Issue 44 / 22 November 2024
Your essential DIY electronic music dispatch - Track Of The Week: bdrmm + Good Stuff from ARC, Pefkin, From Overseas, James Bernard and zakè, Stichflamme Barnick, Mystery Tiime + more
The Twitter/X exodus has been in full effect this week I’m happy to report. It’s been very noticeable how many people have arrived on Bluesky in recent days. In this brave new world, you can find Moonbuilding on Insta, Threads and Bluesky, do come and say hello.
Can I just remind those of you who happen to be in London’s glittering West End this weekend that Paul Cousins’ interactive sound installation, ‘Atomised Listening’, is on at Stone Nest, Shaftsbury Avenue today and tomorrow. If you’ve seen Paul play live you will already have an inkling as to how good this is going to be. Tickets are a fiver, book here.
Our quest to crack 1,000 subscribers before the year is out is edging closer. Just 99 to go! People can subscribe at moonbuilding.substack.com. It’s FREE! We also have advertising slots available in November and throughout December. Reasonable rates, buy one week, get one week free, receptive audience! Drop me a line.
Happy reading.
Neil Mason, editor
moonbuildingmag@gmail.com
Issue 44 Playlist: bndcmpr.co/fb73bf8a
Moonbuilding Tip Jar: ko-fi.com/moonbuilding
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BDRMM ‘John On The Ceiling’ (Rock Action)
Photo: Stew Baxter
The Hull-based shoegazers are doing their best to shed the label of being Hull-based shoegazers if new single ‘John On The Ceiling’ is anything to go by. Taken from ‘Microtonic’, their third album, their second on Mogwai’s Rock Action label, the track has much more of a dancefloor feel about it. The spiralling one-minute-plus intro for starters. You can hear the remixes now. The track, or the foundations of it at least, has been kicking around since their early days, but it was one “that represented a direction they maybe didn’t possess the full confidence or knowhow to follow at the time”. They clearly do now though. The track also laid the foundations for their approach to the new album, so expect more fireworks when that lands in late Feb.
Interestingly, the album has a guest appearance from Working Men’s Club’s Sydney Minsky Sargeant, which is the sort of parallel you need to be drawing with this new-look bdrmm. The blueprint is still all there, the chiming guitars, the drifty vocal, the roots of shoegaze, but there’s this new confidence about them. They talk about a support slot with Daniel Avery and a ravey day out at Field Day as the moments that turned them. It suits them though, there’s an assuredness to their sound, not that they were ever off course, but it’s always good when you can actually see a band progress like this.
‘Microtonic’ is released by Rock Action on 28 February 2025
Got an upcoming release? We’re all ears. Email moonbuildingmag@gmail.com
Words: Neil Mason
GOOD STUFF #1
ARC ‘Chronicle’ (DiN)
ARC is the duo of DiN label boss Ian Boddy and his great friend and long-time collaborator Mark Shreeve, who sadly died in 2022. As ARC they played eight live shows between 1998 and 2017, seven of which have been released on DiN. This is the eighth and final show from E-Live in Eindhoven, The Netherlands, on 13 October 2007. The show was built around their then recently released ‘Fracture’ album, the five tracks being interspersed with ambient passages. At the centre of it all was Mark’s Moog Modular, whose Berlin School retro-style sequencing underpin the show over which the duo add “a heady mix of quirky melodic lines and spacey atmospheres. “Pieces,” writes Ian in the release notes, “have an organic life that breathe and can grow from a tiny staccato rhythm to a huge growl in seconds”. Can they ever. ‘Departed’ is a great example as a huge melodic section explodes around halfway into its eight glorious minutes. The centrepiece of the record is the epic 22-minute ‘Rapture’, which is such a slow builder you find yourself holding your breath with the tension. When it all kicks in, when the melody strikes and the whole thing builds towards its towering crescendo that wait is very much worth it. Those squalling synth solos! Very metal! Love it. Ian tells a lovely tale about how they closed the show not once, but twice, with the same track. “We had an incredible reaction from the audience after we played Mark’s track ‘System Six’ as the encore that the gig organiser Ron Boots said, ‘You must play more’. Mark and I looked at each other and shrugged our shoulders, we had nothing else prepared to which Ron replied, ‘Play that again’, which we did to even more applause.” There’s something very moving about listen to music made by someone who is no longer with us. All the more special that it comes from a live setting, that these works once spiralled out into the ether one night and were captured on tape for us all to hear now. ‘Chronicle’ comes as an edition of 500 and there are not many left. Do not hang about on this one.
GOOD STUFF #2
PEFKIN ‘The Rescoring’ (Nite Hive)
We’ve talked about Penelope Trappes’ excellent Nite Hive cassette label before. More than once. Quick recap… it’s a label run by and for “women and gender expansive artists to allow the free exploration of their approach to experimental music”. Right up our street. There’s five releases to date, and two of them have featured as Moonbuilding’s Track Of The Week, which is an impressive strike ratio. ‘The Rescoring’ is a hauntingly beautiful piece of work by musician, sound designer and field recordist Gayle Brogan. She explains that the work was written in the autumn of 2023 while she was preparing for an unspecified “major life change”, which included a move from Glasgow to Sheffield. Exploring the concept of transformation, she makes use of her deliberately limited palette of viola, synth and voice. The rub was she’d never played the viola before and wanted to layer each track in one take. Brave. “I wanted to channel all the different feelings and thoughts I had,” she says, “writing one piece that reflected an aspect of the landscape I was leaving, one about the land I was moving to and the last track ties it all together.” It is, listened to as a whole, a powerful piece of work about change, which is no doubt something we all can recognise. The opening 17-minute shiver of ‘You Within It’s Branching Arms’ has that deep, dark feel of Clannad in places, and seems to conjure up nature, woodland especially, in its pensive drones to great effect. I always associate Clannad, who seem to have become very trendy in the intervening years, with woodland thanks to their soundtrack to the 80s ITV show, ‘Robin Of Sherwood’. I worked in a record shop around the time, mid 80s-ish, and remember the soundtrack album ‘Legend’ flying out. ‘Gossip In The Leaves’ is such an evocative title and again the piece itself seems rooted in the forest, in the woods. I often talk about how instrumental music can have a subject matter when there are no lyrics, but this is a prime example. It all just sounds like music that comes from nature. You have to appreciate labels like Nite Hive, small they maybe but the power of the work they’re putting into the world is almighty. From little acorns and all that. This is, of course, sold out. Better form an orderly queue for the next release eh?
GOOD STUFF #3
FROM OVERSEAS, JAMES BERNARD, ZAKE ‘Flint’ (Past Inside the Present)
How about an ambient supergroup? ‘Flint’ sees zakè (PITP founder Zach Frizzell) teaming up with frequent collaborators and good friends From Overseas (aka Kévin Séry) and ambient maestro James Bernard for this release that celebrates “the first sharp breath of a brisk chill”. “October and November are my favorite months,” says Zach, “representing a time of winding down, and the promise of reflective stillness.” It’s funny how these things work out. While the label is based in Indianapolis, Indiana, here in the UK we’ve had our first frost of the season this week, those mornings when everything feels still, captured under a glistening, frozen blanket. As you’d expect, ‘Flint’ is such a peaceful release. The title track “drifts on a rapturous interweaving of soft electronics, deep bass, and orchestral sweeps, accented by wafting guitars that evoke the gentlest parts of Fripp & Eno’s ‘Evening Star’.” Which is some big talk, but it’s good to be aiming high, right? And these musicians, as you will know from the PITP releases we’ve been writing about for a while now, are more than up to the job. The centrepiece is the glorious ‘Fir’ that shifts slowly, glacially, “Bernard’s six-string bass anchors Séry’s languid guitar plucks and Frizzell’s reverberating keys”, it repeats backwards and forwards in washes, the nice thing is it just locks into that groove, it doesn’t build or grow, it just moves so gently backwards and forwards. Again, like the Pifkin release, this record is rooted in the natural world. You can almost picture a mighty fir shimmering with a dusting of snow. The closer, ‘Thistle’, features Marine Eyes, who regular readers will be more than familiar with. She is part of this impressive gang and ‘Thistle’ sees her ethereal tones melt into the almost Cocteau Twins-like guitar shimmer, which is very welcome. ‘Flint’ is all just so calm, so peaceful, a moment of which we could all benefit from.
GOOD STUFF #4
STICHFLAMME BARNICK ‘Stichflamme Barnick’ (Superpolar Taips)
One of my very favourite super-quirky labels is the Cologne-based Superpolar Taips, who by their own admission have been neglecting their duties of late somewhat. It took Marco at the label a year to respond to the last email I sent him, which is very impressive. But better late than never. He popped up the other week, holding his hands up to not releasing anything for a year and promising to send me something in the post. It arrived this week in the shape of this Stichflamme Barnick cassette. And it came in a package with sweets too. They were Sperlari Lavazza, coffee sweets, which I’d not had before. Thanks Marco. Sweets aside, it’s nice to have Superpolar Taips back in the saddle. Stichflamme Barnick is the meeting of producers Stichflamme Dormagen (the alter ego of Rudi Baumgärtner) and Robin Barnick, both of who are no strangers to the label and come together here for this new self-titled electroacoustic release. As is the label’s wont, things are vague. The release was recorded “somewhere between Remagen, Niederkassel, Berlin and Cologne” between 2022 and 2024, with the tagline “Old Machines and objects did their thing and started singing”. They did. It’s one of those records that seems to have a life of it’s own. There’s a huge crash on opener ‘Verboden Te Roken’ that has you jumping out of your skin, while ‘Dolce Al Cucchiaio’ sounds like you’re tuning into electrical interference in order to decipher messages from distant galaxies.
GOOD STUFF #5
MYSTERY TIIME ‘Maudlin Tales of Grief and Love’ (Vicious Charm)
Vicious Charm, you should probably know, is a new label from Damian Harris whose Skint label was quite successful. He is a man who knows his onions so you’d expect good thing from Mystery Tiime. It’s the work of London-based producer/DJ Ayman Rostom whose clubby work appears under the name The Maghreban. But this is something different. He’s singing on it for starters. He originally intended to bring in “proper” singers, but after he’d put his own guide vocals down on the demos it was apparent it was his voice that needed to tell these deeply personal tales of love and death, with broader themes covering off fatherhood, relationships and his years of opiate addiction. People say he sounds like Robert Wyatt, which he does. Think Wyatt’s turn with Ultramarine and that’s kind of the ballpark. Musically, it’s a delightful mix of lo-fi dance and post-punk and what his people call “odd pop”. Musically it harks back. Indeed, he was a Cure fan in his own early years and you can hear early Smith and co in the DNA of this record. Many of the tracks have that stripped back lo-fi sound where each instrument picks itself out in a distinct space. The accompanying notes are interesting as Ayman sketches out his musical journey. It helps to hang your coat on the Mystery Tiime peg. He talks about The Cure, and how the melancholy of the music spoke to him aged 10. He also talks about digging for 80s records to sample and for playing out - Eurythmics, DAF, Pigbag, Richard H Kirk, Bauhaus, The Creatures, Quando Quango, Connie Plank, Ultravox, Tuxedomoon, Au Pairs and Jah Wobble. That’s a good list, right? It’s not your usual influences list. And it’s not your usual record. Damien Harris talks about how it took him by surprise “it kept calling me back,” he says, “time and time again.” I know what he means. There’s something captivating about it. The vulnerability of the vocals, the rawness of the subject matter, the simplicity of the music. The choppy house-y piano on ‘Long Distance Runner’, the faint ‘Ghost Town’-y echo of ‘A Cruel Trick’, the ‘Mad World’ licks and sax call of ‘Thank You Deeply’, it all has you coming back.
https://viciouscharm.bandcamp.com/
THE ROUND UP
Excuse the way I’m about to rip through this week’s round up. I really want to mention these releases, but am very much running out of time, as always.
I’ve said this before, but I always look forward to anything that features Sam Britton. The brilliantly titled ‘An Ever-Growing Meridional Entertainment Transgression At The Edge Of The Multiverse’ (Not Applicable) is a ninth album from Icarus, his project with Ollie Bown and it’s their first in 10 years, which I find incredible. They talk about how they’ve been making music together since they were 15 and now in a fourth decade while the gaps are getting bigger they say “it’s essential to our being that we continue our music production dialogue”. And essential to the being of the listener too. This is excellent stuff, as always. With a title like that you will have probably gathered it’s a homage to The Orb’s classic ‘Ultraworld’. And for those of you who know about these things, Moonbuilding is also a homage to the magnificence of The Orb so Icarus are pushing at an open door here. They talk about how they don’t “merely imitate”, but use The Orb “as a jumping off point for quantum leaps and wormholes of their own”. The opening ‘Mazda Bongo Friendee’ and the closing 12-minute ‘Voodoo-Baroque-Vapourware-Serialism’ are especially good. Some of the track titles are pure Alex Paterson too. ‘Lemsip Max Relief’ anyone?
not-applicable.bandcamp.com
I must apologise to Mark Heffnernan whose Pocket Lint album ‘The Jet Age’ has sat on my listening pile for far too long. But better late than never eh? I always enjoy Mark’s work, it’s very much on the right side of 80s retro pop. ‘The Jet Age’ is of course another homage (see above), this time to the jet age of the late 40s that saw the rapid introduction of the jet engine, which in turn revolutionised air travel. The narrative nature of this release gives it the feel of Public Service Broadcasting, whose last album, also aviation based, wasn’t all that. So if you like that sort of thing - and generally I do - it’s time to reach for Pocket Lint.
pocketlint17.bandcamp.com
In a world where indie bands seem to have run out of names - see English Teacher et al - I’m really getting drawn in by some some excellent work from our electronic friends. Quiet Husband is a brilliant name, but better still is the name of the Jordan-based label the ‘Religious Equipment’ album is released on. Drowned By Locals. The record is the full-length debut from Richie Culver and it’s pretty out there. Oh no, hang on that was a fried chicken ad on Soundcloud. It’s quite hard to describe what’s going on here, but it’s a “harrowing portrait of addiction and substitution “where noise becomes a proxy for silence, and intensity replaces numbness”. The first three tracks are gulfs apart, there’s the full-throttle techno of ‘Methadone’, which feels like being dragged through the nighttime streets by the scruff of you neck, experimental noise terror offering ‘Kratom’, while ‘Klonopin’ repeats the phrase “being healthy is the main thing in your life” over and over like a super minimal Gavin Bryers. His accompanying notes are pretty bewildering… “Hey. Read Message. How's it going, bro? Two people and I'm yours. Give me a specific time. So I can get organized. Zig Zag Hypergrid. Attack the sun. 0.8. Our existence is an exasperated attempt to complete being. 0.8.” Liking this a lot.
drownedbylocals.bandcamp.com
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MUSIC PRESS LISTS… PART TWO
OK, so I know you’ve all been losing sleep over this. Just to recap, last week I unearthed an All-Time Top 30 albums list I made as part of a Greatest Albums Of All-Time piece for Melody Maker. I said I’d print my list, then got waylaid by something else entirely so said I’d publish my list this week. You can read last week’s Moonbuilding Weekly here.
The way music press list features tended to work, or a starting point for them at least, was to ask all the writers to compile a list. Any rundowns we published were always controversial, but getting to that point was equally as fraught. Fortunately, we didn’t have social media back then. The only way to take a swing at us was by writing a letter. It was always a humbling experience editing the letter’s page. Melody Maker readers were brutal. I didn’t think it could get much worse and then I moved to NME to work on their website, which had messageboards. They were even worse. And this was long before trolling was thing.
Anyway, for an all-time list everyone chipped in their thoughts and they were used to compile a master list. It wasn’t like the end of year lists, which tended to be vote-driven, these lists were put together on a whim. They were designed to get people talking. I’ve been looking for the issue it was in, I know it was 2000, which was the year the mag closed, and I can’t find it. I found a website that mentions the list, saying “MM were very low key about the list, no mention of it on the cover and it was relegated to the bottom strip of a couple of pages”. Which sounds about right. Here’s the full 100… Looking back, my personal list was interesting.
1 Radiohead ‘OK Computer’ (Parlophone)
2 Beastie Boys ‘License To Ill’ (Def Jam)
3 AC/DC ‘Back In Black’ (Atlantic)
4 New Order ‘Lowlife’ (Factory)
5 Lou Reed ‘Transformer’ (RCA)
6 The Jam ‘All Mod Cons’ (Polydor)
7 Echo & The Bunnymen ‘Ocean Rain’ (Korova)
8 Spiritualized ‘Lazer Guided Melodies’ (Dedicated)
9 Oasis ‘Definitely Maybe’ (Creation)
10 The Fall ‘This Nation’s Saving Grace’ (Beggars Banquet)
11 The Smiths ‘The Queen Is Dead’ (Rough Trade)
12 The Police ‘Outlandos D’Amour’ (A&M)
13 The Stone Roses ‘The Stone Roses’ (Silvertone)
14 Talk Talk ‘The Colour Of Spring’ (Parlophone)
15 The KLF ‘The White Room’ (KLF Communications)
16 Led Zeppelin ‘IV’ (Atlantic)
17 Madness ‘Madness’ (Two Tone)
18 Primal Scream ‘Screamadelica’ (Creation)
19 Beck ‘Odelay’ (Geffen)
20 The Pixies ‘Surfer Rosa’ (4AD)
21 Frankie Goes To Hollywood ‘Welcome To The Pleasure Dome’ (ZTT)
22 This Mortal Coil ‘It’ll End In Tears’ (4AD)
23 The Undertones ‘The Undertones’ (Sire)
24 The Jesus And Mary Chain ‘Psychocandy’ (Creation)
25 The The ‘Soul Mining’ (Some Bizarre)
26 Underworld ‘Secondtoughestintheinfants’ (JBO)
27 The Clash ‘London Calling’ (CBS)
28 Reprazent ‘New Forms’ (Talkin’ Loud)
29 The Specials ‘The Specials’ (Two Tone)
30 Orange Juice ‘The Third Album’ (Postcard)
I also found a second list, which is a slightly rejigged version, with a run-off reserve list. Stuff like XTC’s ‘Black Sea’, Portishead’s ‘Dummy’ and Massive Attack’s ‘Blue Lines’ that didn’t even make my Top 30. And yes, there’s no Beatles, which is just the tip of the iceberg. I was nothing if not contrary when I was at The Maker. There’s plenty of stuff on that list I genuinely love, This Mortal Coil is a record I still listen to with a alarmingly regularity, likewise Talk Talk’s ‘Colour Of Spring’. Last time I listened to Led Zep ‘IV’? Couldn’t tell you. Lou Reed’s ‘Transformer’? Don’t be daft. ‘The Nation’s Saving Grace’ isn’t even my favourite album by The Fall, same goes for ‘License To Ill’. Same goes for ‘Surfer Rosa’.
I do seem to have fallen between two stools and it was clearly a difficult landing. I appear to have made a list that deals with records I really liked rather than creating an all-time greatest list. Looking at it now, I’d say I was being deliberately awkward. NME did a similar chart in 2013, see here, voted for by NME writers “past and present” and they published a bunch of the staff charts. Features editor Laura Snapes, who is deputy music ed at The Guardian these days, submitted a chart that had four albums by The National in her Top Five, another writer did the same, but with four Rolling Stones albums.
If I was doing this all again now, it would be an entirely different list, but I’m actually quite glad I don’t have to. I compiled the Electronic Sound Albums Of The Year lists for years, which was just as stressful, but doing end of year lists was always a lot easier than any all-time list. Give it a try, see how far you get. Maybe we should do a Moonbuilding Readers Greatest Albums Of All-Time one day… then again.
A MESSAGE FROM THE MOTHERSHIP
***MOONBUILDING ISSUE 5 IS OUT NOW***
Bloody hell! Will you look at that? MOONBUILDING, Issue 5, is a scorcher. On the cover, depicted by 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 your ears.
Yes, we are giving you a 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 recent Castles In Space opus ‘There Are Other Worlds’.
Want to try before you buy? No bother. 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 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 Steven Appleby’s brilliant Captain Star cartoon strip.
This issue also features a pile 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
thank you for the kind words! and love the Pefkin release too! great issue 🤍
Amazing :) Thank you for this…