Issue 36 / 27 September 2024
This week's essential DIY electronic goodness... Track Of The Week: Pefkin + Good Stuff from Hologram Teen, Mieke Miami, John Mouse, Domotic, Ducks! + Chris Charlesworth's 1970s Melody Maker memoir
Lots to tell you this week before we get started. The countdown to Castles In Space’s Levitation festival next Saturday, 5 October, at Bedford Esquires has begun. It’s made the move south from Whitby so the soft southerners can enjoy the wares of the label and friends without getting nosebleeds from being so far north. The line-up is almighty, of course it is. Warrington-Runcorn, Polypores, Field Lines Cartographer, Loula Yorke, The Mistys, Paul Cousins, Nik Void, System 7, James Holden and more. Moonbuilding will be there, come and say hello. Tickets are available here.
There was an interesting response to the poll we ran in last week’s newsletter about the new Music Press Rewind feature. An impressive 94% thought running old music press pieces was a good idea, the other 6% thought it was a good idea, but needed a newsletter of its own. Which is an interesting thought. Thank you to those who voted. You are my favourite readers. All 16 of you. And no one even pressed the button marked “What does this button do?”. There isn’t a music press column this week though, mainly because our Book Of The Week features Chris Charlesworth’s excellent 1970s Melody Maker memoir.
Finally, the new Polypores album ‘There Are Other Worlds’ went down a storm on release day last Friday. Have I mentioned the current issue of Moonbuilding has an exclusive Polypores release? Have I? ‘The Album I Would Have Made In An Alternate Universe’ is the sister recording to his new album. With all the tracks coming from the same sessions, they are two sides of the same coin. If you like the new album you’ll like this one too. Get your copy of the mag, with Polypores on the cover, and the CD at moonbuilding.bandcamp.com. Hurry though, we’re expecting to sell a buttload at Levitation. Don’t want anyone to be disappointed.
Righto, that’s me then. See you next week.
Neil Mason, editor
moonbuildingmag@gmail.com
Issue 36 Playlist: bndcmpr.co/c9540643
Moonbuilding Fighting Fund: ko-fi.com/moonbuilding
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PEFKIN ‘The Rescoring’ (Nite Hive)
Penelope Trappes’ Brighton-based Nite Hive cassette label is one you should know all about if you’ve been paying attention to your essential Moonbuilding Weekly. The label released Patricia Wolf’s ‘Bewick’s Wren’ which was our Track Of The Week upfront of the release of her excellent ‘The Secret Life Of Birds’ album back in June. The back catalogue is all killer no filler. First up was Penelope’s own hauntingly unsettling ‘Heavenly Spheres’, then Karen Vogt’s ‘Waterlog’, written and recorded after her cat died, there was the aforementioned ‘The Secret Life Of Birds’ and now here comes release number four, Pefkin’s ‘The Rescoring’.
Due out on 20 November, it’s the work of Gayle Brogan who wrote the album while making the move from Glasgow to Sheffield. Gayle describes her music as “slowly unfolding, ritualistic hymnals that draw heavily on the landscape and natural world”. And this three-tracker, which spans over 30 minutes of music, is exactly that. Using just a viola, synth and voice, she reflects on the landscape she was leaving, the one she was moving to and, in this first track to be released, the huge life change overall. Roll on November when you’ll get the chance to listen to the whole thing as Pefkin intended.
‘The Rescoring’ is released by Nite Hive on 20 November
Got an upcoming release? We’re all ears. Find us at moonbuildingmag@gmail.com
Words: Neil Mason
GOOD STUFF #1
HOLOGRAM TEEN ‘Day-Glo Chaos’ (Dell’Orso)
This is such a gorgeous record, but it seems not that many people know about it and I really don’t know why. We should all be shouting from rooftops about ‘Day-Glo Chaos’. Hologram Teen is Morgane Lhote, a former member of Stereolab, she was in the line-up during their imperial phase, playing on A-grade cobber like ‘Emperor Tomato Ketchup’ (her favourite) and ‘Dots And Loops’ (my favourite). Her debut solo outing, 2018’s ‘Between The Funk And The Fear’, landed on Polytechnic Youth, which should have set all the alarms off. Show me a release on PY that isn’t quality and I’ll show you cloth ears. Anyway, Morgane is an 80s obsessive. “I love the loud neon colours and fashion and the kinetic energy of the music,” she explains. “It’s uplifting and bittersweet with a ton of keyboards, what’s not to like?” She’s right and she pours all that into ‘Day-Glo Chaos’. The opening track alone could slay at 20 paces. ‘Teen Beats Highway’ is such a beautiful melody-fuelled shot across the bows. It even come with tape slurs, which always make me smile. The influences are worn on the sleeve and she hits all the right markers. She lives in LA for starters and you can feel that nighttime ‘Drive’ thrum throughout. She namechecks Jacno’s self-titled 1979 debut, John Carpenter’s ‘Escape From New York’ and The B-52’s ‘Cosmic Thing’ as heavy influences, while the computerised harmonies of Yellow Magic Orchestra are in evidence in a track like the fantastic ‘Valley Nights (Burnin’)’. She also nods in the direction of the prog of Yes and Soft Machine, which is refreshing to hear. “I actually created a synth on Ableton Live named after Rick Wakeman,” she admits. She’s also an avid gamer and has been since her teens and her tursty Commodore 64. She’s a big fan of ‘Outrun’ on the Sega Master System. “I just got the soundtrack reissue from Data Disc and it is beautiful” she enthuses. For those who know their stuff, they’ll know this album first appeared on cassette in 2022 so why are we banging on about how great it is again? Well because it gets a vinyl outing for the first time thanks to the good people at Dell’Orso (very fine label, worth investigating if you haven’t already). My copy is day-glo pink, which needs sunglasses. As do the tunes within.
GOOD STUFF #2
MIEKE MIAMI ‘Birdland’ (Sonar Kollektiv)
I’ve had this one for a while and I’m pretty pleased it’s finally out so you can all enjoy the summery vibes. Yeah, I know it’s not summer, but let a little light into your life with this, the third album from Hamburg’s Berlin-dwelling Sabine Mieke Wenzl. Her first two releases form a bit of a dot-to-dot that ends up here at ‘Birdland’. Her debut, ‘In The Old Forest’, is kinda folky and electronicy. Fully of melody and songs about trees, let’s not call it folktronica, but that’s what it is. The second, ‘Montecarlo Magic’ from 2021, is a darker synthy affair. Again, songs front and centre, but a much spookier vibe. ‘Birdland’, unsurprisingly considering the title, sees the multi-instrumentalist adding psychedelic jazz to her electronic base. With Mieke writing, co-producing, singing, programming, playing clarinet, flute, sax, keys, it’s a solo album for sure, but one that she says is created with a full live band performance in mind. I will be wanting to see that. Opener ‘Whispering Pines’ is the hit. It’s a glorious melodic romp, not that far from Stereolab who we were only just talking about. It is also a former Moonbuilding Weekly Track Of The Week. So you know, it’s good. Very. Not far behind it comes ‘7 Miles To Jordan’ with its extra large bassline. There is a smudge of Tina Weymouth here, with Mieke’s vocal having that Tom Tom Club chanty feel in places. Oh and there’s a rather decent cover of ‘Son Of A Preacher Man’ too. The story of the record is lovely too. The title is a reference to the famous New York jazz club that spawned a thousand copycat venues with the same name all over the world. “Hamburg’s best-known jazz club when I was a teenager was one of them,” explains Mieke. “When I started being really interested in music I used to tell my parents every Thursday night that I was going out to visit a friend. Instead, I took the S Bahn into the city and went to the Birdland jam session and tried to figure out what the hell they were doing. This was the point when I started getting serious about music, I was about 15 or 16 years old back then… oh no, now my parents will find out!”
GOOD STUFF #3
JOHN MOUSE ‘Back To The Clubhouse’ (Keep Me In Your Heart)
The seventh album from Cardiff maverick John Mouse is, in his own words, “a long-player of new wave synthpop vignettes”. Spot on. It seems he has a tempestuous relationship with his long-term songwriting partner Phil Pearce, which he says has “broken down once again” leaving John to salvage what he could from the sessions calling on old friend and former band member Stephen “Sweet Baboo” Black to help out on production duties. There are worse people to lean on when it comes to serving up infectious pop songs. Here the John Mouse quirk is in full effect. On brilliantly titled tracks like ‘Tall Slim Member Of The Magic Circle’ or ‘An Estimate Shows That Recruitment Figures Are Expected To Be Down’, he narrates his tales of everyday disappointment over swirling synth lines. It reminds me of what Neil Arthur does with Blancmange these days, whereas something like ‘Siop Fawr’ comes on with a New Order electro vibe. I’ve always felt that John is treated like a bit of a novelty act. He’s quirky for sure, but his output is sleek, accomplished synthpop and hugely entertain stuff at that. The Fashion Weak, his side-project from last year that saw guest appearances from the likes of Gruff Rhys and Miki Berenyi, caught a good deal of attention. Let’s hope that after seven albums people are starting to come round to the charms of Mr Mouse.
GOOD STUFF #4
DOMOTIC ‘Autre Oiseaux’ (Astra Solaria)
Essential cassette release ahoy. With the loss of the brilliant Paris-based Err Rec label recently, I nominate Bernard Grancher and his Astra Solaria imprint to wave the Tricolore for quality electronics coming out of France. No pressure Bernard. Fortunately, he is more than equal to the job. And while he is only just getting started with his label, what we’ve had so far is of high quality. Bernard tells me that Domotic is Stephane Laporte, “a kind of French unknown genius”. “This new album,” he goes on to say, “has been recorded with no analogue material, it is all digital and recordings of bird songs.” The kit list is “Yamaha PSR 200, various bird recordings, Digidesign FX”. Which doesn’t seem like much and the results are considerable. ‘Autres Oiseaux’ (‘Other Birds’) is one of those records I like having on first thing at Moonbuilding Towers with the window open. It’s fast becoming a genre all of its own. My early morning mood really responds to gentle music like this. I really like the minimal trundle and chimes of ‘Autre Oiseaux Part Two + Three’. I love when the bird song kicks in. You start waiting for it to happen the more you listen. There’s a couple of epic 10-minute+ tracks, ‘Autre Oiseaux Part Seven + Eight’ and ‘Autre Oiseaux B5’ (yes, the track naming conventions are weird!), which are utterly mesmerising. And if like me you’ve got the window open, you get all the sounds from the real world mixed in too. It’s all beautifully minimal. “This is just fantastic,” says Bernard. Well, he would wouldn’t he? But he’s not wrong, it’s captivating stuff.
astrasolariarecordings.bandcamp.com
GOOD STUFF #5
IMPULSE ARRAY ‘System Live’
It’s funny, I did an interview with Field Lines Cartographer’s Mark Burford recently-ish. Can’t quite remember when… hang on, need to look it up… oh right, it was June when he released ‘Portable Reality Generator’ on DiN. In the chat I asked about Impulse Array. What’s happening there? I said, there’s been no release for a while? “Impulse Array has basically been on furlough for a while,” he told me. “For me, techno music has to be 100% genuine, it has to be from the heart, from the soul. I don’t think it’s very good being forced. You’ve got to feel it. Every time I sit down to make some music these days, the Cartographer sound comes out. But never say never and all that. It could change at the drop of a hat and I might make a blistering space techno album again… Impulse Array is just parked there, ready for whenever I feel the urge.” Well, I think he might be feeling the urge. He’s unearthed this 26-minute live studio performance that he made for a radio show around 2017. He says it “captures the Impulse Array sound around that time pretty comprehensively”. Listening to it, you can hear it’s Mark. I don’t quite know what it is, I wonder if you slowed it all right down and stripped out the pounding beats if it’d sound like FLC? This is properly good, there’s some serious face-melting acid action as it reaches the halfway point and some very tasty snare in there too. While you’re on the IA Bandcamp page, do have a poke around, there’s plenty to enjoy. You can’t help wonder if the fire has been lit again. New IA incoming at some point? I wouldn’t be surprised…
A ROUND-UP IN A ROUND-UP
A little hoover up from last week’s rather full schedule brings me to Andrew Spackman’s ‘Milton Keynes Shopping Trip’ on Mortality Tables. As is the way with Mat Smith’s unconventional label nothing is straightforward. The notes on the back of the CD call it “An eight-part contemplation on the period immediately before a change, for plastic saxophone and electronics”. The notes on the Bandcamp are a little more comprehensive. There’s reams of them. Andrew tells the story of his obsession with the guitar and ties it into 13 July 1985. Which you will recall was the day of Band Aid. Andrew watched it round a friend’s house in Milton Keynes. He got there on his motorbike. You can read all about it in the notes. He leaves his friend’s place early, he’s hungry and needs something to eat. “It is a warm and balmy evening,” he writes. “The shopping centre gleams like the Emerald City in ‘The Wizard Of Oz’. I am only 17-and-a-half and so much has yet to come. But I am content and optimistic.” We will never know what the change was. But that’s Mortality Tables and you have to love them for it. Musically, it’s a voyage that seems to build and build, it’s certainly a release that will make you think. I’ve been really enjoying it, while at the same time wondering what it is, exactly. The growl and rattle of ‘First Journey’ is especially good.
mortalitytables.bandcamp.com
We mentioned Tam Lin back in June when he released his ‘bluelightnospaceflattime’ EP on Kate Carr’s Flaming Pines label. The London-based multimedia artist makes an autumnal return with another EP, ‘Mutant Tangle’. Again, the intense rhythms and industrial-like noise of the previous outing is here, but this time there is also a tunefulness fighting to get out. ‘Ratmaxxing’ (great title) sounds like some long-lost obscure new wave cut that would have come with messed up video on Cabaret Voltaire’s Doublevision label or maybe a remix of a Fire Engines b-side. ‘Bowed Branches’ sounds like a familiar TV theme from two fields away, while the squiggles and swirls of ‘Popped’ are charming. Each track comes from modular synth experiments that have been “whittled into fizzy hooks and shifty rhythms” with “chewed up drums, warm plucks and whizzing synth lines.” I’m really, really enjoying this. It’s very much worth an explore.
thatwhichcrawls.bandcamp.com
A couple more and that’s us for today. You always know what you’re getting when you tune into pretty much anything on Library Of The Occult and what you’re getting is quality. Traffik Island is the solo offering from the genre-surfing Oz, Zak Olsen, of doom psych trio Orb (not to be confused with The Orb), garage rockers The Frowning Clouds and new wavers Hierophants. On ‘Ghost Notes’, the label say he’s channelling “Joe Meek, Goblin and Broadcast in this cursed disc of groovy fugue”. My my. libraryoftheoccult.bandcamp.com
Finally, MF Clarke’s ‘Arrays’, on the Syndey-based “ambient noise and broken songs” label Oxtail Recordings, is described as a “sound publication” and is the first release from Melissa F Clarke, a Brooklyn-based multimedia artist who combines data and research into immersive multimedia installations, performances and virtual reality pieces. She’s really interesting. You can read more about her here. For this debut release she leans on “data sonification material”, “bathymetric and other geophysical data sets studying glaciers and the underwater landscapes they shaped” that she has been working with since 2009 and began with her exploring geophysical data sets from the Hudson river. This “publication” also includes similar material from Antarctica and the Arctic where she traveled to capture field recordings along the coast of Greenland. ‘Arrays’ is described as “a listening journey through different threads, components, data sets, sounds and spaces” and rather lovely it is too. oxtailrecordings.bandcamp.com
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CHRIS CHARLESWORTH ‘Just Backdated – Melody Maker: Seven Years In The Seventies’ (Spendwood)
Next year it will be 25 years since Melody Maker closed its doors. First appearing in 1926 and establishing itself as a jazz mag in the 50s (you know, a magazine actually about jazz), its circulation peaked in the 1970s when it was selling over 250,000 copies a week. To give that number a little context, The Maker’s official circulation when it was shuttered in December 2000 was a little over 30,000. These days a publisher would fall over themselves to sell 30,000 mags a week, in the early 00s it wasn’t worth buying the paper to print it on. Melody Maker was a publication that was formative in so many people’s lives and just like that it was gone. I was in the building when they announced it was closing. That was not a good day. The spirit lives on here sort of. Moonbuilding Weekly is my nod at the weekly churn I’ve loved since I was in my early teens and ended up being a part of when I was staff at Muzik, Melody Maker and NME.
Chris Charlesworth was at Melody Maker from 1970 to 1977, which was the very sharp end of its golden years. He arrived during an especially rich period of music and he interviewed the lot, from Lennon and McCartney (separately) to Bowie, The Who, Elton, Slade, Sabbath, Rod Stewart, The Beach Boys, Led Zep, Deep Purple, Zappa, Iggy, Steely Dan and so many more.
There’s tales galore here as you’d expect and while it’s hard to pick just one, his first meeting with John Lennon is pretty gobsmacking. Chris was in the private club above the Rainbow Bar And Grill on LA’s Sunset Strip, a notorious hangout for rock and roll stars, when he bumped into Tony King who he knew as Elton John’s PR.
“Is Elton here?” Chris asked him at the bar. “I’m working for John now,” Tony replied. “Would you like to meet him?”
Turns out John Lennon was in the room. Following his split with Yoko in 1973, he was in his “Lost Weekend” period, “shacking up with Yoko’s lovely Chinese assistant May Pang at a Bel Air mansion”. Tony introduced Chris and “John seemed pleased to meet a writer from Melody Maker”, which isn’t something you’d hear often. “He began quizzing me about life in London, what was happening on the London rock scene, what Paul was up to, what the weather was like, what the government was doing, how much a pint of milk cost and even how the royal family were getting on.”
Chris describes the meeting as like a bit of a hallucination “especially as I was conveying to him news about the bloke who played a violin-shaped bass with whom he wrote most of The Beatles’ unforgettable music”.
For all the amazing megastar tales, it’s the detail about the job that fascinated me. I laughed out loud when talks about his appointment as US correspondent. It was a very different title to the one I worked for in the 90s, clearly. Chris recounts how in August 1973 he was called into the editor Ray Coleman’s office to be told the paper’s US correspondent was returning home to take up the role of assistant editor and the job Stateside was his if he wanted it.
During my final days at The Maker, we would regularly be found driving to and from out of town live shows in a company pool car to avoid overnight hotel bills. If you were driving that was one less bar bill to pay for I guess. Unless you actually slept in the car overnight, which I did more than once.
Chris would take over from Michael Watts who was at the time based in California. “I spent my first month in Los Angeles in the same suite of rooms my predecessor had vacated at the Chateau Marmont, a mock Gothic castle set back from Sunset Boulevard.”
Yeah and I once spent a night in a field somewhere near Penzance in a Ford Escort. Chris settled in nicely, as you would. “My room at the Chateau had a corner tower that overlooked Sunset Strip and here, on a circular table, was where I worked, stuffing A4 sheets into my Olivetti portable, transcribing the words of my interviews as I watched the traffic below.”
Sending a weekly package back to The Maker offices in London, it was quite the life. And it gets better. In December 1973, Chris got a phone call from the editor “to tell me to relocate to New York ASAP”. It seemed that LA was too far from London and getting the stories back was taking too long. If he was based in New York it was a lot easier because IPC, the company who published Melody Maker along with a tonne of other titles including everything from NME to Horse And Hound, had a New York office… in The Chrysler Building. Pretty sure they ditched that before my time.
Chris would leave his package of typed pages and photos at the office each Thursday and a courier would ensure they were delivered to the The Maker office on a Friday morning. At the same time, Chris would also pick up his “living allowance” of $150 a week, which was on top of his rent, phone bills, gas and electric, which were all paid for. It fair makes my head spin. What you could do if the paper you worked for sold 250,000 copies a week.
I love books like this and not just because Chris walked a path that I stumbled down myself. Obviously, he can write and he spins such a rich, evocative tale of those years long gone it makes me almost sad. And of course, it’s vital that people like this have written all it down otherwise these incredible tales would, eventually, be lost forever. I’d love to see more books like this about the music press of old, or even of not so old. I really enjoyed ‘Paper Cuts’, by former NME features ed and the final editor of Q, Ted Kessler and he was pretty new school, relatively. It might just be me in which this kind of nostalgia burns, but I don’t think it is.
‘Just Backdated – Melody Maker: Seven Years In The Seventies’ is published by Spendwood and is out now
A MESSAGE FROM THE MOTHERSHIP
***MOONBUILDING ISSUE 5 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.
The virtual shop doors are open at moonbuilding.bandcamp.com for your purchasing pleasure. This magazine ain’t going to buy itself.
Moonbuilding Weekly is a Castles In Space publication.
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