Issue 40 / 25 October 2024
Issue 40 / 25 October 2024
This week's essential DIY electronic goodness... Track Of The Week: The Sea Of Wires + Good Stuff from The Orb, Pulsliebhaber, r beny, Repeated Viewing, Girls Twiddling Knobs and more...
Life begins at Issue 40. Has anyone got a spare “40 Today” badge for us?
Thanks to those who responded to my quacking about not having much advertising. We’ve got a full compliment of five ads this week, which is great. Just need to keep it that way as advertising means we can keep the newsletter free. If you’d like to join the ad fun, there is one slot available next week. The numbers for Moonbuilding Weekly are quite nice. We’ve got just over 850 subscribers and we generate 1,000+ views each Friday when the newsletter lands. If you’d like to know more, drop me a line. It’d be nice to hear from you.
Friend of Moonbuilding, WIAIWYA’s John Jervis, sent me his latest venture in the post this week. He’s made an indiepop fanzine called ‘The Zine In Between’ with Precious Recordings’ Nick Godfrey, who you will probably know specialises in releasing old BBC sessions on double 7-inches. John said he was inspired to do the zine by our sister publication, which really made me smile. I’m delighted to say his publication is a proper swing at things. It looks cool and is full of good stuff and lots of nonsense, there’s even a bumper word search. John told me yesterday that he is already working on Issue Two. Support independent publishing and grab yourself a copy here…
Righto, that’s me. Happy Friday.
Neil Mason, editor
moonbuildingmag@gmail.com
Issue 40 Playlist: bndcmpr.co/254bd210
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THE SEA OF WIRES ‘S.O.W. (The Sea Of Wire)’ (Cold Spring)
I’m a big fan of Justin Mitchell’s long-standing Cold Spring label. It’s exactly how a label should be. They operate in their own niche, at the dark end of things, and specialise in “all forms of esoteric/industrial music, but particularly: industrial, dark ambient, black ambient, Japanese noise, neoclassical, dark folk, orchestral, power electronics, noise, drone, doom, death industrial, dark soundtracks and experimental music”. I love the cross-genre pollination - death industrial, as if industrial isn’t heavy enough. Dark soundtracks is such a great tag too.
Anyway, last year Cold Spring reissued BEF’s ‘Music For Stowaways’, which is an utter classic for so many reasons. Not least that it was originally a tape-only offering at the very forefront of the Walkman revolution. Lots of contemporary work gets compared to it as well as the fine work of Human League MkI, but not much lives up to the billing. The Sea Of Wires (check out that photo will you) are Chris Jones and Tony Murphy, an early 80s electronic duo from Coventry, whose press notes point out here is an album for fans of early Human League. And for once, they’re right.
These tracks first appeared on a trio of tapes released on the band’s own label between 1980-82 and have subsequently been aired on the long-sold out ‘80s Minimal Synth Wave Vol 2’ 12-LP boxset on Vinyl On Demand and Cherry Red’s ‘Noise Floor’ compilation featured a track called ‘Robot Dance’, but it’s all available here on CD for the first time.
The aforementioned ‘Robot Dance’ is really great, sounds like Slade got some synths and tried to cover the ‘Doctor Who’ theme. Our Track Of The Week is the title track from the new reissue and gives you a very good idea of what to expect. It has that feel of ‘Fade To Grey’ or maybe it’s ‘Electricity’ with all those swishes and whooshes and in places it has that ‘Dare’ bass rumble. When these tracks were made we were at the point where the machines were just beginning to become affordable and weren’t as many and varied as they are now, obviously. The gents helpfully supply a kit list - MS20, Korg SQ10, Wasp and Spider, a CS-30 and a load of Copy Cat Echo. There’s several massive wigouts here that are very pleasing - one is a delightful 34 minutes long. The album is due out in a couple of weeks on 8 November. Can’t wait to get my hands on proper copy. Love this.
Got an upcoming release? We’re all ears. Find us at moonbuildingmag@gmail.com
Words: Neil Mason
GOOD STUFF #1
THE ORB ‘Orboretum: The Orb Collection’ (Cooking Vinyl)
I know what you’re thinking, surely we’ve had The Orb’s greatest hits several times over already haven’t we? Alex is one step ahead of you there, pal, he’s very much alive to the idea that this best-of lark is tugging on the cash cow’s udder. “I don’t want The Orb to end up milking it like Roxy Music,” he says, “who were always cranking out another best-of… although we did release the ‘History Of The Future’ best-of in 2013, and its part 2 in 2015 to be fair.”
Both of which were very welcome in my book. And, well, you can never have too much of The Orb can you? Alex describes ‘Orboretum’ as “a sort of director’s cut, reframing our output, making new neuro pathways”. He goes on to point out that some of these tracks were made 30 years apart, but that “there are clear through lines, a continuum”.
I love the thinking when acts have so much work to play with. The Orb catalogue, and associated versions, mixes and remixes, is vast so a collection like this, curated by Dr Patterson himself and featuring a slew of new and rare mixes, is always going to be a cracker. It all comes on colour vinyl beautifully packaged in an octagonal four-LP set with sleevenotes by old friend and biographer, Kris Needs. There’s transparent green, lilac, orange and blue vinyl to represent the four seasons, and the set is further boiled down into work for Universal across the first two discs, and music made for indie labels on the last two.
Opening proceedings are the mega hits, the big four of ‘A Huge Ever Growing Pulsating Brain…’ in its ‘Orbital Dance Mix’ guise, ‘Little Fluffy Clouds (Ambient Mix 1)’, ‘Perpetual Dawn (2024 version)’ and the 7-inch radio mix of ‘Blue Room’. Nice. The flip is a different beast altogether. It’s a mellow side. We get ‘Pomme Fritz (Meat ‘N Veg’), ‘Asylum’, a 1997 single from the ‘Orblivian’ album, the 1995 pre-‘Toxygene’ single ‘Oxbow Lakes’ from ‘Orbus Terrarum’ remixed by Sabres Of Paradise, which for all intents and purposes is an Andrew Weatherall rerub, and ‘Once More’ (Scourge Of The Earth Long Mix)’, a Jimmy Cauty remix from 2001, which is interesting in itself.
What else? Moving to the indie releases, on Side C, there’s the lovely speed garage-y ‘Gee Strings’. It was called microhouse in 2003 when this arrived during their Kompakt era. There’s a 2024 edit of one of the “round side” tracks from the David Gilmour collaboration, ‘Metallic Spheres In Colour’, which had a welcome reissue recently-ish. There’s the glorious ‘98.7 Kiss FM Mix’ (that’s the NYC show of yore, natch) of ‘Daze In Dub’ from the ‘Familia’ dub album, which is great if you missed it. On Side E, there’s ‘Golden Clouds’, the ‘Little Fluffy Clouds’ sample-swerving Lee “Scratch” Perry version, never tire of that, and it comes back-to-back with ‘Fussball’, also featuring Scratchy from ‘Orbserver’ follow-up, ‘More Tales’ in 2013.
I’d be surprised if there’s not a mix in Alex’s back pocket ready to be unleashed to promote all this. Maybe if there isn’t and I ask nicely… A couple of hours of back-to-back Orb drawn from this lot would be a treat indeed. There’s so much buried treasure in the world of The Orb, I could be here all day picking ‘Orboretum’ apart. It is the sound of a true master at work. It also comes as a double CD set for those who prefer little silver discs to large shiny ones and less of a dent in the old wallet. The vinyl set is £100, which isn’t daft money, considering.
GOOD STUFF #2
REPEATED VIEWING ‘Strip Their Flesh’/‘The Artefact’ (Spun Out Of Control)
It’s always good to hear from Spun Out Of Control’s Gavin Stoker. He was one of the original DIY labels I was writing about in Electronic Sound that turned into all this. So thanks Gavin for catching my attention all those years ago. His Spun Out Of Control label is still going strong and still doing what it does best - turning out high-quality soundtracks to imaginary films. The notes that accompany his releases are always a good read. In the press materials for this he says, “Like any child of the 1980s, Repeated Viewing grew up on a steady diet of Italian cannibal films and Hammer House Of Horror.” I don’t think I did, too young, that said my mate over the road used to have a lot of bootleg horror films on VHS, which he’d show us the best bits from before school so I suppose that’s sort of the same. He we find Glasgow's Repeated Viewing, Alan Sinclair, who is described by Gavin as “NHS worker by day, arch synthesist by night”, turning in his first new music for a couple of years. And joy of joys, it’s a grindhouse double bill... so two soundtracks on one tape, which is the sort of thing that would’ve had me very excited when out tape shopping as a young un. Side A is video nasty ‘Strip Their Flesh’, an Italian cannibal flick directed in 1980 by Enzo Morelli. “An expedition deep into the South American jungle turns into a nightmarish battle for survival”. You can imagine I’m sure. The B side is ‘The Artefact’, a 1985 Hammer Horror piece from director Burt Flagstaff where the discovery of ancient text and a mysterious machine in a museum cellar “sparks a series of unexplained deaths”. The A side doesn’t sound much like a cannibal flick, but then those video nasties often came with sublime soundtracks. The flip meanwhile is more familiar, Carpenter-esque. Welcome back Repeated Viewing, there’s going to be much repeated listening going on here.
GOOD STUFF #3
PULSLIEBHABER ‘Pulsliebkassetten3’ (Woodford Halse)
Woodford Halse seem to be moving into the last part of the year with a flourish. But since when doesn’t the Mat Handley stable do things with a flourish? Pulsliebhaber is an offshoot of Mat’s Pulselovers alter ego, it’s the home jams outtakes division I think. There’s now three volumes in the series (as you might’ve worked out), which Mat says includes “demos, jams, field recordings, live recordings, experiments and other anomalies that wouldn't normally be considered for a Pulselovers release proper.” They’re cracking collections. I love this sort of thing. I guess like most people, Mat has a pile of recordings from various sessions that are just sitting around so why not put them to work? It’s a bit like an artist showing you their sketchbook I suppose. There’s a good deal of variety here, the opening track, ‘Amantina Virosa’, is a lovely repetitive ambient sequence, while ‘Galerina Marginata’ is a four/four window rattler. If you’re wondering, the track titles are all types of fungus. Cue jokes about what good company Mat is, he’s a fun guy to be with, etc. I’ll get my coat.
GOOD STUFF #4
GIRLS TWIDDLING KNOBS Podcast, Season Six
Not a musical release, but audio worth exploring from friend of Moonbuilding, Isobel Anderson, who has just kicked off Season 6 of her excellent ‘Girls Twiddling Knobs’ podcast. For those who don’t know, Isobel is a “global music tech education innovator” and since 2018 she’s made it her mission to “help more women take up space in music through harnessing the magical superpowers of self-recording and production”. She’s clearly hitting the spot because it’s the number one feminist music tech podcast. I’m all too aware of what a boy’s club all this seems at times, and I’ve always done my best to highlight the incredible female artists in our world such as Loula Yorke, Jo Johnson, A’Bear, Kayla Painter, etc. They all started somewhere. With Isobel’s help you can make that start too. The first step is plugging yourself into this podcast. There’s so much amazing chat to work through if you like what you hear. And you will. The first episode of the new season is out now and it’s a real treat, an Oram Awards special. Named after The Radiophonic Workshop’s Daphne Oram, the awards were set up to recognise women and gender diverse people pushing the boundaries of music tech. I know it’s a prize that really means something to the winners (I first discovered Loula Yorke via her Oram Award win). In this new episode Isobel catches up with some of this year’s winners including The Silver Field, xname and Lola de la Mata. Down the line this new season also features a chat with former Moonbuilding cover star Maria Uzor, among many others. Isobel has also been talking about “slow podcasting”, approaching this new season with a slower pace by releasing episodes every two weeks. She says it gives her more time to work on the podcasts, but it also gives more time and space to unpick the conversations in each episode. Which is an idea I can really get behind. Smash Hits was fortnightly, didn’t do them any harm. The whole ‘Girls Twiddling Knobs’ shebang is such a rich resource for anyone wanting to get involved in this world. If you are at all interested in making music you should be listening to this, female or otherwise. What a hero Isobel is.
You can subscribe to the podcast here…
GOOD STUFF #5
r beny ‘discerned in the fugue of streams’ (quiet details)
Another month ticked off. Must be because it’s quiet details release time again. Again! And to mark the occasion of their 25th release - happy… I dunno, what do you call that? A birthday? Anniversary? Congratulations on the milestone whatever it is - they’ve enlisted r beny who is as lowercase-loving as the label itself. The work of California’s Austin Cairns, r beny’s music far outstrips his subtle lowercase demeanor. He needs a bigger name, something bolder and attention-seeking if you ask me. r beny just seems so little when his music is so big. And ‘discerned in the fugue of streams’ is no different. “In times of distress and discomfort,” he writes about the release, “I often find myself seeking out the white noise chorus of water in motion… solace can be found among the distinct tones of the water cascading over moss and stone - calm can be found amongst the roar of a busy mind.” Indeed. And here he serves up a release that is, he says, “a contemplation on slowing down and paying mind to the quiet details”. So that’s Austin and Isobel talking about slowing down and paying more attention. We all should pay attention, right?
A ROUND-UP IN A ROUND-UP
Going toe-to-toe with quiet details for regularity of releases, Mortality Tables wins hands down when it comes to plain weirdness. Take for example the ‘Sink Techno Song’ by BMH. The duo of Matt Jetten and Dark Train’s Kate Bosworth made the track from a leaking tap in a sink. It’s the sound of water dripping into the sink, beautifully in time and sounding like a taut kick drum. There’s two versions, the original, recorded live at the sink, and the full dancefloor ’HQ Wargar Edit’, which goes large on the effects. There’s two further tracks on the EP using the same sink to create the ‘Water Sink Song’ and the ‘End Dark Train 21st October 2024 Mix’. I warn you, a wee will be required after listening to all four versions.
mortalitytables.bandcamp.com
US musician Bruce Brubaker continues his solo ivory-tinkling explorations of Eno classics with a second volume of his interpretations called… wait for it… ‘Eno Piano 2’ (Infine). Bruce is a specialist in American minimalist music, you know, Glass, Riley, Reich, etc. In a real mind-blower he takes ‘Music for Airports, 1/1’, the original of which is 17-minutes odd, and turns in a version that is four minutes and 33 seconds. Which of course nods at John Cage’s most famous work. In a further headfrier, he talks about these longer/shorter versions, saying “Loops that seem to be the same may be a bit different, but then, the things that have differences are fundamentally the same.” Run that by me again? What does it all mean?
bruce-brubaker.bandcamp.com
Staying Stateside, I’m increasingly seeing music landing in the Moonbuilding inbox that comes from our friends across the pond. Do keep it coming. Boston-based Joe Mygan, a “staple of the New England experimental music scene for decades”, releases ‘Add Water’, his debut long-playing outing today on the Moon Villain label. Comes as vinyl too. Here we get two lengthy improvisations made on the the Elektron Octatrack, an audio sampler that Joe has used to mangle the bejeez out of sounds, resampling repeatedly, until they take on a life of their own. The A side almost sounds like the peeling of church bells. It’s hypnotic stuff.
moonvillainrecords.bandcamp.com
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‘SIDEWAYS THROUGH TIME: AN ORAL HISTORY OF HAWKWIND IN THE 1970s’ Joe Banks (Strange Attractor Press)
Earlier this year I hosted a talk with author Matthew Collin about his ‘Dream Machines’ book, a history of British electronic music that stretches back to the Second World War. My big takeaway from the night was that some acts were way more influential than you’d think. Hawkwind were on that list and we chatted about them for a while. They took a resolutely working class approach to being in a band. They were going to gig and they were going to earn money.
“So Hawkwind went around the country playing absolutely everywhere,” Matthew told me. “And they had a dedicated guy making noises - their roadie Dikmik. His job was to weird it up and they took this weirdness everywhere. You talk to people like New Order or Cabaret Voltaire, their idea of electronic music was not high culture, it wasn't Pierre Henry or Karlheinz Stockhausen or Luciano Berio, it was Hawkwind. And this is where one stream of our 80s/90s electronic music comes from, from people having seen them because they were the only band that came to their town to play.”
It all made me go back for a rethink. And that included revisiting Joe Banks’ excellent biography, ‘Hawkwind: Days Of The Underground’ (Strange Attractor). Joe is someone I know from my time as a commissioning editor and his obsession with Hawkwind has always shone through. The first time he approached me for work was with a great Hawkwind-related pitch. When you’re commissioning, people like Joe are spot on. Editors tend to ask themselves why is this person or that person the best choice for the job. In Joe’s case, having written a book about the space rock godheads, he’s the authority. But it’s not one book he’s written, it turns out it’s two.
There was a hardback special edition of ‘Days Of The Underground’ in 2020 that came with an entire 200-page bonus book, ‘Sideways Through Time: An Oral History Of Hawkwind in the 1970s’. The edition was 500 and it understandable sold out in a blink and the oral history has been in demand ever since. So here it gets a standalone release in a revised, expanded version all of its own. It adds eight brand-new interviews to the existing pile of conversations with band members, managers, crew, and assorted technicians of spaceship earth. The new stuff includes Dave Brock, Terry Ollis, Dave Anderson and Del Dettmar, as well as additional visual material.
Joe tells me it's the most comprehensive collection of Hawkwind-related interviews ever compiled “with new revelations guaranteed for even the most diehard Hawkfan”. And he should know. Using oral history to tell a story is often hit and miss and I think the best ones are the ones that happen by accident, like this. Joe just happened to interview a heck of a lot of people for ‘Days Of The Underground’ and as he’d only used a fraction of the chats for the first book, a plan was hatched for a further volume featuring the interviews. He hasn’t made an attempt to weave a story out of multiple interviews, but rather serve up the conversations wholesale before moving on to the next one. Simon Reynolds did this to great effect with ‘Totally Wired’, his companion interview collection for ‘Rip It Up’. And it works for Joe too.
He splits the book into the various factions - so the band, management, the crew, visuals, producers and friends and relations. There are, as you’d expect, some good tales. There is mucho drug talk too, hurrah. I especially like the new interview with drummer and original member Terry Ollis, who left the band in early 1972 having played on ‘Hawkwind’ and ‘In Search Of Space’. The story at the time was that he had to leave because he had a drug problem, which is a bit rich, and that the reason they had two drummers towards the end of his tenure was because he was off his nut all the time. “It’s a load of bollocks,” says Terry in the book. His drug of choice was Mandrax, an industrial-strength sedative that was banned in the mid-80s because people like Terry were enjoying it a little too much. For example, the band were doing some dates in Scotland, and Terry was sharing a room with Lemmy.
“I remember waking up,” he told Joe, “and for the first and only time in my fucking life, I said, ‘Lem, do you want a Mandy?’ He said, ‘No, you must be joking.’ So I said, ‘Alright, I’ll do yours then.’ Two of them. I thought we had the day off, but… we had a gig that day! Fucking hell… I played the gig that night, but I was incapable, the worst I’ve ever played. I apologised to them all after, and I remember Dave [Brock] saying, ‘You cunt!’ I felt really bad letting them all down. But that was the only fucking time.”
Turns out it wasn’t, but I won’t spoil it for you. The interviews are presented in their raw form as Q&A and there’s something rather bold about a writer offering up his material like this. You can tell a lot from a writer’s interview technique so publishing it like this is a bit like having to show your working out in maths. You can see how interviews are structured, how the writer guides the conversation, are they listening and responding rather than it just being a list of questions? I love how it lays bare the the process of a good writer and Joe is undoubtedly one of those. This is an essential companion to ‘Hawkwind: Days Of The Underground’. Nice one Joe.
A MESSAGE FROM THE MOTHERSHIP
***MOONBUILDING ISSUE 5 IS OUT NOW***
Bloody hell! Will you look at that? MOONBUILDING, Issue 5, is a scorcher. On the cover, depicted by the untouchable Nick Taylor, is the awesome Polypores. In our free-wheeling chat we get right under the hood of Stephen James Buckley’s musical operation, offer up a listening guide to help you safely navigate his extensive back catalogue and we also have an whole new Polypores album exclusively for your ears.
Yes, we are giving you a not-available-anywhere-else new album called ‘The Album I Would Have Released In An Alternate Universe’, which happens to be the sister recording to his recent Castles In Space opus ‘There Are Other Worlds’.
Want to try before you buy? No bother. If you’d like an extract from our Polypores cover feature interview where Stephen Buckley talks about his formative influences, which probably aren’t what you’d image, you can do that here… moonbuilding.substack.com/p/issue-28a-26-july-2024
Elsewhere in the issue there’s a profile of our new favourite label Mortality Tables, Pye Corner Audio gets in on the There’s A First Time For Everything act, we round up an absolute mountain of recent releases and serve up our thoughts on the best albums from the last few months, including Loula Yorke and Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan. There’s a column from The Orb’s Alex Paterson, which starts off about Jah Wobble and ends up about Andrew Weatherall, and an all-new instalment of Steven Appleby’s brilliant Captain Star cartoon strip.
This issue also features a pile of great book reviews (that’s great books, reviewed, rather than the reviews being great, although they are pretty good). There’s a cracking chat with Justin Patrick Moore, the author of ‘The Radio Phonic Laboratory’, and a bonus chinwag with the world’s finest music journalist, Mr Simon Reynolds.
The virtual shop doors are open at moonbuilding.bandcamp.com for your purchasing pleasure. This magazine ain’t going to buy itself.
Moonbuilding Weekly is a Castles In Space publication.
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thanks for including qd25 r beny! loads of great stuff in this week :) x