Issue 115 / 3 July 2026
The essential DIY electronic music lowdown: Track Of The Week: Cloud Studies + Album Of The Week: Dohnavùr + Women Of Ambient + Mortality Tables double bill + Dark Fidelity Hi Fi + more...
As I mentioned last week, the Moonbuilding annual holiday is coming up on the rails. Hurrah. We’ll be taking August off, paid subs will be paused for a month and normal service will be resumed in September.
To celebrate, we’ve got a half-price sale on July ad space and it’s booking up fast. Drop me a line if you want to get your wares in front of our nearly 2,000 subscribers for just £25/week.
Talking of our wonderful paying subscribers, we find ourselves in July already, which means we are lining up a fresh download of excellent music for you as I type. More news about that soon. If you want in, a paid sub is just £3.50 a month.
You will also find our Finlay in the house this week with our Album Of The Week of review. It’s a cracking piece of work from the young man as always. Can I also recommend this week’s playlist (see below), it is especially good.
Happy reading.
Neil Mason, editor
moonbuildingmag@gmail.com
Issue 115 Playlist: Listen
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CLOUD STUDIES ‘Cloud Cartography – Extended’ (Happy Robots / Weird Beard)
Photo: Alison Ahern
So South London-based three-piece Cloud Studies are fronted by our great pal Adam Cresswell. We’ve been writing about Adam for a long time. Big fans. You might know him as Rodney Cromwell, or the Happy Robots label big chief, or casting back into the mists of time he was one half of Arthur & Martha along with Alice Hubble and member of John Peel-approved outfit Saloon. All those projects are well worth a dig around in. Rodney Cromwell especially. His label too is spot on with releases from Roman Angelos, Mood Taeg, Tiny Magnetic Pets and there’s even a very early EP from the brilliant Hologram Teen.
What he’s doing with the Clouds, as no one is calling them (yet), is a handbrake turn away from his previous alter egos. But that’s Adam for you. Never one to sit still. There’s been a drip-drip of Cloud Studies singles since they formed in 2024, but this is their debut EP. Four tracks of very solid shoegazey goodness. They describe it as having “a panoramic sound that explores shoegaze and dreampop with flourishes of post-punk goth rock”.
Our Track Of The Week is the EP’s opener ‘Cloud Cartography – Extended’, which is as good an introduction to the band as you’d want. It’s huge, proper locked-down groove, chiming guitars, drifty vocal, hands in the air chorus, shimmering from all angles, synthy sparkles, and a wig out as the track peaks that is the size of a house. Reminds me of Curve, that kind of mix of beats, bleeps and dreampop.
It’s the sort of thing that would really wow live, which is handy if you’re in Leeds because Cloud Studies are playing as part of the Live Inside A Dream Festival, “a celebration of all things David Lynch” at the Hyde Park Book Club on Saturday (4 July). More details here, tickets here.
The ‘Cloud Studies’ EP is out now digitally from Happy Robots or physically from Weird Beard (sold out so you might need a hoover around if you want the cassette).
DOHNAVÙR ‘We Owe Each Other Everything’ (Castles In Space)
Words: FINLAY MILLIGAN
The melancholy that arises during a finale is a weird one to place. It’s not wholly sad. There’s a cheerful anticipation that comes with knowing that the end isn’t quite here yet. But then that feeling is offset by the sombreness of realising the while the end might not be here yet, it is coming. “Here we are then, after a six-year journey,” say Scottish duo Dohnavùr on their Facebook profile. “Release day for ‘We Owe Each Other Everything’ is upon us. It’s our last release, and we’re going out in style.”
Pandemic-related time displacement is, I think, the reason that Scottish duo Dohnavùr feel like they’ve been around a lot longer than eight years (with a legacy that I’m sure will continue a lot longer). Made up of musicians Alasdair O’May and Frazer Brown, the genesis of Dohnavùr is all down to an Electronic Music Open Mic night in Edinburgh back in 2018.
The story goes that after a mutual appreciation of electronic music became apparent, a few months later O’May presented Brown with a USB stick crammed with stems that he’d created from his own modular battle station. Brown took those stems and transformed them into a collection of tracks that straddled the electronic pantheon, from ambient to lo-fi to techno. And so Dohnavùr or rather, as they say, “the Dohnavúr method” was born, with O’May sketching musically from his modular synth and Brown sculpting those ideas into full formed compositions.
Their first full-length ‘You Can And You Shall’ was nine tracks of the pair’s electronic meeting of minds, everything from thoughtful IDM to ambient techno, and arrived on the first day of March in 2020. And while we all know what happened next, the pandemic is actually integral to the Dohnavùr story.
While the world was in the process of shutting down, O’May and Brown were keen to do the exact opposite. On the hunt for fellow appreciators of the DIY electronic scene, their paths eventually crossed with a certain Colin Morrison after he shone the Castles In Space-styled Bat-Signal (that’s how I’m assuming these things work) for contributions to the label’s sparkling ‘The Isolation Tapes’, a compilation that brought together many a locked-down DIY electronicist, with profits donated to Cavell Nurses’ Trust.
This was also the year that Brown set up the now sadly defunct Werra Foxma label, that released the likes of Apta, Sulk Rooms, Veryan, and Survey Channel (a side note here, I’ll always enjoy that the origin of the name Werra Foxma comes from a complete bastardised mishearing of “Where the fuck’s my keys?” after Brown misplaced his car keys after a band rehearsal). Endings, again, they’re never easy.
Colin was such a fan that the rest, as we say, is history. With second album ‘The Flow Across Borders’ finding a home on CiS, as well as the pair recruiting the likes of The Orb, Richard Norris, and Pulselovers to mess around with their own tunes (two remix versions of their two first albums, as well as and entirely separate ‘The Dohnavùr Remix Project’), we now arrive at the final curtain call. And this couldn’t be a finer album to go out on.
‘We Owe Each Other Everything’ feels as much as a tribute to the group themselves as it does to The Dohnavùr Method. Working once again in their usual way (O’May conceptualising, Brown shaping), the group cover a wide range of genres without the record ever feeling disjointed. There’s a sci-fi ambience to opener ‘Preparation’, a ghostly drone that blinks into life, as snatches of background chatter are barely perceptible over the fuzz of static. A synth whines into focus, like a machine waking up. Wavy synthlines sew a melody together on ‘Flowers In A Barrel’, calmly at first before a serrated arpeggio kicks in, demanding your attention as percussion chunters purposefully forward. This is Dohnavùr flexing their muscles, showing off in the best way. ‘Ready For ‘91’ really puts percussion in the spotlight, driven almost entirely by an array of drums and cymbals, with vocal wails and soft keyboard melodies playing back up. A highlight is the Berlin School ‘Make It In Livingston’, a dark personal cut full of ‘Stranger Things’-like motifs based on the West Lothian town where Brown grew up.
There’s a touch of Vangelis about ‘Acetylene’, a sweeping epic drone piece of vast, vibrating synthlines that swing from melancholic to euphoric, a contrast to the buoyant ‘Powerless’, a riot of ricocheting synthesis and manic drums, like the aural equivalent of a party bag. But it’s closer ‘Unwavering’ that ties this all together. The longest track here at six and a half minutes, like ‘Acetylene’ it straddles that line between melancholic and euphoric. Recruiting Emile Wauters on vocals, his warped voice intones over a slowly building melody. It swells, bursting into a cacophony of bright, sky-high synth tones and nostalgic, emotionally-charged textures. The entire album has been building to this, one final starburst of assured electronic composition.
And then it’s all over. The elation subsides and wistfulness sets in. Logic dictates that, as they were companions to their other two records, ‘We Owe Each Other Everything’ might receive a remix album. But that’s just conjecture. As far as we know, Dohnavùr is no more. But if you’re going to call time, do it as gracefully as this. ‘We Owe Each Other Everything’ feels like a beautiful, personal culmination of everything O’May and Brown have done together. All good things come to an end, but not all good things end on such a high note.
Find Finlay’s listening recommendations on his Happening Again Substack
Got something you need to tell us about? email moonbuildingmag@gmail.com
Words: Neil Mason
GOOD STUFF #1
VARIOUS ARTISTS ‘Women Of Ambient – Summer 26’
The ever brilliant Cynthia “Marine Eyes” Bernard shares the first seasonal edition of her long-running (I make it five years and counting) mixtape highlighting, well, women (“and gender expansive artists”) making ambient music. The deal used to be that it was a monthly selection, which of course is pressure. I should know. I used to dream about monthly publishing schedules when I was on the music weeklies. After eight years or so at Electronic Sound (a monthly), the plan was for Moonbuilding to be a quarterly, which I thought would be a dream. It didn’t quite work out and I’ve ended up back on the weekly hamster wheel.
Anyway, Bandcamp is your first port of call for Cynthia’s current playlist. She also provides a rolling list of several year’s worth of monthly playlists on Tidal, Amazon Music, Apple and Spotify, which is the go-to list as it stands at 748 songs. That will take a while to listen to. Over 24 hours suggests Spotify.
As usual, and of course this is the joy of other people’s curation, there’s names I know, some I recognise and others that are a total voyage of new discovery.
Pick from the names I know well we have Patricia Wolf’s ‘Sessile Existence’ from ‘Music To Watch Seeds Grow 009’. There’s the wonderful Penelope Trappes’ ‘Torc (Dania Rework)’ from her ‘A Requiem’ remix album, Jolanada Moletta’s ‘Serpentine’ from her Oceanine’ album and ‘Geese’ from the brilliant Buildings And Food’s ‘Yutori’ album.
From the names I don’t know, Manchester’s Lily Mumby working as Lapalace appears with the delicately beautiful ‘Blooming Flowers In The Fading In The Spring Sun’ from ‘Music To Watch Seeds Grow By 006’ (I think Cynthia might have just discovered this series!) and Dimming’s ‘Kissing You In The Club’, from Gothenburg-based Linn Osterberg, is very lovely, made all the more so for its dark edge. There’s a very slight Kate Bush shiver to it too. And goodness me, Slovak producer Paulina Chrastina offers up the drift twang of ‘In My Cave’, which is pretty incredible.
The whole thing is a treat. As someone who spends far too long in the world of curation, it’s nice to have someone you trust, like Cynthia, passing music back this way. I’m looking forward to seeing how these seasonal collections settle in. I’m hoping they reflect the mood of the season. Roll on autumn.
bandcamp.com/marine_eyes/playlist/summer-women-of-ambient-26
GOOD STUFF #2 / #2a
THE MUSIC LIBERATION FRONT SWEDEN ‘This Is The New Record By…’ / JYOJI SAWADA / SIMON FISHER TURNER ‘Charred Shapes’ (Mortality Tables)
I must apologise to my friend Mat Smith, Head of Collaboration at the Mortality Tables label. I’ve not written about his fine releases of late and there’s a growing pile of them on my desk. A new one arrived only yesterday, it’s still in the envelope. Sorry Mat. Let’s do something about that pile shall we? First up, there’s a great album by The Peace Race out today, but I’ll cover that next week. It’s from songwriter/producers Pascal Gabriel and Jim Eliot. If you don’t know them, they are an impressive duo. More next week.
There is a volume to his label’s output this year that is to be admired. I’d recommend visiting the Bandcamp for a rummage. In May he put out a brilliant full-length from Michael Evill’s The Music Liberation Front Sweden called ‘This Is The New Record By…’. Michael’s work is always interesting as you’ll know if you’re a regular round these parts. This one is about loss, that of his wife’s stepfather, and of the family dog, Watson, and about memories, happy ones, good ones, and just memories in general. It also includes a version of ‘On Mortality, Immortality & Charles Ives’, which is the Mortality Tables manifesto set in sound, previous versions of which have been recorded by Vince Clark and venoztks.
I really like how Michael uses chit-chatter here. It’s the sort of thing you want to revisit and listen harder as stories unfurl like on ‘A Happy Ending To A Tragic Affair’. Musically, the whole album is lovely. Very gentle, very thoughtful, almost dreamlike in places, like on ‘Enter The Lock And Head Forward Towards The City’, which is a heck of a title, and the clockwork juddery shimmers of ‘Static Shambotic Tokyo Window’. Michael says in the notes how this is one of his favourite releases. “In fact,” he writes, “I’m not sure I will release any more new music. I’m happy with this album being my epitaph”. Wow. I’m not sure I believe him. He is nothing if not prolific and has been like that for some time. I’m not sure he has it in him to not create. We’ll see won’t we? I vote for more from him.
The most recent Morality Tables release comes on cassette from Jyoji Sawada and Simon Fisher Turner. I do love a cassette. It is the most democratic of formats. ‘Charred Shapes’ is a proper curio. In the notes Simon talks about how he was in Tokyo at the turn of century for a week of concerts at a multipurpose venue called UPLINK that housed a cafe, restaurant, bar, gallery, shop and “micro mini theatres”. The idea for the concerts he says was that “every day around lunchtime someone, or a group of musicians, would turn up at UPLINK, we’d introduce ourselves, find out what we wanted to do, set up and then play in the evening having only just met”.
It’s here that he met Jyoji “and he seemed to play everything, including a bucket which he filled with water… I was obviously impressed”. The pair began to swap sounds and, in 2022 with Takashi Mori added to the crew, an album appeared on Japanese label Unknown Silence called ‘Correspondence’. “While searching through old drives a few months ago,” writes Simon, “I came across these files. And here they are on a cassette at last.”
As with anything Simon touches, it is very listenable. It’s unsettling like on the seven-minute opus ‘731 Sorga’, which is full of arcade sounds, snips of conversation, dark drones and probably a kitchen sink. Or it’s tensely tuneful like on ‘10449 Takuma’, which sounds like something from the ghost of a Hitchcock film. The spooky piano is brrrrrrr and there’s a marching band… I know, right. ‘5155 Denisyuk’ sounds like it’s techno made in a bathroom. Great stuff.
Mortality Tables is not a label you should take your eyes off for a moment. When I do I end up with a pile of upcoming releases and an almost impossible game of catch up. I’m sorry Mat, it won’t happen again.
GOOD STUFF #3
DARK FIDELITY HI FI ‘Your Skyline Correspondent’ (Bricolage)
It’s been two years since Manchester’s Rick Jones released Dark Fidelity Hi Fi’s ‘Formations’ on Glasgow’s Bricolage label in June 2024. That’s quite a while in this little corner of music world. Listeners do seem to have got used to music coming at them in double quick time and artists seem used to releasing fast too.
Is it a good thing? Dunno, but there was an excitement in the old days driven by decent gaps between releases by your favourite acts. I have to say that the wait for this new DFHF album has been worth the wait.
Six months previous, in December 2023, Rick released ‘Faith And Popcorn’ on Phil Dodd’s excellent Waxing Crescent label and both of these outings are well worth a revisit before you fire up this new offering. Rick has a sound that is dark and alluring and across these three releases, you can hear the progression.
‘Your Skyline Correspondent’ is a very welcome return for Dark Fidelity Hi Fi and it’s a leap and a bound on from when we last heard from him. It’s hard pin down exactly what’s going on here. It’s not ambient, nor is it floorfilling dance music. I wouldn’t call it techno, maybe ambient techno at a push. There’s flecks of a little bit of everything.
I really like the dark and moody ‘Lost Comforts’, which sounds like it could really go off. It threatens like a storm rolling in, but keeps it tight until it’s well past the halfway mark. I love it’s big stabby synths. It’s proper widescreen. I really like the arpeggiating synths and hefty beats of ‘Strange Surface (Neon)’ and the sparkling ‘Distance’ with its bright pots and pans percussion and melodic synth swirls. It all reminds me a little of Nathan Micay in the same way it’s hard to say where he sits. It feels dancey, but it’s more ambitious than that. It has more about it than just filling floors. Something like ‘Please, Let Me Daydream With You For A Moment’ is so cool. It has a warmth and a thrum to it that you want to hear over and over again.
bricolageglasgow.bandcamp.com
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THE ROUND UP’s ROUND UP
It’s a brief round-up this week. I’m usually pretty busy on top of the work that goes on for this newsletter, but I’ve really been chasing my tail all week and it seems to have got the better of me. I’ll get back on top of things next week, hopefully, but there are a couple of releases you should know about before I clock off.
I said last week I’d pick up the new Laptop album, ‘On This Planet’ (Hurricane Cove), after teasing you with that extended version of ‘End Credits’ as our Track Of The Week. Thing is, I can find no trace of the album online. I have a copy on CD, but there’s no point me telling you about it if you can’t go investigate yourself. It’s funny, in the old days I would be expected to write about records that weren’t out. You’d tend to write a week upfront and the idea was to whip the reader into a frenzy about the latest release from whoever. We still had a little patience then, we could deal with anticipation. These days everything has to be instant, including Moonbuilding Weekly. I won’t write about something unless you can go straight out and get it if you want. So anyway, I’ll find out what’s going on with Laptop and then we talk about the record itself.
The Barcelona-based Balmat label has a fantastic house style. And I’m not talking music, I’m talking artwork, all of which is by Netherlands-based artist José Quintanar. His background is comics and architecture, which is quite a brew, and you can see that in his work. It’s very playful and yet often rather precise, with a delightful palette of colours. The releases are just as striking. There are some serious names in their catalogue. There’s two releases from Patricia Wolf (who also gets a second mention in the newsletter this week), three from µ-Ziq, a pair from our pal Luke Sanger and there’s a cracker from Laurence Pike. And when you get quality like that, you know it’s going to be worth dipping into what else they have. The artwork for Play Time‘s ‘Magic Object’ is great. It’s a series of curved lines, like theatre curtains, and two of them are filled in with a wedge of yellow. So simple, so effective. Play Time are a Moog, sax and drums improv trio coming at you out of the Hudson Valley. I love the extensive notes that accompany each release. There is a level of care and detail with this label that very much appeals. The notes for ‘Magic Object’ talk about how the trio found their way to their minimalist/jazz/krautrock bar band sound. And indeed, musically, they come on a little like something out of another decade. Opener ‘Open The Door, Joey’ sounds like a Can support act from one of their fabled 70s shows. It kind of swirls like smoke drifting gently. The title track is all puffy breaths, almost like a steam train, while ‘Public Broadcast’ is a proper old school funker with some Clock DVA-like sax honking. The notes talk about how they recorded the album in a barn, essentially a live room where they jammed for a couple of days solid, edited down the best bits, added overdubs and bingo. Simple eh? It sounds exactly how you imagine it should. Liking this a lot.
Anton Pearson is one of the guitarist in Squid, a band we like an enormously for their 21st century take on angular post-punk. On his debut solo album ‘Driving Through Belgium’ (World Of Echo), Anton flips Squid on its back and serves up six tracks that are almost like their dark underbelly. Stripped to the core, these tracks are drones and textures and slabs of sound that are processed, messed with and presented for your pleasure. He talks about how the record is inspired by the surrealness of touring in Europe, “flat light, service stations and fields stretching endlessly past the window” that become “faintly surreal when the tiredness of touring blurs the edges of everything”. I know the feeling well. Everything in Europe sort of looks familiar, but at the same time not. The service stations serve the same purpose as the ones at home and yet they’re entirely different. The scenery should be same, yet it’s not. On ‘Teeth To Cut The Grass’ he talks about “a swarm of ghostly sheep moving quietly through the track as if they had always belonged there” and listening you know exactly what he means. It has these like puffs of sound that disperse as the track builds into this solid wall of shimmery sound that disappears as abruptly as it arrived. ‘Tintinnabulation I’ builds towards a crescendo that is almost Philip Glass-like in its repetition while the opener, ‘Driving Past The Muscular Cows In Belgium’, is a shimmering 20-minute statement of intent. The notes talk about how the record is “ambient in spirit, adjacent to contemporary classical in feeling”. Exactly so.
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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thanks for sharing women of ambient, smiling wide! ✨