Issue 106 / 1 May 2026
The essential DIY electronic music lowdown: Track Of The Week: Woodleigh Research Facility + Album Of The Week: BUNKR + Loula Yorke + Field Lines Cartographer + Mosaicist + Adele Berti book + more
May! How is it possible that it’s May? What it does mean is there’s a new live Moonbuilding Session for our brilliant paying subscribers. Keep an eye on your inbox today! If you’re a new subscriber, you’ll get details of the latest session and how to acquire it in your welcome email. If your email doesn’t cough up, drop me a line and I’ll help you out.
Like last month’s Field Lines Cartographer opus, the new session is rather special. It’s a recording made at the launch of Paul Cousins’ ‘Vanishing Artefacts’ album in 2023. Paul is wildly talented, he works with reel-to-reel tape machines and prepared tape loops that he transforms on the fly into breathtakingly beautiful music. This session also features live musicians Joe Harvey-Whyte on pedal steel and Vincent Curson Smith on trumpet. Incredible stuff. Enjoy.
Finally, some sad news. The music press family has lost another good ‘un. Ruth Dodson, who died this week after a lengthy illness, was the fearless production editor at Melody Maker for much of the 90s. Wrangling us lot on a weekly basis to ensure the paper went to press on time was no mean feat, but Ruth did it with class and good humour. She was great fun and a huge Bunnymen fan to boot, which is a big plus in my book. I always think I’ll see people like Ruth again at some point. Just bump into them somewhere. If you’ve an old friend you haven’t seen for a while, say hello sooner rather than later. Ruth and her family are in my thoughts.
Neil Mason, editor
moonbuildingmag@gmail.com
Issue 106 Playlist: Listen
Your ad here: Advertise
***ADVERTISE HERE***
email moonbuildingmag@gmail.com
WOODLEIGH RESEARCH FACILITY ‘Borderland (Andrew Weatherall Remix)’ (Circuitry Electronic)
Photo: John Barrett
This is just too good to not point it in your direction. Woodleigh Research Facility is the excellent work of partners in musical crime, Nina Walsh and Andrew Weatherall.
An all-round excellent human, Nina worked with Weatherall for 30-odd years, and was doing so right up until his untimely death in 2021. I’m sure she’d tell you that some of those years were very odd. They were incredibly prolific and created an absolute audio mountain of work as WRF between 2016-2019, which Nina has been working her way through and issuing through various channels.
Your first stop should be the Bandcamp page, which is here. That includes the really great ‘Apparently Solo’ and ‘Maximum Vaultage’ series of releases, which all feature extensive sleevenotes from Kris Needs.
So anyway, there’s a new collection, ‘Anamchara’, heading your way via the good folk at the new Circuitry Electronic label. It’s released at the end of May and “spotlights” nine tracks released digitally via the ‘Apparently Solo’ series, but never before heard on vinyl. There’s one track in particular you should hear.
I first heard ‘Borderland’ a couple of years back, 2023, when it appeared on ‘Apparently Solo Volume 4’, where a fluttery almost demo-sounding version, heavy on viola from virtuoso Sarah Sarhandi, appeared along with an rip-roaring Jagz Kooner remix. Jagz does not muck around with remixes. You may recall he picked up last year’s Moonbuilding Weekly Track Of The Year gong for his remix of Lorelle Meets The Obsolete’s ‘Regresar / Recordar’.
As a track, ‘Borderland’ is a bit special because Weatherall saw it as the next ‘Smokebelch’, the original file was even called ‘Viola Belch’. He has a point. It does have an utterly beautiful melody created by Nina on a midi keyboard and transposed and played by her friend Sarah Sarhandi to great effect.
It gets better though. You see there is also another remix of the track. The Andrew Weatherall mix. Yup. It’s brilliant, of course it is. It snuck out last year, in September, as a bonus cut on the digital version of Rebirth Records’ excellent DJ Alfredo collection ‘Paraiso - True Spirit Of Ibiza’ album. They even popped it onto a 12-inch EP earlier this year, which is worth hunting down if you can.
While the Rebirth version is a mere seven minutes long, this is the full-length eight minute and 40 second version. There’s a wonderful breakdown about halfway where Weatherall clears the track and leaves just the viola melody. Gorgeous. Not one second is wasted.
‘Anamchara’ is released by Circuitry Electronic on 29 May
circuitryrecordings.bandcamp.com
BUNKR ‘Signals’ (VLSI)
Words: NEIL MASON
It’s the build. Goodness me. And on the opening track too. It’s called ‘The Light We Saw’ and it sits there shimmering for the first minute. It properly glistens. And then a gentle beat ripples in bringing with it a huge synth shudder. After a minute and a half a firm bass drum thud arrives, then these warm, chiming chords whisp into range. You almost don’t notice all this happening it’s so subtle.
But then BUNKR, Brighton-based James Dean, has always done that. Listen to ‘Aquatakt’, the opener on his last album, 2024’s ‘Antenne’. It’s like some slow motion trance anthem about to let rip, but never quite does. It’s so good. Which begs the question as to why haven’t we noticed the work of BUNKR quite as much as we should? He does seem to be something of a best-kept secret. Well, let’s try and make it an open secret shall we?
Come to that, why isn’t the London-based VLSI label better known? I can reel off a list of labels I like who haven’t released a thing in months, in some cases years. VLSI’s last release, Octavcat’s ‘Ailurophobia’, came out in February, before that it was Mattr’s ‘Aisle’ in November. It’s not a frequency problem. So why is a label turning out artists this good, operating under the radar? I really don’t know, but let’s put it right shall we?
I was only thinking the other day how artists flit from label to label like butterflies and how very few are loyal to one home. Warrington-Runcorn and Castles In Space springs to mind. Likewise, James has released all his long-players on VLSI, which is run by Dom Hoare and Andy Gillham, who as Echaskech are long overdue a release.
Anyway to BUNKR and his latest album. What I like about BUNKR is he creates an atmosphere with his music that I very much recognise. It has that 1990s dance music feel to it, nu rave I think I used call it at Electronic Sound. It feels just right somehow.
This is album number four and it follows 2024’s ‘Antenne’. The whole thing, like the other three, is themed. This one starts with the mysteries of the Surrey Hills, ‘The Light We Saw’ being a flash of light close to the Mullard Space Science Laboratory, tucked deep in the woods nearby. “A phosphorescent sphere pierced the night sky above Pitch Hill then promptly vanished,” say the notes. “Whether cosmic or coincidental, the moment left its mark — a signal from elsewhere, fleeting but unforgettable.”
The notes go on to explain that those Surrey Hills were a place of escape for James as a child. “Trees to climb, trails to ride, endless woods to lose yourself in”. And as a teenager the hills became “a gathering ground for free parties hidden in quarries and forests… the air alive with the distant thud of 909 kicks and 808 squiggles, the glow of sound systems pushing music into the darkness”.
Like ‘Antenne’, that pumped out the sound of an enigmatic mid-90s pirate radio station, ‘Signals’ is the sound of distant Surrey Hills raves, 21st century style. ‘These Hills’ reminds me of D*Note, especially their eponymous 1997 album and instrumental soundtrack to their short film ‘Coming Down’ of the same year. ‘Eyes Like Mirrors’ is another builder, the deep rumbling bass notes sound great, so juicy they almost bursts. We’re two minutes in and it’s kind of U2-like, think the chiming guitar intro on ‘Where The Streets Have No Name’, now play it really slow, on synths… we’re three minutes in, there’s such a swell you just want it to explode and the utter joy of it all is that isn’t going to happen. You can almost feel yourself back in those fields on a beautiful warm summers evening, you’re coming up on a pill, and everything around you is rushing brightly.
The explosion comes is the next track, ‘Quarry Transcendence’, which froths with drum ’n’ bass beats again. James gets all choppy here, muting the track like the it’s twitching and then a huge synth rolls in, like the sea crashing over everything. Love it. The bass drum thud on ‘Rtaur’ is so satisfying. Like when you find a floor that gives you a good thud under foot. Wasn’t it the floor of black cabs that drummers used to say were the best for that sort of thing? With the crisp cymbal tsk-tsk and cut-glass tinkle of the melody, it comes on like something from ‘Selected Ambient Works’, while closer ‘This Side Of Forever’ is all big rave chords, over and over, as the track builds and builds and builds. It is quite the grand finale.
BUNKR is one of those acts who deserves way more attention than he gets. I love the warmth of this kind of nu rave stuff so much. It’s should be so evocative for anyone who passed through this utterly magical world. James is such a talent and this is such beautifully released release. It is very much time we all started shouting a lot louder about BUNKR.
Got something you need to tell us about? email moonbuildingmag@gmail.com
Words: Neil Mason
GOOD STUFF #1
LOULA YORKE ‘AYM Mixtape’ (Truxalis)
She’s back! The mixtape returns. But don’t get too excited, it’s a one-month-only kinda deal. May Day (that’s today) marks two years since Loula’s first mixtape saw the light and it’s a year to the day since the last one landed, so it seems fitting she marks the occasion with a surprise name-your-price half-hour mix of recordings that include pylons fizzing in the pissing rain, a “Hach SL1000 Portable Parallel Analyser”, Joan’s Organ (phunar), Tawny owls, binaural rummaging, “the gentlest late winter waves lapping at a stone slipway under a midnight moon”, the dawn chorus and a very noisy song recorded at Eurovision hopeful Look Mum No Computer’s This Museum Is (Not) Obsolete in Ramsgate, oh, and “lots of previews of brand-new music I’m working on for my next album”.
Which is exciting. Which part? Well, all of it. Especially the binaural rummaging. The title? She’s already used the name ‘May Mixtape’ so this ‘Aym Mixtape’, of course it is.
Musically, there’s a great track called ‘Nor One Single Star’, a version of which her Cottage Studio subs members already have in full. As usual, the tape comes with Loula’s always delightful read-along notes where you will glean gems about the sounds like “Breaking all the rules of cast-iron pan maintenance by dripping cold water onto sizzling hot metal” or “an array of tubular bells, glockenspiel, chrsoglott and vibraphone: all electromechanical instruments rescued from two sheds in a garden near Leeds”. Of ‘Nor One Single Star’ she says it was a “tricksy sequence as the offbeat keeps slipping away, the result of playing an odd-numbered melodic sequence over an even-numbered drum pattern”.
Adrian Newton of the Evergreen Music label (see below) was telling me about his recent experience at the very first Dyski Weekend Modular residential event in Cornwall (which sounds great, check it out here). Loula was the special guest and over two days she expanded on her music making, sharing expertise and giving a private live performance. He said she was “so generous with her expertise. And she did a great performance for us on one of the evenings, then talked us through it the next day - really insightful”.
Which sounds very Loula. I love how she’s not afraid to let people behind the curtain of her process. In the notes here she talks about her process a fair bit at one point saying, “the minute I stopped trying to get the module to do things it’s resolutely not designed for, and leant into the things it’s exceptionally capable at it, everything came together”.
There’s a new track towards the end, untitled, which she really picks apart in the notes for the more technical among you. She describes it as a “super stripped-back one-take jam of the sequence, running at a fairly low bpm”. It is a glorious piece of work. Can’t wait for new Loula music to appear. Listening here I think the takeaway is what we might having coming up could be pretty beat-driven. Of the new tracks I especially like the gentle slo-mo Aphex-ish squidger ‘Hollow Roar’, which might be called that when it finally gets released, it’s called that for now at least. There’s another untitled track at the end that has “an absolute slab of saw-wave sneaks up from below fit to burst out of the SEM filter”. Even if you don’t understand that sentence, you don’t half know it when you hear it. It is a slab and a half! Huge.
What can I say? Delightful stuff, again, as always, from the brilliant Loula Yorke. This is 30 minutes of your time very well spent.
GOOD STUFF #2
FIELD LINES CARTOGRAPHER ‘Roots In The Firmament’ (Astra Solaria)
Bernard Grancher’s Astra Solaria label goes from strength to strength and just to prove the point here he welcomes the incredible Field Lines Cartographer to the fold. ‘Roots In The Firmament’ is, according to the notes, “a meditative drift through sacred landscapes - where the breath of the forest meets the vast stillness of the stars”. I asked Mark Burford if the could elaborate and, well, he could.
“To the idea came from a really beautiful experience I’ve had a couple of times in my life now,” Mark told me, “lying down on the ground outside on a gorgeous warm late summer night, with clear skies above and the billions of pin pricks of light above... this intense feeling of interconnectedness, of how the earth, the roots below and glorious light of the heavens above are all the same thing, the same mechanism at work and lying there, almost feeling the actual earth beneath me turning in space, I’m part of it all too. We all are.”
Which is about as perfect a summing up of this work, and his work in general, as you’ll get. “It sounds like hippie bullshit,” he went on, “and it is, but it’s also real and it’s cathartic as fuck. This is my soundtrack to that idea and that feeling.” That and, as he succinctly puts it, “too long listening to the Tangs, Mike Oldfield, The Orb and the more psychedelic jazz side of things like Sun Ra and Alice Coltrane.”
You can hear all this and more on ‘Roots In The Firmament’ which consists of six long-form tracks that range from eight to nearly 12 minutes. I can’t tell you how joyous this stuff is. Mark is a proper genius. I’ve seen him do it live, I’ve listened to so many of his releases and I never tire of it. There is something elemental about what he does with electricity that chimes deep down.
Mark cut his teeth as a techno producer and he brings a lot of those skills to this incredible work. Tracks teeter on the brink of exploding. They build an incredible tension and yet somehow it all feels so calming. ‘Wisps’ is classic FLC. It’s a drone that shifts as it gets bigger and bigger, with these tiny little slivers of what might be almost melody, like teaspoons of sound teasing you. The longer the track goes on, and it is the longest cut on the album at 11.37, the deeper into it you fall.
‘Sandalwood’ is a corker, another 11-minute+ offering, it thrums with life. There’s a lot going here, like bees buzzing round a hive. There’s a repeating motif that holds it together, which is useful as it’s noisy too as it builds layer upon layer. Noisy is unusual for Mark, but it is noisy in only way he can be. It’s very controlled noise, but it always teeters on that FLC brink, Mark holding it in place, but only just.
“I suspect our ancestors were far more in tune with this oneness,” offers Mark. “We haven’t lost it entirely through modernity and the crushing grind of late-stage capitalism eating itself, you just need to find some time and space to seek it out.”
The ideal would be stick on the headphones go lie down in a field somewhere, preferably at night, and feel the universe at work while listening. Over to Mark for the final word.
“If you can shut out the awfulness of the bullshit news cycle, the horror of man’s inhumanity to fellow man and nature, just shut it all out for an hour and feel the earth and firmament in harmony for a while, then at least that makes sense. There’s a wonderful logic to it.”
astrasolariarecordings.bandcamp.com
GOOD STUFF #3
MOSAICIST ‘Waves Of Summer Grass’ (Evergreen Music)
We seem to be in a mellow mood today. Here’s an interesting idea that’s turned into something rather wonderful. Inspired by the line “Waves of summer grass” in a haiku by Japanese poet Basho, Adrian Newton has created an entire album by asking what might those waves of summer grass actually sound like. You can almost feel the summer sunshine coming off this one.
Each of the album’s seven tracks was created from a field recording “captured in grassland ecosystems, principally chalk grassland nature reserves in southern England, during the summer months”. The musical accompaniment that grows up around each field recordings is made by sounds “created with sample-based instruments made from different species of grass”. The thought that goes into some of the release we feature is quite impressive. So the instruments used include shakuhachi and other bamboo flutes, bamboo wind chimes, and dried summer grasses.
Adrian describes the album as “a series of sound mosaics, each of which was structured to reference the waves in the grass audible in the field recordings, created by the movement of wind”. It is one of those releases that sits so nicely with the outside world when the windows are open. And we’re getting ever closer to those days when the first thing I do in the office is open the windows.
The field recordings are great, especially when birds are part of it. ‘A Pillow Of Grass’ features a very chatty bird song. There’s even a bee at the end. Musically, the tracks move forwards, like FLC (above), only much more gentle, more restrained, very calm way.
‘Sitting Quietly Doing Nothing’ has bees at the beginning. The sighs of synths ebb and flow, and suddenly, just before halfway, they fade to nothing leaving just the sound of grass rustling in the breeze, a wind chime gently clanking and bees gong about their business. It’s so peaceful, and then the synths gently strike up again. It’s not the last time that happens either. ‘The Grass Grows, By Itself’ lets the field recording do the talking on its own for the last minute and a half, while the rainy closer, ‘My Own Journey Home’ opens and closes with the delightful sound of summer rain.
This really is such a summery album, you can almost see the shimmery heat haze coming off that cover. Liking this very much.
THE ROUND UP’S ROUND UP
It’s Bandcamp Friday so my inbox is utterly frazzled. On top of that there’s a few releases from the last few weeks that I need to tell you about. Hold tight, there’s a deadline approaching, fast. Let’s see what we can do…
One I missed last week is The Music Liberation Front Sweden’s ‘Lost Hope Society’ on Subexotic, which has such good cover artwork. I see they’re doing it as a fetching T-shirt. MLFS is the long-running audio evangelism of Michael Evill. We’ve written about him a ton here and there’s always a message behind his work. Here it’s about “a sense of loss, yearning for better times”. “We should all think about what we have and not what we don’t,” says Michael. “This will help us to be nicer people and someday play the loving tones of the flugelhorn outside someone window who needs it.”
Indeed, the track ‘Anyone Can Play The Flugelhorn Outside My Window’ is perhaps a mantra we should all adopt. It makes a lovely sound, darker and more mellow than its near relatives the cornet and trumpet. Keeping the theme up, sort of, is the gentle lilt of ‘Nice Side – Nice People Where Have You All Gone?’. It is quite sweary (“politicians, fuck off”) as is the upbeat ‘No I Don’t Want You Fuck Off’. As always with MLFS there is much to enjoy here… and lots to think about.
Only last week we were talking about the latest live album from Cabaret Voltaire and here we have Vanishing ‘Shelter (Live ‘25)’, a live offering from The Cabs tour support at their Birmingham show. Recorded in Sheffield, Glasgow and Manchester last year, the tracks are a reimagining of Vanishing’s 2024 State 51-released album ‘Shelter Of The Opaque’. Featuring clarinet, sax, cello, synth, voice and electronics, the band’s Gareth Smith explains that they wanted to capture the set in a more intimate light. And it’s certainly that. While hardly abrasive, the original album – Smith’s spoken-word lyrics set to electronic backings – does have a dark, industrial-feeling edge. This live take seems to lift the instruments to the fore and feels warmer for it. ‘Inertia, Inertia!’ is all glitchy and buzzy in its studio form, here the sax gives it a free jazz edge. Likewise, the live version of ‘Maxim’ brings the melodic cello line to the fore to great effect.
There’s a new Frànçois And The Atlas Mountains album called ‘Halage’ (InFine) that I’ve been trying to mention for a couple of weeks. I loved last year’s ‘Age Fleuve’ and here Frànçois Marry and his sonic pals seem to have taken the pop songs and stripped them right back. ‘Briller Dans La Nuit’ is great, a melody dances over a stark synthy backing. It all feels very reflective, thoughtful, wish I could tell you what it means, but my French only extends to asking for directions to the boulangerie and ordering drinks, un demi pression s’il vous plait. There’s a slew of vocal guests here, which gives the record such a cosmopolitan feel, like something Serge would preside over. Frànçois never disappoints. Well, he never disappoints me anyway.
There’s some seriously lovely artwork doing the rounds this week. I love the look of Circle Bros’ ‘Wade’ on the Gent-based morctapes. I’m told the illustration is based on a drawings by 19th century Austrian artist Ernst Stohr. Very nice indeed. It says in the notes that Circle Bros is “a rare solo album by morc founder Wim Lecluyse”. Wim made me smile when he sent this over, saying it’s “a bit of an odd one to announce, because, well, it’s … me”. Goodness, if only everyone was so modest. morc has been around a fair while and there’s releases here by names you will know from Machinefabriek, Michael Tanner & Sharron Kraus, Pefkin, lots of Pefkin, Jessica Bailiff maybe, with plenty else to discover. Wim’s last outing was way back in the before times, 2018, and he says this new offering picks up where that one (‘Molen’ on Lausanne-based three:four records, great cover too, see here) left off. It’s so gentle, slight, almost not there and yet utterly captivating. Liking the double-edged sword of breath in-breath out ‘Inbound’ and the gentle pulsating of ‘Outbound’. The notes talk about “fractured melodies, hushed sounds, repetitive patterns and details that are hard to place” and Wim hits some proper markers for me as he talks about influence. Flying Saucer Attack, Arab Strap and Labradford among them. Labradford, not heard that name for a while. They were such a favourite in the Melody Maker office.
The always interesting Xqui has something new, ‘Nocturnal Drift’, out on their home label Wormhole World. A quick skim down the tracklisting and, oh, what’s this? ‘Progressive Modernism’ track number four of eight, the halfway point, and it’s near-on half an hour long. That’s our Xqui. There’s no notes either, Xqui usually comes with a few words. I do like a note. Not because I need telling, but because it’s always interesting having the artist’s take. So here I’m left with my old pal Mat Smith’s thoughts via his Further blog. Mat talks about Philip Glass and “staring at Mark Rothko’s bleak ‘Four Seasons’ series of paintings at Tate Modern” (I miss them) and “the level of detail that reveals itself under close examination and intense focus”. ‘Nocturnal Drift’ does feel like a suite of music that builds towards and veers away from the whopping centrepiece. The build up presents ‘Midnight Undercurrents’ that is bright and chime-y as it repeats the motif over and over, while ‘Heat To The Beat’ is tense and taut and then comes ‘Progressive Modernism’ sounding very grand. It moves glacial pace, but is all the more dramatic for it.
It’s all got quite dreamy down this end of the email and Yu Su’s ‘Foundry’ on the Sheffield label Short Span keeps up the theme. The opener on this, a second LP from “Chinese musician, DJ and creative chef”… guess you need to be careful when talking about palette in relation to her work. Could get confusing. Musically, this is very cool work. It’s very mellow, often glitchy ambient washes that can suddenly spin out to create dub-like waves like on ‘Cul De Sac’, which pulses its way to a beat properly kicking in. But not without teasing you first. It’s followed by the otherworldly acid house of ‘Foundry’, which melts into the guitar-y shimmer of ‘One Place After Another’ that features Seefeel. Lots going on here, very, very listenable it is too. The notes describe the record as having a “far-reaching sound”. I’d say that’s about right.
***ADVERTISE HERE***
email moonbuildingmag@gmail.com
‘NO NEW YORK: A MEMOIR OF NO WAVE AND THE WOMEN WHO SHAPED THE SCENE’ Adele Berti (Faber)
Words: CATHI UNSWORTH
Visitors arriving at New York’s airports in June 1975 were handed a leaflet announcing: ‘Welcome to Fear City: A Survival Guide for Visitors to New York’ by member of its own police force. Murders, car thefts and assaults had doubled in the past decade, rapes and burglaries tripled and robberies increased tenfold, while thousands of NYPD officers were laid off. Thanks to the practice of landlords burning out buildings to claim insurance, entire blocks along Avenues B, C and D were demolished, while major infrastructure like the East River bridge was left to rust and Grand Central Station came close to being bulldozed. During the two-day-long power cuts in the summer of 1977, a serial killer calling himself Son of Sam stalked the blacked-out streets, leaving messages for the cops that recalled the prayer of Travis Bickle that “some day a real rain will come and wash all the scum off the streets” in Martin Scorsese’s monumental 1976 evocation of the fallen city, ‘Taxi Driver’.
This is the time and place that incubated No Wave – a musical expression of fear and loathing equal to the magnitude of its surroundings, made by America’s runaways. A Generation Hexed who beelined their way out of the boondocks to CBGBs and Max’s Kansas City, to create great art while squatting in disused storefronts and warehouses, living on little more than cigarettes and the fire in their bellies. Crucially, as Adele Berti so illuminatingly testifies, it was the women – or les guérillères, as these auto-didact revolutionaries called themselves – who led the way.
In July 1977, Berti took a Greyhound bus from her birthplace in Cleveland, Ohio, carrying a guitar, a burlap sack, two suits and “centuries of bottled-up female rage”. She had spent most of the previous six years in and out of reform schools, after her schizophrenic mother and would-be mafioso father acrimoniously parted when she was 11. “Butch daddy” Adele assumed the air of an Artful Dodger who had learned from the experiences of her mother and grandmother that “being a woman meant suffering”. Then she met photographer Nan Goldin, in Cleveland gay bar the Charge, in 1975. Nan’s visual chronicles of her friends “taught me how to look. To see. It was Nan who told me to move to New York, a world where outsiders celebrated each other.”
There was already an outpost of Cleveland misfits in Manhattan, including The Cramps’ Lux Interior and Nick Knox, Dead Boys Stiv Bators and Cheetah Chrome and Bradley Field, who had just been recruited by fellow runaway – Lydia Lunch from Rochester, NY State – to join her magnificently-monikered Teenage Jesus And The Jerks. Berti recalls her first meeting with Lunch, “in a derelict building on Delancey above an abandoned Chinese movie theatre”, in hilarious detail. With shared histories of trauma, exceptional intelligence and striking good looks, it’s no wonder the pair instantly bonded.
Lydia introduced Adele to the beautiful and doomed Anya Phillips – the cover photo shows the three of them – and “venom-spitting malcontent of a musical prodigy” James Chance, who was after a keyboard player for his avant jazz-funkers, the Contortions. Though she had no personal experience, Berti’s grandmother had been an outstanding stride piano player and the ability to pick up the instrument was in Adele’s blood. In any case, Chance was not so much auditioning as giving Berti a literal hands-on lesson in how he wanted his Ace Tone manipulated. “James ‘played’ my hands on the keys until I learned how to manhandle an organ”.
While in New York to master the second Talking Heads album, Brian Eno hired Berti as his assistant and guide through the Manhattan demi monde. Witnessing a virtuoso performance of Chance fighting with his audience as the Contortions played The Artist’s Space on 5 May 1978, Eno was determined to document these times. The resultant ‘No New York’ album caught sets from Contortions, Teenage Jesus, scene founders Mars and DNA at their confrontational peaks. “I don’t know what impressed Eno more that night: the band’s sound or James’ histrionics,” Berti recalls. That night was a turning point. When Chance clapped eyes on Adele’s lover Anya, there began a mutual infatuation that would help destroy them both.
Fifty years on and the Devil presides over a cultural wasteland from a gleaming apartment block on 666 Fifth Avenue. Berti’s ‘No New York’ is both celebration of the wild energy that consumed the city of her youth and an elegy for those that fell into the attendant pits of addiction, violence and madness as this brief moment of liberation passed. Fiercely intelligent and beautifully written, there could be no greater testament.
MOONBUILDING ISSUE 6 … SOLD OUT
Holy cow. MOONBUILDING Issue 6 is completely sold out, so it isn’t available from moonbuilding.bandcamp.com Sure someone is trying to cash in via Discogs.
Let’s look at what you missed, although it is still available digitally of course. Our cover star, illustrated by the peerless Nick Taylor, is the unstoppable force that is LOULA YORKE. In our bumper interview we talk about how she got here and where she’s going. As usual, it is an in-depth piece that lifts the lid on the brilliant mind behind the excellent music.
We meet Loula at her home in Suffolk where we have a proper rummage around in her world, musically, humanly, psychologically, probably even a bit metaphysically. It is a cracking read and opens the doors on what makes this most remarkable artist tick.
As always the issue comes with an accompanying CD. This one is a Loula Yorke collection called ‘How Did We Get Here’, which is compiled by artist herself and charts her rise and rise. The resulting 11-tracker will take you on a journey through her career to this point and it is utterly, totally, absolutely, exclusive to Moonbuilding.
Elsewhere, there’s a great chat with Clay Pipe Music supremo Frances Castle as we profile her wonderful label, A’Bear 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, which feature Loula Yorke, Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan’s Gordon Chapman-Fox, Cate Brooks, 30 Door Key and Sarno Ultra.
We talk to ‘This Is Memorial Device’ author David Keenan about ‘Volcanic Tongue’, his debut collection of music writing. He is one of the last generation of music writers who could actually call themselves journalists. He talks a lot of sense and his work is a shining example of what music writing should be. It’s an unmissable interview.
Elsewhere, we round up an absolute mountain of recent releases and point you in the right direction of some mighty fine independent magazines and books. The Orb’s Alex Paterson tells us about his ‘Top Of The Pops’ experience when he appeared on the legendary show performing ‘Blue Room’ in 1993. I say performing… There’s a new Captain Star cartoon strip from the brilliant Steven Appleby. I constantly have to pinch myself that this strip, that I first read in the NME in the early 1980s, is now in my little magazine.
Find us at moonbuilding.bandcamp.com.
Moonbuilding Weekly is a Castles In Space publication.
Copyright © 2026 Moonbuilding
The Field Lines Cartographer piece was well worth the price of admission here - absolutely excellent, if maybe 3 seconds too short. But definitely digging into this.
And I had to do a double-take there - Andrew Weatherall … *the* Andrew Weatherall? 👀🖤