Issue 3 / 2 February 2024
Electronic DIY goodness galore... Album Of The Week: David Best ‘Message – Send – Failure’ + interview + Bandcamp Friday round-up + Track Of The Week from The Utopia Strong + much more
Hello again. Everyone here? Looks like we’ve all made the seamless transition from January to February, which is always a good thing. It’ll soon be summer. No really.
You know when the mainstream pops its head up in your world? Well, that happened this week. There’s been a lot of talk recently about the demise of music journalism, again. It’s not dead, it’s just changing, but in the wake of Pitchfork being hoovered up by GQ there has been much gnashing of teeth. Oh, if you don’t know the story about Pitchfork and the pissing monkey, former NME editor Conor McNicholas did you a favour this week by retelling it here. Never grows tired.
But back to the mainstream rushing the show. Richard Osman and Marina Hyde had an interesting chat about why music journalism still matters on their very listenable ‘The Rest Is Entertainment’ podcast. Their point was that the machines are taking over, no two ways about it, especially when it comes to curation. “What you hope happens,” said Osman addressing the issue, “is that, as in the case of what’s happened with vinyl, there is an under-industry of hand-crafted things, of hand-written things, and things that are made by real human beings…”
Well. We have news. Already happening. And if DIY electronic music happens to be your bag, you are very much in the right place. Moonbuilding then – hand-crafted by real humans.
Neil Mason, editor
moonbuildingmag@gmail.com
DAVID BEST ‘Message – Send – Failure’ (In Suspended Animation)
He has a nice rumble about him does David Best. Lucky for him you’re probably thinking. Always good to have a nice rumble about you, right? So, erm, who is David Best? While you might not know the name you will almost certainly know his band, Fujiya & Miyagi, from where he has temporarily peeled off to provide this debut solo long-player.
It’s only taken him two decades and 10 albums with the band before attempting a project on his own (that said, there are plenty of frontpeople who haven’t even made one solo album. You can start at Bono and work backwards if you like). On the strength of this fruity debut you’d be right in asking why the long wait?
So anyway, as I was saying, ‘Message – Send – Failure’ has a nice rumble about it. It is a record that has real warmth. Where the introverted motorik funk of Fujiya & Miyagi is all about precision and exactness, David Best on his own is all about chance and spontaneity. “In a world where music has to shout to be heard, it just doesn’t care,” he explains of his work. “It exists purely for its own enjoyment.” And for ours.
You can put all that down to a number of factors. David says the album was made on an old Windows Vista PC, with no MIDI, in an attempt to “get away from the rigidity of life living on and in a grid”. And it does indeed have a free-form swing. It also helps that he has enlisted the production skills of Julian Tardo from fellow Brighton/Hovian outfit Insides. Simon Reynolds first coined the term “post-rock” in an interview with Insides for Melody Maker, so you know. Their 1993 debut album ‘Euphoria’, released on 4AD’s Guernica imprint no less, is an incredible record. All of which bodes well here.
To top it all off there’s David’s recent-ish interest “in the cavernous delays and echoes” of dub, which first popped up on the last F&M album, 2022’s ‘Slight Variations’. Here that raises its head most obviously on ‘Terms & Conditions’, where in a bid to try and mimic the Jamaican Toasters such as Big Youth & U-Roy, and in among the ska-like vocal skats and a laidback booming bassline, it all sort of comes on like Cabaret Voltaire meets Arthur Brown.
‘HD’ sounds very 80s, the sort of thing that’d have your ears prick up when it was a new entry at Number 14 and on ‘Top Of The Pops’. The spoken word ‘Protective White Light’ comes from a Twitter/X account called Rave Comments that posted messages left by people underneath old rave videos. “I initially thought the comments were funny,” offers David, “but the over arching feeling was people’s nostalgia for a time in their life devoid of responsibilities and how much they missed it.” It’s rather effective. There’s talk about Vauxhall Cavaliers and Granada estates and tweaking graphic equalisers. There’s big fish, little fish and yes, there’s some boxes in there too.
‘Message – Send – Failure’ is one of those records that builds towards a climax, getting better and better the deeper you go. I love the closing trio – the acid-like stabs of ‘10 Menus Deep’, the electro-ish ‘Instant Grat Track’ (great title) and closer ‘Old Romantic U’ carries a melody in the same way Edwyn Collins does. And what an outro.
So ‘Message – Send – Failure’ is good then? It is. Very good. Oh, and if you are halfway tempted by all this, do go for a vinyl copy, the first 100 come with a numbered, A4 collage by David himself. “Each one is different,” he says, “and probably a bit rubbish, but unique nonetheless.” I am the proud owner of the horse-tastic 27/100.
This is a proper DIY record doing its DIY thing beautifully. Brilliantly. This is exactly the sort of thing Moonbuilding is for. (NM)
‘Message – Send – Failure’ is out now via davidbest.bandcamp.com
VOLUME ONE>ISSUE THREE: DAVID BEST
You will know him as the frontman of Brighton’s Teutonic troubadours Fujiya & Miyagi. He’s gone solo. Not forever. Just to see how it feels. We discover his plans for the leap year, discuss his mid-life epiphany, a new-found love of dub and touch on ravers, remixers and rabbits…
Interview: Neil Mason
Image: David Best
Hello David, how’s things?
“Good thanks. I’m just about to get ready to go and play football. Last week I moved so slowly it was more like performance art than sport. The lactic acid the next day made me feel quite otherworldly.”
February already. Do you have a favourite month? It’s not February is it?
“Maybe April. It gives you hope that things will get better.”
2024 is a leap year – any plans on how to spend the extra day?
“I might just do a bit of leaping. I think it’s on a Wednesday. I like to trick myself into thinking that Wednesday is the best day of the week to break things up a little.”
To the matter in hand. Your debut solo album. You’ve been in Fujiya & Miyagi for 20-odd years and you decide now is the time for a solo album?
“Well, the gaps between records seem to get a little longer and I’ve had a lot of ideas recently that are just hanging around. I’ve never had a burning desire to do anything on my own, but I would like to release records more frequently. I also believe that the more you create, the higher the chances are that you will find something better, but you have to keep flexing the muscle in order to do that. Releasing stuff is good as it sort of clears the decks for the new songs to come.”
Tell us a little about where this album came from…
“The origins of ‘Message – Send – Failure’ go back to the early days of lockdown. I occasionally had some time to myself so I started to record everything I did without overthinking it too much. I’ve never been very technical and previously that was a real obstacle to me doing anything on my own, so I decided I’d get to grips with various synths, effects pedals and drum machines. Production is like The Wizard Of Oz, it’s kept hidden behind a curtain so people think it’s beyond them, but it’s not. It all comes down to ideas really.”
Is this your Sting moment? Flouncing off to make your ‘Dream Of The Blue Turtles’?
“Yeah, I’ve just put down the first deposit on a lute. I’m not quite sure what it is. It’s the sound of someone working it out as they go along and not worrying too much if things go wrong… and when they do, just adapting to it.”
So no “musical differences” with the rest of the band?
“No, not musical ones. It’s hard to have a gang mentality when you’re approaching 50. It all feels a little ridiculous to still be doing it to be honest. I do think the group is getting better though, which produces a real impetus for future records. Ideally, my own stuff can exist in its own little ecosystem. Or like a granny annex at the back of the main house.”
‘Message – Send – Failure’ is a nicely self-deprecating title, as usual…
“Yeah I suppose so, but it’s more a commentary on the mechanics of making a record. Create the songs, manufacture the records, then wait to see what happens.”
You also say it was “born out of a low-key mid-life epiphany”…
“I realised if I didn’t do it now I probably never would. I didn’t want to look back and regret not trying new things. I’d like to make three solo records then morph into something else. Maybe something more instrumental or more electronic. I’m not sure yet.”
And found solace in dub, right?
“I think I’ve mentioned before how different music fits different times and states of being, so while couped up in lockdown I definitely found solace in the delays and echoes of dub. For what ever reason, at that point in time, it suddenly made total sense to me. Not just dub, but rocksteady and the DJs like Big Youth, U-Roy and Prince Jazzbo.”
You strayed into that territory on the last F&M album, which you told me was “skating on thin ice”. And yet here you are at it again on ‘Terms & Conditions’…
“I mean, I suppose it’s only skating on thin ice if you put on a Jamaican accent like some British groups did in the 70s and 80s. It’s got a ska-like beat, but my voice is still my voice underneath the echoes. I’ve always unashamedly been influenced by what I’ve listened too and haven’t tried to disguise it whether that’s been Can, Prince or Italo disco. It just feels like another space to investigate.”
So what sets a David Best solo outing apart from a Fujiya & Miyagi album?
“I’m not detail based, which some of the others enjoy and value that aspect of making music. Among a lot of music makers there’s so much emphasis on the production that it’s like the song is the least important aspect of the record, which sounds ridiculous to me. It’s like focusing on the guttering to the detriment of the house.
“Making a solo record, where you play everything yourself, will often have a homemade feel because it lacks the interaction of other musicians, but it also has its own charms. If I had to point out a difference I’d say my record is perhaps freer and warmer sounding than the stuff we do together. It seemed pointless to try and recreate something that I’m already a big part of. It would defeat the object of trying something different.”
The album has a lovely vintage feel to it. You’ve dusted down some old kit?
“Thanks. It’s a bit of a mixture between old and new equipment. Pretty much everything used was hardware. I got an Elka string synth, which is similar to the one William Onyeabor used. It’s less somber sounding than a Solina. I bought a Coron DS-7 drum synth, which is where all the disco zaps come from. I really like the old big Electro Harmonix box pedals like the Micro Synthesizer and Frequency Analyser. I really wanted a 16-second delay pedal, but it’s a bit out of my price range.”
The record is co-produced by Julian Tardo from Insides, how was that?
“Julian has been working with us since the very early days of Fujiya & Miyagi. His studio is a stone’s throw from where I live and I really enjoy working with him. We are also working on a disco project together, which will hopefully be finished before the summer.”
What did he being to the record?
“His main contribution was to stop the songs collapsing in on themselves. Some of the drums would drift in and out of time, which was a little problematic when adding other stuff on top. He straightened things out and added effects to various parts to help them gel together and sound less rudimentary. He has a good ear, which I trust, and he has a nice way about him in the studio.”
One of the standouts, ‘Protective White Light’, is about old ravers reliving their glory days. Were you a raver in your day?
“I was the polar opposite. I loved Dinosaur Jr, Mudhoney and Nirvana as well as picking things up from John Peel like Beefheart and The Fall. It wasn’t until I heard Aphex Twin’s first record that my taste changed tack and I got more heavily into electronic music. I sometimes feel I missed out on the rave days as it looked like a lot of fun. I was probably a bit too self-conscious to throw shapes in an abandoned car park though.”
Any plans for remixes? There’s plenty of candidates. Who would be your dream remixer?
“I was thinking of doing more of a dub version of the record at some point and combine it with some of the half-finished ideas from the same period. I do like remixes especially when they totally turn the song upside down. I wouldn’t say no to an Aphex or Squarepusher remix. I’m sure they would mangle it right up.”
What are the others up to while you’re off mucking around? Any of them going solo? Maybe they could get you to sing on them, which would all be a bit meta wouldn’t it?
“Everyone is keeping themselves busy. Ed is always busy with AK/DK and a million other things and I think Ben is going to revisit some stuff he’s been working on. I did write some words for a couple of songs for him, but not sure if they will see the light of day.”
So when can we expect new stuff from Fujiya & Miyagi?
“Myself and Steve have been working on the next record, which the others are going to start contributing to soon. That’s my main focus for the next few months.”
Righto, that’s us. Oh, how’s the rabbit?
“We’ve got two bunnies, Spacecake and Mooncake, who both make our lives much better by doing very little. Space is getting on a bit though. As I get older I think the secret to happiness is in our relationships with animals.”
‘Message – Send – Failure’ is out now via davidbest.bandcamp.com
THE UTOPIA STRONG ‘Lamp Of Glory’ (Rocket Recordings)
A proper modular wig-out and a real treat, ‘Lamp Of Glory’ is taken from a new release by The Utopia Strong. The label tells us 'The BBC Sessions' album, due out on 22 March, is a stop-gap while we’re waiting for a new album from the trio.
Originally recorded live at Maida Vale for a Marc Riley session on BBC 6 Music in September 2022, the set consists of five tracks and the sleeve is a throwback to those Strange Fruit Peel Session releases we all know and love. “A loving homage” say the band. You’ll know the sleeve we’re talking about when you see it.
Get in on the pre-order action here. Watch the video for 'Lamp Of Glory', made by Rocket co-founder John O'Carroll, here…
For those of you who might be new to all this, things get a little wild on the first Friday of each month. Bandcamp Friday sees the site waive its revenue share for 24 hours in order to put more cash in the coffers of artists/labels on the site. It’s a pandemic throwback that’s just stuck and it remains welcome even if it is a bit of a bunfight. Helpfully, here’s our round-up…
Got an upcoming release? Send it our way. Find us at moonbuildingmag@gmail.com
GOOD STUFF #1
CATE BROOKS ‘The Crystal Parade’ (Café Kaput)
A new Cate Brooks record is always big news and ‘The Crystal Parade’ is out today on her own Café Kaput label. The story goes that it was a secret album released under a pseudonym a while back. Not many people knew it was her but it was snapped up pretty sharpish and was subsequently deleted. Cate revisited the record last year and decided it was worth a full release under her own name. A sister outing to ‘Easel Studies’, ‘The Crystal Parade’ is again made from Buchla experiments, but this time with the 200e rather than the Music Easel. “Five crystalline sonic sculptures of nuanced elegance and beauty, to be played softly as a environmental tint,” offers Cate.
GOOD STUFF #2
IAN WELLMAN ‘‘The Night The Stars Fell’ (Ash International)
Funny, we were only talking about Ash International in Issue 1 as it was the vehicle for Scanner’s early, experimental releases. Good to see it still going great guns 30 years on from its foundation in 1993. Here, LA-based sound artist Wellman makes his debut on the label with this offering built from field recordings from the forests and deserts of Southern California. Nice hardware/software list on the release’s Bandcamp page…
GOOD STUFF #3
STEFANO GUZZETTI/IAN HAWGOOD ‘Here’ (Home Normal)
Really loving this. The album marks the duo’s debut release despite Guzzetti and the label’s Hawgood having known each other for over a decade as friends, label collaborators and live performers. It’s worth the wait. If you know Stefano’s ‘Piano Book’ series for the label you perhaps know what to expect. It was made with Ian suffer from debilitating health issues with his friend Stefano supporting him the whole way as he continues to rehabilitate. A healing release in every sense.
GOOD STUFF #4
VARIOUS ARTISTS ‘Werra Foxma Central‘ (Werra Foxma)
This 15-track compilation marks both the end of the label, which is set to close next month, and their swansong WFR Central all-dayer set to take place across three stages and two venues on Saturday 23 March in Derby. Tickets here. This final release, FOX077, looks set to be a collector’s item and features new tracks from the artists playing the festival including Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan, Field Lines Cartographer, Polypores and the label’s in-house band Dohnavùr along with an excellent supporting cast that includes Sulk Rooms, Maria Uzor, Cholly, Steve Hadfield and many more.
werrafoxmarecords.bandcamp.com
GOOD STUFF #5
AUDIO OBSCURA ‘Music For Airports In The Age Of Climate Change’
This is the sort of treat we like on a Bandcamp Friday. “All my own work,” says Audio Obscura’s Neil Stringfellow from his musical bunker in deepest Norfolk, “but it’s as if Eno’s original loops had been disintegrated by Basinski and merged with Chris Watson’s field recordings.” Which, you know, is as good as that sounds. The download comes with a 21-page PDF 'In Flight Magazine' featuring wise words from disquiet.com’s Marc Weidenbaum and Mortality Tables boss Mat Smith, who just seems to be everywhere at the moment doesn’t he?
Righto, quick rattle through a few more bits and bobs worth the ear time this week… Our good friend Richard Norris releases his latest two-tracker, ‘Music For Healing: Freetones - February’. “This one feels like a deep dive into outer space,” he says of the two epic 20-minute tracks. “Happy cosmic February.” richardnorris.bandcamp.com
The brilliant Janine A’Bear releases her live soundtrack to two Luis Benuel films - ‘Un Chien Andalou’ + ‘La'ge D'or’ - which she performed very recently at The Garden Cinema in London’s glittering Covent Garden. Look out for a full-blown release coming your way on Castles In Space later this year. a-bear.bandcamp.com
Northumberland-based Cruel Nature have a cassette double bill. Charlie Butler’s ‘Wild Fictions’ is hugely enjoyable. Lots of people saying it’s early Spacemen three and there is a definate motorik vibe across the four lenghty cuts. Next comes Poppy H’s ‘Grave Era’ a woozy work that The Organ describe very neatly as having a Super 8 feel. Spot on. cruelnaturerecordings.bandcamp.com
While Apta’s ‘Submerge’ EP snuck out digitally last year, the white vinyl version is out today and it’s a bit special, with five remixes of this upfront track from the forthcoming album ‘The Pool’ heading your way on Castles In Space at some point. The remixers are a total slam-dunk. The Hardy Tree, Polypores, Pye Corner Audio, GNOD and Field Lines Cartographer. apta.bandcamp.com
THE WRITE STUFF
Back where we came in and on the music journalism tip. The newsletter that eats itself eh? I love reading about people who have plied our trade and the late, very great Tom Hibbert was one of the best. There hasn’t been another writer like him before or since.
A brilliant anthology, ‘Phew, Eh Readers? - The Life And Writing Of Tom Hibbert’ (Nine Eight), collects together his finest moments and features contributions from those closest to him, including a great chapter by his wife Allyce as well as from friends and colleagues such as Silvia Patterson, Paul Du Noyer, Tom Doyle, Chris Heath, Bob Stanley, Robyn Hitchcock and many more. His great friend Mark Ellen says he’d never met anyone like Tom, a man whose conversation was pure Ealing Comedy, snouts and tuck and sauce for fags and food and booze. “If you had too much sauce,” writes Ellen, “you were ‘in your cups’ and, soon after, ‘plum tuckered out’ and ‘fast a-kip’.”
Anyone who cut their teeth on Smash Hits in the 1980s will know that all this fed into his work. He was responsible for the magazine’s wildly creative lexicon and he built his own little world there through the power of words. All that Dame David Bowie and Sir Frederick Of Mercury and describing acts as twangster combos, that was all him.
He moved to Q, where his Who The Hell… interviews were a total masterclass on skewering pop stars and he ended up at The Observer writing the Pendennis diary column. His health wasn’t great and he never really recovered after pneumonia and pancreatitis wiped him out in 1997. He died, aged 59, in 2011 from complications of diabetes.
‘Phew, Eh Readers?’ is such a warm, heartfelt tribute you can’t help but feel the love while reading it. The editors - Rock’s Backpages’ Barney Hoskins and music journalism archivist Jasper Murison-Bowie - say the book is as much about him as by him. And it really is. But here’s a thing. Why are we waiting until these fine people are no longer with us before there’s a tome? There’s a long list of music journalists whose collected work would make for excellent reading, but let’s not wait until they’re gone, eh publishers?
Order your copy from bookshop.org
Image: An unused shot for Echo & The Bunnymen’s ‘Heaven Up Here’ by Brian Griffin
HEAVENLY
We’ve only been here a few weeks and it seems we’re marking lives well led more often than we’d like. We lost another exceptional talent this week, photographer Brian Griffin, whose work is as iconic as it gets.
Brian created some true classic album sleeves. He was the absolute master, no question. He did the first five Depeche Mode album covers, which are utter showstoppers. In this age of computer trickery and AI, when you look at a something like Depeche Mode’s ‘A Broken Frame’ it’s hard to understand how it could possibly be just a photograph. And yet it is. Shot in a field near Duxford in Cambridgeshire. It looks like a painting.
He took the images for Ultravox’s ‘Vienna’. And don’t get me started on his work for the first four Echo & The Bunnymen albums. Those records were formative, the artwork was towering. I had a huge fly poster, bought after a gig, of ‘Heaven Up Here’ on my wall for years.
I was in contact with Brian on several occasions for various reasons, which was a real thrill. He was great, a total no nonsense smudge in the very finest tradition. His autobiography, ‘Black Country Dada 1969-1990’, is a fantastic reminder of what an enormous talent he was. He died in his sleep on Monday 29 January, aged 75. He lives on through his absolutely peerless work.
VIEW FROM A HILL
Mark Scanlon from Black Hill Transmissions dropped us an email wondering if we’d like to see his latest project, a part zine/part album that he says was kind of inspired by the print version of Moonbuilding. Flattery will get you everywhere, especially round here. ‘Transmission #3’ doesn’t disappoint. It comes in a black A5-ish box with obi strip and US postage stamps. Inside there is all sorts - an A5 zine, a CD, a cassette… the zine is very nice, lots of cut and paste graphics with a bunch of lists that give you a good idea where Mark is coming from. There’s even a postcard advertising a new EP, ‘Versions’, which is out on April. Musically, it’s very much up our street. The CD, ‘Transmissions #3’, is all weirdy-woo soundtracky with a low-slung dubby vibe, while the cassette, ‘Intercepted Recordings 1995-2023’ and accompanying mini zine, collect a bunch of four-track/home studio recordings. There’s handy download cards for it all too. I mean, if Moonbuilding is even a little bit the inspiration for stuff like this, we’ll keep it coming. We’re always really keen to see stuff like this. Drop us a line, you know where to find us.
blackhilltransmissions.bandcamp.com
A MESSAGE FROM THE MOTHERSHIP
The current issue is available from moonbuilding.bandcamp.com and it’s full to the gills with the good stuff. On the cover we have 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, which you will know all about once you’ve read the incredible feature with creator Steven Appleby.
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, have a listen below…
Moonbuilding Weekly is a Castles In Space publication.
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