Issue 38 / 11 October 2024
This week's essential DIY electronic goodness... Track Of The Week: Tunng + Good Stuff from Kayla Painter, Hawksmoor, Gaudi Kosmisches Trio, Loula Yorke, Goat and more + Simon Raymonde memoir
There was something in the air last Saturday at Bedford Esquires. I was on the nightshift at Levitation 2024, Castles In Space’s annual live fest, and goodness me what a night. I missed the afternoon session, but heard great reports about sets from everyone, but especially Jo Johnson, Loula Yorke, James Aiden Brown and Graham Dunning and DJ Food with their wild music making contraptions. I arrived to catch the end of Field Lines Cartographer’s set and spent the rest of the night bouncing between the upstairs and downstairs rooms catching as much of the back-to-back sets as I could.
As Field Lines Cartographer’s Mark Burford pointed out to me during the evening, “if you like electronic music and you’re not here, you missed out”. Boy, did you miss out. Every single act I saw, so that’s A’Bear, Nik Void, System 7, Polypores, James Holden and Warrington-Runcorn, were at the peak of their powers. James Holden made a point of saying onstage how much he had enjoyed watching everyone and that it had just been the best day. It really was.
Here’s the incredible thing though, it wasn’t sold out. Seriously. What is that all about? The line-up could not have been better and there were still tickets. If you’re enjoying any of this, the releases, the live shows, the publications (mainly us), tell your friends, buy them a record, or a gig ticket, or a magazine. Spread the word because this scene is amazing and we need more people to get in on it to keep it sustainable. The more people we have, the more money flows in the direction of our creators. The more money they make from doing what they love, the more time they can spent doing it. Which is a pure win-win, right? Thanks for listening. Right, let’s get on with today’s business…
Neil Mason, editor
moonbuildingmag@gmail.com
Issue 38 Playlist: bndcmpr.co/4b49d240
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TUNNG ‘Didn’t Know Why’ (Full Time Hobby)
Photo: Paul Heartfield
There has been a flurry of Tunng activity online over the last couple of weeks and now we know why. New music! It’s been a while since this wonderful six-piece have born fruit. Just looked and it’s been ages, ‘Dead Club’ in 2020, which is a while isn’t it? The news is they’re back with a new album, which is out almost 20 years to the day since their debut long-player ‘Mother’s Daughter And Other Songs’ appeared in January 2005.
Released on 24 January, the new album is called ‘Love You All Over Again’, which is apt, because that’s exactly what you do with Tunng. The band say they’re returning to their roots on this, their eighth long-player. It’s interesting reading the notes about where the new album is coming from. “I went back to the first two albums just to listen to how we fused genres,” says Mike Lindsay, “things like Davy Graham, Pentangle and the ‘Wicker Man’ soundtrack, all of which I was discovering back then, together with Expanding Records, whose studio space we shared.” I’d forgotten they shared a place with Benge. No wonder they sound like they do. Benge, as well as running Expanding Records, which was way ahead of its time, has almighty collection of analogue synths, which must’ve rubbed off on Tunng. The band’s Phil Winter even cross-pollinated, hooking up with Benge and The Cabs’ Stephen Mallinder to form Wrangler.
This first track from the new record, ‘Didn’t Know Why’, has that juddery glitching that ‘Mothers Daughter’ from their debut album has. Listening to Tunng has always been like you’re tuning in to them, with all the electronic wiggles and squiggles underpinning such sharp songwriting it’s as if their sound is arriving from another place. It’s a place I really, really like. Welcome back.
tunng.bandcamp.com / fulltimehobby.bandcamp.com
Got an upcoming release? We’re all ears. Find us at moonbuildingmag@gmail.com
Words: Neil Mason
GOOD STUFF #1
KAYLA PAINTER ‘Fractures’
When Kayla Painter was on the cover of Moonbuilding Issue 2, she was releasing the excellent ‘Infinite You’, which she was careful to call an “extended EP” perhaps in order to keep her powder dry for this, her debut album proper. Don’t get me started, again, but that “extended EP” was eight tracks so if anything it was a double EP or a mini album maybe. ‘Fractures’ has eight tracks too and she says that’s an album. Confused? For clarity then, I’ve always been two tracks = single, four tracks = EP, between five and eight tracks is a mini-album, everything else is an album, but each to their own. And with the sort of sky-high quality Kayla serves up, she can call whatever she wants whatever she likes.
Talking of sky-high, Kayla is aiming a little higher here. Like all the best people she’s obsessed with space, so much so that ‘Fractures’ was due to be released on the same day NASA’s Europa Clipper was due to launch. Hurricane Milton has put paid to that, delaying the launch from Cape Canaveral in Florida until the storm is out of the way. It could be launched as soon as Sunday, but we’ll see. Europa Clipper’s mission is to explore Europa, the smallest of Jupiter’s four Galilean moons, for signs that it could support life. Don’t get me started, but Jupiter has 95 moons, 95, more if you count moonlets, the little moons, and the irregular outer moons. But don’t expect news any time soon as it’s going to take five years for Europa Clipper to even get there.
‘Fractures’ is a record that pools the various aspects of Kayla’s distinctive sound in one place. The opening three tracks, ‘Europa In Focus’, ‘Fractured In Space’ and ‘Clipper’ (which we featured as our Track Of The Week) are thumping, bass-fuelled floorfillers, with the cut-up glitchy vocal on the latter giving proceedings an almost Orbital vibe. Once the hectic opening gives way, after all the fire-power like Falcon Heavy starting Europa Clipper on its journey, ladies and gentlemen we are floating in space. We’re travelling serenely, further and further into the unknown on the gentle drift of ‘For You I Won’t Forget’, the deep-space blips and beeps of ‘Sublimation’ and the crisp crackles of ‘Ice Shells’. The other thing to note about ‘Fractures’ is it’s supported by the PRS Foundation’s Women Make Music and entirely self-released. This is as DIY as it gets. When you buy a copy, it’ll be packed by Kayla’s own hands. There’s something rather pure about that. Let’s make sure she has plenty of packing to do today eh?
GOOD STUFF #2
HAWKSMOOR ‘Oneironautics’ (Soul Jazz)
And talking of long waits, James McKeown’s latest offering as Hawksmoor is an album that’s been a looooong time in coming. I’ve had this one under my hat since June. I often extol the virtues of my weekly deadline here and how it’s the perfect length for the production cycle. I don’t think I could be an artist, I’d find it too difficult to manage the wait between finishing a record and its release. I know there’s labels who are bucking the trend – Mortality Tables release a track almost on a weekly basis and quiet details has impressed with its high-quality monthly turnover. But anyway, I digress. ‘Oneironautics’ finds James nodding in the direction of “his fascination with the sounds and sensibilities of 70s/80s German electronic groups”. We’re talking a krauty who’s who here – Can, Neu!, Rother, Roedelius, Harmonia, Cluster etc. And on top of that he’s layering “a number of decidedly English references”. So that’s ‘Another Green World’-period Eno, Fripp and Durutti Column. And on top of on top of that he talks about keeping himself rooted in the melodic synth tradition of hauntology. Which is a lot of information to take in, right?
The thing is, you get totally what he means before the first track and earlier single, ‘Parallelograms’ has even finished. There’s a rolling melodic bassline straight out of the Neu! songbook and that bright guitar loop is pure Rother. The squally rich synths of ‘Galadali’ feels like something Ghost Box would get involved, I love the gentle almost slo-mo early New Order-like twang of ‘Salpetriere’ and the deep, pulsing synth on ‘Nereides’ is something I could happily listen to all day. There’s this heartbeat throughout the whole record, a sort of underpinning metronomic beat keeping time. It’s not a thud, it not pounding, it’s very gentle, like you’re holding its wrist and you can feel the pulse. Which just adds to the deliciously laidback feel of ‘Oneironautics’. It is very, very mellow. The sort of thing Sunday mornings were made for. All summer I’ve talking about early mornings in the Moonbuilding office and how certain music is made for listening with the windows open. I need to find the winter equivalent of that because that’s what ‘Oneironautics’ is. Oh, no Bandcamp page for this, it’s on the Soul Jazz site with snippets of the tracks. Link below. You’ll have to actually buy this one, or ask a friend to tape it for you, if you want to listen. Rocking it old school. Like it.
GOOD STUFF #3
GAUDI KOSMISCHES TRIO ‘Torpedo Forward’ (Curious Music)
And talking of kosmische… it really is the newsletter that feeds itself this week. There’s always connections to be made, no matter how tenuous. I mean this connection isn’t even that tenuous, Hawksmoor gets all krauty, Gaudi puts together a new live/studio project that gets all krauty. It’s krautrock week, clearly. Just a catch up for those who don’t know Gaudi. He’s a respected south London-based dub producer who has worked with the likes of Lee “Scratch” Perry, Horace Andy and Steel Pulse and moves in circles with people such as The Orb’s Alex Paterson, Mad Professor and Youth. His dub theremin stuff is well worth a listen. He is an impressive guy however you cut it. Gaudi Kosmisches Trio is a new project with Gaudi on synths, theremin and vocoder and featuring Porcupine Tree bassist Colin Edwin and guitarist De Palma. ‘Torpedo Forward’ finds this power trio really getting stuck in to some very funky grooves indeed and it all comes fused with psychedelic dub. The three of them have been performing live since they came together to tour Gaudi’s 2016 LP ‘Magnetic’, which means they’re tight as hell, and this new record is a kind of metamorphosis of that record and live show. And flipping heck it’s good. It’s relentlessly upbeat, which is always welcome, and things even get a bit knockabout on ‘In A Modern World’. Its vocoder vocal is like Kraftwerk covered by The Buggles. Totally infectious, utterly catchy. A hit all day long in the olden days. Gaudi talks about how the record was recorded in his gaff using vintage equipment and original analogue instrumentation from the 70s and 80s. “It has been made,” he says, “with an old-school approach, using traditional studio techniques, such as recording on a reel-to-reel tape recorder and mixing live on my 32-channel analogue mixing console.” These things matter. Daft as it might sound, you can hear the warmth. You’ll be sold on this almost as soon the opening ‘OWA OWA OWA’ strikes up. Its metronomic groove meets swanky guitar loop is pure kraut. There’s a two-note synth lick that makes me think of ‘Are “Friends” Electric’ too. None of the tracks are especially short, but the seven-minute plus outings like the rattlingly good ‘VOM MOND ZUM ROTEN PLANETEN’ really benefit from the leg stretch. Liking this a lot.
GOOD STUFF #4
LOULA YORKE ‘Mixtape’ (Truxalis)
Loula Yorke is fast becoming the name to watch, in my eyes at least. Her rise this year has been great to see. She’s released not one but two brilliant albums in the shape of ‘Volta’ in January and the quiet details outing ‘Speak, Thou Vast And Venerable Head’ in June. Both peachy, but the latter is of most interest here. Loula says she put it together like you would a mixtape, combining her distinctive modular workouts with home-made field recordings, all of which she found to be an interesting, enjoyable process. She talks about the record being “a plank in the hull of an imaginary ship that once set sail on a quest to uncover the meaning of it all” and how “by recombining patterns of synthesised sounds with field recordings taken from my immediate vicinity, I attempt to cause a glint in the surface of the waves”. When I first heard it, it felt like there was something a little different going on. She explains that the release came together quite quickly and as it was a process she enjoyed she began to think about the possibility of doing something along the same lines on a regular basis and so her ‘Mixtape’ series was born. The first one appeared before the qd album in May and we’ve had one a month ever since. They clock in around the 40-minute mark and come with detailed liner notes that are as essential as the music. Things have already grown since May, with each mixtape telling the story of Loula’s month – whether that’s real-life goings-on, like the gorgeous wedding that appeared in August’s tape, or more cerebral and thinky like this month’s offering where she talks about being “so angry I can hardly function”. Her anger is with the world, at the “rolling news of fire and floods, misogyny and war”, but also of what we’re doing to the place. There’s a great exchange between Loula and her partner Dave Stitch on the topic of throwing away an old door from their house. “You can’t throw things away,” she writes, “there is no away”. It all comes mixed with musical sketches and ideas, new and old, from her studio. These tapes are a wonderful snapshot of an artist’s frame of mind and a glimpse into the output of their studio. Think of it like a monthly audio magazine about Loula. Each month’s tape disappears when a new one appears, unless you’re a subscriber, which is fast becoming a snip at £45 a year. The mixtape itself is available for £2, which seems stupidly little for something so rich. As I was saying earlier, it’s tough out there for creators, there’s not a whole lot of money swilling around and yet out pours all this quality, whether that’s music or art or words. £2 for what amounts to a direct line into Loula’s mind is nothing and if enough of you chip in, that is the sort of thing that frees Loula up to do more of this brilliant stuff. I know you know this, but supporting people like this, even if it is only a couple of quid, makes a big difference if enough of you do it. So please do it.
GOOD STUFF #5
GOAT ‘Goat’ (Rocket)
A former Track Of The Week, psyche outfit Goat are a proper curio of a band. No one knows who they are, they wear outlandish outfits and masks on stage, they don’t seem to have names and they hail from a voodoo-worshiping cult in Kropilombolo, Sweden. They claim to have played together for decades, going right back to when they were children, and that there’s been many incarnations of Goat. I interviewed them recently, which was much fun. They told me the oldest living former member was “now retired from his duties, but soon to be 124 years old”. How much of all this is true? You decide. I love the conceit. What I do know is the records they make are almighty. This self-titled offering is their sixth outing to date and their third in three years. All of them as good as the last. This is a seriously funky record, the rasping wah-wah alone on ‘Dollar Bill’ would have a grumpy old man out of his chair and turning steps round the front room. On tracks like ‘Goatbrain’ and ‘Zombie’, I can hear stuff like The Slits and Tom Tom Club, the true greats, but Goat say nah, not especially big fans of those groups. If you are, you’ll love this. They really wouldn’t be drawn on influences. I know it’s a journo obsession, but it’s interesting. Well, I think so. They told me (I don’t know who it was, they didn’t say, I didn’t ask) that “similarities occur constantly without ever having met each other, if you get what I mean”. They said they hate analysing what they do. “It just happens. We don't think of it. We make music with no plan. I don't wanna try and figure out what the influences are this time because I can’t. But we have worked more with beats for sure.” For sure. The killer cut is the closer, ‘Ouroboros’, which melts old school breaks with an infectious hooky vocal and a Nile Rogers style guitar lick. Loving this. UK live dates incoming this autumn too, which will be fun.
A ROUND-UP IN A ROUND-UP
I’m writing this at 9.30am on Friday, so it’s a quick round-up today, because I really am running out of time. Neil Scrivin’s The Night Monitor released a new single, ‘The Black Monk Of Pontefract’ (Fonolith), last week which is Halloween-ready. All is stuff is pretty much Halloween-ready actually, but this one is the soundtrack to the haunting of the Pritchard family in their council house in Pontefract, West Yorkshire, in 1966. Not a tale for the feint-hearted this, as it features all manner of weird shit, including their daughter being dragged upstairs by an invisible hand round her neck, loud crashing sounds, objects moving, upside down crosses painted on the walls and a black-cloaked figure making regular appearances in the house. Gives me the heebies just typing that. It only went on for a couple of years, so you know. Brrrrr. Neil helpful also includes a further reading list on his Bandcamp page.
fonolith.bandcamp.com
Another one I missed from last week. Well, I didn’t miss it, just ran out of time. Again. Klaus Morlock is one of those names you’re not sure is real or not. Like Stefan Bachmeier, he has a back catalogue of film scores that don’t exist. It’s claimed he’s a UK-born German who lives in LA. And don’t even start to get sucked in by his Bandcamp page. Woodford Halse bill this latest outing, ‘Timeslip At Crail Harbour’, as a “full-length LP by the master of imaginary soundtracks”. Or should that be full-length LP by the imaginary master of soundtracks. This sort of thing drives me bonkers. Is he? Isn’t he? Don’t get me started on my Abul Mogard obsession. It was such a relief when he was unmasked. Whatever, this nautical offering is great stuff.
woodfordhalse.bandcamp.com
Really like Wræżlivøść’s self-titled three-tracker. It’s the work of Warsaw-based pianist/composer Kamil Piotrowicz whose working name means fragile/sensitive in Polish, but, he says, “it is written in a way that you can not really pronounce”. The idea that it’s called fragile and sounds like it does is very good. He came to me via Waxing Crescent’s Phil Dodds (thanks Phil) with this ultra glichy, I dunno how to describe it really. He says it’s free jazz. It’s a bit too leftfield even for that. There’s this tinkly “post-romantic” piano that drops in and out of squally electrical interference on the first track, ‘Wræżlivøść I’. ‘Méñu’ is a little gentler, it’s more ambient drift with a backdrop of occasional squall, while closer, the 10-minute ‘Wræżlivøść II’ is piano meets the electronic mangle, super charged. It’s cacophonous in places, which doesn't half make me smile. This seriously wild stuff. Not one for your next dinner party, that is for sure.
wraezlivosc.bandcamp.com
Meanwhile, New York-based Daniel Klag dropped in with ‘Facsimile’, his 10th album in total, and his second for Brooklyn’s Soap Library label whose aesthetic I really like. It’s a cassette label that pairs releases with “sensory objects to create holistic musical experiences”. Daniel’s release comes with “a hand-embossed notebook measuring just slightly larger than the tape itself”, which is in keeping with the release being “an ode to portable literature”. Daniel utilises “battery-powered synths and samplers interspersed with field recordings sourced from hiking trips” to create this audio diary that “searches for melody amongst the everyday”. It’s mesmerising stuff. You find yourself holding your breath, waiting for the melodies to emerge, and they do, like on the title track, where they arrive out of the waves. Daniel is playing tonight at a Soap Library night at Topos Bookstore’s Topos Too, which is at 5922 Myrtle Ave, Ridgewood, Queens, NYC. Doors are at 8pm and it’s free.
soaplibrary.net / soaplibrary.bandcamp.com
Last but by no means least, let’s finish up today with a palette cleanser from the always excellent Joachim Spieth who released ‘Retrace’ on his own Affin label last week. He says this new record differs from his last album, ‘Terrain’, “in that this time there is a mixture of dub elements with my more familiar ambient pads”. It feels so lush for those dub trimmings. There’s a lot of sub-bass here that gives everything such depth. He calls the tracks “aqueous soundscapes” and on something like ‘Shine’ it does feel like the push and pull of waves rolling ashore, whereas something like ‘Drip’ is equally rhymical, but way more menacing. His work is so sleek and clean, there’s a precision here that feels very reassuring.
joachimspieth.bandcamp.com
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SIMON RAYMONDE ‘In One Ear – Cocteau Twins, Ivor And Me’ (Nine Eight)
The Cocteau Twins are perhaps the one band who are responsible for my love of weird music. They weren’t that odd, they wrote songs with structure that sounded like songs, but Liz Frazer’s made-up language and the incredible sounds they eeked from their instruments was something very special.
Looking at the title of this autobiography by the band’s Simon Raymonde, I was thinking it said “Ivo”, as in Ivo Watts-Russell, the enigmatic figure behind 4AD, the label forever associated with their most famous act. But no, it’s “Ivor”. Turns out it’s Raymonde’s late father. I had no idea his dad was Ivor Raymonde, the clue was in the name I guess, who among other things wrote and arranged songs for Dusty Springfield. ‘I Only Want To Be With You’ was one of his. He also worked with the likes of David Bowie, The Walker Brothers, Tom Jones, Billy Fury and Ian Dury (which rhymes rather nicely) and many more. Yup. And he was an actor, appearing alongside Tony Hancock in the first series of his TV show in 1956. Don’t know about you, but my dad worked in the building trade. Simon has released a couple of volumes of Ivor’s work on his Bella Union label if you want to fully immerse yourself in this story. And you should because he has a great story to tell.
Simon Raymonde has a lovely writing style. It’s very chatty, which when done well is very, very readable. The words rattle along and you’re bounced quickly through the pages. The introduction here is a great example. He covers so much ground. He starts off talking about football. There’s some excellent stuff later about football, including Pat Nevin befriending him, training with Chelsea and playing for Melody Maker in the Music Business Sunday League, which would surely be a book on its own.
He then talks a little about dogs, his early production career and his label before he gets to the brain tumour that lead to him being deaf in one ear (hence the wordplay in the title, ‘In One Ear’). That opens the door to rewind and talk about his mum and dad, childhood accidents, Marbella hospitals, pagers and mobile phones (did excessive use serve up his tumour?) and the beginnings of his musical career, by which point you’re totally sold and catapulted into Chapter One.
Lots of these kinds of books dwell on the how did I get here, but Simon doesn’t hang around. There’s one chapter about school and a loss of virginity story and then it’s setting out his musical stall. Chapter Three, ‘1979’, focuses on his favourite year in music, which allows him to tell stories through a few of the records released that year. The best one is how he was at the famous early Human League show at The Nashville, the one David Bowie turned up at.
He charts the rise and rise of Cocteau Twins and, in the chapter ‘Trouble At Mill’, their downfall. Simon is brutally honest about his feelings of guilt at leaving his wife, a hugely promising fine artist, to bring up their two children on her own while he was away “gallivanting around the world”. Back home, like his father before him, he struggled with work/life balance and at the heart of it all was money. The band were fighting with the label about why they were seeing so little and in 1992, 4AD dropped them with one album left on their deal. The contracts they’d signed on their way up shafted them on their way down. The label owned the band’s back catalogue in perpetuity. “Our heads were elsewhere,” writes Simon of how they signed such draconian contracts early doors, “and our hearts were most certainly only focussed on one thing.” He makes no excuses, but they’re not the only band to suffer at the hands of the brutal music business.
But that’s not the end of the story by any means. The what happens next is as engaging as the what went before. There’s a great chapter about his dad and his work. He died in 1990, when Simon was still in his 20s. He did see Cocteau Twins once though, at The Royal Festival Hall in 1984. “When I asked him what he thought,” writes Simon, “he commented that ‘it was interesting’.”
The story of how his own Bella Union label emerged is great and provides something of a happy ending. It’s a label he runs to this day and he runs it how he knows an indie should be run. He doesn’t own anyone’s work forever, he listens to artists, pays people properly and releases some serious great music.
Cocteau Twins were amazing, still right up there and beyond being influential, they were defining. But pleasingly it’s not the whole of Simon Raymonde’s story. He comes across as a thoroughly decent man and one who can tell a compelling tale, which is kind of important when writing book. Not everyone who puts pen to paper gets that. This is a treat.
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 a lot for the nice words on the Retrace album!
😁