Issue 12 / 5 April 2024
This week's DIY electronic goodness... Album Of The Week: Pye Corner Audio + Martin Jenkins chat, Track Of The Week: SEN + new release round-up + Matthew Worley's 'Xerox Machine' fanzine book + more
It’s been a bit of a week at Moonbuilding HQ – there’s been lots of real life going on and as a result I’ve been right up against the deadline for the first time since I started doing the newsletter in January. The fact you’re reading this must mean I got finished. Hurray for me. I was talking to a friend this week about working on the weekly music press and how the white heat of industry made for better copy. There’s something about the immediacy of work that has been produced fast with little time to polish. You might see what I mean while you read this issue.
In my spare time this week, ha, I’ve been looking at how payments work on Substack. It’s an impressive platform, but there are limitations. For example, it won’t let you dial down payments beyond a certain level in case you undervalue your work. Pfut. As if. I kind of suspect if you could charge, say, £1 you’d get more people doing just that. So in a bid to keep all this free I’ve set up an online tip jar where you can make a donation of £1… ko-fi.com/moonbuilding
Let’s give it a go shall we? OK, that’s me. I’m off to the dentist now. Wish me luck.
Neil Mason, editor
moonbuildingmag@gmail.com
Looking for the Issue 12 Playlist? Here it is bndcmpr.co/d963a47c
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PYE CORNER AUDIO ‘The Endless Echo’ (Ghost Box)
Without Martin Jenkins’ Pye Corner Audio I’m not sure how much of all this there’d be. I think I first sat up and paid attention to this new wave of DIY artists/labels when I commissioned a piece about Salford’s Islington Mill for Electronic Sound. Carl Griffin went up there and spent the day with GNOD’s Paddy Shine and soaked up their fully independent enclave.
It felt like something was shifting. The piece was a pre-print edition, Issue 11, which I’m pretty sure was June 2015. I wrote a side bar about the record labels in the Mill, like Tesla Tapes, Sacred Tapes, Tombed Visions, Ono, Little Crackd Rabbit and so on. I said, “Refreshingly, hoovering up their inventive output for free isn’t on the cards. Instead, and call them old fashioned if you like, you have to actually buy their lovingly produced physical releases to hear the music held within.”
After that, my eyes were open and so it seemed were the floodgates. The more of these kinds of artists and labels I wrote about, the more of them appeared in my inbox and through the letterbox.
Setting up shop in 2006, Ghost Box released their first Pye Corner Audio album in 2012. They picked up on him through his excellent ‘Black Mill Tapes’ as Pye Corner Audio Transcription Services. It was proper Ghost Box-y. The conceit was the head technician at Pye Corner Audio Transcription Services (est 1970) came across some boxes of “archived magnetic recordings” at a village auction while on the hunt for tobacco pipes. The sole bidder, he discovered the boxes were full of cassettes and reel-to-reel tapes all of which were only labelled “Black Mill Sessions”.
OMD’s Andy McClusky tells a story about how early doors they were doing their thing in Liverpool oblivious to the fact that the very same sort of invention was going on elsewhere – The Human League in Sheffield, Daniel Miller in London, Soft Cell in Leeds. Same thing with Ghost Box and PCA I guess. Martin was busy creating this alluring parallel world of long-lost tapes that were thick with hiss and noise and conjuring up mysterious images of where they came from and who made them. It was something straight out of Ghost Box’s world, no wonder they came together and remain together.
‘The Endless Echo’ is the label’s fifth album with Martin and there’s something rather magical about a PCA release on Ghost Box. While there’s a list as long as your arm of his releases, it’s the Ghost Box outings you return to. From ‘Sleep Games’ and its 2016 sequel ‘Statis’ to ‘Hollow Earth’ from 2019 and 2021’s ‘Entangled Routes’, each one is uniquely Pye Corner Audio, each one distinctly Ghost Box.
And this new offering is no exception. From the squally opening of the first track, ‘The Awful Majesty’, you get the feeling there’s something a little different going on here. Most people talk about PCA in terms of imaginary soundtracks, but this is cinematic, wide-screen stuff. Drawing inspiration from the nature of time and “the idea that it may be entirely unreal”, your imagination is going run riot when the needle drops on this one.
‘Decision Point’ starts out like The Cure’s ‘A Forest’ before a slow heartbeat of a rhythm builds it into a monster of a track with the deep, warm synth sound coming on like a slo-mo version of David Lowe’s BBC News theme. That distinctive rhythm, which after all is based on the famous time-keeping pips, appears again on the vocodered dancefloory ‘Counting The Hours’.
It’s a long album, 16 tracks, although many of the cuts are short, relatively, at two or three minutes. ‘Chronos’, the longest offering here at five and half minutes, feels like the cornerstone of the record. It’s like swirling round a vortex and is almost Workshop-like.
Martin reveals that the whole premise of the record was set with the chiming bell that keeps time on ‘Written In Water’ as ‘Blade Runner’-like squalls dig in. There’s the melodically rich ‘Deeptime’ and the beautiful ‘Green Pulse’ and… and… and… I could go on.
Stick all that in striking Julian House artwork where the shadowy figures lend proceedings an almost Hitchcockian sheen and you have a record that really isn’t going to disappoint. But what do you expect? Pye Corner Audio is the grandmaster. He never disappoints. Especially when he’s releasing on Ghost Box. [NM]
’The Endless Echo’ is out now on Ghost Box
MARTIN JENKINS
Call him Pye Corner Audio, call him The Head Technician, he’ll also answer to the name The House In The Woods. Today though it’s PCA all the way as we talk heavy metal, unreliable narrators and short attention spans… oh look, a squirrel
Interview: Neil Mason
Hello Martin, how’s things?
“All good here, getting excited about the release of ‘The Endless Echo’.”
I’ve got this theory that the best people had a metal phase in their youth. That’s you, right?
“Oh, I definitely did! I was listening to all the standard classic rock, Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, etc, and a lot of thrash metal. Suicidal Tendencies were a favourite.”
Did you ever go to Monsters Of Rock?
“I went to Monsters Of Rock in 1988, Iron Maiden were the headliners along with Guns N’ Roses, Megadeth and David Lee Roth. Unfortunately, that was the year that two people died in the crush. The atmosphere was pretty subdued after that.”
One of your first jobs was as a tape op at Milo Studios in Hoxton Square when it was Howie B’s place?
“Yes , I worked with Howie often. Nick, the studio manager, also co-ran Pussyfoot records with him, so most of the label’s output was produced and mixed in the studios. Howie was great, always super enthusiastic and really willing to see where things could go, musically speaking. I also got to meet some cool people through him, Bjork and Jarvis Cocker among others.”
I feel like I should know this, but why the name Pye Corner Audio?
“There’s a mysterious signpost round my neck of the woods, pointing to the mythical place. I became aware that there are a few of them dotted around this country.”
You were self-releasing in 2010. What promoted that? Not many people were doing that at the time?
“I needed to release music with a minimal outlay. Bandcamp seemed to be the most fuss-free means of getting it out there. I liked that I was able to bundle a PDF of the artwork and related images alongside the music. I’m happy that it’s going from strength to strength. It’s still a really important outlet for me.”
The mythology of your ‘Black Mill Tapes’ collections was also ahead of the curve. Where did that idea come from?
“I’ve always been into the idea of the unreliable narrator and misremembered histories and things like that.
Curious to know if there was a Ghost Box influence before you worked with them?
”I was really intrigued by Ghost Box and Mordant Music and their world building at the beginning.”
Do you look at the DIY scene that’s blow up these days and feel like a bit of a pioneer, because you should!
“No, not really! I wasn’t really that aware of it, I thought everyone was doing it.”
Let’s talk about the new record. ‘The Endless Echo’ is your fifth album on Ghost Box, do they look after you nicely?
“They do. Jim is always on hand with some gentle guidance, and the moment where we start discussing the artwork with Julian is one of my favourite points in the process. It’s been a real pleasure to work alongside them over the years.”
I love the themes on the new record. What comes first with you? The themes or the music?
“I almost always start with some kind of concept, this one started with the tolling bell at the beginning of the track ‘Written In Water’ and my course was set.”
‘The Endless Echo’ is about time isn’t it, both scientific and science fictional. Tell me more…
“It’s about the experiential nature of time, how it stretches or compresses, depending on circumstances.”
There’s an idea that time speeds up as you get older whereas it really drags when your a kid. How come?
“Probably something to do with hormones.”
This is a long album, 16 tracks. Do you think kids will find it a bit long and adults a bit short?
“There’s probably not enough AutoTune for the kids, and a lack of guitars for the adults!”
That’s us then. Thanks for your time. What else are you up to today?
“Back to the daily grind I’m afraid!”
For more PCA, get yourself over to pyecorneraudio.bandcamp.com
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SEM ‘PHOX’ (Bytes)
We’d like to wish a very happy fifth birthday to Joe Clay’s Bytes label who released BYTES01, ‘MINO’ by Minotaur Shock, exactly five years old today. To celebrate they’re announcing a release worth getting hot under the collar about. SEM is the 1990s alias of Damon Baxter who you will probably know as Deadly Avenger. He released two scorching electro 12-inches, ‘PHOX’ and ‘The Demon’, in 1995 and 1996 on Electron Industries, which was run by Depth Charge’s J Saul Kane. Totalling eight tracks, the two releases are loooooong out of print and they’ve never been released digitally, until now. Well, I say now, both EPs have been collected on a limited edition CD and “collectors edition” MiniDisc and are set to be released on 17 May.
Remastered for this release by Two Lone Swordsman’s Keith Tenniswood, the tracks pack real punch – thumping 808, analogue synths, growling basslines and, it says here, “dystopian strings worthy of Vangelis or John Carpenter”. Which is big talk until you note that at the time these tracks popped up in mixes by everyone from Dave Clarke to Robert Miles. Oh, hang on, ‘Phox (Logan Strings)’ is playing again, just need to turn it up. Loud.
Got an upcoming release? We’re all ears. Find us at moonbuildingmag@gmail.com
Words: Neil Mason
GOOD STUFF #1
JANE WEAVER ‘Love In A Constant Spectacle’ (Fire)
Jane Weaver is just so reliably brilliant. That’s not all she is, she’s other things as well of course she is, but from the first chords of this, her umpteenth album in a career that spans a frankly unbelievable 20 years, you know that here you are in for a total treat. When are you not with her? Opener ‘Perfect Storm’ is classic Weaver, the motorik beat, that thrumming bass, those synths, the fuzzy guitar… #swoon. This is her fourth long-player for the Fire label, they’re all great, you can’t choose between them such is the consistency of her work. And yet she remains a cult treat. What the heck is going on? Why isn’t she everywhere, being a huge star? Honestly.
The press release is nicely weird. It talks about “the stream” being “awash with scrabble piece poetry and Letraset lullabies”, which paints a nice picture even if you have no idea what it means. And that’s kind of Jane Weaver all over. She talks about themes stemming from “interpretation and translation, observations and emotional cues”… I mean, isn’t that life? So yes, sure, there’s themes and meanings, take them if you want or just clap ears round this totally lush record. It is music for listening to. Yes, yes, isn’t all music? Well, you should hear some of the stuff I hear. So the whole of ‘Love In A Constant Spectacle’ is great, but I’m currently loving the tutonic sparseness of ‘Is Metal’, the swirly repeated refrain of “I love you / Let’s go home’ of ‘Romantic Worlds’ and the closing ‘Family Of The Sun’ with the those Hawkwind-y whooshes at the end. Loving this, but then it’s Jane Weaver. What’s not to like?
GOOD STUFF #2
A LILY ‘Saru l-Qamar’ (Phantom Limb)
I love the story behind this record. A Lily is James Vella, top dog at the brilliant Phantom Limb label. There’s a bunch of A Lily albums (last spotted on Joe Clay’s Bytes label, which features in Track Of The Week. It’s like I plan this stuff) but never on his own label… until now. You have to admire the integrity, but if you’ve got a label as good as Phantom Limb and you’re releasing music as beautiful as A Lily getting the two together makes perfect sense. Anyway, the story. I didn’t know this, but James is Maltese and he explains that it was quite common for relatives abroad to send their news home to families in Malta on cassette. The news was often in the form of għana, traditional Maltese folk music in the form of a sung narrative poem. A heritage foundation on the island has been collecting these tapes, which date back to the 1960s, and James has been granted access to the collection, responding to these recordings with his usual dream-like vigour. Although vigour perhaps isn’t the word for these delicate aural delights. The recordings take on ghostly qualities, although the subject matter can be mundane (“there was a burglar in the house yesterday”,
“I can’t tell you how much I miss Malta”), but the idea of this simple storytelling and news-sharing being immortalised like this is really very touching especially when you consider many of these voice have been lost to time.
GOOD STUFF #3
VON HEUSER ‘Mono Thought’ (Preston Capes)
A first offering of the year from Woodford Halse offshoot Preston Capes and it’s been playing away nicely all morning at Moonbuilding HQ. Von Hauser is South Shields-based animator, filmmaker and educator Robin Webb and he makes this, hang on, how did the label describe it? … “Industrial soundscapes, radiophonics, disjointed rhythms and lo-fi electronica”. It’s got that sort of Cabaret Voltaire vibe about it. Fuzzy radio voices, buzzy electrical sounds, you know, the cacophony of stuff with plugs on. Robin says it’s all about “off-kilter music making and the serendipitous intermingling of sequences of dissonant notes, static and other things”. The imagery suits the sounds, the cover features a grain black and white image that Robin says was taken “somewhere in the south west circa 1987”. I like the idea of not quite remembering where or when but still liking the image enough to make a sleeve of it. Musically, I’d head straight for the 15-minute ‘Revolutions For Beginners’, which is pretty hectic and clearly full of “other things”. ‘Mono Thought’ is a cassette release, which no doubt adds to the aural experience, but be warned it comes as an extremely limited edition of just 45 copies. Hurry!
GOOD STUFF #4
THE NIGHT MONITOR ‘Horror Of The Hexham Heads’ (Fonolith / Library Of The Occult)
It’s always a good day when The Night Monitor pops up with a release. Here Neil Scrivin serves up ‘Horror Of The Hexham Heads’, which caught my attention because round my way there’s a bunch of roads named after battles during the Wars Of The Roses. The Battle Of Hexham was fought near the Northumberland town in 1464. It was a key battle with The House of York kicking Lancastrian ass and securing the throne for their man Edward IV for a bit. Anyway, 508 years later, in February 1972, 11-year-old Colin Robson unearths two mysterious stone heads in his family's garden in Hexham. “The heads depicted a skull-like face and a witch-like figure. Their discovery sparked a series of bizarre events, including poltergeist phenomena, reports of a half-human, half-sheep-like creature encountered by neighbours, sightings of mysterious lights, and even a terrifying encounter with a werewolf-like creature recounted by Celtic scholar Dr Anne Ross.” All of which is classic The Night Monitor. This stuff weirds me out, I never know what’s real and what isn’t. Neil has done stuff about the Enfield poltergeist ('This House Is Haunted'), Pennine UFOs (‘Close Encounters Of The Pennine Kind’) and strange events in South Wales in the 70s (‘Spacemen Mystery of the Terror Triangle’). I guess I could Google it all, but where’s the fun in that? The digital is available from Neil’s Fonolith label, while vinyl comes via LOTO.
fonolith.bandcamp.com / libraryoftheoccult.bandcamp.com
GOOD STUFF #5
ADAM WILTZIE ‘Eleven Fugues For Sodium Pentothal’ (Kranky)
Well this is interesting. As are most things that come out of the brain of Stars Of The Lid/A Winged Victory For The Sullen’s Adam Wiltzie. The album was initially inspired by a recurring dream where if someone listened to the music he created, they would die. Analise that. He then goes on to talk about the fugue states of the title and in particular the barbiturate, Sodium Pentothal, which he sees as a both muse and sacred escape. “When you are sitting face forward on the daily emotional meat grinder of life,” he offers, “I always wished I could have some, so I could just fall asleep automatically and the feeling would not be there anymore.” Some weighty themes there and have no doubt. Musically, it’s the sort of record that has you holding its breath as drones stretch and spiral outwards over time and space. Interesting to note that it’s produced by Loop’s Robert Hampson. Loving the opening track just for the title alone. It’s called ‘Buried At Westwood Memorial Park, In An Unmarked Grave, To The Left Of Walter Matthau’. The guitar-shimmering of ‘Tissue Of Lies’ is rather wonderful too, but the standout for me, at the moment, is the warm musicbox plinks and plonks of ‘Dim Hopes’ which last for a fleeting two minutes before it evaporates. Lovely stuff.
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PHOTOCOPY AND PASTE
Back in Issue 1 we featured a great book called ‘We Peaked At Paper’, an oral history of UK fanzines that included a whole bunch of contemporary interviews with old fanzine editors. With Matthew Worley’s ‘Zerox Machine – Punk, Post-Punk and Fanzines In Britain 1976-88’ (Reaktion Books) we have the history. The author is Professor of Modern History at the University Of Reading and a massive music fan, hence his book title, as all fans of early Adam & The Ants will know, is pronounced “mo-sheen”. Anyway, an expert on punk and punk-related cultures, when Matthew writes you should be reading. Often when academics turn out stuff like this it can be a little, well, dry. Music journalists they are not. Thankfully, as well as being very knowledgeable, Matthew is also very readable.
‘Zerox Machine’ traces a line from the punk zines to what happened next. For me, it’s what came after punk that was crucial. Everyone knows about Mark Perry’s Sniffin’ Glue, but there was a wealthy of great DIY zines out there, especially as punk began to morph. Matthew really breaks it down, year by year almost – part one is punk fanzines, 1976-8, which is further broken down into London and the provinces, part two gets post-punk from 1978-80 and so on. As punk changed, the zines followed, and crucially, while you were most likely devouring the national music press each week, you wanted a bit of local action from your zine.
Matthew, like me, grew up in Norwich and it’s great to see John Shelley’s excellent Blue Blanket getting a mention. John moved to Norfolk from Manchester in the very early 80s and came with first-hand experience of Buzzcocks, Factory and the like ringing in his ears. What a shock Norfolk must’ve been, no wonder Blue Blanket stood out. It wasn’t a rough and ready cut and paste job, it was really well put together, looked very cool and to my aspiring art student eyes it totally rang my bell. And it’s that level of detail you can expect from ‘Zerox Machine’. Even the book can’t escape its culture. It’s laid out across a four-column grid with loads of black and white illustrations giving it a zine-y feel in itself. If you’re a regular round here, this is essential reading. No, make that compulsory reading.
reaktionbooks.co.uk/work/zerox-machine / Buy from Moonbuilding bookshop
SIGHT VISIT
The mysterious Scottish-based recording artist known as Veryan has published another edition of her ‘Insights & Sounds’, a quarterly EP and e-zine focussed on words and music. We’re up to Volume 5 here and as usual she invites three artists to choose a word, provide a sound sample and have a chat. So you get interviews with the artists exploring the significance and meaning of their chosen word, while Veryan makes accompanying tracks from the samples. It’s an ambitious project, which is always great to see. The zine is 30+ pages so there’s a good chunk to get stuck into and the music, as is the case with Veryan, is always quality. This issue finds Moonbuilding cover star Maria Uzor, Rupert Lally and Karen Vogt starring. The whole thing looks very minimal sleek, it’s all black and white with striking photography throughout from Veryan. There’s a nice little behind the curtain section where she explains how she created the tracks that go with the issue and she catches us up on activity from her studio.
SOUND FOR POUNDS
Last but not least, my old friends over at Electronic Sound had a stock take recently during which they’ve unearthed some old school gems. Well, they’re gems in my eyes because I was at the helm for them. They’ve found some copies of Issue 83, which they’re knocking out for a tenner. The issue celebrates 50 years of the Minimoog and comes with a reissue of the synth’s 1971 demo disc. The main piece is by Bob Moog biographer Albert Glinsky, who is a total gent. Loved dealing with him. Best of all though is they’ve found some copies of Issue 80, which remains one of my absolute favourites. It’s a mag-only deal, but you can bag it for a mere £4. I mean, what else this good can you buy for four quid these days? The cover feature takes a long, hard look at the ‘Drive’ soundtrack. It’s one of those proper labour of love pieces – you can often tell which ones they are because I’ll have written at least some of it. Here I interviewed the film’s editor, Matthew Newman, whose iTunes library was the inspiration for the stunning soundtrack. We also had chats with Johnny Jewel, College and Electric Youth. It’s one of those ideas that we just ran with and it turned out very nicely indeed. A brilliant issue even if I do say so myself. Hurry, these mags will be around in very limited numbers and at those prices they’ll be gone in a blink.
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The current issue of MOONBUILDING is full to the gills with the good stuff. On the cover, star-in-the-making Maria Uzor, we profile label-of-the-moment quiet details, there’s an incredible interview with Captain Star creator Steven Appleby, and Ghost Box’s Jim Jupp gets busy with our There’s A First Time For Everything questions.
We review a big pile of releases from labels including Castles In Space, Woodford Halse, Persistence Of Sound, Assai, Ahora, DiN, Werra Foxma, Ghost Box and many more. There’s a column from The Orb’s Alex Paterson and the world-famous Captain Star cartoon strip.
This issue’s CD is ‘The Moonbuilding Miscellany – Volume One’, which is put together by CiS supremo Colin Morrison. It’s a belter featuring tracks from the likes of Lo Five, Lone Bison, Twilight Sequence, Ojn, NCHX and more.
Moonbuilding Weekly is a Castles In Space publication.
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