Issue 117 / 17 July 2026
The essential DIY electronic music lowdown: Track Of The Week: Andy Bell & Masal + Album Of The Week: 'Undulating Waters 10' + Diagonals + Kindergarden Odyssey + Hawksmoor + more...
Two newsletters to go before the official Moonbuilding Weekly summer hols begin! So no newsletters in August, but we’ll be returning on 4 September raring to go. In a bid to keep all five ad slots full for the month, I’m extending the £25/week July offer to the end of September. Book now to avoid missing out.
If you can keep a secret, there’s something that we can’t officially announce yet, but I’d like to tell you about anyway. The very first Moonbuilding Label Market/Live Sessions knees-up will be at The Social in London’s glittery West End on Sunday 1 November from 2pm-10pm. Put it in your diary. The label market will feature loads of your favourite DIY imprints and it’s followed by an evening of synthy goodness with three incredible live acts. You are not going to want to miss any of it. Full details and ticket info coming soon.
One last thing. If you happen to be in Bristol tonight, can I point you in the direction of my friend DJ Food’s Extended Turntablism night featuring a packed bill of people performing incredible feats with mutant turntables. There’s an ad below with a link for tickets. If you happen to go, tell him I sent you.
Righto, that’s me for another week. Happy reading.
Neil Mason, editor
moonbuildingmag@gmail.com
Issue 117 Playlist: Listen
Your ad here: Advertise
***ADVERTISE HERE***
email moonbuildingmag@gmail.com
ANDY BELL & MASAL ‘The Morning Of The Trip’ (Sonic Cathedral)
Photo: Brian David Stevens
The hot weather has been shaping our listening a good deal. Sonic Cathedral really tapped into the sunshine vibe with Pye Corner Audio’s ‘More Songs About The Sun’ album from a few weeks back, which is awash with shimmery distortion and saturation. Then last week the new album from Andy Bell and Essex-based harp/synth duo Masal turned up. It’s a second collection of tracks from the team-up and boy, it’s perfect music for the weather… thing is, it’s not out until early October. I’m hoping for an Indian summer so you can enjoy it in the hazy heat too. We’ve had it on most days, letting the whole thing drift round the Moonbuilding office is such a treat.
Helpfully, first single ‘The Morning Of The Trip’ is here as a taster while we still have the good weather. The visualiser, by the excellent innerstrings, is total sunshine, the track itself is a great introduction to the record and finds Andy making his guitar “sound like a waterfall”. It builds so gently, so beautifully. There’s a glorious harp arpeggio (I don’t know what it is about harps, but they make such a happy sound) and only Andy Bell could let a guitar rip as gently as this. Much more about the album as a whole when it lands in October. The closing track, the eight-minute-plus ‘Rudi’s Dream – The Third Bardo’ is “a krautrock crescendo inspired by their studio’s resident cat”. Yup.
Oh, before you go, Andy Bell & Masal also have a couple of live dates booked in around the album release too. They’ll be playing two nights, 5 / 6 October, at SJQ Dalson, London. Tickets are on sale now and are available here
‘Common Primitives’ is released by Sonic Cathedral on on 9 October.
soniccathedral.bandcamp.com/music
VARIOUS ARTISTS ‘Undulating Waters 10’ (Woodford Halse)
Words: NEIL MASON
Here we are again with another flag in the sand along the way to the Woodford Halse empire shutting up shop at the end of the year. The mothership and associated labels are slowly being wound up by big chief Mat Handley and this 10th volume of the brilliant ‘Undulating Waters’ series is the last.
The art of the compilation is one that Mat understands well. His two-volume ‘Sinking In The Black Mud’ cassette compile, the final release on the Preston Capes sub-label back in May, paid homage to an almighty early 80s compilation called ‘Rising From The Red Sand’, which introduced many of us to the likes of Hula, Chris & Cosey, Nurse With Wound, Colin Potter, Ian Boddy, Legendary Pink Dots, and many more.
The five-cassette set was compiled by Gary Levermore for his own Third Mind label. Gary is music PR days and dropped me a line after reading my review of Mat’s collection. He said how could he resist ‘Sinking In The Black Mud’ and told me he’d popped over to Mat’s Bandcamp and hoovered up not only the comp, but the label’s back catalogue too. It’s such a ringing endorsement for Mat’s great work.
The journey that Mat has been on, that has seen his Woodford Halse label become one of the mainstays of the DIY scene, started out with compilations. In fact it was the double whammy of the first two volumes of ‘Undulating Waters’ in quick succession in September and October 2018 that set the ball rolling. Billed as “A new series of compilation albums featuring new or exclusive recordings from some of the most exciting underground artists from across the world”, Mat tells me that the whole idea of running a label was born out of those two collections.
“I thought half a dozen mixtapes would be enough to satisfy my urge to get a little involved in a scene that had reignited my passion for new music,” he says. “Counting the sub labels, I’ve put out around 160 releases in eight years! That’s bloody crazy isn’t it? The compilations are what I hope the label is remembered for. I’m so proud of them and humbled by the generosity of the artists who’ve trusted such a small and promo-illiterate label with their work.”
The collections started out on tape, “Limited in nature, just 100 cassettes, all beautifully sculptured in eye-catching die-cut sleeves replete with exclusive cigarette cards, which on the reverse feature an excerpt from the Woodford Halse mystery written by Paul Bareham.” They made the leap to glass-mastered CD for Volume 6 in 2021. The look has remained the same though, follow the same design, slotting neatly into a livery set up by the brilliant Nick Taylor.
The musical contents have always been storming. Some of the finest snapshots of this corner of the music world you’re likely to hear. Take those first two collections, well-known names like Polypores, Panamint Manse, Revbjelde, Time Attendant, Midwich Youth Club, Spaceship, The Heartwood Institute, Grey Frequency and Field Line’s Cartographer sit alongside a total voyage of discovery of names lost in the mists.
Of course, this is eight years ago, many of those “well-known” names would’ve been just starting out, perhaps not so well-known. They only go to prove what a good ear Mat has and that, of course, has been reinforced across those 160 releases. I would recommend rewinding and checking out some of the names on those early collections. Or indeed, on this collection. Mat’s fine ear is still keen right up to the very end.
This 10th and final outing opens, fittingly, with Mat’s own Pulselovers project. What’s the point of having a label if you’re not going to bark yourself? He tells me there is a new Pulselovers album in the can which is “a bit of a change in direction”. This track would point to that. Pulselovers very much embraces Mat’s love of the early electronics coming out of Yorkshire in particular. Here he heads west, to Manchester. There’s a guitar, and swirling synths. With flecks of Joy Division, it sounds not unlike a lost Factory release.
We have a new Polypores track, ‘Strange Teeth’, which is always welcome. Stephen Buckley’s world has shapeshifted in the eight years since he opened the first ‘Undulating Waters’ collection, but he remains such a distinctive voice. More recently, his work has been beat driven and here we get that both barrels with rich arpeggiation, acid squelches and a flute-like solo. Proper Buckley it is.
Paul Bareham pops up with the brief but brilliant ‘My Light Has Gone Out, But I Still Work’. It is very much at the more musical end of his experimental sound art, a spoken work piece set to a sparse, funky groove. We then flick to Ryan Shirlow’s melodic folk-powered ‘Half In Love / Blood Red Shoes’ which in turn melts into the deep synthesis of Swansither’s ‘Moog Meadows’. You can perhaps guess how that sounds. Lovely stuff.
The pacing here is glorious. The way acoustic tracks sit next to the electronics works perfectly. Mat is the sort of person you would have wanted making mixtapes for you at school. If this was a vinyl set, you’d flip it over at the conclusion of Burd Ellen’s haunting folker ‘Oran An Roin’ and the B-side would open with Field Lines Cartographer’s wonderous eight-minute ‘Eternal Depths’, which in turn gives way to Beckoning III’s ghostly monk-like chanting of ‘Transfiguration Hexing’ followed by the sweet pop sound of The Twelve Hour Foundation’s ‘Roissy 1977’. I mean, you couldn’t get more eclectic in that run if you tired. And it all just sits together perfectly.
The run in to the end is very cool indeed featuring, in order, the gentle psyche of The Hologram People’s ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth’, Soft Estate’s dreamlike ‘Without You’ (“I finally got Alan Outram involved,” says Mat. Expect a full length from Soft Estate on Woodford Halse before the year is out), Warmfield’s swooping and sweeping brilliantly titled ‘Waterton Vs Walton Soapworks’ (1-0 to the Waterton! I don’t think they’re football teams). And the whole thing closes with Land Observation’s shimmeringly delicate ‘The Mill And The River’.
Brilliant stuff. I will tell you this for nothing. We are going to miss Mat’s labels when they’re gone.
Got something you need to tell us about? email moonbuildingmag@gmail.com
Words: Neil Mason
GOOD STUFF #1a / #1b
DIAGONALS ‘Planetary Motivations’ / KINDERGARDEN ODYSSEY ‘Technicolor Polygone’ (Astra Solaria)
A double bill from Bernard Grancher’s increasingly indispensible Rouen-based Astra Solaria label. First, one I missed from June. Kindergarden Odyssey’s ‘Technicolor Polygone’ is a brilliantly wild excursion into psych pop. Looking at the tags on their Bandcamp page they have “math rock” and “French pop” and “Canterbury” too, which may give you a pointer as to where they’re coming from.
It’s always interesting to hear where bands think they’re coming from. I’m sure they know best, mostly. Bandcamp is a great leveller for that. There’s the tags at the bottom of the page, but there’s also the description, usually penned by the band. Kindergarden Odyssey say they’re “A horde of children having fun around a statue of Roy Köhnke while scribbling on the floor a psychedelic hopscotch reminiscent of Tame Impala, Marc Melia or even Toy”.
There is a voyage of goolging discovery right there. Roy Köhnke? A contemporary French artist, scuplture, writer, drawer, video maker. No idea what the connection is. Tame Impala you will know, Marc Melia is a Spanish composer based in Brussels. Nice work, I liked ‘Pièces Monophoniques’ “a tribute to simplicity, crafted entirely on an analog monophonic synthesizer with no overdubs”, Toy… there’s a few bands called Toy. I’d be interested in which one.
Anyway, Kindergarden Odyssey as you might expect from all of the above, is full band stuff – guitare, basses and batterie. French is such a great language isn’t it? Batterie? Drums. There’s all sorts of other here too, lots of things beginning with the letter c – clavier (keyboard), cloches (bells?), choeur (choir!), chant (erm, chant).
It is a wild ride. You’re hooked immediately with the gentle warm keys and rolling bass opening of ‘Love Bugs (As I Spit On Dry Land)’. The opening line is great, the vocals half sung, half spoken – “Nature has a new baby / Born from an horror-or movie / I don’t mind / never mind”. You can feel it coming, but around halfway, the whole thing just goes off. Plinky plonk xylophone, overloaded fuzz guitar, driving beats and a delightful melody fighting its way to the top.
And we kick on from there. We have the clattering drums and locked down bassline of ‘Blast’ with its sample-driven spoken word that dissolves into some very 70s-like backing vocals and the krautrock of ‘Rosee’ is stand up and cheer good. Would love to see this lot live. If I hear anything about live dates, I’ll let you know shall I?
Which brings us to Diagonals’ ‘Planetary Motivations’. Let’s call it a mini album. There’s five original cuts, and five remixes of the title track from a who’s who of remixers. “This is Nick Daly’s project with Sean O’Hagan (High Llamas) and Andy Ramsey (Stereolab),” writes label big cheese Bernard. “Nina Savary and Sophie The Operator are singing in French and we are extremely proud of it.” And rightly so. It is rather brilliant. It has that lovely laidback melodic Lamas vibe, the swirl of the ‘Lab and lots and lots of lo-fi quirk stirred in along the way.
Nick Daly? Well, no one seemed to know much beyond he lives in the Bay Area of San Francisco and has some sway when it comes to impressive collaborators. I sent Bernard off on a mission to find out more.
Turns out Nick grew up in Florida “in the middle of nowhere”. Played guitar in post punk bands as a teen, which is also when he started messing around with electronics and computer music. He started using the name Diagonals in 2008 for mixes and audio collages. An MS diagnosis led to him having to relearn how to play the guitar. Which is impressive. “It was almost like physical therapy,” says Nick.
In 2023 an online chat with Sean O’Hagan about another Bay Area artist led to him asking to hear some music. This album is the result of Nick sending over a handful of demos. His influences, he says, includes library music, lots of Brit artists like FSOL, Autechre, The Orb, Orbital. Stereolab obviously, Broadcast, Pram, High Llamas. “When making the LP,” say Nick, “I was listening to a lot of Brian Bennett especially his album ‘Voyage’, French comps like ‘Space Oddities’ and ‘Cosmic Machine’, Aquaserge and Astrobal and even stuff like Snuggie Otis.” And Diagonals? It’s a track on Stereolab’s ‘Dots & Loops’. Perhaps not unsurprising this sounds like it does.
The drum machines are all tsk-boom, there’s myriad squelches, blips and things that go bump in the night. The wonk funk that kicks in at the end of ‘Metro-Bulot-Dodo’ is a delight. The track starts out like a gentle future waltz before it swerves to kicks up a super funky groove. The title track is very cool indeed. The vocals from Nina Savary and Astrobal are so delicate and the wigout at the end of the track is a delight.
And so to those remixes. They are not mucking around here. There is a danger that the universe will eat itself if you get Tim Gane to remix an act with a ‘Lab vibe. His ‘Metro Planetary ReMix’ here stares that danger in the face and melts the title track and the above mentioned ‘Metro-Bulot-Dodo’ into a mellow krauty sounding thrum. Sweden’s Death & Vanilla work their magic with two bites, phasing in an out of sleek off-kilter dancefloor vibrations on one mix and bringing the “New Age” to the other. US space age psyche poppers The Galaxy Electric serve up a throb and bright tight drums in their take, while Future Children bring a low slung sheen to the party with their “Dub Remix”. It all feels just right. This is one heck of a record, a psyche pop extravaganza. It comes on vinyl for €20, which seems like an utter snip to me.
astrasolariarecordings.bandcamp.com
GOOD STUFF #2
HAWKSMOOR ‘Yclept Thron’ (Library Of The Occult)
Blooming heck. Hawksmoor eh? It wasn’t that long ago we were waxing about his last long one, ‘Am I Conscious Now?’, his response to sucking up a load of DMT, a naturally occurring psychedelic found in a number of plant species and in the glands of the Colorado River toad. No toads were licked in the making of that record. I also have to say that the project was approached with “near academic rigour” as a kind of research project. Which is the right thing to do. Drugs eh? Can’t be too careful. I interviewed a rather famous person recently and they were very candid about drug use in the old days. Great copy for my piece I have to say. They estimated a spend somewhere in the region of £250k on Ecstasy alone, which I was impressed by. I mean shocked and appalled by.
Where were we? Oh, yes. Hawksmoor. James McKeown has been around since 2018… which is a nice piece of synchronicity with our Album Of The Week, with Woodford Halse have been around that long too. Maybe it’s a year dot. Anyway, James has spanned a raft of genres over the years, but it has to be said he does feel very at home making dark horror for Library Of The Occult.
‘Yclept Thorn’ was made on Teenage Engineering’s EP-1320, “the world’s first medieval electronic instrument”. It’s a quirky piece of kit, which is something of an understatement, that features “a number of readily playable medieval instruments” including stringed stuff such as the hurdy gurdy, bowed harp and gittern, reeds and brass, bagpipes, flutes and trumpets. There’s drums (including the classic “coconut horse hooves”!) and various “foley sound effects” including swords, arrows, farm animals, “two separate witches, rowdy peasants and an actual dragon”.
You couldn’t make this up, could you? What on earth were they thinking? If I didn’t know better I’d be checking the calendar. It’s here if you’d like to believe your own eyes. And yet, in the hands of our friend, well, it’s a pretty magical piece of kit.
The notes say James “has a knack for making the kind of music which drops you into another world”. No wonder when you’ve got music maker like this in your hands. The notes on James Bandcamp, where you can get a “Heathen Green” vinyl variant, are very good. He offers “great praise and gratitude to Teenage Engineering for their magick creations of which one day I hope to actually read the manuscript of instructions”. Very good.
To the music itself. The opening title track, the drum pattern, reminds me of Phil Collins’ ‘In The Air Tonight’. Or Peter Gabriel’s ‘Biko’ maybe. It has that remixed feel of the ‘Birdy’ soundtrack. If someone could do a mash-up of any of that, I’d like it a lot. It really is captivating. I love the speeding up and slurs, of which there are a lot here.
You sort of imagine this whole shebang would sound like that bard at the end of ‘Blackadder’, but of course that is so very wide of the mark. James has taken what he usually does, arpeggios, repeating pattern, melodic hooks, and tuned them to his medieval music machine. ‘Lunastus’ is a deliciously deep hurdy gurdy drone with sparklingly bright pops and pings over the top. I do like a drone, these 15th century sounds are very suited to them too. ‘Lingulaca’ delivers. A spooky pant and a deep bass beat, like you’re being marched to the chopping block. It’s almost Ye Olde Joye Division, as are the tribal beats of ‘Vorigern’. I love how that track tunes itself up and down too.
James really is one of our most creative practitioners. Top quality gear, essential listening from Hawksmoor and LOTO, as always.
libraryoftheoccult.bandcamp.com
***ADVERTISE HERE***
email moonbuildingmag@gmail.com
THE ROUND UP’s ROUND UP
Right. Time is not my friend at the moment. I feel like I’ve been chasing my tail for weeks… hence the break in August. I need to tidy the desk, stare out the window. All that.
There’s a few releases I need to get on your radar this week. The first is ‘Rotterdam Is My Tokyo’ from Neil Branquinho’s Eat Lights Become Lights (Feral Child). It’s been four years in the making and comes with a book of photography, “the CD is the soundtrack to the book and the book is the companion to the new album” say the notes. It comes to you via Dom Martin’s Feral Child and may be sold out already. Dom is at thegreatpopsupplement@hotmail.com if you want to see if there’s any left. Do check shops, usual suspects, but don’t hold your breath.
I’m telling you about it because Dom says it’s “one of my favourite releases ever after all these years”, which is pretty wow. Like Mat Handley, I really trust Dom’s ears. If he releases something it’s going to be good. The other thing is this might well be the very last release for Eat Lights. What is it with people packing all this in?
So it comes in nine parts, close on 70 minutes of music, hence the CD rather than vinyl. But it is as Neil intended, no edits, which they would’ve had to do for vinyl. “Easily the best record of his career,” writes Dom, “full of his trademark motorik, krautrock leanings certainly, but that’s just a springboard to some gigantic tangent which he then veers off. Krautrock rave? Kosmische floorfillers? Heavy motorik disco? Teutonic techno? Whatever, put simply, this is just epic and makes for quite the aural journey.” No streams, there never are with Feral Child. You need to own it if you want to hear it. Old school idea I know. Do not miss… if you can find it the first place.
A quick nod at ‘Cosmic Balearic Beats Volume 3’ from the Ghent-based Eskimo Recordings. You may know the label. They “championed the spacier end of club music” and came out of the late-90s Ghent party scene that championed DJs like The Flying Dewale Brothers, who later became 2 Many DJs, and The Glimmers. The label was founded in 2000 and highlighted acts like Lindstrøm & Prins Thomasm, but there specialty was always compilations that built on the sound of these underground parties, with the Scandinavian scene well represented, these collections highlighted old and new synthpop, acid house, funk, disco, and whatever else you might have to hand. Check out the three volumes of their turn of the century ‘Various Artists and Many Others’ for a good taste. In 2008 they released Volume One of a new collection called ‘Cosmic Balearic Beats’, which was cracking stuff. Not one single act you’ve heard of, but killer cuts from start to finish. Some 17 years after 2009’s Volume 2, they’ve got round to Volume 3 featuring “18 otherworldly tracks selected by Izhevsk-based producer Antenna”. Check out opener, Atella’s ‘Transition’, “A dreamy near 10-minute long homage to the likes of Vangelis and Kraftwerk”. Love it.
You may recall that a little while back, could’ve been a couple of weeks, a month or two or last year the way time seems to warp in the Moonbuilding office (I’ve just checked, it was November last year!), our friends at the Tokyo-based All Horned Animals label released ‘Bone Of Contention’, a cracker from the brilliant Eric Random. They’ve been in touch again with another release they think we’ll like and they’re right. Mitsuru Tabata + Jun Morita’s ‘Live Critique of Judgement’ sees a fully improvised, so that’s no prep at all, just sit down and play, from electronic musician/DJ Jun Morita and veteran underground composer, guitarist, bassist and vocalist Mitsuru Tabata. “Tabata found improvising with Morita especially engaging because,” say the notes, “in sessions with fellow string players, he usually had a sense of what they might play next. Morita’s keyboard and live electronics, however, produced sounds that were completely unpredictable.” There’s six improvisational pieces ranging from two to 10 minutes. No track titles, just ‘Improvisation 1-6’. It’s wild work, often with noisy guitar splintering over skittery electronic beats as on ‘Improvisation 3’. It comes off best when there’s beats that Mitsuru can dance around with his guitar squalls like on ‘Improvisation 2’. Such interesting work from our friends in Japan.
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