Issue 114 / 26 June 2026
The essential DIY electronic music lowdown: Track Of The Week: Laptop + Album Of The Week: Richard Norris + Cathi Unsworth's ‘Dressed In Black' goth compilation + Conflux Coldwell + more...
Last week I was bemoaning my third heavy cold in as many months. I only had Covid didn’t I! Very retro. I feel much, much better this week.
The Moonbuilding annual holiday is fast approaching. We’ll be taking August off like we did last year, so six newsletters to go. If you wanted to share your wares with our nearly 2,000 subscribers, July ad space is booking up fast so reserve your spot today!
Just a reminder that the Moonbuilding June session for our paying subscribers comes from the Liverpool’s Lo-Five, who serves up a whole album called ‘Vanish’. Sign up now for a paid subscription, which is just £3.50, and you’ll get instant access to the session in your welcome email. You know it makes sense.
Happy reading.
Neil Mason, editor
moonbuildingmag@gmail.com
Issue 114 Playlist: Listen
Your ad here: Advertise
***ADVERTISE HERE***
email moonbuildingmag@gmail.com
Laptop ‘End Credits (Director’s Cut)
Photo: Joseph Cultice
There’s been a recent flurry of activity from New York’s Jesse Hartman as he reactivates his Laptop project for the 21st century. There is a new album, ‘On This Planet’, which happens to be out today (review to follow, most likely next week), but there’s a few cool bits and bobs appearing from the old days that bear a poke around in first.
You may know that one of Jesse’s tunes, ‘End Credits’, was covered by Doublespeak, the electronic supergroup starring Benge, Vince Clarke and Neil Arthur. And that Jesse returned the favour with a Laptop version of Blancmange’s ‘Living On The Ceiling’. That take is tucked away on the new ‘End Credits’ EP that collects a slew of remixes of the track. Also in attendance there are “previously unreleased extended mixes and remixes”, my favourite of which is the above ‘Director’s Cut’, which is an excellent extended version of the original, adding around three minutes to clock in close to the eight-minute mark. Sublime stuff. It’s a song about being dumped by answerphone, we’ve all been there, right? Answerphones eh? Try explaining to anyone under 20 what one of those is!
Jesse has also stuck his three previous albums up on his Bandcamp. The debut ‘Opening Credits’ (which features the wonderful ‘I’m So Happy You Failed’), the follow up ‘The Old Me vs The New You’ and ‘Don’t Try This At Home’. There some serious listening there and we’ve not even got to the new album yet. I’ll be asking questions next week before I can hand that over to you.
RICHARD NORRIS ‘8mm’ (State Of Mind)
Words: NEIL MASON
As temperatures soar, you do tend to reach for music that suits the mood. Or I do. Last week we had Pye Corner Audio’s sunshine album ‘More Songs About The Sun’, which continues to be on rotation at Moonbuilding HQ as the mercury has shimmied its way upwards and upwards this week. Our new favourite summer album though comes from friend of Moonbuilding, Richard Norris, whose ‘8mm’ is a delight.
I surely don’t need to introduce Mr Norris, but I will anyway. A mainstay round these parts, he cut his teeth musically when he was working for the St Albans-based psyche label Bam Caruso label in the 80s. He was writing articles for their brilliant Strange Things Are Happening zine (we covered it in Issue One of Moonbuilding, very influential) and one day he went off to interview Genesis P Orridge and Psychic TV.
I spoke to Richard about all this for Electronic Sound. “It was the first time I’d ever met Gen and they were saying, ‘Have you heard of acid house?’,” Richard told me. “I hadn’t, but I thought the idea of putting psychedelia and dance music together was fantastic. ‘Right,’ they said. ‘Let’s go and make a record next weekend.’ That’s what we did.”
That is what they did. In September 1987, about a dozen artists, including Richard, convened in a “tiny studio in Chiswick” and made ‘Jack The Tab – Acid Tablets Volume One’. It was there that he met Dave Ball and The Grid was born. You should also know Richard’s work with Erol Alkan as Beyond The Wizards Sleeve or you might have tuned into one of his many, many remixes. Discogs has 117 listed, there’s a collection coming next month called ‘Re-Make Re-Model’ that we’ll be talking about. Or maybe you’ve fired up one of his meditative ambient sessions in his ‘Music For Healing’ series via his Bandcamp page.
I’ve done well there to keep no introduction down to a couple of pars. He is nothing if not prolific. So anyway, he also has a habit of serving up lovely little releases like this. Richard often utilises the online hive mind when he has an itch. So when he was struck with an impulse to write music for the moving image, but without a film to score he put out a call asking if anyone had any unwanted Super 8 reels. Within a couple of weeks he’d acquired a projector, two cameras, and boxes and boxes of film. “The films,” he writes in his notes for this releases, “told tales of family holidays, birthdays, road trips, days out and special occasions, spanning from the mid 1960s to the present day.”
Anyone who has worked with Super 8 will know the rich, saturated quality image he was dealing with. “Their scratchy images and DIY nature suggested a sonic palette full of disintegration, lo-fidelity, dropouts, wobble and surface noise,” he writes. Indeed.
The other thing is these images are steeped in family history, these are moments someone felt needed capturing for posterity and yet here they are, lost in the mists of time, spooling out for Richard’s eyes only. It’s interesting that he has chosen not to display the films, but just use them as inspiration. You wonder how the titles came about. ‘Thief Of Time’, ‘All Of Us Strangers’, ‘Infinity Pool’… were they drawn from the films that we will never see? But on thing is for sure, you can feel the melancholy in the work.
Most of the tracks come with an immediate motif. A melody sits neatly underneath while over the top a bright topline dances. A track like ‘Morning’ feels fresh with hope, full of the day’s early promise. It has a repeating refrain, bright and alert and looping over and over. Like Pye Corner Audio last week, the sounds here shimmer. They’re rich and warm and saturated. Opener ‘River’s Song’ has a picky electric guitar chiming out a beautiful lost lament of a melody. Sometimes the tunes seem to cross the tracks. The lovely drifty piano line from ‘Thief Of Time’ (which has an almost ‘Apollo’-like pedal steel drift in) seems to stick around on following track ‘The Process’.
The pieces are vignettes, nothing over four minutes, almost snapshots, just like the images that inspired them. ‘8mm’ has a distinct 1970s Eno vibe, which is curious. It has the feel of ‘Evening Star’, the album he did with Robert Fripp, or ‘Discreet Music’ or even ‘Cluster & Eno’. The curiosity comes when you think that much of the source film must’ve been 1970s-based and here we are with a soundtrack that feels grounded in the same decade too. It’s a thought that occurred to Richard too.
“These home movies evoke memory, feelings of longing for times past, and reflection,” writes Richard. “This seeped into the music, creating a sound and melody unlike anything I’ve previously recorded.”
Home movies do tend to be shot on holiday, when families are together having a break. So perhaps it’s little surprise that there’s a summer sheen to this fine work. Quite how it all ends up sounding so much like the soundtrack to the source material, the films that Richard randomly sourced and was inspired by, is something I don’t think anyone can explain. Let’s call it magic shall we?
‘8mm’ is a record that asks so many more questions than it answers. But sometimes the best music is like that.
Got something you need to tell us about? email moonbuildingmag@gmail.com
Words: Neil Mason
GOOD STUFF #1
VARIOUS ARTISTS ‘Dressed In Black – Goth Divas From The Dark Side 1941-2025’ (Ace)
As temperatures soar, even Moonbuilding has ditched the black attire for sunnier hues. There’s no rainbow tie-die and sandals, but we have tucked into the summer holiday wardrobe in a bid to at least feel a little cooler. Doubling down in the face of such sunshine, our great friend/Moonbuilding contributor Cathi Unsworth has turned up with a totally brilliant compilation that flies in the face of the good weather.
Across four sides of vinyl, Cathi collects together a who’s who of goth divas. You can imagine lesser mortals turning in a goth compilation and it being a bit lacklustre, full of the usual suspects. ‘Dressed In Black’ comes with some serious effort behind it and as a result it’s a proper voyage of discovery.
The sleevenotes alone will keep you quiet for some time. In them Cathi talks about how the music gathered is “an aural manifestation of turbulent times”, how the music contained emerged from the “dark end of the 1970s”, from a world of discontent, an IRA mainland bombing campaign, a murderer on the loose in West Yorkshire and it was all capped off in May 1979, when Thatcher became our first female prime minister.
Cathi talks about how at night, “malcontent youth were united by forces of opposition, whose dissenting voices were aired across the land on John Peel’s Radio 1 show” where “punk’s unruly offspring distilled the dissonance of the times into a new kind of music… they were the outlaw leaders of the greatest style tribe of the decade: the goths”.
From Nina Simone, Billie Holiday and The Shangri-las to The Velvet Underground & Nico, Cocteau Twins and Anna Calvi, here Cathi lines up goth royalty for your enjoyment. Some surprising names in there? As you dig into the notes, Cathi explains that while she was writing her brilliant 2023 book ‘Seasons Of The Witch’, she realised that this music was “linked to previous generations of gothmothers”. The oldest track here is Shirley Collins’ ‘Death And The Lady’ from just after World War II, but she notes it’s a song that has it roots the Black Death of 1348-49. She also talks about The Cramps who took “long-forgotten hillbillies and bordello blues singers and re-recorded their songs”, while Greek/American Diamanda Galàs “drew upon the demotiki tradition of her forebears in the hills of Sparta”.
This is thoughtful, deeply researched, brilliant stuff. And the music within is equal to the job. The opening side is belting. Diamanda Galás and John Paul Jones’ ‘Do You Take This Man?’, Siouxsie & The Banshees’ ‘Night Shift’, Danielle Dax’s ‘Cat House’ and the wonderful Anita Lane with Die Haut’s ‘Subterranean World (How Long…?)’. Blast, if that doesn’t get the juices flowing, nothing will.
“I hope you will find illumination within,” writes Cathi. “You know the dress code”.
GOOD STUFF #2
CONFLUX COLDWELL ‘Echolalia’ (Bulletdodge)
We’ve been writing about Mick Coldwell for a fair while now and his work never fails to deliver, striking at the heart of the matter both musically and thematically. Earlier this year he had a Moonbuilding Weekly Album Of The Week for his ‘Shadows And Simulacra’ album that looked at the “weird spectres lurking below the surface of artificial intelligence”, previous to that there was ‘The Sunshine Miners’ that looked at the “disappearing industrial landscape near his hometown of Leeds”.
His work often concerns his research at the University Of Leeds into the “hauntology of media”, but ‘Echolalia’ is a lot closer to home. As the notes say, this new release “deals with a different kind of ghost – a ghost that lies within the mind”. With members of Mick’s family being diagnosed with autism, he began to wonder about his own neurodiversity and asked if perhaps it had affected his music, “the strange way he sees the world, his love of machines and his obsession with hauntology?”
It’s an interesting one. I think anyone involved in creative pursuits wonder how far onto the spectrum they slide and these days it’s impossible to go too far without encountering someone who is divergent in some way. It’s the new normal. That people are wanting to understand more about it, and more about themselves, can only be a good thing.
To accompany this release, Mick has contributed an extensive essay that makes for fascinating reading. There’s a lot of reading that comes with this week’s offerings isn’t there? Like Cathi’s release above, I’d say the notes are as integral as the music itself.
Mick’s research has seen him looking at how autism and other neurodivergences have been seen historically, especially in mid 20th century educational contexts. While these days much neurodiversity is seen as a normal variation, back in the 70s it really was quite a stigma. So little was understood and that’s echoed in Mick’s own experience of his own developmental issues, beyond him being “a bit weird” or “away with the fairies”.
It was only through music that Mick began to feel like he belonged or felt understood. Musically, he takes us on that journey with echoes of the sounds that shaped him appearing like ghosts throughout. So you can pick out everything from the electronica and kosmische his parents played him as a child (I know, right?), to the techno and trance he cottoned onto as a teenager and his first attempts at making music inspired by labels like Slam and Warp in the late 90s.
He talks about echolalia, the involuntary repetition of words, phrases and sounds that is used by toddlers in early language development, but also by those with autism to communicate. Mick expands on that idea and looks at how sampling and repetition in electronic music is a form of echolalia.
It’s such interesting work. Musically, Mick is never too shabby either. Especially good are the hectic high speed arpeggiations of ‘Five Wing Four’ that settles into a really beautiful almost Philip Glass like workout, the Warp-isms of ‘Daily Excorcise’ and the spooky chimes and vinyl crackles of ‘Pattern Glare’. A track like ‘Night Terrors’ is genuinely unsettling. There’s a lot of spoken word on the album, much of it from retro sounding films, or public information-like broadcasts. ‘Night Terrors’ really messes with spoken word to ensure you will have those night terrors.
Digital is out now with the physical release to follow in September.
GOOD STUFF #3
PRIMITIVE PERCUSSION YOUTH ORCHESTRA ‘Gabble Ratchets’ (Forged River)
We’re really in the presence of some super interesting projects this week. Mark S Williamson, who you will know as Spaceship, founded a youth orchestra in 2016 called Primitive Percussion Youth Orchestra, which is made up from 7-10-year olds who are a split of orchestra veterans and new recruits. Yeah, you’re thinking. I’ve been to school concerts, I know what an orchestra of 7-10-year olds sounds like. Think again.
Mark, a primary school music teacher, brings something a little different to his orchestra. “The group is an ever-shifting line up of primary school children playing improvised music on homemade instruments and the stuff that usually gathers dust in music cupboards,” he tells me. “While much of the work is one off workshops, I’ve been working for many years at a school in Cornholme near Todmorden, which is where these recordings were made. Half of the children on the album have been orchestra members for three years now and the maturity of their playing is really showing.”
The current orchestra members are Alice, Archie, Eleanor, Erika, Jenson and Tom and the maturity of their playing really is showing. It’s also important to say members are welcomed with “no pre-existing musical experience”, which makes their latest release, ‘Gabble Ratchets’ (Forged River), all the more impressive.
Listen to a track here like ‘To Rochan Rocks’ and it is quite a sophisticated piece. It keeps a haunting rhythm for five minutes, while sinister sounds pick their way around. I’d be hard pushed to tell you what the instruments here are. There’s a lot of drones and strings that make for a rich sounding cocktail. Likewise, ‘By Blackheath Barrow’ is an utter nail-biter. Here we have shivery strings, a cello probably, supported by various cymbal crashes. It fades to almost nothing around the four-minute mark and you can feel it building back up again. I bet being in the room with this going on is special.
“The album is all about the Gabble Rachets, a pack of demonic flying hounds who terrorise Todmorden every Halloween,” says Mark, cheerily. You can see why the children would engage with a story like that. You can hear that the orchestra is fully engaged with the story. I love how the tracks build tension, you can imagine the flying hounds waiting to spring, wanting to make you jump out of your skin. ‘Dawn Chorus’ is wild, with the drone of sunrise backed by the twittering of birds as morning arrives and the threat of the Gabble Rachets is over.
“It’s also probably the best thing the PPYO have done,” says Mark. “But I say that every time.”
***ADVERTISE HERE***
email moonbuildingmag@gmail.com
THE ROUND UP’s ROUND UP
Ben McElroy is back with the latest instalment in his field recording series made on Nottingham allotments. ‘Allotment Tapes #6 – Urban Nature’ finds Ben at a project called… well, Urban Nature, which until recently was a large wildlife and habitat project that was managed by St Anns Allotments. “It is no longer a managed habitat,” writes Ben. “At time of recording it was just about accessible via an old allotment gate... but it won’t be long before the ivy and brambles take over completely.”
This one is such a delight. But when aren’t Ben’s recordings? It’s one long piece, 19 minutes, which just requires you to press play and sit back. Even though the site is no longer managed, says Ben, “the birds still love it and if you listen closely you can also hear the sounds of boy-racers who populate the surrounding roads.”
The drift from the start to Ben’s squeezbox playing is three minutes. Three minutes of bird song and the rustle of leaves that is quite wonderful. The music is intense, a 15-minute drone that threatens to overload the whole time. And then it fades, disappears, and you’re left with the bird song again and Ben crackling dry foliage as he makes his way from the site. There’s a film on his Bandcamp page, which is almost entirely lush green. Wonderful stuff as always.
A quick appeal from Ben to finish with. “It's a labour of love,” says Ben of the Allotment tapes, “but I do need some help in order to make it viable.” A fiver will get you the digital track, £35 buys you the whole project, with a bunch of extras. He has some tempting tiers for investors that include bespoke tapes and Polaroids. Please help if you can. Full details here… benmcelroy.bandcamp.com/allotment-tapes
I was looking at wunderkammer, or kunstkammer, recently. I can’t remember why. A kunstkammer is a cabinet of curiosities that emerged in the 16th century, a collection of objects with no particular rhyme or reason to them. They would have been a collector displaying his wares, his collection of trinkets from his travels for house guests to admire. “All it hopes to do is present objects that the owner thinks are beautiful or interesting,” suggests Pocket Lint’s Mark Heffernan, whose new album ‘Wunderkammer’, is named after a room full of such stuff, which is a whole other level, and would have been a precursor to modern museums.
Mark is rather taken with this kind of stuff. He tried his hand at making his own cameos from amethyst, giving up after three weeks of sandpaper and purple dust, but here he’s built his own ‘Wunderkammer’ with each track being an object in his personal cabinet. He has items like a ‘Clockwork Boy’, ‘Heartbreak’s First Teardrop’ and ‘(A Cartography Of) Desire Paths’, all of which would hold your attention we’d wager.
When the vocal kicks in on opening track ‘From An Ancient Land’ you would be forgiven for hearing the tones of an early Human League Philip Oakey. His ‘Amethyst Cameo’ is here and in the vocal there’s a flicker of Marc Almond. You can hear the 1980s musical influence of both those artists here too. There’s a lovely moment in the latter where everything stops, just stops, silence, for a couple of beats that really grabs the attention. There’s a real warmth to Mark’s sound, the synths here in particular come on rich and deep. Nice work in a catalogue of work that sits, as we’ve said before, very much on the right side of 80s retro pop.
M. Geddes Gengras’ ‘Guest List’ (Hausu Mountain) is a heck of thing to get your head round. The title comes because it features contributions from 22 artists and it has a sound that is vast in scale and ambition. Reading the notes it sounds like our Woodstock-based multi-instrumentalist big chief has provided, with the help of his modular set-up, the starting point from which his collaborators can then jump off. And jump they do. The Don Letts quote “a good idea attempted is better than a bad idea perfected” sits at the heart of this release. It’s all about good ideas being attempted and for the most part they really come off. The pumped up to bursting ‘Motore’ is perhaps my favourite. There’s clarinet, wild drums, guitar loops and solos and something called “low light situation guitar” all swirling in the musical pot. There is a lot, A LOT, going on here. The second track, ‘The List Is Millions Long’, stretches itself out over 10 minutes and you don’t even notice. It all bears repeated listens and perhaps a good pair of headphones to fully get lost in it all.
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