Issue 23b / 21 June 2024
In part two of your essential DIY electronic music bulletin... Track Of The Week: Aphex Twin + Good Stuff round-up with Kate Carr, Loula Yorke, Moon Diagrams + Tom Sheehan Radiohead photo book + more
Previously on Moonbuilding Weekly… In this morning’s issue we had a chunky review of Field Lines Cartographer’s new album, ‘Portable Reality Generator’ as well as a great chat with FLC’s Mark Burford. Read all about it…
moonbuilding.substack.com/p/issue-23a-21-june-2024
This week’s new release round-up features a bunch of albums that could all have been our Album Of The Week such is the quality of the music doing the rounds at the moment. These are golden times my friends.
Thanks for reading.
Neil Mason, editor
moonbuildingmag@gmail.com
Issue 23 Playlist: bndcmpr.co/bf6cdd71
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APHEX TWIN ‘#19’ (Warp)
News arrived this week that Warp are reissuing Aphex Twin’s ‘Selected Ambient Works Volume II’ in the autumn to mark its 30th anniversary. I’ve been on a bit of an Aphex kick recently for reasons that will become clear at some point and as a result I’ve been listening to ‘SAW II’ quite a lot of late.
It was a record that divided opinion when it was released in 1994. He was a man who divided opinion and whatever he released to follow up ‘Selected Ambient Works 1985-92’ was going to take some sticks. Reading the reviews at the time, ‘SAW II’ was either the greatest ambient record of all-time or a bit lame, depending. The biggest beef was where were the beats? His answer seemed to be drill ’n’ bass, which for some was waaaaay too many beats. He couldn’t win.
Anyway, listening to ‘SAW II’ now you can hear why it became the blueprint for so much ambient music that followed. So much so that it sounds normal today. Its influence has kind of overtaken it.
It’s going to be a welcome reissue as the secondhand prices for the original vinyl have been eyewatering for a while. This new version comes as 3xCD, 2xcassette and 4xLP and include all the tracks from the various 1994 formats in one place for the first time. ‘#19’, which hit the internet this week, was previously vinyl-only. There’s also two unreleased tracks from the time, ‘th1 [evnslower]’ and ‘Rhubarb Orc. 19.53 Rev’, although Aphex could well have knocked them out last week. Who knows?
That new vinyl set seems like something of a snip at £50, but there is a deluxe boxset edition that’s a much more wallet-emptying £300. ‘Selected Ambient Works Volume II (Expanded Edition)’ is released by Warp on 4 October.
Got an upcoming release? We’re all ears. Find us at moonbuildingmag@gmail.com
Words: Neil Mason
GOOD STUFF #1
KATE CARR ‘Midsummer, London’ (Persistence Of Sound)
Iain Chambers’ Persistence Of Sound label has been quite for a little while. There was a Beatriz Ferreyra/Natasha Barrett splitty last autumn, so what’s that? Eight months ago? That’s quiet round here. Anyway, the label is back in action with a new record by Kate Carr, one of our finest field recordist, which was created on a journey across London on last year’s Summer Solstice, 21 June. ‘Midsummer, London’ is one continuous piece of work, but with named sections. Boy does it have named sections. ‘A Strangely located cafe, echoes of St Paul’s and a drain that drew breath as I journeyed into Blackfriars’, ‘The bins being emptied somewhere near Twickenham’ and ‘Walking down to the Thames at Woolwich I banged some guard rails, thought about a recordings of another station piano’ are just some of the belting titles onboard. The piece itself is great, it’s a “sonic transect”, work that traces sounds along an axis, in this case the Thames as it moves from west to east. It’s not all field recordings, there’s a musicality in the shape of a whole ambient suite here sat underneath the clanking of buses, the emptying of bins, the distant chatter of human voices and the occasional playing of station pianos. It’s a wonderful listen, especially with headphones on.
persistenceofsound.bandcamp.com
GOOD STUFF #2
LOULA YORKE ‘Speak, Thou Vast And Venerable Head’ (quiet details)
Top of my listening pile lately has been Loula’s June mixtape, a 60-minute journey constructed from scratch using field recordings, voice notes and “synth-heavy ear candy”. It’s really great stuff. And here she comes again. It’s perhaps no surprise to find her on the excellent quiet details release schedule. So much fine work is to be found in her contribution to the continuing series of releases where artist's provide their own interpretation of the label’s name. ‘Monolith Undertow’, a 13-minute+ growler that is really quite dark for Loula, sees her dance music background rear its head with some delicious squelching. Have to say I’m enjoying these lengthier cuts, the Field Lines Cartographer album has three tracks in double figures. Here there’s two with another couple in the eight/nine minute region. I like how immersed you get in tracks like that. ‘Matter Tells Spacetime How To Curve’ is a classic Loula title and it’s another brilliant track. I won’t spoil it for you, but you do need to give it a listen. It does something unexpected that stopped me in my tracks. quiet details eh? The hits keep on coming.
GOOD STUFF #3
VARIOUS ARTISTS ‘Solstice 24’ (SubExotic)
Dan Saville’s SubExotic label celebrates the longest day (yesterday if you’re reading this on Friday, last week if you’re reading next week, etc) with a midsummer compilation of solstice electronics. The label has done this before, but not since 2021. Not quite sure why this isn’t an annual event such is the strength of the line up. Maybe Dan’s aiming at every four years like a football tournament. Anyway, the line up here is indeed cracking and includes Ogle, Pulselovers, Giants Of Discovery, Onepointtwo, Cub\Cub, Swansither and more all ruminating on the theme of the longest day. Particularly good is Onepointtwo’s ‘Orthodox Particles Of An Earlier Stage’, which comes on like mid-period Cabaret Voltaire, Garden Gate’s beautiful skew-wiff pastoralisms of ‘Feldgeister (Field Spirits)’ that sound like they’re out of a David Lean film and ‘The Riser’ from Felix Machtelinckx that comes on like the funkiest garage band in the world.
GOOD STUFF #4
MOON DIAGRAMS ‘Cemetery Classics’ (Sonic Cathedral)
Moon Diagrams is a name you should know, but it’s been a while since we’ve heard anything from them. It’s the side-hustle of Deerhunter drummer Moses John Archuleta, a man who doesn’t half put the work into these releases. I loved the 2017 debut album ‘Lifetime Of Love’, which took him a mere decade to piece together. That’s a lot of love. For that one he used loops and textures from random secondhand LPs that he’d then re-record. Do give it a listen. For this, his first offering since the brilliantly titled ‘Trappy Bats’ mini-LP in 2019, he’s hooked up with old friend/producer-in-demand James Ford. “James and I had talked about industrial noise and the tape experiments going on in some Faust recordings and the rudimentary appeal of the first Daft Punk record. I was also thinking about massive sculpture – Richard Serra and stuff like that – and trying to create music that takes up space.” I mean who doesn’t want to hear a record that takes on board that kind of that stuff? Nowhere near as noisy as you might imagine, it’s rather beautiful in places. Tracks like ‘Mousetrap’, ‘Neptune’ and ‘Left Hand Of God’ are like the wonky soundtrack to your odder dreams and they’re interspersed with the trancey, repetitive beats of tracks like ‘Fifteen Shows At One Time’. Nice work.
GOOD STUFF #5
VARIOUS ARTISTS ‘The Engineer’ (Mortality Tables)
Mortality Tables released their latest album, ‘The Engineer’, on Father’s Day, which you will know was last Sunday. Too early to feature in last week’s newsletter because, well, it wasn’t released, and too late for this week’s newsletter because the limited edition cassette run is very much sold out. Of course. It is still very much worth mentioning though. The release features a short story called ‘The Engineer’, written by the label’s Mat Smith and based loosely on his dad, a mechanical engineer who worked for most of his life in a factory in Statford-Upon-Avon. The story is narrated by author, producer, playwright and poet Barney Ashton-Bullock. This being Mortality Tables that’s not the end of the, well, story. Nope. Mat then carved the tale into 30-second sections and asked a whole bunch of artists to create a sound response. Two and a half years in the making, the final piece is a 14-minute collage featuring 29 artists including Vince Clarke, Simon Fisher Turner, Audio Obscura, Dave Clarkson, Penelope Trappes, Fiona Soe Paing, Gareth Jones and many more. It is very good as we’ve come to expect from Mat and his label. The thought that goes into these things is almightily impressive. Mortality Tables has paused since the release of ‘The Engineer’ last weekend. I guess Mat needs a rest, but he does say the label looks forward to returning. And so do we.
GOOD STUFF #6
EMILIANA TORRINI ‘Miss Flower’ (Grönland)
I first wrote about Emiliana Torrini around the release of her ‘Love In The Time Of Science’ album in 1999, the year of the party. It was a Maker Breaker new artist feature and I think it might have even been her first piece of press. We lived near each other in east London and spent a lazy afternoon in a local park followed by the pub. She was great company - funny, smart, feisty, ambitious. Not that many people I interviewed from those days are still cutting it as musicians these days. Delighted that Emiliana is still around and better still is that I’m enjoying her work just as much. She has this wonderfully off-kilter approach to her music, which is no doubt helped by her Icelandic/Italian heritage. A heady brew, her work has a good mix of Italian class and leftfield Icelandic quirk. There’s always a good smattering of electronics too and there’s some great synth work here. The opener ‘Black Water’ is a dark, while the warm arpeggiating on ‘Love Poem’ sounds like she might be embracing a bit of modular synth, which would be good. Delighted to see this new record is being released by the brilliant Grönland label too.
GOOD STUFF #7
SWANSITHER ‘The Waken – Extended Edition’
Tom Kennedy self releases this fine album that first saw the light of day via Werra Foxma’s subscription club in May 2023. It’s a great record and one very personal to Tom. He runs a farm (among other things) and his right-hand man, friend and mentor was a chap called Pete Vallone, who tragically died of cancer in February 2022. A good enough reason to create a musical tribute you’d think. But there’s more. Five months after he died, Tom saw Pete walking down a lane near the farm. “It was definitely him,” says Tom. “I could tell from the filthy T shirt he always wore, but most of all from his very distinctive walk.” Tom says he saw Pete turn a corner and disappear out of sight. “I went down there pretty quick, and there was nobody around the farm at all. I mentioned this to his niece, whose daughter had also seen him, twice. And my sister-in-law had also seen him standing in a field.” Tom’s a pretty rational guy and knows what he saw even if he can’t explain it. Pete’s ghost hasn’t been seen since July 2022. “My feeling is that once we got the harvest in, he could finally rest,” believes Tom. So here’s Pete’s record, this time with bonus live tracks and a low relief sculpture for the front cover. Yup, you read that right, it has a sculpture made by Tom for the cover. Like ghosts, it’s not something you see every day either. Find out more about how he made the cover here.
THE ROUND UP’S ROUND UP
There’s a truism in the music world that good artists know other good artists. When MySpace was in its pomp and hoovering up bands like no tomorrow it was really interesting to see who artists listed as their friends. And their friends. And their friends. I discovered a lot of great new music that way. Alex Gold of quiet details fame put me onto Euan Alexander Millar-McMeeken’s ‘All The Weather Of The Human Heart’ (Sleep In The Fire), which is an excellent tip. It’s such a gentle whisper of a record, Euan’s voice is so delicate, it reminds me a little of Sparklehorse’s quieter moments in places. Lovely stuff. Great artwork too.
sleepinthefirerecords.bandcamp.com
Last year, The Twelve Hour Foundation created the original music for Mulgrave Audio’s debut audio drama ‘Simon Perkins’ Lurgy’. The tracks were beamed in with a heavy lick 1970s library music and the BBC Radiophonic Workshop’s work in the heyday of schools television and radio. On ‘Music For Modules – Themes From “Simon Perkins’ Lurgy”’ we find full-length versions of the four tracks used for the drama along with an audio ident and a new bonus track, ‘In The Pink’.
mulgraveaudio.bandcamp.com
Missed this last week, but it’s a proper curio by London-based multimedia artist Tame Lines masquerading here as Tam Lin. Cunning. ‘Bluelightnospaceflattime’ is on Kate Carr’s excellent Flaming Pines label. Anything she has a hand in is always worth investigating and this is no exception. It’s pretty out there – the gentle, softly spoken narrative isn’t exactly linear and even having listened to it several times and read the accompanying notes I’m still not entirely sure what it is. “Chat rooms, emojis, dreams, words and water, water and gloss and fizz and fuzz, glitches and loneliness. The smooth and not-so-smooth online spaces of despair and connection, and their reverberations or otherwise. This is the material Tam Lin has worked and reworked to produce ‘bluelightnospaceflattime’.” Probably best if make your own mind up. I do like the intense rhythms and industrial like noise of ‘Chat Bubbles / Ennervation’.
flamingpines.bandcamp.com
Finnish duo Pepe Deluxe have a new album, ‘Comix Sonix’, out on the the delightful Brighton-based Catskills label. Like their last album, 2021’s ‘Phantom Cabinet Vol 1’, this new outing continues their quest for discovering and using the world’s oldest and weirdest instruments. There’s a mammoth bone flute believed to date back to 40,000BC for starters, as well as American Airlines 747 flying coach lounge Wurlitzer. Come again? It seems that when the 747 first entered service they had upper deck cocktail lounges. Different airlines kitted them out in different ways, but American Airlines had piano bars, well, Wurlitzer bars. There’s some incredible photos online. Anyway, one of those Wurlitzers is on this record. It seems they weren’t alone in getting instruments air born. The airship Hindenburg apparently had a piano, which they are claiming features here “resurrected from the ashes with modern technology”.
pepedeluxe.bandcamp.com
Pianist, producer and sound engineer Jan Wagner is an interesting chap. He’s worked for Berlin’s Ostgut label, the city’s famous Berghain club and for the last decade with Hans Joachim Irmler at the legendary Faust Studio Scheer. Quite the pedigree. His latest solo album, ‘Energie Braucht Zeit’, has lots going on. The record comes out of the grief he felt after his mother died,. He talks about becoming increasingly interested in the background noise of the recordings and started to record the room rather than the instruments. “In the beginning,” he says, “I was using all these expensive mics, but eventually I recorded with my phone or MacBook”. The results are worth listening to with headphones on. The shimmery, prolonged reverb-y echo on ‘Overcome’, the gorgeous violin of Tobias Preisig on ‘Holy’ and the silky tones of spoken word artist Ain’t About Me on ‘Oblige’ are all a treat. A lovely record.
janwagner.bandcamp.com
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MAJOR TOM
A photographer I worked with on many occasions during my time at Melody Maker, Tom Sheehan is the absolute master. We did countless trips all over the place and if Tom was around, good fun was guaranteed. He had rules, which were important and were adhered to at all times. Like no drinking until the sun was over the yard arm. Except it was always over the yard arm somewhere and so it was pretty much always Tanqueray o’clock.
He’s worked in music photography all his life, starting out in-house for CBS records before becoming chief photographer at Melody Maker in 1978, spending the next two decades capturing the good, the great and Britpop bands.
‘Radiohead: Climbing Up The Walls’ (Welbeck) collects Tom’s images of, well, Radiohead who he shot on many occasions. The interesting thing with collections like this is that to us, now, the subject matter is instantly recognisable, but in these early sessions no one had a clue who they were. Tom started working with Radiohead in 1992 and the book spans the years up to 2003.
In the foreword, the band’s Ed O’Brien says that you realise as you get older that while success is a wonderful thing, it’s the way you get there, the journey, that counts. So we travel from Tom’s first encounter with band in Oxford in September 1992, through the ‘Pablo Honey’ campaign (their second single, ‘Anyone Can Play Guitar’, had Tom taking portraits of the band’s hands on a guitar, which was a classic music press literal idea – they are flipping lovely portraits though), various early trips to the States (Thom’s amazing bleach moptop period) right through ‘The Bends’ and into the wild ‘OK Computer’ everyone-goes-bananas-biggest-band-in-the-world years and finishes up with ‘Kid A’ in the early 00s.
Each session comes with notes from Tom giving you some context and there’s text throughout from Craig Mclean. I don’t know if it’s just my wishful thinking, but much of this work was shot on film. I like to think there is a quality to film, a depth and warmth that you can see here by the bucket-load. What you can also see in abundance is the power of working with someone who you trust. Tom shot the band repeatedly over this 10-year period and you can see how relaxed they are with him in this work.
Tom is a total master of his art and really knows how to compose and the images here are glorious. There’s an incredible black and white image he produced for Uncut in 2001 at his regular haunt of Holborn Studios just near Old Street. The band were fed up with doing sessions so Tom rattled off portraits in the corridor, “quick as you like” he writes. “And then worked on painstakingly comping them together to get a single portrait the old-fashioned way”. He built the image in the darkroom, focusing on each member in turn and producing the most incredible image. It must’ve taken him days.
All this and so much more is here. I’d love to see more books like this. I know how much work we got through each week at Melody Maker, covering countless bands with a large team of photographers. There must be some cracking books just waiting to pulled together.
Wellbeck / Moonbuilding book shop
MAKE A BEE LINE
Tim Spear from WHI Recordings has been in touch to let us know that there’s an electronic music night at The Bee’s Mouth in Hove this Sunday (23 June). Organised by Daniel Hignell-Tully from the Brighton-based Difficult Art And Music label, the line-up should be familiar to Moonbuilding Weekly readers. There’s four local acts lined up and it’s a pretty rich night of entertainment. The bill features Armatures, who is Preston Parris, the artist formerly known as Preson.Outatime, Distant Animals, which sees organiser Daniel taking to the stage, WHI Recordings bring Tim Spear’s own Secret Nuclear project to the table, while Brighton Ambients also make an appearance. They’re described as “illusive”, which is always a good thing. Go along, see who they are. Doors are at 7pm and tickets are a snip at £7.
A MESSAGE FROM THE MOTHERSHIP
MOONBUILDING ISSUE 4, £5 (+P&P). GRAB YOURS WHILE STOCKS LAST … MOONBUILDING.BANDCAMP.COM
The latest 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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thanks so much for the qd19 loula yorke mention, awesome edition as always 🙏💛