Smiling C and Charles Bals’ latest compilation Neon Castles is available now via In Sheep’s Clothing Distribution!

Walk into any record store with a healthy supply of dead stock or dollar bins and you’ll find the same forgotten bounty: stacks of ’80s smooth rock, quiet storm and jazzy R&B from artists who never scored hits but poured everything they had — emotion, skill and studio magic — into making them. Their failure to chart says more about the shady record men and bribed radio programmers of the era than about the music itself, which still hums with conviction and polish decades later.

Not that all of it was good. Like plenty of commercially successful music, much of it was forgettable — slick productions chasing trends, soft-focus love songs that never found a pulse. But hidden among them were records that shimmered with imagination and atmosphere, little one-off miracles that slipped through the cracks. Neon Castle, the new compilation from Charles Bals and Smiling C, digs in that territory, unearthing the kind of overlooked gems that prove the mid-’80s could be as strange and inspired as any golden era.

Songs like the title track, by Sally Townes, drift between folk reverie and studio fantasy, the kind of thing you’d expect to hear on a late-night FM show hosted by a poet with a Roland synth. Glistening slide guitars, fretless bass and drum machines mingle with voices that sound half-awake, as if recorded by candlelight. Cheesy? At times, but the honesty eclipses it.

The mood is dreamy but deliberate, rooted in pop structure yet always slipping toward something more spectral. Neon Castle captures that moment when analog warmth met digital shimmer and musicians, mostly women, used the tools of pop to build their own small worlds, fragile, luminous and perfectly out of time.

Charles Bals has made a quiet art of this kind of excavation. A French visual artist and film-minded curator, he treats compilations like storyboards, sequencing songs to unfold as scenes rather than tracks. Neon Castle marks his third collaboration with Smiling C, following America Dream Reserve and Black Rain—two equally cinematic explorations of lost musical corners.

Where those sets traced private-press daydreams and noir-tinted minimal wave, Neon Castle turns its lens toward a softer realm, where melody and atmosphere blur and the line between sincerity and spellcraft dissolves. It feels less like a mixtape and more like a film scored from memories that never happened.

The label’s release notes describe it like this: “Each track unfolds like a scene from an imagined film: castles glowing with noble gas, kingdoms awash in purple haze, white horses roaming free, hair cascading to the waist. The collection sketches a realm both new and ‘upon a time’, a world where fantasy takes shape through music. With Neon Castle, attentive listening becomes narrative.”

What gives these tracks their quiet power is the push and pull between the organic and the engineered. The fretless bass anchor the songs then bends them, its smooth, vocal tone lending a restless melancholy that keeps everything in motion. Against it, the drum machines tick with an almost tender precision, tracing time in a way that feels both human and mechanical.

That mix — hand-played emotion framed by circuitry — turns these recordings into something uncanny, a kind of technologized bedroom pastoralism. By narrowing his scope to a precise set of sonic rules, Bals transforms the past into something newly coherent — a collage that feels less archival than authored, as if the scattered voices had always been meant to converge.

It all ties back to Bals’ lifelong fascination with mood and motion. Long before Neon Castle, he was crafting worlds through selection — most memorably in his 2010 mix for Lovefingers (above), a seamless glide through cosmic disco, soft rock and dream pop that hinted at the sensibility now fully realized here. More than a curator, he’s a narrator of hidden histories, using sequencing as storytelling and nostalgia as raw material. Neon Castle closes that loop: a dream assembled from forgotten songs, glowing quietly in the dark.

Neon Castles is available now in our webshop: https://insheepsclothinghifi.com/product/various-neon-castles-lp/

Shops can reach out to [email protected] for wholesale!