Issue 52 / 7 February 2025
Your essential DIY electronic music beano – Track Of The Week: Laibach + Good Stuff: Jo Johnson, Loula Yorke, Pulsliebhaber, Luddite Tapes, Driftworks triple bill + more!
Here we go then. I’ve not got much to say today. Unusual I know. This week’s releases, like last week, are of the highest quality so I’ve used up a lot of words on those. The reviews are longer than usual, which I quite like. It’s nice to have the room to spread out sometimes. This week is one of those times.
Our good pals at WIAIWYA kindly send us the second edition of their new zine, ‘The Zine In Between’, which is rather excellent. It’s grown in confidence from the first issue I thought. The 36-page outing is just £3 and available from here. Looks like it’s flying out so don’t hang about.
What else? Oh yes I know. This time last year I was awash with books to review. There seems to be very few about so far this year. There’s a flurry in March (including ‘Volcanic Tongue’, David Keenan’s collection of music writing, which is great), but there’s little else blipping on my radar. All is quiet, which is odd. If you know of any left-field books that’d be up our street, please do get in touch.
Righto, that’s me for another week. Happy reading.
Neil Mason, editor
moonbuildingmag@gmail.com
Issue 52 Playlist: Click here
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Video: Sašo Podgoršek shot live in various locations in Europe, 2024
LAIBACH ‘I Want To Know What Love Is’ (Mute)
Well this is a showstopper. An actual a showstopper. People have some funny ideas about Slovenian mavericks Laibach, they seem to think they’re some full-throated metal outfit, all fire and brimstone. I mean, they can be, they have been, but in more recent times they’ve been all about sharing the love.
In 2023, they released the magnificent ‘Love Is Still Alive’ EP, a 40-minute suite originally composed as part of their work on the ‘Iron Sky – The Coming Race’ film soundtrack in 2012. It’s an extraordinary piece of work that the band call a “sci-fi country love song”. The film is a cheery number about a nuclear apocalypse destroying Earth and survivors heading out across the stars in search of a new home and the reality dawning on them that there probably isn’t anywhere. ‘Love Is Still Alive’ is here if you’ve not heard it.
Anyway, Laibach have been continuing to spread the love on their current ‘Opus Dei Revisited’ tour where they’ve been showing off the new version of their first Mute album from 1987. It’s the record that saw them unleash their cover of Queen’s ‘One Vision’ (‘Geburt Einer Nation’) and their magnificent take on Opus’ ‘Life Is Life’ (‘Opus Dei’). To keep us keen, they’ve recently added to the collection with two more versions – ‘White Christmas’ and ‘Strange Fruit’, both released as singles last year. This stuff isn’t accidental, Laibach are always making a point. Read the thinking behind these two covers here and here.
To complete a trilogy of interpretations, they’ve been raising the roof and prompting actual sing-alongs at their recent European shows with an encore of Foreigner’s ‘I Want To Know What Love Is’. The mission here does appear to be as simple as it seems. That they’ve picked a track by a band called Foreigner is pertinent in the divisive world we currently live, where no one seems especially welcome by the populist governments sweeping into power. It would seem that in the face of all that, Laibach are just asking their audiences to show the love.
The ‘Opus Dei Revisited’ tour arrives in the UK at the end of the month. Catch them in London (22/02), Manchester (23/02), Southampton (24/02) and Bristol (25/02). After that it heads back into proper Europe until the end of March. Tickets/info here.
laibach.bandcamp.com / muterecords.bandcamp.com
Got an upcoming release? We’re all ears. Email moonbuildingmag@gmail.com
Words: Neil Mason
GOOD STUFF #1
JO JOHNSON ‘Alterations 1: Unbroken’
Well this is all very exciting. Last week Jo Johnson served up ‘Unbroken’, her first fruit of 2025, which she revealed is also the first track from her new album ‘Alterations’. There aren’t enough Jo Johnson albums, last year’s CiS-released ‘Let Go Your Fear’, was only her second full-length solo outing and it came a full decade after her first, ‘Weaving’ in 2014, so you know. If you’re not aware of Jo’s delightful line in gentle modular missives, I’d suggest starting with the two albums to get you up to speed.
The thing is, Jo means business this year. She isn’t going to be just sticking a new album out. Nope. ‘Alterations’ is a slow album project. “It will be recorded and released track-by-track throughout 2025,” she explains. “The music will have limited availability during this phase, but at the end of the project I’ll compile a 10-track digital and CD album.”
Artists like Jo need our support and I think 2025 might be the point where that message hits home. That “limited availability” means she’s not scattering the tracks like so much free confetti. You’ll need to be a subscriber to her Bandcamp page for the full experience – £3.50 a month gets you each track as it’s released, plus additional “remnants”, including further music made from audio outtakes, excerpts from her notebook and journal from the recording sessions and a PDF collecting together her thoughts and processes for the pieces. It is a bumper package that I know we will be eagerly awaiting each month.
Of course, the thinking here is not a million miles from what quiet details’ Alex Gold starting doing with his own work as Fields We Found last month and it’s very much adjacent to Loula Yorke’s monthly mixtape. You won’t be surprised to learn that Jo and Loula are good friends. “I’ve got so much respect for Loula – both her music, which is outstanding, and her crazy work ethic,” says Jo. “She has a true DIY approach and comes up with all these clever ways of sharing music during a really challenging time for musicians. It's healthy for musicians to have more ways to share new music than the sporadic vinyl release, that’s like asking a mechanic to fix one car a year. I also really value having other women to talk with about gear, music making and generally swapping notes.”
Indeed, the pair swapped notes about Jo’s new project. Like Loula’s mixtape, there ain’t none of this stuff available to stream for free. You don’t go to Tesco and scoff one of those big bag of crisps before leaving without paying. Or maybe you do. If you’ve felt the quality of Jo’s work before you will know that what she is asking is a small price to pay. I’ve said this before, and more than once. For artists like this to not just survive, but thrive, doesn’t take much. If 1,000 people subscribed to Jo’s project that would see her become self-sustaining overnight. I think 500 would probably do it. It’s kind of up to you.
But hold on. There is more. There is something else afoot in Jo’s world. Last month’s second coming of Donald Trump as the US president really shook right-minded people around the world, Jo included. She writes on her Bandcamp page that there were “genuine feelings of powerlessness and defeat” after his re-election.
“Trump winning the election was devastating,” she told me. “I’m not even American, but I have a lot of friends in The States. Making music can feel frivolous, self-indulgent, even pointless in this context, but I’ve been thinking that maybe we could say fuck it. Defy the pressure to be small and quiet and instead make more music during 2025. Not less. Share more. Not less. Resistance takes many forms.”
I like this kind of talk, Jo remember was in Huggy Bear, a band who were always on the front foot when it came to speaking their mind. It’s good to see that fire is still burning in her. As a result, she says she’s agreed to a lot of invitations. “And I have a lot of projects in the works”. Which is seriously great news. I’m a big fan Jo’s work, it’s high time she stepped into the spotlight.
On the strength of the new tracks, I’m really looking forward to singing from the rooftops about her over the coming months. Both ‘Unbroken’ and the ‘Unbroken – Remnants’ promise much. Of course, the “remnants” are equal to the main attraction, this first one clocks in at 12 minutes. It really lets rip around the halfway mark and doesn’t let up. It is a proper belter. The main track is a delight of course it is. It starts so quietly I had to check it was playing (more than once!).
More exciting still is the news that she is setting up a new label, Silver Threads. Named after a track from her first album, ‘Weaving’, what can she tell us about that?
“All I’ll say about Silver Threads for now is that I’m incredibly excited to have so many cool people involved,” she says. “The first release hasn’t been scheduled, yet, but it is real and coming some time soon. It will bring together artists from overseas with artists here in the UK and it’ll be a way for me to release my own music, more collaborations and stuff.”
Had enough or do you want more? There is more! There’s a double bill coming out of Jo’s house. Her other half is Emile Facey of Plant43 fame and he’s offering up a live set from one of the Bleep43 nights the pair promote. This particular set, titled ‘Soul Fragments’ for this release, comes from Jackson’s Lane arts centre in North London on December 2022 and is rather fine. Talented couple of little buggers aren’t they?
GOOD STUFF #2
LOULA YORKE ‘February Mixtape’
Talked that up didn’t I? Having taken a break in January, Loula Yorke hurtles back into view with her latest mixtape. As regular readers will know, we are huge fans of these monthly offerings. And things are a little different with the tapes this year. The audio has had a spruce. It’s shorter for a start, this one clocks in at 30 minutes instead of the 40+ minutes of last year’s tapes. “This month’s tape is waaaay snappier than previous editions,” Loula writes in her York Talk newsletter (sign up here). “I’m focused on building up the layers and using the sounds to create the compositions rather than on the durational aspect of the field recordings.” Which means they have more music, less of the fieldy stuff, they are more mixtape if you will. I suspect this will vary from month to month depending what Loula has to play with, but it’s still as great and it still comes with the comprehensive liner notes, which are essential reading on the first listen. There’s a track, ‘Untitled #26’, that arrives early doors that has Loula wondering “does this adorable little melody come in too strong? Did it give you a slightly sweet sickly shock?”. It is one of those melodies that sounds as if it’s been lifted from the Aphex playbook, that bright-as-buttons tinkle. While things are certainly more musical, there are still plenty of moments of real-world action. Storm Éowyn features as does a biplane drone that, if you’ve got this on headphones, makes its way slowly overhead and prompts Loula to ask if we know what the sound of this kind of plane reminds her off. We do, of course. ‘Little Fluffy Clouds’. She also revisits her own dance music days. There’s beats popping up here all over the place and there, right at the end, a full-blown garage-y track with a delightful sleek bassline and cut-glass drum machine. This, as usual, as always, is great stuff. The best 30 minutes you’ll spend this month. Oh, and Loula has also added talking liner notes, should you want her to read them to you, they’re here.
GOOD STUFF #3
PULSLIEBHABER ‘PLK0’
I love Mat Handley’s Pulsliebhaber alter ego almost as much as the mothership Pulselovers. It properly occupies that world where synths were on the turn in the early 80s. He captures that moment where they are no longer the preserve of hoary old prog heads and young guns like OMD were picking them up out of their mum’s catalogue on the never-never. And when people started buying them with their Saturday job cash, that’s where the revolution starts. I already know these tracks well as they first saw the light of day as part of a split vinyl release with Gabe Knox (what a combo!) back in the summer of 2022 on Polytechnic Youth. I’ve just had a hoover around and there’s no sign of the three Gabe Knox tracks from the a-side, which is a shame. You can snag the PY LP for £20 on Discogs though, which seems like good value. In fact, that release looks like the last known sighting of Gabe. High time for a reappearance if you ask me. Anyway, ‘PLK0’ is a first digital/cassette outing for this set with the addition of two extra tracks – ‘Silica’ and ‘Arcing’ – from the same sessions. Mat explains that the project is an exercise in “super fast recording with as little computer use as possible”. He says the tracks here were all written and recorded in just one session, “with not one of them taking more than a couple of hours to finish, most of them significantly less”. He goes on to say that the original intention for the Poly Youth release was he’d see the tracks as demos and go back to them later for some refinement and polish. It seems Dom at the label was more than happy with the tracks how they were and they agreed to release them with just a light touch in the mastering. It is quality gear. The Opener ‘Catching Buckets’ is great, sounds very early Mute, a pumping krauty beat putt-putting like a tractor up a country lane and over the top and there’s an almost kids’ TV melody. The two unheard tracks are great, ‘Arcing’ is an oscillating hypnotic, two notes alternating as a fuzzy racket grows underneath kind of thing, while ‘Silica’ counts out a lazy beat with a bubbling synth line dancing all over it. It opens up onto a lovely haunting melody towards the end too. Pleased to see this is getting another airing and is now available for all to hear. While you’re at it do check out ‘PLK1’, PLK2’ and PLK3’. Be rude not to.
GOOD STUFF #4
LEOPARDS OF WHITE ‘Luddite 5 (Engine / Summer)’ (Luddite Tapes)
Look as us making all the connections this week, joining up all the dots. Oh, hang on, can’t remember the rules about Luddite Tapes. We all know who’s behind it do we? I’ve just looked back over what’s been said before, I’ve already outed Luddite Tapes as another Mat Handley label so we’re ok. “We will not have any presence on social media,” he has said of the label. “You will not see posts from related labels (eg Woodford Halse) mentioning Luddite”. Not that it needs any help, the first four releases are all sold out. The idea behind it, as I’m sure you’ll recall, is short-run home-dubbed tapes, music only made with kit available in 1983 or before, and that goes for the artwork too. Where Mat finds these things I’ll never know, but then that’s why he runs labels and I don’t. This is another exemplary release. A quartet of Adrian and Jez Newton (who do the heavy lifting sound-wise), Antje Waisznor (piano) and Baz Pikesley (“radio pulse”, cool job), Leopards Of White made these tracks in 1982, which the notes explain was a special year for the four-piece as it was the year they finished school. Which meant “months of summer holidays without a care for what might happen next”. Those 80s summers did go on forever. They talk about how their time was “spent very happily ensconced in our garage, constructing unfeasibly long tape loops, hitting any object in sight to explore its sonic properties and recording summer rainfall in the garden”. Time well spent clearly. The two 30 minute+ tracks featured here – ‘Engine’ and ‘Summer’ – are every bit as experimental as you’d have hoped. They’re very soundscapey. I love the interference-like synth drone over a woman’s voice repeating “We come to the station / You come to the station”, most likely off some language lab tape. The synth drops octaves and octaves until it bottoms out sounding like ‘The Clangers’ at one point on the way down. There’s messed up church bell chimes, some German speaking (off the same language lab tape?), lots of synths oscillating wildly, lots of buzzing, video games (maybe), pots and pans (perhaps), there’s a VL-Tone in there for sure (who didn’t have one?), banging pipes, ghostly wails, plus plenty of sounds that will have you scratching your head. I love the chaos at the end of the ‘Summer’, where a piano and interference compete before the whole thing descends… I also like how both tracks are 31.24, these boys are proper. That was no accident. The list of “instruments” is good too, among them an “Ohm1 synth built in a biscuit tin” and an “infra-red remote control unit and radio”, point one at the other apparently. This is, as we should expect from Luddite, quality gear.
GOOD STUFF #5
ANDREW HEATH Heath ‘Signals | Codes’ (Driftworks)
GLÅSBIRD ‘Glacial Drift’ (Driftworks)
PETER MAYNARD ‘Upper Tranquility Fields’ (Driftworks)
Double bills all over the place today, but new label Driftworks trump them all. Headed up by solo artist Andrew Heath this sub-label to Harry Towell’s Whitelabrecs debuts with a triple bill! It’s a bold start to put three albums out on the same day, but where would we be if people weren’t bold? They’ve got three and you’re getting them all at once. Their modus operandum is, they say, a specialism in “lower case, ambient and minimal music often containing fragmentary melodies and field recordings”.
Andrew Heath’s ‘Signals | Codes’ is a very evocative record that “paints a picture of academic research into paranormal abilities”. Right up our street. “It is 1965 and you’re attending a seminar on psychokinesis in a unknown foreign city,” writes Andrew in the notes. “The architecture is clean and modern – there are walkways, forums and plazas – all with carefully crafted vistas. It’s high summer and you meet with other delegates to explore your ideas and observations. It is this scenario and narrative that ‘Signals and Codes’ seeks to convey through a slowly evolving series of pieces.” It also comes with a bonus set of remixes. Which is a bonus. Ha.
Glåsbird is Whitelabrecs boss Harry Towell whose main influence is topographic, dealing with landscape and place. ‘Glacial Drift’ was inspired by some very moody photos of the Swiss Alps taken in 1938 by the father of labelmate Peter Maynard. The images made Harry wonder how much that landscape must’ve changed since the photos were taken. It also happens that 1938 was the year that Samuel Barber’s ‘Adagio For Strings’ was performed for the first time. You can almost hear the cogs whirring can’t you? Can’t you? Well let me tell you. Here Harry is fuelled not only by the effects of climate change, but a range of minimalist and ambient legends from the past 86 years. “I challenged myself to create music inspired by the techniques employed by greats such as Aphex Twin, Harold Budd, Stars of The Lid and more,” he says. Your challenge? Spot which track is who. They’re all helpfully titled with a date. I’m sketchy on the 30s to the 60s, but I think ‘1975’ is Harold Budd, ‘1994’ is Aphex…
Last but not least, and not a label boss as far as I know, it’s the aforementioned Peter Maynard (whose dad took the Alps photos). A sound/visual artist, Peter works “mainly with treated field and sound recordings using a hand-held recorder and found instruments” to create “sonic landscapes held and coloured by the minds eye”. ‘Upper Tranquility Fields’ is one long track that takes you on a journey through, you suspect, the image on the sleeve of an expanse of field stretching off towards woodland in the distance. You hear chattering voices, birds gabble, sounds drifting in and out, a guitar strum, a piano ping, a cello shivers and shimmery, very, very gentle electronics guide you the whole way. A promising start for this new label, looking forward to seeing where they go next and how they develop.
THE HANDY ROUND UP
Can I remind you that today, from midnight to midnight (PST, so that’s 8am-8am GMT), Bandcamp will be donating 100 per cent of their proceeds from sales to MusicCares in aid of those affected by the LA wildfires. US-based charity MusiCares is a safety net supporting the health and welfare of the music community. Founded by the Recording Academy in 1989, it provides critical support, offering mental health counseling, addiction recovery, health services, housing assistance, and more during times of crisis. To support this very worthwhile cause all you have to do is shop as usual on Bandcamp, the donation will come from the site’s cut. The artists and labels are not affected, which seems like a win-win.
I’ve had Rüdiger Lorenz’s ‘Synrise – Early Tape Recordings 1981-83’ (Bureau B) on loads this week. He’s something of a best-kept secret. Rüdiger Lorenz was a German pharmacist and synthesist, which is a line I think I’ve always subconsciously wanted to write. He died 25 years ago, aged just 58, on 31 January 2000. He was a prolific collector of synths, including his own self-built modular set-ups (his collection is listed here, he had FOUR System 100s!), and he churned out the albums using this collection. He released, quick count up, 18 albums and a slew of compilations all DIY style on his own Syntape and Syncord labels between 1981-1998 and yet despite all that, few seem to know about him. I know there’s been reissues over the years, there was a whopping boxset called ‘The Syntape Years 1981-1983’ from 2015 released by Vinyl On Demand, Bureau B served up his 1984 opus ‘Southland’ in 2015, while ‘Invisible Voices’ from 1983 was re-released by US label Anthology Recordings in 2014, but I think I’m right in saying this is the first new collection (a best of put together by his son, Tim, the DJ/producer Superdefekt) to bear his name since his death, which is pretty remarkable when he hear just how good he was. If you want a taste, just fire up the opening track, ‘38-17-34’, and wonder why the name Rüdiger Lorenz remains so steadfastly underground.
ruedigerlorenz.bandcamp.com
Pye Corner Audio returns to Lapsus to wrap up the ‘Where Things Are Hollow’ series he did for the Barcelona-based label. The first of the EPs appeared in 2017 and was a game of two halves, two tracks of solid techno and two of his more trademark ambient soundscapes. The second EP, released three years later in 2020, took much the same path, a little techno, a little of the dreamlike textures and oh, a remix from Spanish DJ/producer, John Talabot. Here, collected together in a nice-looking boxset on vinyl or CD, you get those first two volumes and two entirely new ones. ‘Where Things Are Hollow 3’ picks up from the first two and again does the techno/ambient trick, and very good it is too. While ‘Where Things Are Hollow 4’ takes the Talabot remix of ‘Resist’ and adds rerubs from Alessandro Cortini, Lord Of The Isles, Surgeons Girl and Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith. Lapsus is a really interesting label, do take a browse of their back catalogue when you have a moment. Lots of goodies just waiting to be discovered. And talking of goodies there’s some cool looking purchasing options for the boxset. The limited edition ‘No Tomorrow’ jumper bundle would be my choice.
pyecorneraudio.bandcamp.com
One more for today, I’m feeling a bit worded out, which is unusual for me, I can normally bang on until the cows come home. They must be on their way. German electronic artist Markus Guentner’s ‘Black Dahlia’ (AFFIN) is a dark ambient delight. People might recognise the name from his pop ambient days and his debut ‘In Moll’ on Kompact waaay back in 2000. As a young person pointed out to me earlier, that’s so long ago, like 25 years! I KNOW. He has come a long way since those days, I mean haven’t we all? More recently you might know Markus’ work from his releases on A Strangely Isolated Place, who he still works with. The striking black and white artwork for this release, designed by Markus himself, “reflects a fusion of the darker elements of the natural world with technology”. And so it is musically too with track titles like ‘Hive’, a rather beautiful dark, glistening track, and ‘System Seizure’, which sounds like, well, just that. One for the late, dark nights that’s for sure.
markus-guentner.bandcamp.com
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***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.
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