Issue 26 / 12 July 2024
Your essential DIY electronic music bulletin... Track Of The Week: Public Service Broadcasting + new release round-up... Plant43, Inquiri, Teeth Of The Sea + ‘Logo Rhythm' band logos book + more
Big news. Moonbuilding, the print version, rides again. Issue 5 is at the printers as I type. It’s been a while in the making, mainly because this weekly version is like some kind of time hoover. Set on max. It should’ve been the spring issue, but it’s now the summer version, but it is well worth the wait. The big chief at Castles In Space says it looks like the best issue yet. I think it might be. We will reveal all very soon. You’re not going to want to miss this one.
In other news, there’s going to be a bonus Album Of The Week edition next week. The summer schedule lasted an entire two weeks, but this is a pretty special release. There’s lots of revealing going on round here isn’t there. The cats will soon be out of the various bags. Until then, happy reading.
Neil Mason, editor
moonbuildingmag@gmail.com
Issue 26 Playlist: bndcmpr.co/7c8917c9
The Moonbuilding tip jar: ko-fi.com/moonbuilding
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PUBLIC SERVICE BROADCASTING ‘Electra’ (SO Recordings)
Photo: Alex Lake
Public Service Broadcasting revealed their fifth long-player this week. ‘The Last Flight’ is set for release on 4 October and tells the story of aviation pioneer Amelia Earhart’s final adventure. The first single, ‘Electra’, is classic PSB and comes with a brilliant video. “The song is about Amelia Earhart’s plane, the marvellously named Electra,” the band’s J Willgoose Esq told Steve Lamacq on his 6 Music show. “To match the name, the vibrancy and the excitement of the aircraft, the track is full of pulsing electronics and interlocking, percussive melody lines, plus pace.”
Who needs music journalists, eh? As always, it’s a thoughtful project with the band fully immersing themselves in the life of the remarkable Amelia Earhart. She was the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans and set many speed and distance records. In 1937 she headed out in her The Lockheed Model 10-E Electra to circumnavigating the globe. Along with navigator Fred Noonan, they’d crossed the Americas, Africa, the Middle East and Asia. On 2 July 1937 they left Lea in Papua New Guinea to fly to Howland Island in the Central Pacific Ocean, but didn’t arrive. Her plane has never been found, which has fueled much speculation as to what happened.
Like the single, the album is also prime PSB. More about that nearer its release.
Got an upcoming release? We’re all ears. Find us at moonbuildingmag@gmail.com
Words: Neil Mason
GOOD STUFF #1
PLANT43 ‘The Unfading Spark’ (quiet details)
quiet details, you spoil us. Last month it was the Loula Yorke album, this month it’s Emile Facey’s Plant43 in ambient mode. Swoon. Like his last long-player, which was a Moonbuilding Album Of The Week, ‘The Unfading Spark’ is influenced by Emile’s experiences at Berlin’s famous techno club, Tresor, where he is a resident.
A track like ‘Broken Through’ feels very Aphex, those warm, rolling bass notes picking out a delicious melody, while the tense rhythms, squelches and tippy-toes tune of ‘Outside Lines’ has a real dark edge to it. And I’m loving the sinister string sweeps of ‘Voices High Above’. It’s interesting that he uses beats too, not something you get a lot of on quiet details releases. But Emile has taken the idea of “quiet details” and very much made it his own, which is the whole point of this most brilliant label.
Alex from the label talks about the release saying that “the quiet moments are as important as the loud and Emile finds the spaces between in a way that everyone who has experienced such moments can relate to”. Totally does. You can hear how many of these tracks, like the ominous ‘Voices High Above’ could quickly become a techno floorfiller with a pounding beat onboard. Excellent stuff, but then when a label like qd meets an artist like Plant43 it was never going to be disappointing was it?
GOOD STUFF #2
INQUIRI 'See You Someday' (Past Inside The Present)
Here we go again with out Past Inside The Present love-in. Los Angeles-based Lacey Harris makes very large ambient music as Inquiri. The label say she “creates an emotional fantasia… a powerfully personal reckoning with grief, loss, and the complicated task of finding a place in the universe as an individual”. You know, all the big stuff. Opener ‘My Eyes Opened’ is a squall of strings repeating over and over with the ominous drone underneath sounding like waves rolling in on the shore. The thing that strikes you is the tracks here are crafted into song-length pieces, mostly around the four-five minute mark, which is unusual for this sort of thing.
The tracks feel weighty, ‘Be The Hero’ has the best shimmering intro and it lasts for the whole length of the track, Lacey’s distance vocal sounding no unlike Tracey Thorn. In fact, ‘Our Souls Kissed’ has a vocal guest in the shape of the brilliant marine eyes. The track itself grows and swells to a crescendo before tailing off, like climbing up a hill and then back down again. Excellent stuff as always from our friends at PITP… talking of which they’ve just released their mid-summer mix featuring artists who have appeared on the label so far this year. Featuring tracks from Inquiri, 36, Slow Dancing Society, ASC, marine eyes (her again!), Color Of Time and TR Jordan, it’s a beautiful 40-minute guide to this most excellent of labels.
GOOD STUFF #3
MOLLY NILSSON ‘Un-Amercian Activites’ (Night School)
Run by Michael Kasparis, who releases brilliantly bonkers records as Apostille, I can’t resist Glasgow’s Night School label. The last Apostille record, ‘Prisoners Of Love And Hate’, was great, he described it as “melodrama in the vein of Meat Loaf and Springsteen”. Imagine the bombast of either of those artists gone electronic pop. Yup. With that in mind, I’m not surprised that he has released a slew of albums by the Berlin-based Swede Molly Nilsson.
This, her 11th long-player, was written and recorded as part of an artist residency at the former home of Lion Feuchtwanger, who was declared an enemy of the state by the Nazi regime for his opposition to the National Socialist regime in 1930s Germany. For such heavy subject matter (lyrics on rave-y ‘The Communist Party’ come from a McCarthy-era anti-Communist pamphlet), the album is incredibly upbeat. It has a delightful 1980s synthpop sheen, sounding like she could’ve crashed the charts with pretty much any of the tracks here. ‘Red Telephone’ comes on like Bananarama meets ‘I Just Died In Your Arms Tonight’, while ‘The Beauty Of Duty’ is a proper EBM pounder. Enjoying this a lot.
GOOD STUFF #4
SHROPSHIRE NUMBER STATIONS ‘Recordings Of Covert Shortwave Radio Stations (Shropshire & Mid Wales)’ (Plenty Wenlock)
Details are important, right? This 19-track “five-inch white CDr” comes “in archival-quality 125mm x 125mm square 150 micron polythene sleeve, with hand-cut laser printed cover and insert slip”. It is the stuff that Moonbuilding Weekly was made for. Number stations are mysterious shortwave broadcasts of encrypted information, “messages, to those who know how to receive them, and are able decode them in their various forms and configurations”. Spy stuff basically. They’re often blips or beeps or a voice reeling off lists of numbers.
Here, captured by Plenty Wenlock’s Eric Loveland Heath, is a collection of covert number stations that he’s picked up in Shropshire & Mid Wales. It’s fascinating stuff. Anyone with even a passing interest will be used to the sounds of ‘Noise Station 2’, which is soothing muffle of white noise, or ‘Morse Station 1’, which is the dots and dashes of the famous code. The likes of ‘3577335’ where a voice says “3-5-7-7-3-3-5” over and over are perhaps the most famous form of number stations, but it’s things like ‘All Is Well’ that plays a melodic motif over and over, ‘Callow Melody Station’, which sounds like something from ‘Close Encounters’, and ‘5 Tone’ that the late, great Richard Kirk would have turned into an acid house banger back in the day, which truly baffle.
Number stations date back to at least World War I and were in their prime during The Cold War, but how many of these communications are regular folk adding to the noise? I guess we will never know. This is great stuff.
plentywenlockrecords.bandcamp.com
GOOD STUFF #5
TEETH OF THE SEA ‘Get With The Program EP’ (Rocket Recordings)
Taken from last year’s thrilling ‘Hive’ album, the release of an EP that zooms in on the standout synthy belter ‘Get With The Program’ is most welcome. It’s a bit of a clear the decks sort of the release as the band are “charging up their rocket engines for adventures anew” so this is seen as rounding off this chapter. As well as the album version of the lead track, a “noise-fuelled, speaker-shaking, electro-industrial banger”, there’s four mind-bending remixes of other album cuts. Regular Rocket collaborator Jamie Paton turns in two new versions of the epic nine-minute ‘Megafragma’, both shorter than the original, with the ‘Jamie Paton Remix’ imbibing it with four-to-the-floor “cosmic-disco effervescence” and his ‘Acid Atmos’ version really comes up trumps as he lashes it with some glorious early Josh Wink-like “acid-fried exuberance” that kicks down a gear and heads into Megadog-like head banger territory. J Zunz marries a no-nonsense driving motorik beat with deep dub stylings on ‘Æther’, while Goatfool from Goat turns ‘Liminal Kin’ into a rather frantic “percussion-driven rite of tension and release”. Can’t wait to see what’s next from TOTS.
THE ROUND UP’S ROUND UP
The ever-inventive experimental pianist Matthew Bourne releases ‘This Is Not For You’ (The Leaf Label), which finds him composing and performing in his living room under the instruction of his publisher to “not delete anything”. Matthew admits to usually deleting everything he doesn’t like almost immediately, but here he allows himself to ponder over the outtakes. I love how thinky Matthew is and there’s some great notes on his website’s blog that talk you through the album track by track. You do need to find your own way through as he explains little. Despite the album’s title, each track has a dedication, which is interesting. I do like people who still have blogs.
matthewbourne.bandcamp.com
You may know Shropshire-based outfit Thought Bubble from their ‘Weaving’ album on Woodford Halse or ‘Beguiled’ on Moolakii Club Audio Interface or you may know Nick Raybould and Chris Cordwell from their previous life as space rock outfit Glowpeople, who shared stages with the likes Nik Turner, Daevid Allen and assorted Ozrics and Hawkwind spin-offs. Which must’ve been great. For ‘Universe Zero’, their sixth LP as Thought Bubble, they’ve enlisted a vocalist, Peter Gelf, who brings a kind of Peter Gabriel meets ‘War Of The Worlds’ vibe. Listen to the seven-minute ‘Entropy’. See what I mean?
bubble.bandcamp.com
‘Audio Report A’, a various artists collection from Bath’s Institute For Alien Research label, caught my ear. There’s no information about it or any of the artists, which is very 1981. I know the label is home to Shaun Robert, who features here with the avant-garde sound piece, ‘Silence Is Dangerous In The Current Age Of Rising Fascism’ and a art-synth collaboration ‘Full Of Misophonias’ with Neil Campbell. All the tracks are a Cageian 4.33, but none of them are silent. They are however all experimental sound art, so not one for dinners parties really. Of the artists here I know of Lithuanian sound artist Gintas K and… erm… well, that’s it. But then digging around in this sort of stuff is how I like it. Especially like ‘DanzDas’ by Möwen Und Störche, which is actually very tuneful.
ifarmusiqueconcretecompilation.bandcamp.com
Also on a compilation tip, Dustopian Frequencies release the second of their ‘Arboribus’ collections that “focuses on the mythologies, folklore and legends surrounding trees”. Trees are pretty important, always good to celebrate them. Here the artists were invited to “realise in music an arboreal folklore of their choosing”. The always excellent Dave Clarkson features and his track, ‘Dark Hedges’, is quite dark and fairly hedgey, while you can imagine the wood nymphs gathering to the string-soaked ‘Closing The Circle’ from Order Of The Arcane. Available on tape, there aren’t many left so best make like someone with a tenner burning a hole in your pocket.
dustopianfrequencies.bandcamp.com
I missed Mark David Hadley’s ‘Modular One’ the other week. Easily done round here such is the volume of work being shovelled into the Moonbuilding boiler room. It is rather good and deserves mentioning. The story goes that a friend built Mark a small modular set-up to play around with. Having not used modular before he set to work, studiously documenting his adventures at whirrings.substack.com. “The album,” says Mark, “is a distillation of the music I produced… my first month of modular music.” It’s a great insight. You will no doubt be pleased to hear the experiment is still afoot over on his Substack where he continues to document his modular adventure. soundbymark.bandcamp.com
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ON YOUR MARKS, GET SET, LOGO
It’s funny how certain people seem to crop up again and again. Graphic design legend Malcolm Garrett crops up a lot. Which is fair enough. He’s great company, is a mine of information, a constant source of inspiration, has friends in high places and he’s created some show-stopping work along the way.
So before I’d even opened Jim K Davies and Jamie Ellul’s ‘Logo Rhythm – Band Logos that Rocked the World’ (Circa Press) I thought, ‘Oh, I hope Malcolm is in here’. He wrote the foreword, of course he did. His name continues to pop up, he’s on pages 6-7, 210-213, 220-223, 252-255 where he writes about his friend Jamie Reid’s Sex Pistols logo and talks about his own logos for Buzzcocks and Duran Duran.
But before you marvel at Malcolm’s dominance in logo world, the first thing that strikes you is the book is a great calling card for the nine-to-five skills of the authors. Jim K Davies is a copywriter, Jamie Ellul a designer – this thing has impact visually and it’s a great read.
It comes out of a blog that the pair launched in 2017. bandlogojukebox.com was a place where they could feed a “voracious interest in music and graphics”. They quickly discovered band logos were their sweet spot and they set about an A to Z, critiquing the logos and telling their tales with the help of fans, artists and designerly friends.
Of course, it wasn’t long before that needed turning into a book, “a book that properly celebrated these small pieces of history, preserving their origin stories for posterity”. Which as I keep saying is crucial. If people like this aren’t charting this kind of history, who is going to? If no one is doing it, all this sort of information will just be lost in the mists of time. And that won’t do.
‘Logo Rhythm’ really is a cracker. I’ve lost entire afternoons flicking through its pages, getting lost in the fascinating tales these instantly recognisable logos throw up. The book is broken down into decades spanning 1960s-2000s. I love the early logos, The Byrds, The Doors, The Monkees, they all seem from a different world, charmingly simple, but highly effective. The stories are good too. I had no idea The Beatles famous drop T logo was created by a music shop owner when Ringo Star wanted his band’s name painted on a bass drum head, or that the Motown stencil “M” is a straight lift from the experimental German typeface, Futura Black.
I really love the more contemporary logos, you know, the ones we painted on our school army surplus rucksacks. Telling their stories here you’ll find top TV commercial director Daniel Kleinman recalling how he created Adam Ant’s ant warrior logo, Fiona Skinner talks about creating an entire lino cut alphabet to achieve The The’s logo. There’s the story of Anthony Sweeney and Mark Bown’s “blobby and lava lampy” Chemical Brothers logo. The pair had a little design studio in Soho above the Heavenly Records office, which as young designers looking for work must’ve been like shooting fish in a barrel.
As always, I’ve spent good time in the extensive credits section and so have the authors. Everything is credited, every photo and photographer, every designer, every clipping, every sleeve, every pin badge, every piece of merch. Looks to me that even sourced some of the material… “Buzzcocks vintage pin badge eBay £5.99”.
This is a book that has been put together with a whole lot of love. You can see it and feel it on every page.
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.
Copyright © 2024 Moonbuilding
thanks for the mention of my collaborative song with Inquiri! great issue per usual! :)
Thank you ever so much for finding our Shropshire Number Stations release, massively appreciated.