Issue 116 / 10 July 2026
The essential DIY electronic music lowdown: Track Of The Week: Gnoomes + Album Of The Week: Ultramarine + The Peace Race + Baby Smith + Ian Boddy & Andy Pickford + more...
Goodness me, the half-price sale on July ad space went well last week. If only every month was like that! We’re almost sold out for the whole month. I’ve got one slot left on 24 July and 31 July. Drop me a line if you want to get your wares in front of our nearly 2,000 subscribers for just £25/week. Advertising really does help us to support independent DIY electronic music. We also cap the ads at five a week to ensure all the advertisers get proper exposure.
Talking of supporting independent DIY electronic music, our paying subscribers are very much helping do that. As a reward they get exclusive music downloads each month. We are working on July’s download as I type. More news about that soon. If you want in, a paid sub is just £3.50 a month.
No guest writer this week, it’s just me you lucky lot. Right, three newsletters to go before the official Moonbuilding Weekly summer hols… not that I’ll be slacking. There is something rather exciting coming down the pipes that we should be able to announce before the end of the month…
Happy reading.
Neil Mason, editor
moonbuildingmag@gmail.com
Issue 116 Playlist: Listen
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GNOOMES ‘Losey’ (Rocket)
Photo: Konstantin Kondrukhov
Flipping love this. I’ve had it on repeat for days now. The new album has just landed too, out in September, can’t wait to tell you about that.
Gnoomes are a band we’ve had our eye on for a long time. Finlay Milligan, from Happening Again and honorary member of the Moonbuilding writers’ pool, has been championing this Russian “psychedelic stargaze kraut techno kosmiche pop” outfit since he was in short trousers… I know, it’s not an analogy that works too well when it’s 30 degrees outside. Anyway, he’s been doing it a while.
Hailing from Perm near the Urals in the east of Russia, Gnoomes have been around in various forms since early 2014. They revolve around Sasha Piankov and Masha Piankova, and that’s how we find things with this new album, the duo’s sixth outing for Rocket and their first since they relocated to Slovenia. There is much to talk about, which we’ll do when the album drops.
It’s safe to say this, the title track, is totally brilliant. It’s described as a “crepuscular acid stomp”. That groove! It just locks in from the off. The bassline is killer. It’s like Factory Floor meets Confidence Man. Yeah I know, right. It also reminds me a little of the last Lorelle Meets The Obsolete’s last album. The band talk about being inspired by Chris & Cosey, which is fair. There’s even a nod to Paul McCartney in there, which again, we’ll get to when the album lands.
It has a sound that really hits the spot that is for sure. Really like how, around the halfway mark, it morphs. Stabbing strings arrive and the whole thing moves up a notch, building into this ominous slab of sound. It will have you off your seat and cheering like they’ve just headed in a Jude Bellingham cross. It’s sounds great.
The album is released by Rocket on 4 September
ULTRAMARINE ‘Companion (Every Man & Woman Is A Star Versions)’
Words: NEIL MASON
Ultramarine, the Essex-based duo of Paul Hammond and Ian Cooper, are right up there when it comes to my favourite artists, but I can’t for the life of me remember how I first came across them. I can usually pinpoint where/when I first encountered this band or that band. There are connections to be made, influences that feed in, lines to be drawn, reasons to be unearthed. But not with Ultramarine.
They sit with the likes of The Orb, Underworld, Aphex, Orbital, FSOL, Sabres, Global Comm, etc. I can tell you my routes into all of those, and yet Ultramarine… nope.
I’ve got two theories. Their 1993 album, ‘United Kingdoms’, a record I’ve listened to with alarming regularity over the last 30+ years, first came my way on cassette. Not a home-recorded TDK, but the shop-bought version. It was their third LP and their debut release on Blanco Y Negro. Why do I have it on cassette? Not sure, but in 1993 I was living in Norwich. I’d returned from the first of my three spells of living in London. Long story. There were a bunch of decent record shops in Norwich at the time. Lizard, on Lower Goat Lane was always clearing out stock at knockdown prices. I spent a fair bit of time in there each week sifting through the racks and would pick up all sorts. I’m thinking I must’ve picked it ‘United Kingdoms’ on cassette there. I really like to artwork, so it might have been one of those taking a chance on something with a good sleeve purchases. That said, why didn’t I know about them by 1993? I was very much into electronic sounds by then. It’s weird isn’t it?
My other theory is I went hunting for it after hearing ‘Weird Gear’, which samples Echo & And The Bunnymen’s ‘The Cutter’. It is an audacious sample. I’m a huge Echo & The Bunnymen fan who morphed into a dance/electronic music type. The two meeting on this track is laugh out loud brilliant.
So anyway, however I came across Ultramarine I’m glad I did. Their music has been with me ever since. Which brings us to ‘Companion (Every Man And Woman Is A Star Versions)’. The album, as the title suggests, is a “companion” to the 1991 album, ‘Every Man & Woman Is A Star’, which is a proper buried treasure. This collection has actually been available since 2003, but this is it’s first digital release.
It’s based around the 1992-released ‘Nightfall In Sweetleaf’ EP and features “complementary remixes, alternate takes and lost tracks from the parent album”. Curiously, in keeping with the world order that says an EP is always four tracks, the original EP only lists four tracks. There was ‘Intro / Incidental Music’, the Spooky remix of ‘Lights In My Brain’, the Sweet Exorcist remix of ‘Geezer’ and the Coco Steel & Lovebomb remix of ‘Panther’. That’s a killer EP right there. And yet there’s more. It actually comes with two bonus, unlisted tracks. There’s instrumental ‘The Downer’ and at the end ‘Outro / Incidental Music’, both featured here.
That, in a nutshell, is the joy of Ultramarine. They’re full of gifts like that, you thought this was a four-track EP. There’s more! They come with decades of little surprises, samples like The Bunnymen that perk you up, bonus tracks, whole new albums of stuff they found in a drawer, like last summer’s ‘Routine’ on Blackford Hill, which is an entire record of outtakes from their ‘A User’s Guide’ period.
So here we get those six EP tracks and a supporting cast of nine more. The EP remixes are dazzlers, the jewel in this record’s crown no doubt. None of them too shabby, but the Sweet Exorcist remix in particular is a sterling piece of work. Sweet Exorcist is a brace of Sheffield legends, Cabaret Voltaire’s late, great Richard H Kirk and DJ Parrot. I’m pretty sure this is just a Kirky production. It’s listed as being remixed at Western Works, which is a buzz. Here Kirk takes the skanking guitar riff from the track and loops it, and follows the original’s reggae beat with a snappy drum machine. It’s a real joy.
The thing is, no one has decimated the track they were working with. You can hear Ultramarine still in all of them. Which is exactly what you want with Ultramarine.
The original release of ‘Every Man & Woman Is A Star’ had 12 tracks (11 on the vinyl but who’s counting), the electro meets acid jazz remix of ‘Saratoga’, which you assume is a Ultramarine re-rub, and ‘Nova Scotia’ are additions from a Rough Trade Singles Club seven-inch at the time and appear here. Elsewhere we get a US remix, a stripped back edited version, of the aforementioned ‘Weird Gear’. I really like the almost bosa nova of ‘Lovelife #1’, an unreleased outtake, which is perfect in this heady weather. As are the two other previously unreleased cuts, ‘Early Discovery’ and ‘My First Canoe Trip’, a beat-driven version of the album ambient interlude ‘Canoe Trip’.
There’s a track called ‘Stella Connects (Edit)’, which is a full-length eight-minute version of ‘Stella’. They let the whole thing settle into a delightful groove that swirls around you and clocks in at almost twice as long as the original. And then, right at the end, we get a great dub version of ‘Geezer’, called ‘Old Geezer Dub’ and a lovely live at Glasto take of ‘Pansy’ from 1993 with some great live sax.
That this release is over 20 years old and dealing in tracks that are closer to 30 years old and it all still delights doesn’t surprise me. Ultramarine are the best. They really are the gift that keeps on giving.
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Words: Neil Mason
GOOD STUFF #1
THE PEACE RACE ‘Shelter’ (Mortality Tables)
We touched on this release last week and it deserves more than a passing nod, so, as promised, we’re going to jump into it now.
Peace Race are songwriter/producers Pascal Gabriel and Jim Eliot, who are quite the duo. Jim is a member of synth duo Kish Mauve with Mima Stilwell, as well as their own output the pair have worked as writers and producers with some almighty names, in particular Kylie, who covered their song ‘2 Hearts’, Kylie has also co-written songs with them. They’ve worked with Will Young and Sophie Ellis-Bextor, while Jim has teamed up with the likes of Ellie Goulding, Girls Aloud and Olly Murs, who I always get mixed up with Bruno Mars. Easy mistake to make.
Pascal was up to his elbows as producer/co-writer for both S’Express’ ‘Theme From S’Express’ and Bomb The Bass’ ‘Beat Dis’, which is some claim to fame. The names he went on to work with is no less impressive. Wire, EMF, Billy Mackenzie, The Creatures, Dido, Kylie, Dot Allison, Miss Kittin, Ladyhawke, Goldfrapp, Little Boots. It is one heck of a CV.
They have a number of artists in common and met in 2008 while working separately on songs for the first Ladyhawke album. Together, perhaps not unsurprisingly, they make a very sophisticated synthpop brew.
The story behind ‘Shelter’ is rather lovely. It started out in 2020 when Jim suggested to Pascal they have “synthpop Mondays”, some time set aside at the beginning of each week where they’d come up with the seed of an idea then work independently on it until they came back together to share the results the following Monday.
Neither of them saw it as anything other than some fun. “No agenda, no deadline, no labels, no pop singers and no expectations” explains the notes. Then they wrote a track called ‘As It Happens’ – a thrumming, uptempo belter that would’ve been a hit in another era – that had them wanting to see where the project might go if they put their weight behind it.
Well, where it went is here. Blimey, this is such a good album. The opener ‘Wonderful’ really is. It’s a list song – “We are the crowd in the photograph / We are the ravers that never sleep / We are your nightmare in your dream / We are the trashed car in your street” – that makes me think of The Beloved, and there is that kind of quality here. In places, the album feels a little like Mercury Rev, like on the soaring ‘Infinite Fields’.
‘Something From Nothing’ catches your ear with a deep drum thud, a growling bass guitar and a cowbell. You cannot go wrong with a cow bell. I really like the punchy vocal style, the words move in time, making their own rhythm rather than being a topline in their own right for the verses and more often than not there’s a more melodic chorus. It’s a trick that’s specially effective on this track.
‘Love Affair’ has a Neil Tennant-like spoken-ish vocal to a rich, deep backing track. I love the choppy piano, sounds great. But it all sounds great. There’s a lot going on here, a lot of depth. “We always add a lot of stuff that’s there in the background if you listen really closely,” says Pascal. “For both of us, the detailing is every bit as important as the things that hit you straight away.”
The joy of all this, is it’s on a label like Mortality Tables. You have to love both the faith of the artist and the balls of the label here. With a record of this quality, made by people who have worked with some of the world’s biggest pop stars, Mortality Tables are punching well above their weight. But why not? Why not have a gem of an album like this sat with a DIY label just waiting to be discovered. That’s what we love about all this, it’s what we love about music full stop. There’s just 50 copies too. If you like the pop end of all this, chop chop.
GOOD STUFF #2
BABY SMITH ‘Lately, Love Is Dead’
The Australian Berlin-based duo of Ray Sonder (female) and Saxon Gable (male) make music that feels just right for this heady weather. My immediate thought when I heard ‘Adored’, the opener on this their debut album, was with its krauty beats, driving bassline, twangy guitar and infectious melody, they’re like a maverick Wet Leg. Which is absolutely no bad thing. Ray’s chorus vocal, “I give up / I give up / I give up / I give up / On you” is great.
Let’s go back to the sunshine for a moment. The pair grew up in “sleepy beach towns on Australia’s east coast”. They both, independently, began writing songs at an early age “evoking the quiet beaches of Byron Bay and the wild Gondwana Rainforest that were their back yards”. By university, “they were writing hazy, sun-kissed demos to upload online and burn onto CDs for their friends”, but they didn’t meet until, separately, but within a couple of weeks of each other, they both moved from Sydney to Berlin. I mean, what a coincidence, right? It’s no wonder they got married.
The notes say ‘Lately, Love Is Dead’ was made entirely in their Berlin flat using a stripped-back set-up that “trades the sun-kissed haze of their early releases for something darker, sharper and more immediate”. If you go back and listen to ‘EP1’ and ‘EP2’, you’ll see what they mean. Those outings are more acoustically driven, quite Steely Dan, very, very sunshine. What we have here is all there though – Ray’s breathy voice, the sharp drum track, the seething lyrics – they feel floatier, quite yacht rock-y, but you can totally hear the progression through those first two EPs to here.
What we have now is a much more electronic sound. It’s sparse yet there’s a total warmth to the work. It’s nicely krauty in places, the drums are pleasingly sharp and bright, like on ‘Take It Or Leave It’, which, with its bubbly synth and twangy guitar comes on in flashes like The Stranglers. Something like the title track is much more in line with their old ways, it has that sort of MOR swing to it, while ‘Walkie Talkie’ is cracking, so mellow and yet so angry and that wah-wah synthline over the top is cracking.
I love the sound they kick out. I’m a big fan of the Manchester-based Melodic label, these two would be very at home somewhere like that sat alongside acts like Nightbus, Formal Sppeedwear and Abracadabra. Great stuff.
GOOD STUFF #3
IAN BODDY & ANDY PICKFORD ‘Symbiont’
DiN’s Ian Boddy is unstoppable, there’s always something pinging around, up his sleeve, in the pipeline, on the way to being released or actually being released. He does, after all, have an extensive back catalogue and currently he is in full curation mode, remastering and making some of the more interesting/lost corners available again on his personal Bandcamp. It must be weird listening to music you made 30 years ago, weirder still putting it back out in to the world again. This long-player was last spotted in 1995, it’s Ian’s first collaborative outing and it was the eighth release on his Something Else label, the frontrunner to his DiN empire.
Ian writes in his notes that at the time, “Andy Pickford had been making quite a name for himself on the UK electronic music scene at this time with a string of excellent, melodic, synth-driven albums”.
They would often bump into each other at various UK festivals and, Ian says, it seemed inevitable that they would collaborate at some point. And so it came to pass. Released in 1995, ‘Symbiont’ is a real kitchen sink of an outing, a mish-mash of styles/genres.
Buckle up because there’s a lot going on here. There’s ‘Who Goes There?’ for starters, a Gothic soundtrack type piece that would be very welcome on Library Of The Occult. It melts into ‘Dreifarbig Bomber’, another soundtrack-y piece that makes me think of Harold Faltermeyer’s ‘Axel F’ or the throbbing ‘Top Gun’ soundtrack… and then vocals kick in! It’s a proper builder of a track, very prog if you ask me.
There’s the electronic rock of ‘Enigmatic’ the opener, and ‘BYST’, which is the album’s closer. In between there’s Berlin School-isms, of course there is, ambeint-isms and even, as Ian says, sort of techno. ‘Sequence In Blue’ comes with beats, which are rather too polite to own the techno label. I really like the mellow, repetitive beats and house chops of ‘Moebius Loops Again’ and ‘Prophet’, which you suspect is packed with sounds from the Sequential Circuits series. It’s nine minutes and passes through several movements, the rattling centrepiece has a snake charmer kind of vibe. I think my favourite here is the Berlin School-y title track with its lovely arpeggio and vocodered vocals or it might be the swirls and bright tinkles of ambient drift of ‘Kuhl Bleu’.
There’s also a bonus here in the shape of ‘Alfa Centauri 1996’, which is a half-hour live set from the Alfa-Centauri festival in Huizen, Netherlands, in 1996 and is one of only two concerts they ever played together.
I really appreciate artists taking time and energy to look at work like this again make it available in new forms for us to hear. This one was well worth it.
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THE ROUND UP’s ROUND UP
It doesn’t seem like two minutes since we had ‘Silent Harvest Volume 1’ as our Album Of The Week. Calling something Volume 1 is a dead giveaway. Mostly. The Traveling Wilburys’ debut album was ‘Travelling Wilburys Vol. 1’, there was no ‘Vol. 2’, but there was ‘Vol. 3’. Those guys. If you can think of a better example of a standalone ‘Vol. 1’ I’d love to hear it. So anyway, I assumed here there would be a ‘Silent Harvest Volume 2’ (The Folk Police) and here it is. But it comes at things from a different angle to Vol. 1.
A recap? between 1967 and 1968, folk types Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger recorded a 10-LP set of traditional folk songs and ballads, released by Argo Records as ‘The Long Harvest’. These fresh takes are an homage to that collection. The first volume featured a who’s who of “various modulists, ambientologists and other electronic musicians from the UK” who each selected a track as inspiration for a new composition. Here the label asked artists involved in the Inner Echo ambient community to choose a ballad or song from ‘The Long Harvest’ and to “use its imagery as the inspiration for a new piece of music”. The names might not be as recognisable as those on ‘Vol. 1’, but the quality of the work is no less.
There’s 19 tracks, so about an hour and a half of delightful drifting. I really like Micmac’s slightly unsettling ‘The Dewy Dewy Dens Of Yarrow’. Musically it’s lovely, a repeating harp motif dances around, but the disjointed vocal really gives you the heebies. There’s a few unsettling tracks. The spooky hunting horn and distant chatter on ‘Lamkin’ by Analogue Path & Akira Film Script is the sort of thing that’ll haunt your dreams. Lots to like here and added to ‘Vol. 1’ it’s quite the package.
I missed this last week. Well, not so much missed it as ran out of time, as always. Speed Of Life’s ‘Sign-Off Music for US Television Stations’ (Plenty Wenlock) is well worth a mention, as is much of this label’s output. The work of Michael Branch, these five tracks are imaginary sign-off themes for US TV stations. “These are memories from when television stations would go off the air for the evening,” says Michael. “There was something magical about it. I would feel as if I was floating outside of or removed from any notion of time. These are attempts to evoke that same sense of something just beyond, always slightly out of reach.”
I’m not sure we had the same thing here. I remember the national anthem being played before a channel shut down at night, which always felt slightly surreal. And we all know how freaky the test card was. but anyway, here we have a collection of tracks suggestive of US TV station name and each with a subtitle. The opening ‘KKZ96 (Wonder People)’ is rather ethereal and dramatic, like a slo-mo marching band, and I really like ‘WMGT (La Jetee Part Two)’ that has a great melodic pulse running through it. I’m not sure how I’d feel hearing these coming out of a TV set after an evening’s entertainment, I think you’d be quite surprised not to mention a little spooked. That said it’s is all rather good.
We’ve mentioned Hadley Roe before. We caught her second long-player ‘The Inner Garden’ when it came out last April. We said “There is something very shoegazey about it all. It has that kind of swirl and drama, only very gently so”. It looks like she’s reissuing everything on her own Slow Mending imprint and that includes this latest release, ‘Beauty Weeps’.
As with previous outings, the new EP is, as the notes say, “both melancholic and uplifting”. Her “soft dreamy ambient” work helps her cope with a “rare and debilitating mental illness” and by releasing it she hopes it might resonate with others in similar positions. The title track is a drone that shimmers away, like sunlight reflecting off something shiny. My favourite track, ‘Coastal Town (Offseason)’ settles around a beautifully melodic refrain that swells very, very gently, while the seven-minute plus ‘Destination Unknown’ is a treat. It starts out as another shimmery drone with cut-glass sharp droplets that shapeshift into another delicious melody. It even has a ‘Reprise’ at the end of the EP. The set is completed with ‘For Dear Life’, which is an intriguing title and is full of the gentlest whooshes and gushes.
How can you resist and artist called Tokyo Bedroom Orchestra? The solo project of composer Hiro Nakamura, the title of this new album ‘Tsuioku / 追憶’ (KITCHEN. LABEL) means “a distant recollection” so you can perhaps imagine what this sounds like. The artist is based in a quiet coastal area of Japan and, “influenced by expansive skies, the sea, and the atmosphere of the countryside, the music carries a sense of distance and quiet nostalgia”. It feels very calming, pastoral almost. The notes explain that “field recordings, analog synthesis, and acoustic fragments move through a tape-woven texture, where guitar, strings, and voice emerge and recede, forming a language shaped as much by atmosphere as by melody”. It comes complete with imperfections such as glitches and tape slurs that, the notes say, are “letting texture and time define the work”. A track like ‘Yuuge / 夕餉’ with its mournful violin and delicate female voice is rather powerful. You do feel a cinematic drama within. Lots of artist talk about imaginary soundtracks, this feels like a film without pictures.
One last release for today and it’s a belter to finish with. I don’t know what it is about the sun and krautrock, but the two do seem to go hand in hand. Nuremberg trio Konformer follow up 2023’s ‘Konformer I’ with, well, ‘Konformer II’ (Before I Die). Our good pal Steve Cobby said of the first release that it was “Martin Hannet meets Edgar Froese in Irmin Scmidt’s front room” … you’d be wise to listen to that, just in case. The first album felt very taut and tight, this one seems looser somehow, not so wound up to burst. The opener, across two tracks, is a four-part suite that clocks in at 17 minutes. This lot are not messing around. It’s all very mellow. The lovely bassline on the very laidback almost shoegaze-y ‘Marseille’ could be twice as fast and it would still be downtempo and then straight out of that you get the noisy rattling beat, double quick bass, retro synth melody of ‘Berufsverkehr’. It’s very cool stuff. The label (I’d suggest you keep an eye on them) tell me the band have a short UK tour lined up at the end of August culminating in a performance at Manchester Psych Fest on 5 September. Details here
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.
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