Issue 109 / 22 May 2026
The essential DIY electronic music lowdown: Track Of The Week: The Lo-Fidelity Allstars + Album Of The Week: ‘Sinking In The Black Mud Volume 1& 2' + five Bubble criteria + Bleed Air + D.Rothon + more
No time to lose this week. Places to go, people to see. Super Furry Animals in Brixton tonight too. Looking forward to that I have to say. Can’t tell you how many times I saw them in the old days. I know ‘Demons’ is on the setlist, hoping it’s with the brass section dressed up as furry animals like they used to. There is also talk of yeti suits for ‘The Man Don’t Give A Fuck’ too. Can’t wait.
As I say every week, don’t forget the new live Moonbuilding Session download which is exclusively available for our brilliant paying subscribers. This month we have a live 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. Subscribe now for instant access.
Righto, that’s me. Happy reading.
Neil Mason, editor
moonbuildingmag@gmail.com
Issue 109 Playlist: Listen
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THE LO-FIDELITY ALLSTARS ‘Lo-Fis In Ibiza (Live 26)’
Photo: Liam Battersby
Yeah, so. Easter just gone, I found myself in St Leonards-On-Sea at a small venue just up from the seafront called The Piper. Regular boozer downstairs, plenty of locals enjoying a noisy pint, while upstairs there’s a snug music venue where The Lo-Fidelity Allstars were preparing to take the stage for the first time in over a decade. It was a warm-up show for a short tour that included dates in Brighton, Cambridge and Glasgow as well as a headline slot at the Shiiine Weekender.
I’ve known Chief Lo-Fi Phil Ward, The Albino Priest, since my Melody Maker days. I first heard them via their appearance on the various artists Fierce Panda-released ‘Listen With Smother’ EP where they offered up a quite brilliant cover of John Barry’s ‘Diamonds Are Forever’ Bond theme. I roped Phil into a Camden Crawl preview feature, which got rather messy, and we’ve kind of stayed in touch ever since.
Earlier this year Phil announced new live dates, which isn’t something I thought I’d ever see. They last played in 2015 at the very first Shiiine On Weekender and after they lost drummer Johnny Machin to cancer in 2018 they said that was that, no Johnny, no Lo-Fis. But time changes things. The Shiiine Weekender came knocking again and Phil, who has lived in New York for nearly 20 years, thought why not. He’s the only one remaining from the original line-up and is joined by bass player/vocalist Del Vargas, who has been in the band since their third album ‘Northern Stomp’, and new recruits Hannah Dennard on vocals and keys and drummer Britta DeVore who is Phil’s bandmate in their NYC band, Kid Midnight.
What to expect? I was hoping it’d be good and it really was. The highlight in a set of highlights was this rousing version of ‘Lo-Fis In Ibiza’ from their second album, 2002’s ‘Don’t Be Afraid Of Love’. I wondered if they’d play it, the female vocal is belting on the record and they’d always used a sample for it live, but they have a new secret weapon in the shape of Hannah who stopped the room in its tracks as you’ll hear. She has a set of pipes on her. This version was recorded at King Tuts Glasgow on 5 April. It is sterling work.
The band are back on tour in November with dates in Bristol, Nottingham, Liverpool, London, Manchester, Newcastle, Dundee and Hull. I would make a beeline if I were you. See website for tickets.
VARIOUS ARTISTS ‘Sinking In The Black Mud Volume 1 & 2 (Preston Capes)
Words: NEIL MASON
All good things come to and end goes the saying. Right up there this week on the list of things that are undoubtedly good that are coming to an end is the Preston Capes record label. Part of Mat Handley’s Woodford Halse Empire, the label was set up as a sister outlet to the mothership, the idea being it would be a home for some of the more experimental work that came his way.
This isn’t just a tidying up of the office desk though, a streamlining of the operation. This is the beginning of process that will see Mat step back from running labels entirely by the end of the year. After three years and 30 releases, Mat is bringing the curtain down on of the first of his labels, Preston Capes.
Presented on short-run cassette, the label has seen releases of… well, I’ll hand you over to Mat for potted summary. In his notes for ‘Sinking In The Black Mud Volume 1& 2’ he writes, “We have released some very pretty electronica (Ogle, Scholars of the Peak), pastoral indie folk (Bizarre Statue) and punishing electro punk (Photophobik, Hope & VX), but by and large, experimental sounds have very much been the order of the day, from harsh noise (Drew Mulholland), drum heavy jazz (Omega Institute) and radiophonic musique concrete (Harder Than Concrete) to dystopian soundscapes (Grey Frequency, Von Heuser), classical minimalism (Gregory Nieuwsma) and slow shifting ambience (Autumna, Prism Capture).
It is quite the line-up. The easy way to mark the occasion would be a compilation of tracks drawn from the various releases over the last three years, but Mat being Mat, that wasn’t ever going to happen. So what do we have here? Well, collected here are 26 all-new tracks from artists who have released on the label.
What’s more, the set is a nod to the legendary five-cassette industrial/underground electronic music collection ‘Rising From The Red Sand’, released by Gary Levermore’s Third Mind label in 1983. Now there was a collection that opened doors.
“This compilation mirrors the aesthetic and, hopefully, intent of those early DIY cassette labels bringing you music that you might otherwise have missed through more established channels,” writes Mat. “I’m proud of what we’ve achieved with the label .”
And so he should be. ‘Sinking In The Black Mud’ not only echoes the look of those ‘Red Sand’ tapes, but like that set it also provides a snapshot of the current state of the nation. Well, our little electronic corner at least. The hope should be that this release will resonant down the years much like ‘Red Sand’ did. Who here then will be the new Chris & Cosey or Section 25, Nurse With Wound, Test Dept or our great friend Ian Boddy, who remains as vital now as he was back then.
It comes as a double cassette pack, split into volumes one and two, and it’s a proper smorgasbord. I really like the industrial clicky rhythms of ‘Back Of The Island Into The Mirror’ by Ruaridh Law’s Ayshire-based TVO, Botex Spykidelic’s ‘Kjeller’ is the sound of an amusement arcade coming out of a detuned radio, while VX/Hope’s abrasive ‘Fat Controllers’ would scare the neighbour’s cat from three gardens away.
As Mat says, there’s some “very pretty electronica” in the shape of the synthy swirl of Ogle’s eastern influenced ‘Japanese Sky and Scholars Of The Peak’s lovely ‘The Moon Remains’. There’s also plenty of drifty ambiance, such as Autumna’s ‘Rainbow Noise’, The Wyndham Research Institute’s ‘Surf’s Up With The WRI’ and Grey Frequency’s ‘Memorial Dance’. We could be here all day running through the tracks, but let’s not. This really is one for sticking on, sitting back and perking up when you hear something you like, which will be a lot. And there, tucked away at the end is Mat’s own Pulselovers with the thrumming ‘Fiori Musicali’. The one upside to this closing down collection is it will afford Mat more time to actually make music.
The thing about all this, and as great as this set is, we should not lose sight of the fact that it marks the beginning of the end of an era. But Mat is far from alone in shuttering a brilliant label. He’s a proper trailblazer and someone who has featured heavily in Moonbuilding over the years. We are indeed in a sorry state when one of our premier outlets is throwing in the towel. Following him this year, that we know of, is Alan Gubby’s Buried Treasure and Dom Martin’s Feral Child. These are not people who don’t know how to run labels. These are people for who the diminishing returns are no longer enough. It’s not just about the money, of course, but people used to buy this stuff in their droves. Where a run used to be a sold-out 1,000, it’s now a struggle at 300. And as you know from reading this newsletter week in week out there is no let up in quality releases. So what’s gone wrong?
Last year I wrote a cover feature for Electronic Sound about how the DIY electronic scene might be in rude health musically, but if we don’t start to get properly behind it by investing in these labels and artists, be that buying their vinyl or going to their live shows, we are going to lose it. Guess what? Yup, we do seem to be losing it.
Got something you need to tell us about? email moonbuildingmag@gmail.com
Words: Neil Mason
GOOD STUFF #1
FIVE BUBBLE CRITERIA ‘Temporary Second Residences’ / BLEED AIR ‘Bleed Air’ (super Polar taïps)
I think I’ve said this before, but Marco Trovatello at the Cologne-based experimental pop cassette label super Polar taïps does a really neat line promo parcels. I got a package the other week that had three tapes, a CD, a bunch of press releases, Yum codes and a small pile of Sperlari Lavazza coffee candies. The sweets don’t last long. They’re these if you don’t know what I’m talking about.
I really love Marco’s label, it’s exactly the sort of thing Moonbuilding is all about. While he’s not prolific, he more than makes up for it when he does release stuff. I always think of super Polar taïps being quite “prog”, not hoary old 70s beard stuff, but the sort of place Polypores would be at home.
So we have two releases here (I’ll tell you about the other tapes in a bit). There’s a second album from five Bubble criteria who are a rather skilled instrumental post-rock outfit and a reissue of Bleed Air’s eponymous outing, one of the label’s early releases, which deserves another lap round the block. The two artists are connected, they’re offshoots of each other, not that you’d know listening.
five Bubble criteria’s ‘Temporary Second Residences’ is really lovely. The label notes that the tracks were released several years ago digitally, but the artist felt they needed to be “refined and deserved a proper physical re-release”. So here they are remixed and remastered and available on CD or cassette. It’s the sort of stuff that really benefits from the analogue warmth of a tape, with the notes explaining that the sound was built on “various guitars, including electric bass, a Fender VI, baritone guitar, glockenspiel, vibraphone, and a few rather early analogue synthesisers whose age you can tell just by listening”. Favourite tracks? We like the wonky ‘Reditus’, which heads off with delicious drumming and delicate guitar melody that is punctuated with some great digital dropouts before the whole track dissolves into a gentle haze of buzzy electronic feedback for ages before the instruments chime back up. Or there’s ‘Fioriscono Limone e Fragole’ that has a kind of early Beck/wonky folky vibe. The whole thing is delicious.
That Bleed Air’s first album is getting a repress is only right and proper as it’s a doozy. It’s presented as a mixtape, the A-side and flip are mixed as two long pieces and all the better for it. It really travels too, the notes talk about analogue electronic gear, that is “often of the cheaper and not exactly hip kind” and says “when robot choirs start singing or broken analogue circuits and filters start doing what they want, it can get wacky, but we think it always remains pleasant to listen”. It does. Oh, it does. Like five Bubble criteria this too benefits from having the warmth of tape behind it. It works so well, even though (or especially because) the tracks are by the same artist it does come over as being a mixtape, or a film soundtrack. With its swinging drum machine tsk-tsk-tsk, bass growl and bright keys, ‘I TEL’ sounds very celluloid. I’ve been listening to a few mixtapes of late (my absolute favourites are the DJ Food ‘Blech’ tapes for Warp, had those on a fair bit lately), this one is going into rotation.
There were two other tapes in the package, neither of which I’ve had time to listen to yet, but I am greatly looking forward to getting them in the tape deck. Perrache’s ‘Letter To Jane EP’, which is Joachim Hen of post-rock outfit Ma Cherie For Painting, who has featured round here more than once before. The label and associated artists are big fans.
There’s also Porz 1975’s ‘Schmitz & Neibuhr’, which is described as “an insane prog-rock double concept album”. It uses only instruments that existed when Porz, now the largest district of Cologne, stopped being an independent town in 1975. “An acoustic road movie through the 70s”. How good does that sound? It’s the same idea Warrington-Runcorn employed on the first album. Can’t go wrong, surely.
That all this great music is sat out there on labels like super Polar taïps waiting for you is such a shot in the arm, especially on a day when we’re talking about labels shutting up shop. All power to these people. If you want them to keep doing what they’re doing, you know what to do. Coming soon: I have a pile of CDs released by Mat Smith’s Mortality Tables label that I need round up. Stay tuned!
GOOD STUFF #2
D.ROTHON ‘Angel Pavements’ (Clay Pipe)
I picked this up from Frances at Clay Pipe at the recent Indie Label Market, where early birds would have been able to do likewise. I hope you did given the chance. It’s an edition of 250 and they will not be hanging around. There was also a listening party last night for it, which I suspect was well attended and where copies were also available.
I do love the label’s mini CD series, they’re such lovely artifacts. Check out that artwork above, brilliant eh, and it’s four times the size of the real thing! ‘Angel Pavements’, as is the case with D.Rothon’s work, comes with a story too. This is his second appearance in this series and the last mini CD, ‘Lonesome Echoes’, came from spotting the name on a map of London. Lonesome is, apparently, a long-lost south London village. You can investigate that release here.
Staying with the London theme, ‘Angel Pavements’ is inspired by early to mid 20th century novels of everyday London life. D.Rothon stumbled across a copy of James Curtis’ ‘The Gilt Kid’ in a charity shop, which led to an interest in tracking down other books along the same lines by authors like JB Priestly, Patrick Hamilton, Pamela Hansford Johnson and Norman Collins.
“I’ve already stolen a few titles for tracks on my other Clay Pipe releases,” says David, “but thought it was time I did a whole set of pieces based around this theme.”
It’s a four tracker, an EP to all intents and purposes, less than 20 minutes of music, but what music it is! Opener ‘In The Racket Too’ reminds me a bit of Barry Adamson sleaze. Taking of which, he’s just made an album with Marc Almond, which I can’t wait to hear. That sounds like a perfect match to me.
On ‘Plains Of Cement’ there’s a great melodica refrain, played by frequent collaborator Hilary Robinson, that really reminds me of the work of Edwin “Ted” Astley. I do seem to be referencing this TV composer increasingly. When people talk about the 70s TV composers, his name rarely comes up, it’s all Alan Hawkshaw this, Keith Mansfield that, but Astley’s work is great, he’s rather underrated. He did some dazzling work. His most famous pieces is probably ‘The Saint’, but he also did the themes for ‘Department S’, ‘Randall And Hopkirk (Deceased)’ and ‘Danger Man’. A couple of interesting facts… his eldest daughter married Pete Townshend and the family pile was in Goring, which is where Martin Rushent’s Genetic Studio was. You wonder if they ever crossed paths.
Anyway… ‘Her Own Shadow On The Wall’ is rather spooky. You can feel the London night of France’s wonderful artwork pressing down on you here, while closer ‘London Lights The Clouds’ is rather wonderful, very melancholic with its church-y organ sounds and the delicate wordless vocal of Johanna Warren.
Great stuff, but when isn’t it with Clay Pipe.
GOOD STUFF #3
VISIBLE CLOAKS ‘Paradessence’ (RVNG Intl)
Another week, like last week, were we are being spoiled with a slew of cracking releases. And this one is yet another great offering from our friend’s over at New York’s RVNG Intl label. It was only last week that they served up Discovery Zone’s ‘Library Copy Do Not Remove’. It is also another week pedalling the fine wares of PR outfit 9PR… we really need to talk about all these free plugs, lads. Moonbuilding ain’t a charity you know!
Visible Cloaks, Portland-based duo of Spencer Doran and Ryan Carlile, bagged our Track Of The Week hotspot not so long ago and ‘Paradessence’ is the full album, so you know, it’s going to be good, right? Right. It’s their third long-player and their first in nine years, if you don’t count the collaborative outing in 2019 with ambient pioneers Yoshio Ojima and Satsuki Shibano as part of RVNG Intl’s excellent FRKWYS series that pairs intergenerational talents for long-playing outings.
So what to expect. Like I said with the Track Of The Week entry, their sound is grounded in Japanese ambient territory, hence the keenness to work with Yoshio Ojima and Satsuki Shibano. But they don’t half mess with ambient. It’s sound that’s almost liquid. I was talking the other week about how some of the stuff I listen to has me checking my ageing Bose desk monitors. ‘Balloon’ does that. It phases in and out, glitches digitally… or it might be speakers.
‘Slippage’ lets a melody escape, not that there isn’t great deal of beauty here, but you really notice it when a track like this is allowed to breath. There are plenty of tracks that let a gentle tune escape, like ‘Telescoping’, which gently weaves its way, like its tiptoeing somewhere.
‘Intarsia’ is lovely too. Featuring Romanian composer/violinist Ioana Șelaru, it’s a stop-start piece that feels in places like it’s what happens before the proper music starts, like it’s tuning up, and in other places it offers up the most beautiful violin swoops and sweeps.
It’s one of those releases where you don’t quite understand how they’ve made it. It’s almost like it’s being beamed in from another dimension. It has that forward facing digitalness about it and yet it is also utterly beautiful almost in a classical way. Liking this a lot. It’s often on at Moonbuilding HQ as I’m firing the office up.
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THE ROUND UP’s ROUND UP
Picking up where I left off above with Visible Cloaks comes Richard Pike of Salmon Universe fame. I mean he’s better know for other things, like being in Warp outfit PVT, but round here he is Richard Pike of Salmon Universe. I think I said somewhere that the Visible Cloaks album reminds me of the work coming out of Salmon Universe. It’s got that future-facing digital sheen to it. That said, Richard’s new release, ‘Redemption Suite I-IX: For Textures & Piano’, leads with his piano playing, a practice he took up as a daily ritual following the death of Ryuchi Sakamoto in 2023. Here then, his two worlds collide. The improvised piano pieces meet electronic textures, subtle beats and spoken word recordings (credited to “Vivian Pike and Emma Gunn” that you suspect is the sound of home) as on opener ‘I - What Happened’ and the uplifting ‘III - August’. It’s all very subtle, the notes say “The textures echo the likes of Romeo Poirier, Jan Jelinek, Deepchord, early music concrete and a nostalgia for the ‘clicks and pops’ era that inspired Richard’s early experiments in his Warp Records-affiliated band PVT”. There’s strings too that meet his sparse yet rich piano and understated beats, as on ‘V - Ephemera’. Performed and recorded by Stefano Tiero, in Rome, Italy, the track is all the better for knowing those strings are real. This is brilliant stuff.
The new album from The Early Years ‘Modern Moonlight’ (Sonic Cathedral) comes with some mighty music writer comparisons. They channel Joy Division, A Certain Ratio with “shimmering DFA-style grooves” say my old pals at Electronic Sound, while the label talks of “Davids Bowie and Byrne, John Cage, Conny Plank, Brian Eno, Radiohead”. And you know, opener ‘A New Way Of Living’ does have a Peter Hook bass twang to it as well as a string sweep and vocal melody that sounds like ‘Heroes’. I do like stuff that draws so obviously on the big guns. When there’s no chance of new material from the likes of Joy Division or Bowie, getting something like this, original, accomplished, very listenable, there’s something rather comforting in it familiarity.
I would like to point you at Hannah Peel / Beibei Wang’s ‘The Endless Dance’ (Real World) because it’s flipping brilliant. Hannah you will know all about. I’ve been writing about her since she was doing cute cover versions on hand-cranked music boxes. I continue to love her invention and creativity. She is one of our brightest musical minds and here she teams up with Chinese percussionist Beibei Wang to “travel through the 24 solar terms of the Chinese calendar with a cornucopia of sound in tow”. They first met while working Manchester Collective’s 2023 album ‘NEON, and an improvised show between the pair soon followed at Kings Place in London. You get the feeling that here too improvisation is also the key. The record is produced by Tunng’s Mike Lindsay, who is a go-to for many these days. “Mike loves elements that are nuanced, like breath or the noises in a room,” says Hannah and that lends a whole other level of delight to these pieces. You can hear a giggle on opener ‘Wild Geese Arrive’, which also has the rhythmical splash of water keeping time, there’s a laugh at the start of ‘Mantis vs Horse’. The sound of the room is everywhere, it’s what lends the warmth to these brilliant pieces. Dance music figures large too. ‘Tiger Sex’ barely needs a remix to have it filling floors and likewise ‘Offerings To The Beast’ kicks off from the start. There’s a potentially huge hands in the air moment that starts to build, but it’s cut short before the storm breaks. What I like most about this is it is totally the sound of artists having fun.
And talking of myth and legend, which we sort of were with the Chinese calendar above, we find ourselves with SHHE’s ‘Thalassa’ (One Little Independent), which came out last week, but who’s counting? The album from Su Shaw, a Scottish-Portuguese sound artist and producer, takes its name from the primordial Greek sea goddess who is “the personification of the sea itself, and unfolds as a sonic dive from submergence to emergence”. It is haunting, watery stuff. I don’t know if you’re watching ‘Widow’s Bay’ on Apple TV (brilliant, infuriatingly one new episode a week), but the opening cut here, ‘Pneuma’, makes me think of The Hag in episode three, who scratches her victims so she can hunt them down and kill them in a rather interesting manner. The sight of… yeah, I won’t spoil it for you. Anyway, this is powerful work. I love the rise and rise of ‘Katavasi’ and how it just stops dead, leaving shimmers of sound in its wake and the delicate, but frightening slow build of ‘Allasso’. Have to say, there’s some delicious artwork around this week too.
Another shouty caps name this week is BAG, the London-based spoken word/electronics duo of Jody DeSchutter and Daniel Allison whose ‘This House Is A Body’ (Phantom Limb) is described in the notes as being formed from Daniel’s “head-spinning, depth-mining production for synthesis, field recording, and acoustic instrumentation” and Jody’s “lysergic and prophetic spoken word”. It’s captivating stuff. The spoken word really draws you in as you follow each word, piecing everything together slowly as Jody tells her stories that can be “illuminated in sunstreamed glory in places and dripping with basement effluvia in others”. Effluvia isn’t a word you see too often. It’s from the Latin effluere, “to flow out”, usually it’s some sort of foul exhalation. You know, think of those kitchen vents outside supermarkets. Blearch. A track like ‘Floor Phlegm Hue’ is actually quite song-like as musically it spits out a deep rumble of a bassline and crisps beats while Jody almost sings over the top. It reminds me of something. The discordant sax is very Clock DVA, but the vocal is maybe Polly Harvey at her whipsery-ist. Liking this a lot.
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.
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Lovely collection to explore - Richard Pike and Visible Cloaks have already made my morning better.
Just bought the Hannah Peel / Beibei Wang album - excellent stuff!