Issue 29b / 2 August 2024
Your essential DIY electronic music bulletin... Track Of The Week: Goat + Good Stuff release round-up starring Simon Fisher Turner, Sculpture, Lisa Bella Donna, James Bernard, Loula Yorke and more...
Did you catch this morning’s Book Of The Week special starring Justin Patrick Moore’s ‘The Radio Phonics Laboratory’? You can catch up here…
moonbuilding.substack.com/p/issue-29a-2-august-2024
An edited version of our interview with the author appears in the brand-new issue of Moonbuilding, which is out now. Have we mentioned it? Ha! The print version of all this, a lovely 48-page A5 zine full of interviews, reviews, release rounds ups, is available right now at… moonbuilding.bandcamp.com
Have a lovely weekend. Oh and if you haven’t already, don’t forget to pick up the new issue of Moonbuilding, it’s selling fast, Bandcamp chart-topping fast. Tell your friends. I know you told them all last week. Tell them again.
Neil Mason, editor
moonbuildingmag@gmail.com
Issue 29 Playlist: bndcmpr.co/cb0ebdff
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GOAT ‘Ouroboros’ (Rocket Recordings)
There’s something in the air at Rocket Recordings. I think this might be the third time they’ve appeared in Track Of The Week. The first fruit from the new album by Gothenburg’s Goat is a proper cracker. Taken from their eponymous new album due out on 11 October, the single ‘Ouroboros’ is, explain the band, “the cycle of rebirth means the refinement of the soul. An evolution in which we slowly find our direction. Our own rhythm”. Yup. No idea either. But the track does very much have its own rhythm. The Ouroboros is the symbol of the snake or dragon eating its own tail, which means all sorts apparently, chief among the symbolism is the endless cycle of birth and death that characterise life on our planet. And musically it’s a strong hint as what to expect from this mysterious outfit when the album lands in the autumn. There’s talk from their people of “summoning rhythmically-driven rituals”, “igniting dancefloors” and “expanding minds”. So that’ll be business as usual from Goat then.
‘Goat’ is released by Rocket Recordings on 11 October
Got an upcoming release? We’re all ears. Find us at moonbuildingmag@gmail.com
Words: Neil Mason
GOOD STUFF #1
SIMON FISCHER TURNER ‘Instability Of The Signal’ (Mute)
He’s a fascinating creature is SFT. Typically, there is a lot going on with this new album, not least he’s singing on one of his own records for the first time in donkey’s. The record captures the four strands of his “sonic experimentation” – slivers, sounds, strings and singing. The slivers are the source material he used for the record, little snippets created by David Padbury who you may know as Salford Electronics. SFT then worked those into the foundations of entire tracks, augmented by piano, a detuned Fender Tele and a whole raft of field recordings, which is the sounds. The strings come from the excellent Elysian Collective. And the singing? “I was making these tracks with Padbury’s slivers one day, and then the penny just dropped,” says SFT. “I just knew I wanted to sing over them, to use my voice again.” Drawing on a lifetime of experience, it’s such a gentle shimmery record. The lyrics come cut-up style from a couple of Pinter poems and a book on the Czech filmmakers Breda Beban and Hrvoje Horvatic along with memories pulled from SFT’s own diaries. Like I said, lots going on, but it’s beautifully done. His people sum it up nicely. “A document of times and places delivered in beautifully impressionistic palettes of sounds and voices”. One of those records you’ll revisit and revisit listening for what is hidden within. “I'm now a 69-year-old man,” offers SFT, “and by hook or by crook, and some good luck, this album has turned into something which really sounds like me.” You know, it does. It really does.
simonfisherturner.bandcamp.com
GOOD STUFF #2
SCULPTURE ‘Max Ax’ (Psyche Tropes/LTR)
That Sculpture, Dan Hayhurst and Reuben Sutherland’s excellent a/v collaboration, returns with a record released on a 10-inch zoetrope disc should come as little surprise. Of course, with an a/v project having the audio and the visual is key to your enjoyment and I can fully recommend catching Sculpture live, but the recordings on their own more than stand up. It’s always really interesting to read accompanying notes on Bandcamp, some people are better than others at it. Whoever is writing Sculpture’s needs a round of applause. They called Dan’s music his “signature junk pop gnarl” and talk about “chewed tape loop psychedelia”, “cassette deck melancholia” and “disintegrating chamber pop”. Love that. It’s exactly right. ‘Max Ax’ veers from the wonky techno of ‘Cross Processor’ and the noise art of ‘Your Security Code’ to the misfiring ambient drift (with bells on) of ‘Chromophoria’. Favourite track at the moment is ‘Repo’, which sounds like an alien transmission of ‘Once In A Lifetime’. It says here that ‘Max Ax’ is “Sculpture’s most direct and focused transmission yet”. I think they might be right.
GOOD STUFF #3
LISA BELLA DONNA ‘Hysteresis’ (Appalachian Recordings)
So there we were last weekend, minding our own business when we landed up topping the Bandcamp Discover bestseller list. We even got a shoutout from Bandcamp HQ on Twitter or whatever it’s called, which made our day. I tell you all this because right alongside us over the weekend was Lisa Bella Donna’s new album ‘Hysteresis’. It cracks along with her usual delightful verve and vigour. She’s a fascinating artist is Lisa, there’s an excellent interview with her over at Headphone Commute from late last year that lifts the lid on her early adventures in recording, right up to the current day where she talks about her incredible studio set up and offers up some photos which are worth seeing. One of the key moments in her early composing days was when someone lent her a copy of Weather Report’s ‘Heavy Weather’. I’ve talked before about the various key influences of electronic artists and how a lot of them are the same (Kraftwerk, ‘Doctor Who’, etc). Weather Report are a name that increasingly comes up. I know that 808 State’s Graham Massey cites them a massive influence. Of course, the other thing is that Lisa is based in Asheville, North Carolina, which has been the epicentre of all things Moog since the 70s. That sort of thing rubs off you know.
GOOD STUFF 4(a)
JAMES BERNARD ‘Only Now’ (quiet details)
There’s a lot of Stateside ambient action this week. And some trans-Atlantic cross-pollination too. LA-based James Bernard is one of contemporary ambient music’s foremost practitioners and a regular on Past In The Present label. He is also the husband of Moonbuilding fave Cynthia Bernard/Marine Eyes, which doubly puts him in our good books. Here he lands on the ever-brilliant quiet details with ‘Only Now’, which the label describe as “a constant flow of meditative calm, realised in the most gorgeous way by a master of his craft”. Indeed.
GOOD STUFF #4(b)
ANGELA WINTER AND ZAKE ‘Mid Sky’ (Past Inside the Present)
And talking of PITP, which we seem to do with an almost alarming regularity, the label serves up a collaborative outing from the big chief zakè and vocalist Angela Winter. ‘Mid Sky’ is the product of “a patient exchange of ideas and arrangements over the course of more than a year” and you can tell it’s a piece of work that has been pored over. Here zakè’s brew of sweeps and drones and field recordings mix seamlessly with Angela’s otherworldy voice. She talks of working quickly and intuitively and once her myriad of voices are recorded she shifts to “a subtractive, sculptural approach for edits” where she listens deeply until she hears “angels in the mix”. Goodness, they’re here. While it’s not really fair to talk Cocteau Twins just because there’s a wordless vocal here, ‘Mid Sky’ does have that shimmer, it’s like the sound of the spaces between the grooves of their late 80s work, something like ‘Lazy Calm’ from ‘Victorialand’ or their Harold Budd collaborations.
GOOD STUFF #5
LOULA YORKE ‘August mixtape’
It’s August already. We know this because Loula Yorke has released her ‘August Mixtape’ (you should expect the aforementioned Cynthia Bernard to be serving up the latest installment in her ‘Women Of Ambient’ monthly mixtape any moment). We live in a time of such rich musical adventures and Loula’s monthly mixtape, like everything she’s done this year, just leaps out. She calls them “40-minute psychedelic audio offerings” and they’re a collage of original material created “fresh every month from field recordings, voice notes and unreleased synth-heavy ear candy”. On top of that, each piece comes with very detailed liner notes, which are just as wonderful as the music itself. For this installment, Loula has been to a wedding and the tape beams with the joy that sort of celebration brings. “One of the brides arrives by sea, floating across the bay on an inflatable swan,” say her notes. “The assembled company is gathered at what remains of the pier to greet her. By Monday, the scene is being reported at the school gates 17 miles away. ‘That must have been what my sister saw!’. This is how legends are made.” The mixtape costs £2. It’s a very small price to pay and it helps support a brilliant artist doing what she does best.
loulayorke.bandcamp.com
THE ROUND UP’S ROUND UP
In further adventures of tangled webs, Brad Deschamps’ anthéne has collaborated and released work on Past Inside The Present, but it’s rather apt that he is releasing his new one, ‘cloudburst’, on Home Normal, because as he points out, during the making of it his home was anything but normal. “My family was temporarily living in an apartment while we were doing some work on our house, so I set up a small studio and did my best to be creative,” he writes. “There was a lot of stress due to our housing situation, and some extra anxiety with other things happening in our lives. Working on this album was a nice distraction and I’m very happy with how it turned out.” It is, as you’d expect from anthéne and indeed Home Normal super chilled out. ‘Deeper In The Valley’ is a total whisper of a song, one of those if you opened the window on a noisy day you’d be closing that window again pretty soon.
homenormal.bandcamp.com
The Lincolnshire-based whitelabrecs aren’t messing around on the release front with this ambient triple threat. Big chillout vibes in the newsletter this week, eh? Glåsbird’s ‘A Sonic Expedition’ is a special limited edition compilation release of composer Harry Towell’s eight album travelogue of the same name. Yup, that’s right, eight albums where he explores the world, from the North Pole to the South Pole from the comfort of his recording studio. Circa Alto’s ‘Faint Structures’ finds Copenhagen-based Mathias Lystbæk “getting across the calm and unhurried sensations felt when it was created”. It is an incredibly calm piece of work with each piece coming from no more than two core sound sources. For opener ‘Reeds’ that would be “clarinet and lightbulb”. Daou’s ‘Bluebird’ comes from Paris-based architect, musician and multidisciplinary artist Georges Daou who brings us a journey into his sound. It is, he says, a reaction to a (very) short story on his Bandcamp page about someone who is stuck in the past, “filled with nostalgia and longing for the much simpler days of old”. Hands up if that’s you. Yup, most of us then.
whitelabrecs.bandcamp.com
I had a lovely email this week from See Blue Audio in Barcelona. The joy of doing this is that you can’t possibly cover everything and because of that labels new to you pop up all the time. See Blue Audio has been around for four years and doing sterling work. Matthew from the label describes their policy as “ambient / electronic / beatless / cinematic / downtempo / eclectic / introspective… shade rather than light”, which isn’t too snappy, but it is right up our street. Two recent releases to flag up for your listening pleasure. The label’s 52nd release, ‘A World Within Our World’ by f5point6, the London-based multidisciplinary artist R Cleveland Aaron, and ‘Mutual Expression’ which sees West Yorkshire-based electronic musician Rhombus Index join forces with f5point6. Both come as limited edition cassettes and both are made for the sort of open-windowed weather the UK has been enjoying of late.
seeblueaudio.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.
If you’d like an extract from our Polypores cover feature interview where Stephen Buckley talks about his formative influences, which probably aren’t what you’d image, you can do that here… moonbuilding.substack.com/p/issue-28a-26-july-2024
Elsewhere in the new issue, 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 not only sharing james’ new one, but for the shout as well 💜💫
thanks for mentioning qd21 james bernard, great edition 🙏💜