mailing list and follow us on Bandcamp. They’re the surest ways of keeping in touch with the latest AGS updates, at least in this digital era. If there’s anything we want to say about today’s outages across Instagram, Facebook, and all of its services, is that we’re grateful for all the connections we’ve made over the years, near and far, in-person...
Kalapana's 1974 debut: the record that forever changed Hawaii.
This record changed Hawaii forever. Fronted by songwriters Mackey Feary and Malani Bilyeu, with guitarist DJ Pratt (who recently passed away... RIP) and keyboardist Kirk Thompson (of Lemuria legend), their debut shaped the sound of a contemporary Hawaii in the 1970s, a sound that is still embedded in our islands.To this day, the music of Kalapana defies categorization — is it jazz? rock? pop? R&B? — the band fills a space uniquely its own. Kalapana has always been difficult to define, especially their first album which remains the pinnacle of modern music from Hawaii. The band was so in tune...
Designing a vinyl record jacket for reissue in 2021 (and 2022)
When recreating album artwork for reissue, we prefer to start from scratch, with Roger Bong rebuilding the jacket piece by piece by relying on a combination of photographing the original LP, touching up the images in Photoshop, and rebuilding the text and colors with InDesign. (Check out our Catching A Wave LP for a finished example!). In our experience, scanning original LPs rarely yields satisfactory results for modern day reproduction. Coincidentally, when tasked with selecting the jacket’s green, orange and blue colors, Leimomi Bong discovered the solution in Pantone’s most recent Fashion Color Trend Reports for New York and London Autumn/Winter...