Issue 28a / 26 July 2024
Your essential DIY electronic music bulletin... It's a Moonbuilding Issue 5 publication day special! Read an extract from our Polypores cover feature right now...
Fanfare please. The brand-new issue of Moonbuilding, Issue 5, is out today. For those who don’t know, we do a print version of all this. It’s a lovely 48-page A5 zine full of interviews, reviews, release rounds ups and much more. Each issue includes a CD and this one comes with a entire new Polypores album.
If you’re enjoying Moonbuilding Weekly, the print version is essential. But we would say that wouldn’t we? Find us at moonbuilding.bandcamp.com.
Just to whet the appetite, we’ve got an extract from our Polypores cover feature interview where Stephen Buckley talks about his formative influences, which probably aren’t what you’d image. The rest of the interview is equally revealing, especially when he goes into detail about how, exactly, he makes one of his albums. He is a real treasure, one of the brightest musical minds and a real joy to spend time with. I hope you think so too.
We’ll be back this afternoon with our usual Track Of The Day and Good Stuff recommendations drawn from the latest new releases. I’d like to say it’ll be a Moonbuilding-free zone, but it’s highly unlikely.
Neil Mason, editor
moonbuildingmag@gmail.com
Issue 28 Playlist: See this afternoon’s mailout
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“It was Queen who made me want to make music”
In an extract from the Moonbuilding cover feature interview, Stephen James Buckley talks about his formative influences, his early alt rock recordings and what led him to morph into Polypores. The full interview appears in Issue 5 of Moonbuilding, which is out TODAY and available from moonbuilding.bandcamp.com
Stephen’s formative influences are much more interesting than most. When you’re talking to people who make electronic music, quite often, most of the time actually, the starting point is the same. There’s some sort of Kraftwerk influence incoming, either that or ‘Blade Runner’. But Stephen didn’t tread your usual path.
“It was Queen who made me want to make music, they made me want to be in a band,” he says. “I remember distinctly when it happened. It was the last year of primary school, so I was 10 or 11, and I had really serious salmonella poisoning so I was in hospital for a couple of weeks and my dad got me ‘Queen’s Greatest Flix’, which was the videos of their greatest hits.
“Actually seeing the performances, seeing what a drum kit looked like, seeing what a man in eyeliner and a leotard looked like, it blew my mind. That was what I wanted to do. I played drums for quite a long time and then I moved on to wanting to sing and play guitar and write my own songs.”
The thing was, while there was still a journey to go on to get him to Polypores, even by this point, even before he was in double figures, the electronic seed had already been sown.
“When I was seven or eight,” says Stephen, “if we drove anywhere I would insist that we had ‘War Of The Worlds’ on in the car. It captivated me like nothing else. I’ve always been fascinated by things that are a bit darker or a bit weirder. So the idea of unfriendly Martians invading…”
It has to be said, Jeff Wayne’s opus is an absolute stonker. It has it all.
“The music is fantastic,” Stephen continues. “You’ve got that combination of really great songwriting and fantastic 1970s production, which is somehow between prog and disco. It’s an exciting album, a bit ridiculous, a bit overblown, but I love that. So even though I can’t listen to my own music now and think, ‘Oh yeah, that sounds
like ‘War Of The Worlds’, it is a hugely formative influence. Everything goes in, it all feeds the machine. It all feeds the brain.”
You’d also be hard pushed to listen to his music today and say, “Oh yeah, sounds like he’s been feasting at the 90s alt rock trough”.
“I started doing sub-electronic stuff in around 2001. It was all very Nine Inch Nails, all very industrial goth. Someone had a CD they ripped of all my old stuff and they sent it to me recently. It’s unbearably cringey. After that I spent a good 10-15 years playing in bands and making a lot of music where I did everything myself – played drums, guitar, bass, singing, keyboards. I had a Bandcamp page that had more albums on than the Polypores page does.”
Which is a lot. I’ve tried to tally up how many releases bear the Polypores name. Discogs says there’s 66 albums alone.
“I’ve always been prolific in terms of writing and recording,” beams Stephen. So how did he make the transition from rock bands to Polypores? It would seem a leap by
anyone’s standards.
“Towards the end of 2014 I didn’t feel like I wanted to sing or write lyrics anymore,” he says. “I just felt like I wanted to express myself in a different way so I sacked off the singing and guitar-based music.”
Just like that? You woke up one morning and that was that?
“I’m quite resistant to change,” he offers, “but whenever I’ve made big changes in my life, when I know it’s got to happen, I’m suddenly like, ‘Right, this is it now. I’ve got to do it’. But I think with the music it was a more gradual process, it was more about growing up and feeling, I guess, mentally better, happier.”
So was there a lot of teenage angst? Did the music act as an outlet?
“Yeah, yeah, but I wasn’t a teenager,” he says. “I didn’t feel like I needed to express how sad I was in lyrics, but every so often I feel like I need to drastically change what I do, because I get bored easily. Even within Polypores the sound has changed quite a bit since the beginning. The difference is that it is by design, I wanted something where I could mould and change what I do within this framework, within this umbrella of Polypores.”
A lot of people make music for fun, as a distraction from the dreary day job, but talking to Stephen you increasingly get the feeling that there’s more to it for him, there’s a bigger reason for all this.
“I don’t think there’s anything I can necessarily pinpoint as I sat down and thought, ‘This is what I need to do and this is why’, but I know in my heart that I don’t feel right unless I’m creating and I’ve been like that since I was a kid. There’s always been a compulsion to create.”
Anyone who makes anything will recognise that restless need to be doing, to be making, to just keep on producing.
“I have a few ideas about why that is,” says Stephen. “It’s something that’s always been there. I feel at my best when I’m in the creative zone, when I’m not thinking, when I’m just making. I guess with Polypores I’ve found a way in which I can do that.”
Moonbuilding Issue 5 comes with a brand-new Polypores CD called ‘The Album I Would Have Released In An Alternate Universe’. It is out now and available from moonbuilding.bandcamp.com
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A MESSAGE FROM THE MOTHERSHIP
***THE NEW ISSUE OF MOONBUILDING IS OUT NOW***
Bloody hell! Will you look at that? The new issue of MOONBUILDING, Issue 5 for those of you who are counting, is here. Yes, we’ve taken our sweet time, but it is very much worth the wait.
On the cover, with another cracking illustration from the untouchable Nick Taylor, is the awesome Polypores. In our free-wheeling chat we get right under the hood of Stephen James Buckley’s musical operation, offer up a listening guide to help you safely navigate his extensive back catalogue and we also have an whole new Polypores album exclusively for you.
Yes, you read that right. We are giving you a freshly minted, not available anywhere else new album called ‘The Album I Would Have Released In An Alternate Universe’, which happens to be the sister recording to his forthcoming Castles In Space album ‘There Are Other Worlds’. Read all about it in the new issue where Stephen talks you though it track by track.
Elsewhere, there’s a profile of our new favourite label Mortality Tables, Pye Corner Audio 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, including Loula Yorke and Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan. There’s a column from The Orb’s Alex Paterson, which starts off about Jah Wobble and ends up about Andrew Weatherall, and an all-new instalment of the brilliant Captain Star cartoon strip.
We’ve gone book crazy of late and this issue features a shit-tonne of great book reviews (that’s great books, reviewed, rather than the reviews being great, although they are pretty good). There’s a cracking chat with Justin Patrick Moore, the author of ‘The Radio Phonic Laboratory’, and a bonus chinwag with the world’s finest music journalist, Mr Simon Reynolds.
You will be kicking yourself and quite hard if you miss out on this issue. The virtual shop doors are open now at moonbuilding.bandcamp.com for your purchasing pleasure. Don’t delay, this magazine ain’t going to buy itself. Call it scarcity marketing if you like, but snooze and you lose.
Moonbuilding Weekly is a Castles In Space publication.
Copyright © 2024 Moonbuilding
Welcome to our world, Stuart!
New subscriber. Buzzing to have found this. Ordered last two physical issues on Bandcamp. Can't wait to have my brain altered to reflect this new reality.