Issue 28b / 26 July 2024
Your essential DIY electronic music bulletin... Track Of The Week: Photay + new release round-up starring Charlotte Keeffe, Rjania, Poppy H, Associated Sine Tone Services and more...
Did you know that the brand-new issue of Moonbuilding, Issue 5, is out today? Have we mentioned it? Ha. Yup, the print version of all this, a lovely 48-page A5 zine full of interviews, reviews, release rounds ups, is out now at moonbuilding.bandcamp.com. In this morning’s mailout we whetted the appetite with an extract from the cover feature where Stephen Buckley talks about his formative influences, his alt rock past and how he morphed into Polypores. You can find that here… moonbuilding.substack.com/p/issue-28a-26-july-2024
Have a lovely weekend. Don’t forget to pick up the new issue of Moonbuilding, it’s selling fast, not sure it’s going to be round for long. moonbuilding.bandcamp.com, tell your friends. All of them.
Neil Mason, editor
moonbuildingmag@gmail.com
Issue 28 Playlist: bndcmpr.co/a60ef5da
The Moonbuilding tip jar: ko-fi.com/moonbuilding
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PHOTAY ‘Derecho’ (Mexican Summer)
Photo: Carson Davis Brown
Photay has a new album, his fifth, landing this autumn. Los Angeles-based producer Evan Shornstein is something of a musical butterfly, mixing and matching his sound to whatever mood takes him over the last decade or so, be it folk jazz, IDM, electronic pop or dancefloor-skirting disco/house. His people say it is all brought together by “a shared sonic warmth”, which is true. Some people just make “warm” music. Photay is one. His people go on to say that “whatever category he engages, Photay makes outdoor music under the spell of the elements”. While I think this is metaphorical, he gets quite actual here for his new record ‘Windswept’, which is “about wind”. I’m sure they probably meant it’s about “the wind”. An album about wind would be quite odd. Didn’t Matthew Herbert cover wind in his bodily noises opus ‘A Nude’? An extraordinary record for so many reasons.
Anyway, I digress. When don’t I? ‘Windswept’ is a wonderful record, full of that aforementioned sonic warmth, more about that nearer release. The lead track, ‘Derecho’ gives you a good flavour of what to expect. Or it’s a ballpark at least. This is Photay after all. The first track comes on like wonky Kraftwerk, it has that same melodic bassline chime, not to mention a rather lovely windchime solo. There’s not nearly enough windchime solos in music these days is there?
‘Windswept’ is released by Mexican Summer on 20 September
Got an upcoming release? We’re all ears. Find us at moonbuildingmag@gmail.com
Words: Neil Mason
GOOD STUFF #1
LUDDITE 4: The Music Liberation Front Sweden (Luddite Tapes)
A new release from the fantastic Luddite Tapes. Bring it on. Like the other three outings on this mighty fine label, it’s all about home-dubbed tapes recorded only with equipment available in 1983 or before. And that includes the artwork. I don’t like to ask too many questions about the people behind these releases, I very much like the idea that an old tape has come to light, or that a new tape has come to light using old kit. There’s a great statement comes with this one. “We always tried to stay under all radars mainly because we loved to take party drugs and realised we could ruin our lives if our ‘lower’ middle class asses got nicked. We had good jobs, good drugs and made good music and didn’t need fame or all that shit.” The accompanying four-tracker sounds great, the sort of thing you’d have seen live as the support act and been blown away. ‘I Know You’re Better Than Me’ is a proper racketous belter. It has a touch of The Lo-Fidelity Allstars to it, except The Music Liberation Front Sweden did it first no doubt! There’s a proper driving rhythm, drum machine bashing away, distorted vocals, misfiring synths, live bass, really melodic and over seven minutes long. This is great. Love it.
GOOD STUFF #2
CHARLOTTE KEEFFE ‘Sound Brush & Shell Mobile’ (Mortality Tables)
Season Three of Mortality Tables’ LIFEFILES “creative exchange” series is upon us. If you’re playing catch-up you can read an in-depth interview with the label’s Mat Smith in the new issue Moonbuilding… which is out today. Have we mentioned it? So the label’s LIFEFILES series involves artists working with field recordings made by Mat and creating something new. LF21 stars improv trumpet player Charlotte Keeffe using a source recording of a shell mobile made in a Penzance B&B on 6 May 2023. It is short and sweet, lasting just over a minute, and sounds like her and her trumpet are coming in to land. But there’s more, it comes with the ‘Simon Fisher Turner Subway Remix’ where the ever-inventive SFT takes the recording on a ride underground. Trains pulling into stations, Tannoy announcements, the full nine yards.
GOOD STUFF #3
RJANIA ‘Rjania’ (Moolakii Club Audio Interface)
Coming out of a Wirral bedroom, Rjania makes “electro-ambient soundtracks to a Utopian sci-fi dreamscape”. They also name check synthwave, Eno and Vangelis. Which is all rather interesting as what you’re told and what you receive here are two different things, to my ears anyway. Rjania makes music not much like their stated influences. Which is great. Describing your own music must be a tricky business, everyone is a sum of their parts, of the multitude of outside factors that seep in, and it’s always massively useful for people like me to be able to soak this up too. I really love stuff that stops me in my tracks, makes me listen, and this does that. If you’re not paying attention, it’s like there’s two things playing at once in places. There’s also a lot of guitar, shoegaze style. The wonderful ‘Discovering Exoplanets’ takes a rattling drum machine pattern and sits it behind a looping melody as a swell of sound then builds and builds. It’s almost early New Order-y if they were just Bernard and machines in his bedroom. There’s lots of tsk-tsk drum machines here, but they sit back letting washes of sound and the melodies, the arpeggios take over. The lovely ‘Keystone’ is a great example. I’ve always got my eye on longer tracks, here it’s the seven-and-half-minute ‘Soaring Temperatures’, which gets proper shoegaze with guitars chorused to heck shimmering away like a mirrorball. This is terrific stuff. Oh, there’s a listening party over on their Bandcamp tonight at 8pm.
moolakiiclubaudiointerface.bandcamp.com
GOOD STUFF #4
POPPY H ‘Good Hiding’ (Adventurous Music)
I’ve been keen on the work of Poppy H for a while. Their thing is using a smartphone as both mic and mixing desk, “collaging live compositions, improvisations and field recordings at home and on the move”. It’s been called smartphone concrète, which I rather like. This new offering is all about ambiguity, which is apt when the artist is referred to as “he” throughout the sleevenotes by my old pal Spenser Tomson. A boy called Poppy, why not? This is 2024 after all. Nothing surprises. ‘Good Hiding’ is accomplished stuff, almost post-classical in places, like the opener ‘Lies Here v4’ and the string-soaked ‘dIRT hEAVEN’. Throughout, it’s delightfully experimental without being overly out there, like on ‘Todemons’, a dream-like spooker of a track and the rattling rhythms of ‘This FMS for MFS’ that sounds like it could be the theme to an off-world news programme. It’s out on the rather stylish German not-for-profit label Adventurous Music who don’t do physical releases, but this is comes as a 12-part postcard set specially commissioned from visual artist Meneh Peh.
GOOD STUFF #5
ASSOCIATED SINE TONE SERVICES ‘Associated Sine Tone Services’ (Machinefabriek)
Great name. This eponymous album sees the Montereal-based duo of Jeremy Young and Nicolas Bernie hook up with Netherlander Rutger Zuydervelt for an album recorded entirely using “sine wave oscillators, electronic filers, stacks and processing”. You’d like to see their studios, right? Jeremy Young would offer up “a bouquet of material” as starting points and each track would “coalesce around the vision and momentum of one of the members individually, creating pocket productions that make the album in full”. Pocket productions! Love that. There is, funnily enough, an almost dance-y edge to some of these pieces. ‘001000’ is a killer floorfiller in waiting, if only oscillators did drum machines, while ‘000600’ has the Tina Weymouth throb of ‘Psycho Killer’, which is hard to get your head round and utterly brilliant when you hear it. Very cool artwork too.
flagdayrecordings.bandcamp.com
THE ROUND UP’S ROUND UP
I’m always slightly bamboozled by the releases coming out of Bath’s Institute For Alien Research label. Their Bandcamp page doesn't help with my bafflement. They release a lot of various artist collections under various titles. A lot. I’ve mentioned their ‘Audio Report’ collections before, but there’s also 23 volumes of ‘Collage Music’, there’s ‘Concrète Poetry’, ‘Nocturnal Emmissions’… their 28th release of the year is ‘Éliane Radigue 4’, a fourth collection named after the pioneering French electronic music composer. There’s never any kind of notes with these releases so I’d guess that the tracks here are all compositions inspired by the great Radigue, who at a mere 92 years old is still working. There’s lots of drones, including Fiver’s Stereo’s ‘Radigue Drone’, which is quite a literal title. To add further to my headscratching, of the 15 contributors I’ve heard of non of them, which is always a good thing. Every day is a school day and all that. This is the sort of thing I like to have on as I potter around first thing. There is a lot of it to choose from here.
ifarmusiqueconcretecompilation.bandcamp.com
Debris Discs’ pop-fuelled ‘Post War Plans’ album from last year was a real winner so this reimagining of five of the tracks as ‘Post War Live’ is very welcome. From his base up in High Peak in Derbyshire, Debris Discs’ James Eary has taken the original versions and stripped them back so they’re not only more electronic sounding, but also rearranged so he could play them live. Which really wasn’t the plan for Debris Discs. James had played in bands for decades, and “lugging gear around for miles only to play to a handful of people in a rundown bar at 11pm on a Monday night had somewhat lost its appeal”. What changed was the interest in his album from Analogue Trash. You can read more about the process of turning his studio output into a live project over at his Bandcamp page. These new “live” versions are really good. He’s a very accomplished songwriter and ‘The Worst Sight That I’ve Seen So Far’ now has a kind of ‘Tango In The Night’ era Fleetwood Mac swing about it, while ‘Beat Your Neighbour Out Of Doors’ has such a great intro, the sort of thing that would have early OMD nodding approval. It’s all most enjoyable I have to say.
debrisdiscs.bandcamp.com
The last one for today is ‘-͟͟͞☆’ by Oundviklight ∞ (Bogus Collective). You wouldn’t believe the bother formatting that has given me. So I’ve come across Bogus Collective before, they’re a net-based vapourwave label from Savusavu in Fiji who release new albums every Monday and Friday. Which makes our friends at Institute For Alien Research look tardy. There is, at last count, 855 releases and it looks to me that you can buy the entire digital discography for $6. Which is bonkers. over 800 releases for $6? Who doesn’t like a bit of vapourwave? Or a lot. I was drawn to ‘-͟͟͞☆’ by the sleeve, a sombre sky with a distant row of people lugging something across a landscape, like something Anton Corbijn might have captured. The album consists of 35 tracks that vary from 11 seconds to to 15 minutes. Bit of a Sweden theme to this mailout out it would seem, we started with The Music Liberation Front Sweden and Oundviklight ∞ looks to be the work of Swedish producer Memory Keeper 7 who has stitched together snips raided from Swedish TV, most likely from old VHS tapes, theme tunes, idents, adverts and the like, and then squashed, squeezed, stretched and generally messed with them. Play it on shuffle for the “full experience”. There is a “full album” version, but where’s the fun in that?
boguscollective.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
Thanks for the support as always Mat
Double Moonbuilding day! Great read Neil and thanks for reviewing the new Luddite tape x