Issue 46 / 06 December 2024
Your essential DIY electronic music dispatch – Track Of The Week: Penelope Trappes + Good Stuff from The Black Dog, Sanger And Sanger, The Antiquarian, Fred und Luna, The Scholars Of The Peak + more
One minute it’s the summer, the next it’s nearly Xmas. How did that happen? The upshot is there’s only two more issues of Moonbuilding Weekly this year. It’s been quite a first year. It’s funny launching something new like we did in January, there’s a lot of work goes into the first one, then you realise you have to do another and another and another. Before you know it, you’ve done a whole heap, found a weekly rhythm, and after a while you start to wonder what you used to do before all this.
We’re also closing in our target of 1,000 subscribers by the end of the year. Less than 70 to go now. I’m hoping by New Year’s Eve we’ll have cracked that particular nut.
The last issue of 2024 is 20 December and it will be an Albums Of The Year special. It will. And I’m hoping I’ll have time to do a Books Of The Year list too. How’s it all coming along? Oh you know. Who needs sleep?
Anyway, enjoy this week’s issue. Same time next week?
Neil Mason, editor
moonbuildingmag@gmail.com
Issue 46 Playlist: bndcmpr.co/a40a3c51
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PENELOPE TRAPPES ‘Platinum’ (One Little Independent)
Photo: Jason Renaud
Brighton-based Oz Penelope Trappes has been building such a nice head of steam this year. While she hasn’t been releasing herself, she has been using her excellent Nite Hive label to great effect. The label, if you’ve missed us banging on about how good it is all year, describes itself as “an experimental cassette imprint, designed as a label run by and for women and gender-expansive artists”. The line-up so far has been mightily impressive. In Feb there was Karen Vogt’s ‘Waterlog’, which was about her cat dying, the title referring to how she was “weighed down with tears”. I felt that one, the Moonbuilding cat is just over there, snoozing in the office, as always. It is a beautiful piece of work - incredibly cassettes are still available. Then, in June came Patricia Wolf’s ‘The Secret Life Of Birds’ that marries her field recordings with electronics to great effect. It’s an album that should feature in end of lists for sure. Finally, just the other week, we had the Pefkin’s ‘The Rescoring’, an earthy and rather wonderful meditation on a big life change for musician, sound designer and field recordist Gayle Brogan. As a trio of releases it says much about Penelope, which is how all good labels should be. Through the artists she chooses to release you gain a deeper understanding of where she’s coming from. And lo, here she comes with news a new album of her own. ‘A Requiem’, her fifth full-length, but her first for OLI, lands on 4 April, which will be with us before we know it. In readiness, Penelope releases the second single from the record this week. It follows on from ‘Sleep’, the amazing video for which stars not one but two great actors, Maxine Peak and Kate Dickie, while the new single, ‘Platinum’, also has an show-stopping video that Penelope says is a visual representation of many of the themes on the album. The album itself sounds great. Her people describe it as “a raw, spiritual journey… a compelling examination of loss, the threat of it, the meaning of it, the coming to terms with it… we are asked to bear witness to a sacred personal experience like no other.” On the strength of everything Penelope has served up over the last year, her label and the two teasers for her new record, I can’t wait for this to land.
‘A Requiem’ is released by One Little Independent on 4 April 2025
penelopetrappes.bandcamp.com / nitehive.bandcamp.com
Got an upcoming release? We’re all ears. Email moonbuildingmag@gmail.com
Words: Neil Mason
GOOD STUFF #1
THE BLACK DOG ‘Sleep Deprivation’ (Dust Science)
“We make techno” says the tagline on the Sheffield legend’s Bandcamp page. They do, for sure, and brilliantly so for decades, but brace yourselves because this ain’t techno. The accompanying notes are precise and to the point. “‘Sleep Deprivation’ began in 2006,” they write, “during a time when our sleep patterns were drastically altered by constant travel and late-night gigs. This relentless cycle of broken sleep became a persistent part of our lives, and over time, we noticed something remarkable: our music became more emotional, raw, and vulnerable.” The Black Dog, who these days are founder Ken Dowie and Dust Science’s Martin and Richard Dust, go on to explain how the lack of sleep has affected every aspect of their lives and how it had an undeniable influence on their creative process. So much so they decided to embrace it, “allowing it to take centre stage”. So here we have music made knowingly in state of “emotional chaos”. And it’s all really rather beautiful.
There are a fair few album about sleep – Max Richter’s night-long opus springs immediately to mind, but not too many about sleeplessness. Maxi Jazz couldn’t get any, but that was insomnia rather than deprivation. The tracks here are numbered and have titles. So ‘Sleep Deprivation 06: The Future Is Now The Past’, which is the second track (01-04 are included as bonuses, the album starts with 05), is where The Black Dog really make you sit up and pay attention. You think the album is going to be a gentle ambient drift, but almost as soon as ‘06’ opens up there’s a string drone. Interesting. It sits over a bed of electronic pings and fizzes, a distant rising siren kind of sound strikes up and then it happens. My goodness, the strings start to sing, a melody begins to emerge. It’s like something out of a Saturday afternoon Hollywood weepie. It is as good as anything you’re going to be hearing this year. And we’re only two tracks in.
Because of the sublime second track, you are on high alert for further nuggets. And you are not disappointed. There are hints of ‘Chill Out’ on ‘Sleep Deprivation 10: New Times End’ where brass sounds like a distant nighttime train horn blare, ‘Sleep Deprivation 14: REM Kiss’ is such a restful piece of work, over an electrical buzz of a drone delicate tuneful strings sweep majestically. There’s some almost Vangelis-y type menace on ‘Sleep Deprivation 16: Null’. I love the airport themed beat-driven bonus tracks, which come from their 2010 ‘Music From Real Airports’ album that they made with interactive artists Human. It’s all connected in the world of The Black Dog. Like Max Richter’s ‘Sleep’, ‘Sleep Deprivation’ works as one piece, and if you’d like their last album, ‘Other, Like Me’, a raw exploration of mental health, to sound less minimal I have played both at once (by accident at first) and I can report it sounds pretty good. There’s also a new EP out today featuring ‘Deprivations’ 22-25.
The Black Dog have been going about their business since forever and they remain the most vital of practitioners. And if they can produce something as great as this, especially when you consider it’s out of their comfort zone, three decades in, that’s a very high bar.
GOOD STUFF #2
SANGER AND SANGER ‘Exotopia’ (quiet details)
The last release of the year from Alex Gold’s ever brilliant label comes from friend of Moonbuilding Luke Sanger and his brother Joseph. This time last year I said quiet details was head and shoulders the Label Of The Year, you’d be hard pushed to pick a label that’s trumped it this year. There’s been some sensational releases – Veryan’s ‘One Universal Bath’, James Bernard’s ‘Only Now’, Plant43’s ‘The Unfading Spark’, Loula Yorke’s incredible ‘speak, thou vast and venerable head’… I feel like I’m just about to list every release this year, but Alex really has been totally on the money once again. And ‘Exotopia’ is no exception. People will know Luke Sanger, maybe more for his techno than ambience, but his quieter side is well worth exploring. He’s graced quiet details before, early doors, with qd03, ‘Salt Water Motifs’. There’s a couple of releases on Balmat that are very much worth checking out, 2021’s ‘Languid Gongue’ and this year’s ‘Dew Point Harmonics’, both his Serein releases – ‘Ancient Pathways’ and ‘Global Horizontal Irradiance’ – are great too. And if you can find it, ‘World Of Inherent Noise’ on the sadly long-lost Miracle Pond is excellent. His brother, Joseph Myoushin Sanger, is, as Alex points out, “less well known in electronic cirlces”. “Having played Clavinet and Rhodes in numerous bands in the 90s and early 00s,” explains Alex, “he moved to Japan in 2006, where he took up the shakuhachi”. Which of course I had to look up. Wikipedia says it’s an “end-blown flute that is made of bamboo”. There’s various kinds, but its origins stretch back to the 7th/8th century, with the current incarnation a mere 16th century development. “Joseph has been studying the ‘Honkyoku’ [traditional/classical solo pieces associated with meditation and Zen Buddhism] with a grand master in Hiroshima for over 12 years,” continues Alex, “reached the level of master himself, and is fascinated by exploring the sonic possibilities, which this seemingly simple instrument offers.” Anything with a grand master is cool with me. Here we find Joseph on the standard and long shakuhachi and Luke on a variety of esoteric Ciat-Lonbarde instruments (look them up, they’re mad) and effects. The resulting album is a treat. The shakuhachi makes such a distinctive warm haunting sound, it’s hard not to imagine being on some sort of meditative retreat among the cherry blossom trees by a welcoming-looking lake. But a track like ‘Hyperpod’, with its repetitive echo-y swirl building slowly over eight minutes or ‘Bubble Nebula’ that loads up on electronic squalls and squiggles soon let you know we’re dealing with contemporary music makers here. Classy stuff from the brothers Sanger. I should also mention that for those of you who like Luke a little harder edged, he has something for you out today too in the shape of a new Luke’s Anger EP ‘Corporate Hell’ (Co-Accused). You’ll find that here…
GOOD STUFF #3
THE ANTIQUARIAN ‘Christmas' (Plenty Wenlock)
The idea came from a friend of the label who puts together what Eric describes as “a sort of anti/alternative festive compilation” featuring all sorts - spoken word to ambient to industrial. Eric has contributed tracks before but wanted to take the idea a little further. “The Antiquarian project is a study of the past, of texture, sound and a leaning towards archaic melody,” offers Eric. “Reinterpreting the melodies of well-known songs and carols has been done in many forms. I wanted to work on the sound and feel, there's something lovely about hearing something as familiar as ‘Last Christmas’ turned into a dystopian ‘Blade Runner’-esque synthscape.” Here he says the melodies have changed into something else and that the release is “something different to put on while settling down with friends and family”. You’ll see what he’s up to immediately, and it’s clever stuff. ‘Past Christmas’ really is Wham’s ‘Last Christmas’ gone ‘Blade Runner’, the shimmery ‘Oh Little Dreaming Boy’ lifts the riff from ‘Little Drummer Boy’, ‘I’m Dreaming Of A Bleak Christmas’ is a ghostly take on the Irving Berlin classic and ‘The Magic Toy’ is drawn from ‘The Marvellous Toy’, the 1970 strummer by Tom Paxton. Do keep an eye on Plenty Wenlock next year as they’ll be upping activity to mark the 15th anniversary of Eric’s ‘Snailbeach Mines Trust’ and ‘Shropshire Hill Country’ albums, which were originally released on epic45’s label, Wayside And Woodland, who they’ll be working with on a book edition of ‘Shropshire Hill Country’ album as well the second in the label’s series of guides to the lore of Plenty Wenlock. “A pretty full year,” Eric tells me, “I hope it goes as well as this one. There might even be more Number Stations...”
plentywenlockrecords.bandcamp.com
GOOD STUFF #4
VARIOUS ARTISTS ‘Future Sounds Of Kraut Vol. 3 – Compiled by Fred und Luna’ (Compost)
This third volume of Compost’s excellent ‘Future Sound Of Kraut’ comes with a bittersweet taste. The label’s Rainer Buchmüller, who was behind the brilliant Fred und Luna sadly died in January following a long illness. “A few days before his death, Rainer had sent us the tracklisting for ‘Vol. 3’, and already ideas for ‘Vol. 4’,” write the label in the release notes. He said he’d be like the albums released posthumously and “he would be very happy if his fans and all those who will be would receive a ‘sign of life’ from him”. Which made me smile. I interviewed Rainer once and he was a joy, funny for sure as you’d have to be if you released music by two showroom dummies, but totally serious about his work. And rightly so. These collections are “a journey through time to discover the different elements of German electronic music from the 1970s and 1980s and their impact on the more recent German and global music scene”. What I like is most of these names are vaguely familiar or completely new. There’s so much to like here, Fred und Luna’s opening tsk-tsk-putt ‘Der Allgemeine Tenor’ is corking and Christian Nainggolan’s ‘Nachtraucher’ pounding drum-led workout is very nice. I’ve heard of Harmonious Thelonious, Benoit B and Die Wilde Jagz, the rest has me happily searching around while the album plays out. Loving Cologne duo Salvage Art’s Kraftwerkian ‘Wer Macht Die Arbeit’, Puma & The Dolphin’s quirky 80s-flecked ‘Nuances’… it’s all so good, it all hits the right spot somehow. And like I said, bittersweet for the loss of the mastermind behind it. But it is great that we have this sonic missile from the afterlife. And another one to come, hopefully.
GOOD STUFF #5
THE SCHOLARS OF THE PEAK ‘A Peaklanders’ Winter’
The Scholars Of The Peak’s Drew Huddart sent me a lovely email this week to let me know he had a new release. “It was intended as a winter EP,” he wrote, “but became a nine-track collection somehow.” It happens, Moonbuilding Weekly started off as a bunch of social media posts on a Friday, now it’s a 5,000-word newsletter that doesn’t write itself, despite everyone telling me I should get AI to do it for me. Not my style I’m afraid. So Drew is great. He found us earlier this year, April in fact, with his debut six-track EP (how many more times? EP = four tracks!), which was pretty flipping great. “I've only half an idea of what I'm doing and this is simply put together by me at home at this stage,” he wrote. Of course, that’s what everyone here is doing. We had a great exchange about him being a church bell ringer. “I spent three months in 2020 learning how to handle/control a bell,” he told me. “I'm still what you'd class as a ‘newer’ ringer, but I've rung three quarter peals so far, that's 1,260 changes of the order of the bells taking around 50 mins – just make sure you nip to the loo beforehand.” His work very much sounds like he rings bells. Here ‘Drifts Across The Dale’ almost sounds like a peel, and ‘A Winter’s Peel’ is a peel! And of course, halfway thorugh the synthy simulation the church bells kick in, credited as “Church bells rung by the Chapel-en-le-Frith bell ringers, Christmas Eve 2023”. It is lovely stuff. I really, really like what Drew is up to. The psychogeographical themes of the Peak District melted in with church bells, his knack for a beautiful melody and the distinctive artwork all add up to an artist you really should be watching in 2025. I strongly suspect if you like anything Clay Pipe have done, you are going to love this.
thescholarsofthepeak.bandcamp.com
THE HANDY ROUND UP
I notice there’s a new Blancmange ‘Nil By Mouth’ (London) collection. This is ‘Nil By Mouth VI’, which is six in normal numbers. I am a massive fan of Blancmange, Neil is an enormously fine human and someone I’ve interviewed probably the most. Underneath all the hilarity, and there is much of it, is such an enormously talented musician. He’ll tell you not, that he just plinks and plonks away, but the man is brilliant. Lyrically I think there are few better. I’d pay good money for an evening out with Neil Arthur where he reads his lyrics spoken word style. One day maybe. Anyway, no point in going on about lyrics here because the ‘Nil By Mouth’ collections are his forays into ambient music, experimental soundscapes and imaginary film soundtracks. It’s weird seeing them on a major label, when they used to be lovingly self-released on his Blanc Check label. They’re great collections, a peak inside the cogs and springs of Blancmange. They’re like audio sketchbooks, the yin to his songwriting yang. On the last one ‘IV/V’, there’s the wonderful ‘Vostok’, all 40-minutes of it. Anyway, ‘Nil By Mouth VI’ doesn’t disappoint. It’s beat-driven this one. There’s a kind of Kraftwerk-y thrum to tracks like ‘Without Knowing’ and ‘Circular Square’, while the slow build of the seven-minute ‘I Am Negative’, which dissolves into an arpeggiating swirl is rather good. ‘Misconstrued’, with its gentle bird song and rippling synthlines, is a snarling menace in the back garden, and the brilliantly titled ‘Dad’s Taxi’ has a darkside too. Always a treat to have Neil Arthur around.
blancmangemusic.bandcamp.com / https://blancmange.tmstor.es/
Mezanmi ‘Always Upwards’ (Always Upwards) has singing on it, which almost put me off on first listen. The opening track isn’t really representative, but second one out of the traps, ‘Again, Again’, sounds huge and the way it builds and builds and builds really dragged me in. There’s a Radiohead-y feel to it, which is always welcome. The piano-led, string-soaked ballad ‘To You, My Friends’ is lovely. His people describe ‘Always Upwards’ as “glitchy electronica with ambient folk and contemporary classical”, which is good with me. It’s the work of Newcastle-born, London-based Fran O’Hanlon whose voice gets more compelling the further you head into the record. I really like the squally ‘Like Spun Gold’, which is much more up our alley. His rich soft vocal take verses and then gets swept away with such a huge a sonic gale, it’s like interference cutting in, as if he can do nothing about. Very cool. It’s a mixed bag though, there’s plenty here that isn’t for me, but when he’s good, he’s really, really good. Maybe it’s a case of having so much going on he’s falling between too many stools. I’d love to hear him going full-on glitch. Plenty of time, one to keep an eye out for sure.
mezanmi.bandcamp.com
Some big guns releases that I can’t ignore, both from the Mute stable. It’s release day for Sunroof’s ‘Electronic Music Improvisations Vol 3’ (Mute), which we featured a few weeks back as Track Of The Week. I love this stuff, I love that Daniel Miller bothers doing it, he doesn’t have to. Nor come to that does Gareth Jones, but they both do for the joy of it. And it is a joy. Three volumes of their minimal modular adventuring and a live album to catch up on if you’ve missed out so far.
muterecords.bandcamp.com
How about a 30th anniversary vinyl reissue of Plastikman’s classic second album ‘Musik’ (Novamute)? Don’t mind if I do. It’s the Richie Hawtin guise I’ve always liked the best. It’s the record that features ‘Plastique’, a 13-minute ticking timebomb of a track that paved the way for a more dancefloor-friendly Plastikman. It’s classic stuff, the whole album is a total masterclass in how the Roland 808/909 drum machines and the 303 should be used. The limited palette, deliberately so, really shows of Hawtin’s genius, and I guess that was the point. And he did this in 1994 makes it all the more remarkable. Hawtin is rightfully right up there with techno gods these days. This is a masterpiece.
richiehawtin.bandcamp.com
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‘I’M WITH PULP, ARE YOU? Mark Webber (Hat & Beard Press)
In his foreword for ‘I’m With Pulp, Are You?’, Jarvis Cocker describes how Mark Webber was the band’s first fan who took it upon himself to “collect and collate the debris left behind by Pulp’s first stumbling attempts to make music”. From fanboy he became their first tour manager, not only securing their debut shows outside Sheffield, but joining them onstage to help out musically, before becoming a fully fledged member of the band in 1995. Jarvis talks about Mark’s impeccable taste and how he introduced the band to all manner of cinematic art and music, and how “he made us better”. It’s a glowing reference should Mark ever need one. In his own introduction, Mark begins “I was always a hoarder… I was also an obsessive fan, attracted to the scraps of ephemera that had been left behind by the bands that I loved most.” Two sides of the same coin, Jarvis glowing about his long-time associated, Mark drooling over exciting scraps of paper left behind by his idols. Little did either know that the group’s “self-appointed archivist” would come up smelling quite so rosy. With the benefit of hindsight, everyone should have an official hoarder, just in case. And if you’re going to have one, get a proper one because when it comes to sticking it all in a book if the hoarding has been done properly it’s all going to tell a rather great story. As is the case here. This is such an enjoyable book.
Of course, Jarvis has his own book of hoarded, erm, Pulp memorabilia. ‘Good Pop Bad Pop’ featured the contents of a loft that he cleared out item by item, documenting the whole lot and making a string of discoveries along the way. As I recall, there were decades-old sticks of Wrigley’s Extra in that loft. Mark Webber’s hoard is something very different. Where Jarvis seemed to randomly keep stuff and shove it all in a loft, Mark deliberately collected setlists, posters, flyers, stickers, tickets, letters to record labels, promotional balloons, newspaper and magazine cuttings, fanzines, badges, unused artwork, photos galore, hotel bills… it’s incredible what he had.
The thing about this sort of the stuff is at the time no one gives a fig. I was talking to a well-known music photographer recently about his formative work in the 70s/80s. These days, it looks like he was golden boy, landing in exactly the right place at just the right time. The truth is he was everywhere. He had no idea who the next big thing would be, let alone who was going to have the longevity, so he took photos of everyone, all the time. For every classic shot in his untouchable back catalogue, there’s a Dorian Gray box of never-beens in his attic. Hundreds of photos of bands who never got anywhere near, but he took photos of them all anyway.
So at the time who would give a hoot about a flyer for a show featuring Pulp and Those Flexible Penguins at The Limit in West Street, Sheffield, on Tuesday 13 May in 1986? It was a quid to get in if you were wondering. I arrived in Sheffield in 1989 and a hundred flyers like this must’ve passed through my hands. I went to The Limit countless times, do I have a single flyer from those days? I do not. Did I have a good time? Yup, very much so, thanks for asking. But now. NOW! A Pulp flyer from back then is gold. Do you know, a year later, they were charging £1.50 for a show at The Limit. I know, I’ve seen a flyer that someone hoarded.
The detail Mark goes into about some of this stuff is mind boggling too. On one of the opening pages there’s a “vinyl sticker designed by Mark Webber, circa 1993” from which the book takes its title. The caption inside explains that said sticker was inspired by the “I’m with David Bowie, Aren’t You” promo sticker that was “seen on the BBC Nationwide documentary of the 1973 ‘Aladdin Sane’ Tour”. He designed a sticker that some 30 years later was the title of a book that contained the very sticker is quite meta isn’t it? On the very next page, there’s a “visitor pass for Polytechnic Of North London, 10 December 1991”. Which he kept because it was one of first times he appeared live onstage with band.
Along with the ephemera, which is trove in itself, Mark provides extensive notes that lay out the history of Pulp from his point of view. And there are also two new essays, one by Simon Reynolds and another by The Quietus’ Luke Turner, both of which are essential reads. I love books like this. We are fortunate that the act of being in a band also seems to lend itself to hoarding piles of what seems like useless crap. Of course, when your band hits the big time that box of junk is suddenly the motherlode.
Mark adds a note in the index, right at the back, entitled ‘About This Book’. He talks about how it took several years to get this whole thing together in which time Jarvis published his book (“I wasn’t expecting it to be so visual”), there was the Louise Colbourne/Paul Burgess ‘Hardcore: The Cinematic World of Pulp’ book (Thames & Hudson) and ‘So It Started There: From Punk to Pulp’ (Omnibus) by the band’s drummer Nick Banks. You get the feeling he thought his book was going to end up way down the pecking order. Not a chance. It’s a cracker. Get this on your Xmas list.
‘I’m With Pulp Are You’ is published by Hat & Beard Press and is out now
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
Superb. Thank you <3
thanks so much for the sanger and sanger review and lovely comments neil!