Issue 37 / 4 October 2024
This week's essential DIY electronic goodness... Track Of The Week: Kayla Painter + Good Stuff from Godspeed, worriedaboutsatan, Brendon Moeller and more + retro Sean Lennon interview
The countdown to Castles In Space’s Levitation festival this Saturday at Bedford Esquires is ticking down. It’s all happening TOMORROW from 2pm. The line-up is almighty as you know… Warrington-Runcorn, Polypores, Field Lines Cartographer, Loula Yorke, The Mistys, Paul Cousins, Nik Void, System 7, James Holden and more are playing, the merch stall will be mouthwatering (Moonbuilding mags galore I hear), the company first class. We’ll be there, come and say hello. Tickets are available here.
The Music Press Rewind feature is back this week, hurrah, and we’re following the Grand Royal paper trail we started the other week by reprinting an interview with Sean Lennon from 1998 when he released his debut album, ‘Into The Sun’ on the Beasties’ label. Continuing the theme, I’m still looking for my Josephine Wiggs interview you will be pleased to hear. I’m sure it’s here somewhere.
Have I mentioned the current issue of Moonbuilding? Only every week for what seems like forever. It has an exclusive Polypores release called ‘The Album I Would Have Made In An Alternate Universe’, which is the sister recording to his new album, ‘There Are Other Worlds’. With all the tracks coming from the same sessions, you can’t have one without the other. I tell you all this only out of kindness. We’re going to Levitation this weekend where there will no doubt be a run on Moonbuilding Issue 5. Guarantee your copy before it sells out… moonbuilding.bandcamp.com.
Righto, that’s me then. Levitation here we come.
Neil Mason, editor
moonbuildingmag@gmail.com
Issue 37 Playlist: bndcmpr.co/89249be5
Moonbuilding Fighting Fund: ko-fi.com/moonbuilding
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KAYLA PAINTER ‘Clipper’
Photo: Ozge Cone
Former Moonbuilding cover star, the fabulous Kayla Painter, returns to the fray with her debut album next week and she’s teasing it up rather nicely with a brand-new video for recent single, ‘Clipper’.
Kayla’s fascination with all things space sees her coinciding the album’s release with the launch of NASA’s Europa Clipper. You’ve got to love that sort of thinking. The craft’s mission is to explore the watery worlds beneath Jupiter’s icy moon, Europa. Weighing in at 16 tonnes and spanning more than 100 feet, it’s the largest spacecraft NASA has ever built for a planetary mission. It’ll take five years to get to Jupiter, but the hope when it does is they’ll discover signs that Europa could support life. All of which is just part of the reason Kayla is so welcome on our pages.
Since the release of her mini-album ‘Infinite You’ on Castles In Space in 2022, Kayla has been flying totally solo in full DIY mode, which we wholeheartedly support. She’s self-released before, but she’s in a rich seam of form at the moment that includes her two brilliant ‘Owlcore’ collections and now there’s this, her new album, that’ll be coming directly from her studio, packed by her own hands no doubt. Proper DIY.
Musically ‘Fractions’ is a real treat as you can probably tell from the above track. We’ll be talking more about the album next week, but for now enjoy ‘Clipper’.
‘Fractions’ is released on 11 October
Got an upcoming release? We’re all ears. Find us at moonbuildingmag@gmail.com
Words: Neil Mason
GOOD STUFF #1
GODSPEED YOU! BLACK EMPEROR ‘NO TITLE AS OF 13 FEBRUARY 2024 28,340 DEAD’ (Constellation)
Godspeed are a band who are difficult to resist. I’m a big fan of their co-founder Efrim Manuel Menuck, who is also responsible for the excellent Thee Silver Mt Zion Memorial Orchestra, who go under various other names some of which get a bit People’s Front Of Judea. His solo work too is a treat. His brilliantly titled ‘Pissing Stars’ album from 2018 is particularly fine. So anyway, Godspeed have this habit of just dropping new albums whenever they feel like it. That’s Canadian anarchists for you though, isn’t it? Isn’t it? As you might have guessed, the title of this, their eighth studio album, refers to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but it could easily be any conflict, depressingly, there’s plenty to choose from right now. The accompanying notes, as always with Godspeed, are cryptic at best. “NO TITLE= what gestures make sense while tiny bodies fall? what context? what broken melody? and then a tally and a date to mark a point on the line, the negative process, the growing pile”. As always, their sound is driven by plenty of strings and lots of guitars, and what they do with it all is just so beautiful. The drones, the loops, the repetition, as sound builds on sound, the textures, the effects. ‘Babys In A Thundercloud’ is a 13-minute-plus epic that builds to a vast crescendo before breaking like a storm, while ‘Grey Rubble - Green Shoots’ also lets everything get huge before it bursts. Interesting fact. They were on the cover of the NME once, summer 1999. The editor was on holiday and the underlings rebelled. The story goes it was the worst-selling NME cover, ever. Which I put to Efrim once. “I never know how to respond to that,” he said. “Speaking personally, most music writing kind of blows right past me. It’s like descriptions of a different country on a different planet than the one that I live on, or like an Ikea catalogue written in alien pictographs. I’m happy that people still write about music, and that people still care and marshal words in that regard, but it’s not a place where I often rest my head.” How good is he? Such a dude. And what a band they are. Do not fuck about, this is an essential purchase today. It’s glorious, life-affirming stuff.
GOOD STUFF #2
PUBLIC SERVICE BROADCASTING ‘The Last Flight’ (So Recordings)
It’s like release day for the big guns isn’t it? There always seems to be a flurry of excitement around a new PSB album and here, with their fifth long-player, you should know what to expect by now. Who doesn’t still listen to ‘The Race For Space’ and hold their breath during ‘The Other Side’ when Mission Control loses radio contact with Apollo 8 during the first manned orbit of The Moon. ‘The Last Flight’ sees them taking to the skies again and we find J Willgoose Esq and friends charting the final flight of pioneering US female pilot Amelia Earhart. She set all manner of speed, altitude and distant records. She was the first woman to fly solo across The Atlantic and Pacific Oceans and in 1937 she set out to circumnavigate the globe in her Lockheed Model 10-E Electra. Having crossed the Americas, Africa, the Middle East and Asia, she was kind of on the home straight when she went missing flying from Papua New Guinea to Howland Island in the Central Pacific. There’s lots of wild conspiracy theories about what happened if you care for that sort of thing. Unusually, the record doesn’t feature the voice of Earhart. Drawing from her writings, she is voiced by an actor with the recordings treated to give them a 1930s authenticity. I have to admit I struggle a little with PSB, when they’re good, they’re very very good, but they can be a bit hit and miss. There’s a track here called ‘A Different Kind Of Love’ that’s so MOR it hurts. Featuring vocalist EERA, who appeared on ‘Bright Magic’, it sounds like something the band on ‘Strictly’ knock out on a Saturday, and then right after it, closing the record, they knock it out the park with a stunning string-drenched, ‘Howland’ with Earhart’s voice coming over as a distant radio crackle. Oh, and ‘Towards The Dawn’ is prime PSB, a rattlingly good romp that is really going lift roofs on the forthcoming tour. Maybe it’s just me, I loved the early work, the first album ‘Inform - Educate - Entertain’ and of course ‘The Race For Space’, and I really don’t want to sound churlish by suggesting they’re a one-trick pony (their people call them “masters of conceptual pop historiography”), but they’re a one-trick pony, right? I mean they do it so well, but isn’t there going to come a point where they need to show of their considerable skills by doing something a little different?
publicservicebroadcasting.bandcamp.com/music
GOOD STUFF #3
WORRIEDABOUTSATAN ‘Ricochet’ (This Is It Forever)
Following on from ‘If Not Now, When’ back in the spring, here’s a second album from worriedaboutsatan this year. It is only just October so there’s plenty of time for a third. Releasing on his own This Is It Forever label, which seems to be the direction of travel for a number of artists whose names we’re used to seeing on other labels, Bradford’s Gavin Miller is man who always needs listening to no matter how or how often he releases his wares. worriedaboutsatan are one of the very first names I began to latch onto when the whole DIY thing was starting to rear its head on the pages of Electronic Sound. A decade or so on and he’s still very much occupying his very own place in time and space. “It’s a very ambient, washy, clicky sort of thing,” he tells me about ‘Ricochet’. “Plenty of synth warbles and glitchy electronics.” I think it’s best if he sticks to the tunes and I do the words, eh? No one needs to hear me making music do they? That said, I would be quite interested in what sort of noises would come out of me. Anyway, I’m often wrong about this sort of thing, but it sounds like Gavin has cracked out some live instruments on the title track, that sounds like a real bass to me. And there it is again under pinning the rich thrum of ‘Circle Of Glyphs’, mellow as you like. Real or not, it’s good to hear a rolling bass like that. ‘Femdkörper’ is cracking too, the synthy clank it uses make it sound like a super slow-motion version of Paul Oakenfold’s ‘Big Brother’ theme tune. It’s a five-tracker is this, don’t get me started on what that should be called, mini-album, extended EP, but Gavin’s calling it an album and the tracks are pretty chunky, lengthwise. The closer, the stark squirts, deep rumbles and mellow beats of ‘Hidden Images’ is the pop song among them at six and half minutes or so. The rest stretch out toward the eight-minute mark and a little beyond, which is becoming a sweet spot kind of length for me. Quality gear from start to finish, but then I’d expect nothing less. Oh, and that artwork is lovely.
worriedaboutsatan.bandcamp.com
GOOD STUFF #4
TRAVIS ELBOROUGH & STONECIRCLERSAMPLER ‘Memorex’ (The Tapeworm)
Well here’s a curious one. If a tree falls in a forest, does it make a sound if no one is there to hear it? You can’t buy ‘Memorex’ because it’s sold out and you can’t listen to it because the label hasn’t opened up any of the audio on Bandcamp, so does it exist? Well it does, I have the tape. Stonecirclersampler, London-based electronic musician Luke J Murray, kindly sent me a copy along with a couple of other tapes that I’ve yet to check out. I will though because ‘Memorex’ is rather good. It’s funny how all this fits together. Luke got in touch with a very kind email about Moonbuilding Weekly saying how he and counter-culture historian Travis Elborough are big fans. Travis’ books are right up our street, I’ve written about them in this very newsletter, big fan, so it’s perhaps not a surprise we have a two-way street of mutual appreciation. It still surprises me when people say nice things though. So what we have here, if you can lay your hands on a copy, is two tracks, ‘Memorex’, which is kind of audiobook with Travis reading from his excellent ‘Atlas Of Improbable Places’ (Aurum) and Luke providing plenty of atmosphere to go with. The readings take you on a whistle-stop tour of quirky places across the world, like Hearst Castle, a grand hilltop estate created by William Randolph Hearst, the US newspaper publisher, and No Man’s Land Fort, a sea fort in the Solent. While on the flip, ‘An Evening Of Misremembering’ is a spooky shudder of a piece, like the soundtrack to one of those dreams that wakes you up with a start. It’s like the olden days, this. You want to hear music? You’re going to have to buy it. You mission now is to hunt down a copy. Let me know if you do.
GOOD STUFF #5
BRENDON MOELLER ‘Mirage’ (quiet details)
We’re all going to have to have a word with Alex at quiet details to see if he might slow things down a little. I don’t know if it’s me, usually is, but time is shifting so fast that it feels like his label is on a fortnightly schedule rather than a monthly one. The thing is, the deeper we get into their releases, the more artists who add to the pile, the more we start to see broader and broader interpretations of the brief, which in case you forgot, is to respond to the label’s name. Here the New York-based South African producer Brendon Moeller pushes at that brief with ‘Mirage’. This is rich-sounding stuff. You can hear that Brendon has been exploring the “deepest planes of electronic music for nearly two decades”. There’s a dancefloor sensibility at work here for sure and his sound, rooted in dub and techno, rinses out in these cuts that he describes as soundscapes. Recorded during a heatwave last summer in New York, you can feel the bass prickle like it wants to tap out time or a synth wash that holds itself back or a dub-like chord that shimmers in the background. “Time drips, pools, melts -liquefied, slipping into cracks of unreality,” writes Brendon in the notes. “Like vapor, slipping between what is and isn’t. The mirage hums.” It does that thing ‘Chill Out’ does, reveals glimpses that don’t fully realise, but tease and tempt. The rhythm of ‘Cloudburst’ and the drone that sits underneath feels like it should be building to a drop that lets the whole thing explode. And yet it doesn’t. Very nice. Despite feeling so mellow, the more you listen the more you can feel the tension and little release. This really is one where the continuous mix on the CD will reap large rewards.
A ROUND-UP IN A ROUND-UP
And talking of labels on a hectic schedule, here comes Mortality Tables with another installment of their LIFEFILES series. I love that they seem to be adding to the collection almost on a weekly basis. I also love that it’s often just one track, maybe two. I think we’re so used to the album format that we almost don’t notice when people are bucking that trend. The LIFEFILES releases are digital-only and should be enjoyed for the momentary glimpses they offer into people’s soundworlds. It’s a shift in thinking about how we consume music, but in these times of firing up Spotify and listening to whatever you want from the last 100 years, taking a moment to catch up with an contemporary artist who has put a lone track our way should be seen as a treat. Anyway, Allmanna Town is Waxing Crescent’s Phil Dodds and Jonas Geiger Ohlin of The New Emphatic who are breaking the MT mould for this release by not using a Mat Smith recording to create the tracks on the ‘C.FXNOISE’ EP. “The source materiel,” says Mat, “is a series of cassettes I collected in the 1990s hoping to one day use them in a project. I labelled each cassette ‘C.FXNOISE’. The guys took those, manipulated the sounds and created things that I could never have dreamed of creating even when I was trying to make music.” It’s a five track EP and a proper curio as you’d expect from the label. It’s got that vapourwave vibe, found sounds, mashed up, hectic beats. Liking this a lot.
Brisbane psyche outfit Nice Biscuit caught our ear and ended up as our Track Of The Week back in May when they released ‘Rain’ as a taster for their upcoming second album ‘SOS’ (Bad Vibrations), which is long-awaited for fans of the debut, ‘Digital Mountain’ from 2018. October did seem a long way off back in May. And here we are. Anyway, the album is great, reminds me of Jarrod Gosling’s Regal Worm/Cobalt Chapel. That’d make a great double bill. There’s a real krauty sensibility here, which is very welcome, always welcome. The aforementioned ‘Rain’ really slays coming in its full-length head-down freak-out seven-minute version. It also helps that they all look great too, like all good bands should. Never understand that thing where a band shuffles on stage dressed like they’re going to the supermarket. Make an effort eh? Nice Biscuit make an effort. Love the artwork for this release too.
Couple of quick mentions before I disappear for another week. our dear friend, the medic dropped me a line from North Carolina pointing us in the direction of her new release ‘when air collapsed within’ (Dragon’s Eye). She also pointed out that she is very much a lowercase kinda gal, which drives me a bit mad as a journalist, but I understand it’s very popular in music world. That our dear friend was recommended to look in the direction of Moonbuilding by Alex at quiet details, another lowercase fiend, is no surprise, but it also speaks volumes. Good people always know good people and our dear friend doesn’t disappoint. ‘when air collapsed within’ is one 30-minute-plus track, an “aural diary of the months following a sudden and violent panic attack”. From the outset it’s as alarming as that sounds. “It is a much darker record than my usual,” she explains, “opening with an organ drone suffocated in saturation and distortion and drifting between more lucid states and disturbed spaces”. Well worth your time.
ourdearfriendthemedic.bandcamp.com
Finally, do check out Crystal Blaze’s ‘Forest People’ EP on Sheffield’s mighty fine Do It Thissen label. It’s not something I would have expected from the label, it’s a giant slab of vapourwave and you’ll know if you come here often enough that’s a very welcome genre round these parts. I know my pal Fin from the Happening Again Substack will totally dig this… I wonder if he reads this far down Moonbuilding Weekly. I’m sure he’ll tell me. So Crystal Blaze is Sheffielder Josh Kelson, the release is mastered by the one and only Dean Honer and it comes on a delicious limited-edition crystal clear 10-inch lathe-cut from DIT or as straight digital release from the artist’s own Bandcamp. Very little not to like there.
doitthissenrecords.bandcamp.com / crystalblaze.bandcamp.com
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The love-in for the Beastie Boys’ long-lost Grand Royal label continues in our new feature where I republish old music press pieces. I kind of figure that many of these more pieces would only have been read once, in the week they were published, so perhaps deserve a little more air.
Picking up where I left off the other week with the Buffalo Daughter piece, I’m pretty sure I interviewed Sean Lennon on the same day. Released in May 1998, his debut album caused a bit of a ripple seeing as he was from musical royalty. That it was released by Grand Royal gave the label a bit of bump too. You wouldn’t want to waste that momentum.
If there’s a theme for these pieces it’s that my memory is pretty sketchy. I’m hoovering around trying to find mention of a Grand Royal showcase in London, but drawing a blank so far. I’m pretty sure the show was Buffalo Daughter, Ben Lee and The Josephine Wiggs Experience, rather than Luscious Jackson. I think Sean was just along for the ride, promoting his album and give the label the big up. Or I might be having total brain fade, which let’s face it, is quite likely as this was nearly 30 years ago.
One for the magazine purists - this is the new-look format of the Maker Breaker piece. We used to write them as run-on copy, like a mini feature. This one, although it has the same amount of words, has the headings that breaks it up and makes it look a bit more exciting on the page. With this sort of change, Melody Maker was entering the death rattle period that got serious when it became a godawful glossy mag in late 1999 and finally carked it entirely a year later.
SEAN LENNON
Sublime Summer Grooves
WHO HE?
Aw, come on. Do we have to spell it out? Look at the picture, remind you of anyone? Yup, Sean is equal measures John and Yoko. Problem is, with parents like that, the hurdles for your own musical career are going to seem as huge as their fame. Not so with Sean whose “Into The Sun” long-player will surprise and delight in equal measures.
“Some serious Beatles fans who are friends of mine listened to the record and said at first it’s hard to escape the feeling that it’s John’s son, but after a while they forget about that and listen to the record for what it is,” believes Sean.
And what is it? Well, if you’ve heard Money Mark’s “Push the Button”, “Into The Sun” will similarly appeal. It’s a stress-buster of the highest order: laidback grooves, drifty tunes and Sean’s gentle voice are an aural massage after a hard day at the office, dear. Add to that the Beastie’s seal of approval in the shape of a Grand Royal release. . . hang on - super famous parents? Beasties record label? Feeling the pressure a tad?
“I’ve had pressure my whole life,” offers Sean. “I had people coming up to me when I was like six or seven saying, ‘Hey, when’s your album coming out?’. Men have pressure to have big penises, women have pressure to have big tits, the whole of life is pressure.”
So how’d the Grand Royal thingy come about?
“Adam Yauch was the first person who asked me to release something because he liked the music. I knew it wasn’t because of my dad, that’s what it came down to. I actually feel a lot less pressure because I’m on Grand Royal. While I was making this album I didn’t have record company people coming into the studio saying, ‘Where’s the hit?’, I just had Mike D come over and we’d smoke a spliff, it was very, very mellow.”
WHY BUY
Because it’s very, very mellow. And with summer approaching, we could all do with a little mellow.
“It’s basically about love,” says Sean, “love and the power of nature and the ocean and the sun and romance and the newness of falling in love… a lot of the songs are about my girlfriend.”
So that’ll be Yuka Honda of uber-cool Japanese girl group, Cibo Matto. Not only is she Sean’s girlfriend, but she produced the record. Songs about her, produced by her?
“I guess it’s weird, but it didn’t seem weird to us,” says Sean. “I think people appreciate it when you give yourself. I’m just trying to emit good energy into the universe. If people don’t like me because I’m too honest, f*** ’em.”
TELL US MORE
From the Beatlesee stomp of ‘Queue’ to the country-ish ‘Part One Of The Cowboy Trilogy’, from the dreamy acoustic melody of ‘One Night’ to the bossa nova title track, it’s clear Sean is a musician with a ton of ideas (and ideals) swirling around his head.
“I’m just weird,” he laughs. “I think a lot about stupid stuff.”
Example?
“I feel like that sometime in evolutionary history there was some kind of alien race that came down to the earth and mixed with our ancestors. When I look at the planet, I see every animal in perfect harmony with its environment except human beings. We seem to be the only foreign element on the planet.”
BEST ENJOYED…
Over to Sean…
“I had this mystical experience in Kensington Park. I woke up at six in the morning and went out for a walk. There was a huge rainbow and then 30 swans started flying across it. It was just me, alone in the park. I’ve never seen anything that beautiful.”
Add Walkman containing ‘Into The Sun’ and you’re pretty much there.
Interview: Neil Mason
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.
Copyright © 2024 Moonbuilding
thanks for the qd24 brendon moeller review, great edition as always :) x