Issue 45 / 29 November 2024
Your essential DIY electronic music dispatch - Track Of The Week: QUINQUIS + Good Stuff from Sun Drawing + Sea Level, Mark Barrott, Lo Five, Kristen Roos + Huggy Bear book + more
What’s that coming over the hill? I know Xmas is on the way, but I always do my best to ignore it until it’s actual December and I like it when it’s finally here, but it feels like the run up just gets longer and longer doesn’t it? The upshot is we’ve got three more issues after this one before we’ll be taking a winter break.
Our last issue of 2024 will be 20 December. And that’ll be an Album Of The Year special. How’s that coming along? Don’t ask. The early New Year schedule is looking quiet at the moment, but that can easily change. If you’re planning anything release-wise do let me know. I’ve got half an eye on returning on 18 January, which happens to be our first birthday, so that’ll be nice. We can have a cake and everything.
In the meantime, business as usual. Happy reading.
Neil Mason, editor
moonbuildingmag@gmail.com
Issue 45 Playlist: bndcmpr.co/89af9066
Moonbuilding Tip Jar: ko-fi.com/moonbuilding
***ADVERTISE HERE***
email moonbuildingmag@gmail.com
QUINQUIS ‘Morwreg’ (Mute)
Photo: Aurelie Scouarnec
Another week, another great release coming out of Mute. This is also one of the oddest videos I’ve seen a long while. It makes me feel drunk and very tired, like I’m in the same room at the end of what looks like it could have been a long night. The lights are so bright! The video was shot “late night/early morning” by QUINQUIS and features the “many beautiful people” from the Clockwork Voltage Festival, Ljubljana, Slovenia. Enjoy. QUINQUIS is Breton musician Émilie Quinquis and ‘Morwreg’ is her first new track since her debut album, ‘SEIM’, in 2022, which Uncut described very accurately as “casually ominous”. Her music is casually ominous, and this track is no different. Released upfront of a performance at the famous Trans Musicales Festival in Rennes, Brittany, next week, it’s a “haunting love song between a mermaid and a sailor”. There’s a synth break towards the end that should have you standing on a chair and cheering. Don’t know if you’ve read Monique Roffey’s ‘The Mermaid Of Black Conch’, it’s such a brilliantly evocative book full of myth and wonder and darkness. Her mermaid and Émilie’s have a lot in common. The track is inspired by the women of Ushant Island, where Émilie lives. Legend has it that some of the women there are descended from a mermaid. “The mermaid in the song had 11 sisters,” she explains, “all left behind when she fell in love with a human, and she, and her descendants were cursed because of this. ‘Morwreg’ is the love song that the mermaid may have sung to her sailor before the sea – or her sisters – took him.”
‘Morwreg’ is out now on Mute
Got an upcoming release? We’re all ears. Email moonbuildingmag@gmail.com
Words: Neil Mason
GOOD STUFF #1
SUN DRAWING + SEA LEVEL ‘Afternoons At The Library (Objects Forever)
I don’t know if you remember Kings Of Convenience. A couple of indie folksters from Bergen, Norway, whose 2001 debut album ‘Quiet Is The New Loud’ very much did what it said on the tin. Earworm melodies, rich, minimal arrangements, the occasional tippy-tappy rhythm, it was a proper late-night kickback of a record that, somehow, resonated with the early 00s dance music fraternity. ‘Quiet Is The New Loud’ got a lick of the electronic music stardust in the shape of ‘Versus’, which wasn’t really a remix record, more a collection of new arrangements, collaborations and remakes from the likes of Ladytron, Four Tet, Andy Votel, Röyksopp and so on. Which brings us to Sun Drawing + Sea Level’s ‘Afternoons At The Library’, which operates very much along the same lines. In the summer of 2023, The Leaf Library’s Matt Ashton found himself living in Helsinki. Turns out that at the city’s central library you can rent rehearsal space, recording studios and borrow instruments, which is very cool. Matt did just that, because it would be rude not to. “I managed three morning sessions with an acoustic guitar and piano in one of the rehearsal rooms, recording quickly onto a laptop via a Zoom H4N mic,” he says. The results of those sessions are an album called ‘Aamut Kirjastossa [Mornings At The Library]’ released under this solo nom de plume Sun Drawing last year. The album found itself in the hands of Makoto Onuki and Takeshi Yamamoto, the core duo at the heart of Fukuoka-based experimental/post-rock band Sea Level, who “built on the foundations of the original album, adding rich new layers of sounds and vocals”. The result is an entirely new record, ‘Afternoons At The Library’, and it’s something of a triumph. Matt’s original is such a soothing balm, as delicate as they come, the new version takes it up a notch. Not in a noisy way, they’ve not gone death metal or anything, although there is more sound. And many of the tracks come in an extended form. The new version of ‘A Hare Underneath The Window / 窓の下の野うさぎ’ clocks in at nine minutes, three times as long as the original ‘Jänis Ikkunan Alla [A Hare Underneath The Window]’. It also comes with a vocal, a distant falsetto that doesn’t overwhelm or get in the way as the track slowly builds, giving way to an undercurrent of electrical swirls. I love the details like the original tracks are titled in Finnish and English, the new version in English and Japanese. I also love the Scandi connection from this record to the Kings Of Convenience rework and how, once again, music has made magical connections for us, the lucky listeners.
GOOD STUFF #2
MARK BARROTT ‘Everything Changes, Nothing Ends’ (Reflections)
And talking of magic… Mark Barrott isn’t perhaps a name you will know, you many know him as Future Loop Foundation, or you might know his Balearic label, International Feel. ‘Everything Changes, Nothing Ends’ is his 11th album under various monikers, but it’s also something new. It comes from a place of such sadness it has no right be as joyous as it is. As Mark writes, it’s the story of how “life can change and be snatched away in the blink of an eye”. It’s a record about loss. It very much reminds me of Mark Van Hoen’s ‘Plan For A Miracle’ (Dell’Orso), which is also about devastating personal loss, but somehow resonates with such hope. In the weeks following the death of Sara Kult-Smith in 2023, Mark’s partner of some 20+ years, he began working with orchestra and choirs across Europe to find the “right sonic language to portray the tsunami of emotions that were running through my body, mind and soul”. It would seem he found that language, not only because we’re listening to ‘Everything Changes, Nothing Ends’, and that it communicated those feelings sufficiently for him to release it, but because you can feel it. Following her cancer diagnosis, Mark wrote throughout Sara’s illness. It was, he says the only way he knew how to cope with coming home from the hospital to an empty house. He freely admits the work wasn’t good, understandably. While it helped him cope, he says it will never see the light of day. Following Sara’s death though things changed and a “clearer purpose” emerged. The orchestral and choral elements “just felt like these were the tools and the sonic pallet of the story that I wanted to tell,” he says. Sara went from diagnosis to death in three short months. You can’t imagine. He talks about how there was no palliative or hospice care in Ibiza where they’d lived since 2012, so the team treating Sara set up a room at home as a mini palliative care suite for her final days. You can hear all that in this record, the sadness, but also the tenderness, the warmth. The love. The interesting thing is Mark tried it with a full orchestra initially and it didn’t work. Felt flat. So he whittled things down to a quartet and small choir from where he could layer until to create the feel. And it worked as you can hear. “This is not a sad story,” says Mark. “It's a story of joy, love, grief and gratitude for what was.”
GOOD STUFF #3
LO FIVE ‘Aspirant’ (Waxing Crescent)
Lo Five’s Neil Grant is a man who has been quietly brilliant for far too long. If you don’t know his stuff, you should make some time. His Discogs page says he makes “hazy tape-worn beat-driven soundscapes as an outlet for an ongoing interest in consciousness and enlightenment”. Which is fair. Last year’s woozy ‘Persistence Of Love’ on CiS is a good example. He brings this 90s rave sensibility - call it nu rave if you like, I like to call things nu rave - which has been refined over the years into what he does now. I was describing this sort of thing only recently, somewhere, can’t remember where. I think I said it’s music made by people who were on the ground back then and this is how they see/hear it now. It’s the sound of their youth though the filter of time. And it chimes because the listener was there too and they recognise it all only too well. ‘Aspirant’ finds Neil in new age mood. The opening two tracks are beatless, but brim-full of spatronics. Oh, made myself laugh there. Spatronica, you know the sort of thing, the tensionless chord progressions, nothing abrasive, smooth warms keys. Melodies on pipes. By track three, ‘The Way Of The Golden Flower’, a 1990’s shuffling breakbeat emerges, ‘The Intimacy You So Desire’ is a hypnotic drone that gives way to more breaks, 90s style, ‘The Observer Trap’ is a melodic chord sequence that could have come out of Moroder’s studio. There must be money to be made selling exclusive chillage to spas all over the world. Neil, if this is the plan I salute you. I know what I’d rather hear in the sauna. My favourite track is perhaps the closer, ‘Cosmic Joke’, which kind of explodes the whole thing. I’m still trying to unpick it. It is classy stuff. I know Neil will explain all next time I drop him a line. When I know, you’ll know.
waxingcrescentrecords.bandcamp.com
GOOD STUFF #4
KRISTEN ROOS ‘Universal Synthesiser Interface Vol III’ (We are Busy Bodies)
“Lauded by The Wire” is the kind of thing that would usually have me heading in the other direction. I’ve always wished I liked that most leftfield of leftfield music magazines, I really should, I sould be their target audience, but I find it such heavy weather. Because of this I’m probably missing out and quite often too. Take for example Vancouverian Kristen Roos. The Wire said he’d made “two of the most beguiling electronic albums of recent years”. I mean, on investigation he has (guess what they’re called, I’ll wait), but The Wire telling me that puts me right off. Wish I could my finger on why. Anyway, ‘Universal Synthesiser Interface Vol III’ sees Kristen continue his foray into the wonderful world of early MIDI sequencing software intended for use on personal computers. He focuses on the software titles of a company called Intelligent Music and its champion Joel Chadabe. Joel wanted to create “intelligent, algorithmic tools that allowed users to adjust aspects of their music while a computer algorithm was composing it”. Crazily prophetic stuff for the 80s, eh? Here Kristen focuses on a rhythm sequencer called Upbeat, which was hailed at the time as “the world’s best drum machine”. Really loving the whole lot of this, the driving rhythms of ‘Samb’, the rattle and hum of ‘Zimba’, the almost acidy ‘Bok’. It’s amazing what computers could do isn’t it? How about “three of the most beguiling electronic albums of recent years” The Wire, eh? One more thing about The Wire while I’m on it. They’re never going to read this. What blows my mind is every time I see their cover my first reaction is “Who?”. I have a decades-long career at the same coalface and still I have no idea who these people are! Which I guess The Wire would wear as a badge of honour. I would if I were them. I’ll get some made up.
THE HANDY ROUND UP
Just going to catch you up with a few bits and bobs I’ve missed in the last few weeks. As you will know, a big favourite round these parts is Bernard Grancher and his latest offering is ‘Lumière Volante’ on his own Astra Solaria label. “This is music for violence, music to fight or to fly high. This is music to watch flash blip blinking too fast. This is music for cars, not for loving,” says Bernard, which all sounds very un-French. If there’s no room for loving in France, what is the world coming to?
bernardgrancher.bandcamp.com
I am a sucker for any track called ‘Arrival’ and Glitchkase’s opening track from the ‘KALI’ EP (ALLES) doesn’t disappoint. I mean the word “arrival” is always about aliens in my mind. Don’t know about you. The second track here is called ‘Contact’. Good to know we’re on the same wavelength. You will be pleased to know it is tense, shivery, toweringly tense stuff.
glitchkase.bandcamp.com
Not quite sure how I missed Inhmost’s ‘Future Research Journal Entries (Part I)’ (Past Inside the Present). The artwork alone is plenty eye-catching enough. Inhmost is UK-based Simon Huxtable who is making his PITP debut here. You should know what to expect from this fine label by now, this, Simon explains, is “a time capsule from a forgotten generation of space travelers”. His work spans the spectrum, from drum ’n’ bass to this kind of weightless ethereal shimmer. Versatile chap.
pitp.bandcamp.com
I’m getting lots of lovely emails from people who are only just finding, and liking, Moonbuilding Weekly, which is great news. You worry with something like this that there’s a ceiling, a max number who want to read about quirky electronic music, but every time I get an email from someone new, I know we’ve not hit our ceiling. Bacelona-based See Blue Audio label dropped me a line this week pointing me in the direction of their final release of the year. Rhombus Index is West Yorkshire-based producer Loui Binns whose fourth album of gentle electronics ‘hycean’ has had the remix treatment in ‘hycean revisited’, chief among the remixers is f5point6, but there’s some new names here worth investigating. Looking forward to ‘polyeme (Kuma’s ‘Train To Todmorden’ mix).
seeblueaudio.bandcamp.com
Constant Little Ghost dropped me a line pointing me in the direction of his debut album from last month, ‘The Yellow Knife’. He describes it as on the post-rock side of things. It’s an album that has a beginning, a middle and end – an ‘Intro’, ‘(Interlude)’ and a three-track cinematic finale that is very cool. In the finale, there’s a track called ‘There is a place in the universe where you and I can fly faster than light’, which is epically shimmery and shuddery. Nice strings and a distorted bass rumble. There’s something almost Spiritualized about it, reminds me a little of Eat Lights Become Lights. Anyway, this sort of thing deserves a wider listening to and well, there’s a listening party at 8.30pm on 3 December on Bandcamp. Get it in your diaries.
constantlittleghost.bandcamp.com
I find it hard to ignore Bob Bhamra’s West Norwood Cassette Library label for obvious reasons. We are both in the ‘burb. Small world etc etc. It feels like a little while since he’s popped up with his own brew of bass and bleeps from SE27 and this double header ‘Jump Up (Get Beat Down)’ in ‘Original Mix’ and ‘Rawtraches Remix’ flavours is just the ticket.
***ADVERTISE HERE***
Email moonbuildingmag@gmail.com
‘KILLED (OF KIDS)’ by Niki Elliott, Jo Johnson, Chris Rowley and John Slade, edited by Ethan Swan, designed by Matthew Walkerdine (The Grass Is Green In The Fields For You / JABS)
It’s funny how those moments that thrust bands into the limelight are often the moments where, for those at the sharp end at least, everything starts going wrong even if to everyone else it looks like it’s the beginning of everything going right.
That moment for riot grrrl trailblazers Huggy Bear came with their explosive live appearance on Channel 4’s ‘The Word’ in February 1993. The show was essential post-pub viewing not only for its great musical guests, but because it was always teetering on the brink of completely falling apart. It would seem that night things went more than a little array.
In a new book, ‘Killed (Of Kids)’ (The Grass Is Green In The Fields For You / JABS), that story, along with many others that shaped the trajectory of Huggy Bear, is told through a huge new interview with the whole band and comes with a raft of photos, correspondence, flyers and cuttings from the time. I’m telling you all this because the book is well worth knowing about, but also because the band featured the excellent Jo Johnson, who these days can be found making beautifully delicate modular music under her own name.
The great appeal of bands like Huggy Bear is that they were engaged and they were smart. Before they even played a note together, they were friends who wanted to fill up culturally on everything that was going on around them. In the book, bass player/vocalist Niki Elliott talks about those days and their whirlwind of discovery. In one breath they talk about buying tickets to see Pixies, in the next they’re at Whirl-y-gig at Belsize Park Town Hall “dancing to Asian tribal techno”. Those Whirl-y-gig nights were something else. Niki’s recollection of her new relationship with soon-to-be bandmate, frontman Chris Rowley, and how “it brought new things to do” really chimes. The late 80s/early 90s for anyone on the cusp of their 20s seemed ripe when it came filling your head up. There was just so much to see, to hear, to read, to talk about. “We shared jackets, food, went to see films, check out book shops, markets,” Niki says. “We went on long city walks to comic shops and galleries – all of this new for me.” They talk about hanging out at Rough Trade in Covent Garden and at the ICA Bookshop where they’d fill up on seven-inches, zines and texts such as ‘The Situationist Handbook’, all of which began to shape their thinking.
As Huggy Bear came together, the band consisted of two couples, Niki and Chris and Jo (guitar/vocals) and Jon Slade (guitar), along with drummer Karen Hill who reveals she didn’t have her own kit until a couple of days before that fateful appearance on ‘The Word’. She’d practice on phone books and cardboard boxes and use other bands’ kits at gigs – “I bought the main bit from Record And Tape Exchange, plus two shitty symbols,” she says. She kept the £3 price tag on the splash symbol because “it felt punk”. It was knackered so it sounded punk too.
Everything shifted for the band when they saw a copy of the Riot Girl fanzine by US trailblazers . “Reading it,” says Niki, “we realised the potential of making music that was fierce and girl-positive was a revelation. We could make songs that incorporated our views and anger, our stories and passions, challenge political injustice and issues we felt weren’t being addressed.” Riot Girl was a major catalyst and saw HB venture deep into feminism and punk rock and very much develop their own take.
‘The Word’ appearance was perhaps the first time many of us had been exposed to Huggy Bear and it was indeed a revelation. Performing the ferocious ‘Her Jazz’, they were so cool. They looked like us, like our friends – the girls with hair clips, cute dresses, Doc Martens and attitude, the boys with steelies, beanies, hoodies, ripped jeans and mops of hair. And they had full heads like us, and things to say. And they were saying it on the telly. Following their performance they hung around in the studio and were dismayed with an interview The Word’s shambolic presenter Terry Christian did with American models and self-proclaimed “bimbos” The Barbi Twins. The band objected to the “casual sexism” and berated the presenter, loudly and swearily, for his line of questioning. They were promptly, heavy handedly, turfed out of the studio during a chaotic ad break. The fall out landed them on the cover of Melody Maker and caused waves that never really went away.
The band describe ‘The Word’ appearance as the moment “being in Huggy Bear stopped being fun”. Which is a shame as it was the moment many of us were just getting switched on to them. The book does lay bare just how unpleasant that fall out was. A photo session in The Maker that had the boys kissing each other and the girls doing likewise became incredibly divisive. Harder to fathom is how their gigs became fraught with men turning up to show their distaste for women who spoke their minds, or indeed, just their distaste for women.
While the book admirably lays bare their story, oral history style, it does a whole lot more too. HB published seven zines, a set of which come to light in Chris Rowley’s garden shed during a spring clean in 2021. They are the main reason the book came into being and the title sees all the zines republished here in their entirety. As always, it is such a treat seeing old zines ride again.
The book seems like a well-taken opportunity for the band, with the distance of time, to tell their side of the story and to set the record straight about Huggy Bear in general. Non of the band have spoken much in the intervening years, all choosing to leave it in past where they felt it belonged. They do have an incredible tale and they were a powerhouse of a band, proper mavericks and people like that should never just be forgotten. I’m glad they done what they’ve done, pleased they’ve told their story their way, because a legacy like that should be more than just some swearing live on the telly. Huggy Bear have set the record straight. Admirably so.
thegrassisgreeninthefieldsforyou.co.uk
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