Issue 54 / 21 February 2025
Your essential DIY electronic music beano – Track Of The Week: Factory Floor + Good Stuff: Apta, Sulk Rooms, Fantastic Twins, DiN's 'iNDEX09', quiet details' latest + more, more, more!
Another busy week for releases and I’m pleased to say the ads are picking up, slightly. I know I sound like a very broken record, but the aim of Moonbuilding Weekly is to put DIY electronic artists and labels in front of as many people as possible. To do that the newsletter needs to remain free. The only way that happens is through ads. If you would like to advertise, there’s more info here. Thanks for listening. Again.
In other news, I’m off to Synth East in Norwich this weekend. Anyone else? I’ll be at the Adam Buxton/John Foxx talk tonight, the Synth Expo tomorrow afternoon and I’m really looking forward to Loula Yorke and Seefeel on Saturday night. Come and find me if you’re there too. I’m the one who looks like a music journalist.
See you next time.
Neil Mason, editor
moonbuildingmag@gmail.com
Issue 54 Playlist: Click here
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FACTORY FLOOR ‘Between You’ (Phantasy Sound)
It started as a flicker, almost blink and you’ll miss it, but Nik Colk Void and Gabe Guernsey returned from their Factory Floor wilderness with a live appearance at the long-running MUTEK Montreal electronic arts shebang last summer. They were billed like they’d never been away, but there was a footnote, “Factory Floor return to the stage after a five-year absence”.
Now they’re back in the recording fray with ‘Between You’, their first offering since 2018’s ‘A Soundtrack For A Film’, their live score to Fritz Lang’s ‘Metropolis’. New label too, Erol Alkan’s Phantasy. They released Gabe’s solo albums so that bodes well.
‘Between You’ is prime FF. A sequencer firing on all cylinders, punchy rave synth lines, a firm bass drum thud, rattling hi-hit, repeat-y hypnotic vocals. It features additional percussion from touring member Joe Ward and was recorded in the studio by Stephen Morris. You can hear why he’s drawn to working with the Floor again. You can hear the New Order in them.
It’s funny this getting the band back together lark though. All parties are very much holding their own solo, Gabe’s brace of solo albums, 2018’s ‘Physical’ and ‘Diablo’ from 2022, both dancefloor-fuelled, are stonking, likewise Nik’s more experimentally edged work, top of the pile 2022’s Editions Mego outing ‘Bucked Up Space’, is excellent, and yet there’s not the same fizz around them as there seems to be for Factory Floor.
It’s just the way it is sometimes. Same thing happened with Paul Hartnoll when Orbital went their separate ways. His solo stuff, essentially Orbital just not under the name, just couldn’t get the traction. Stick him back with his brother and call what he does Orbital again and boom.
I know what you’re thinking, but try as I might I can’t get anyone to admit there’s an album. There will be, surely. The official line is there’s no news of an album, but there are live shows and more new material on the way… which can only be a good thing.
factoryfloor.bandcamp.com / phantasysound.bandcamp.com
Got an upcoming release? We’re all ears. Email moonbuildingmag@gmail.com
Words: Neil Mason
GOOD STUFF #1
APTA ‘The Pool’ (Castles In Space)
Castles In Space open their 2025 account with a release that sets a high bar. That said, their schedule is looking almighty. Andrea Cichecki, Warrington-Runcorn, a Dalham double-bill and the launch of their new Lunar Module sub-label. You will want in on the that when it lands, keep an ear close to the ground for details. All that is coming your way before the summer and It starts with this, which is being described as Barry Smethurst’s “most focussed and compelling release to date”.
‘The Pool’ is a metaphor for the “transformative plunge” of a psychedelic experience, hence the titles. It opens with ‘Sink’ and ‘Shivers’ and moves through ‘Awash’ and on to ‘Dive’, ‘Emerge’ and ‘Breath’. All one-word titles, brief and to the point. But then Apta is very much from the less is more school. The whole thing has such a relaxed feel, the melodies spinning gently like they’re wind chimes caught on the breeze. Proceedings feel very much like a super-mellow ‘Tubular Bells’ in places. There’s a track called ‘One Foot’ that has a bell-like chime that ushers in a growling bassline, very Oldfield. And like Oldfield, Apta’s work always feels very accomplished. You couldn’t make music that sounds this good without being a musician of some skill.
‘The Pool’ feels like the tracks become richer and more luscious as the record goes on, either that or it takes you a while to tune into Barryworld, which could well be the case. Once you are tuned into his gentle lilts though, ‘The Pool’ gets better and better with each listen. It’s like it reveals a little more to you each time. The real treat is when Barry adds a vocal to ‘Emerge’. His voice is, of course, very light of touch and, with the repeating guitar line, it sounds not unlike Spiritualized. Very nice indeed. As is the whole of ‘The Pool’. I like how that vocal track appears almost at the very end, the penultimate track, almost as if you were building to that moment, you know, as if it was the blissed out end to delicate psychedelic experience. Add it to ‘Breathe’, the final track, and you have a delicious eight-minute finale.
This really is his most focussed record to date. ‘Pool’ works like a proper album should, the trippy concept ensures a beginning and end, but even the uplifting ‘MLT’ closing side A and the satisfyingly tuneful ‘Meniscus’ opening side b lends to the proper listening experience. One to be heard on vinyl that is for sure. And on repeat at that. What a joy this is.
This is probably a good place to mention The Seventh Wave all-dayer at The Castle And Falcon in Birmingham on 2 March. Apta is on the bill, along with Polypores, Field Line Cartographer, Kylie Monologue, Cholly, Sulk Rooms and Lo Five. £25 the lot does seem like incredible value. Grab tickets here.
GOOD STUFF #2
SULK ROOMS ‘Take A Look At God’s Face (Music From The Original Soundtrack)’ (Subexotic)
I really like what Thomas Ragsdale is up to from his musical HQ in West Yorkshire. Only last month I was singing the praises of this Frosti label in the grassroots issue of Electronic Sound (remarkably not sold out, cuh). You can tell when people are putting in the time when it comes to labels, the whole look and feel, not to mention the actual music, are spot on. Thomas is clearly putting in the time. Likewise, I very much like the cut of his work as Two Way Mirrors, whose ‘Endure’ album we featured here the other week, saying it was “epic in scale, it’s dark, of course, but upliftingly so”. I also said of it, “Goodness me, if this is how he’s starting the year, I’m very much looking forward to seeing what else is up his sleeve”. Didn’t have to wait long, did I?
Donning his Sulk Rooms hat, this soundtrack shows off the other side of his coin. Neither side is worlds apart, but you can feel the distinction. So ‘Take A Look At God’s Face’ is “a short and true story about revenge, lost love and exotic animals” by award-winning writer/director Jack Laurence (watch here). I lost a decent amount of time watching his other work, it’s all nicely quirky. I especially liked the four-part web series he did for Carlsberg called ‘Build The Danish Way’ where a bunch of strangers build a hang-out (that serves Carlsberg) in the middle of nowhere.
The Sulk Rooms soundtrack works seamlessly in ‘Take A Look At God’s Face’. Like all good soundtracks, you don’t notice it unless you’re supposed to and listening to it again without the film adds a new dimension. You can just bathe in the soundtrack if you like, it lives and dies as a standalone, but it really comes to life once you’ve seen the film. I do like how soundtracks do that. How the film can linger without the images. I like a soundtrack that involves you like that. ‘Take A Look At God’s Face’ does. There was a band in the 90s called D*Note who soundtracked a short film called ‘Coming Down’, it was a kind of frontrunner to ‘Human Traffic’, an all back mine post-rave tale, it’s here if you’d like a look. I found a line about it in some blurb that says it’s “an elegy to the days gone by”. When it came out in 1996-97, it was pretty much a documentary.
So here we have full-length versions of all the music that appears in the film. ‘I Wasn’t Fast Enough’ shimmers with menace, it has an ominous bass quiver much like Peter Gabriel’s ‘Birdy’, one of my absolute all-time favourite soundtracks, there’s the pure fear of ‘Know Your Customer Intimately’ as it builds and builds, while the centrepiece is the utterly lovely piano-driven melodic ‘A Dear Friend’. Talented chap is Thomas.
And just to show off that talent, he’s created a very cool mix for Foxy Digitalis. It features 23 tracks by artists he loves – Kayla Painter, Gordon Chapman-Fox, Apta, James Adrian Brown, Jilk, Patricia Wolk, Loula Yorke, Lo Five, Polypores, Field Lines Cartographer etc etc, which he’s taken, deconstructed, played them through tape echo, guitar pedals and the like and recorded the results. “I ended up with a bunch of 1-2 minute snippets of each track that were totally different to their original states, but also still totally recognisable,” he explains. Very nice. Listen here.
Thomas really seems to have the bull by the horns this year, there’s already a lot going on with the promise of more to come from him and his label. Looking forward to it I have to say.
thomasragsdalemusic.bandcamp.com
GOOD STUFF #3
FANTATIC TWINS ‘Suite Of Rooms’ (House Of Slessor)
You can’t beat a bit of mythology, and Berlin-based French musician/producer Julienne Dessagne obliges with ‘Suite Of Rooms’, an album inspired by Theseus and the Minotaur that explores ideas around the meaning of the Labyrinth. This is album number two and follows, confusingly, her first which was called ‘Two Is Not A Number’ from 2023. ‘Suite Of Rooms’ has been reworked from a dance piece, ‘Méandres’ composed and performed for children, which would be interesting to hear and comes with a reading list that includes André Gide’s ‘Theseus’, Walter Benjamin’s ‘On Hashish’, and Viktor Pelevin’s ‘The Helmet Of Horror’. Google is your friend here.
Her people say the LP draws inspiration from “an eclectic range of music, ranging from classic opera to high-budget soundtracks, and beyond” and has a palette of “deep techno, 3D sound, kosmische and vintage soundtrack atmospheres”. Which is a lot of talk for a five-track album. Sometimes you just need to get into things and ask questions later. ‘Suite Of Rooms’ starts slowly with the haunting ‘The Ship Of Theseus’, but hang in there for your reward is rather pleasing. ‘Ariadne’s Thread, Unraveling’ is a sprawl of a track, nearly eight minutes, and it sounds like Kraftwerk might if they were a 21st century invention. Crisp synths, sleek beats, teutonically locked down. With its rattling drums and bold synth lines, ‘Labyrinth(s)’ reminds me of something like Capricorn’s mid 90s techno belter ‘20 Hz’, there’s some cracking synth work afoot too. For the second time this week, I’m hearing ‘Birdy’. Maybe it’s my unhealthy Gabriel obsession, but I can hear him in the rhythms of the moody closer ‘Nuances Of Triumph’. Love the piano in there too. The whole thing is just five tracks and clocks in under 30 minutes, but that’s no bad thing. Only last week I was talking about the rise of the compact live set. This is another good example of less is more.
There’s a quote in the notes taken from Julienne’s reading into the subject where it talks about how ‘Suite Of Rooms’ embodies what Penelope Doob (a medievalist, dance scholar and medical researcher, which is quite rangey) said in her book ‘The Idea of the Labyrinth’ was the maze’s duality – “superb design and unfathomable chaos”. There is very little chaos here, it’s a piece that carries weight though, it feels very serious, very sombre, but there’s a lot of ideas here too, certainly enough to hold the interest and keep an eye on the name for future releases.
GOOD STUFF #4
VARIOUS ARTISTS ‘iNDEX09’ (DiN)
So I’ve been a fan of these compilations for a while, but they are easy to miss in the general release bunfight. DiN, home of Ian Boddy and his analogue modular friends, sticks out a compilation every 10 releases collecting together two tracks from each release. In addition, Ian creates an mix that “not only showcases the albums featured on the release, but presents an exciting and varied title in its own right”. It comes as a digital album for a fiver or for a couple more quid you can nab it on CD. No brainer there really. I’ve really been enjoying CDs lately. I do tend to listen to most stuff via stream or downloads. Add to that all the listening I do via Spotify and you kind of get desensitised to compressed sound. Everything is perfectly listenable, but when you pop a CD on the difference is stark. They sound amazing. I’m not talking about playing it through your computer. There’s a lovely Marantz CD player hitched up in the Moonbuilding office that sounds incredibly good. It’s proper listening, as the artist intended I guess. No one wants their work to be heard compressed to buggery do they?
So ‘iNDEX09’ is home to tracks from releases DiN81-89, nine albums, 18 tracks in total. With me? And it’s a ripe run that includes Polypores’ ‘Multizonal Mindscramble’, Benge’s ‘The View From Vega’, Field Lines Cartographer’s ‘Portable Reality Generator’, which you know, bodes well. Add to them Parallel Worlds, Dave Bessell on his own and in collaboration with Ian Boddy. There’s ARC’s ‘Chronicle’, a live album from another Ian Boddy project, this time a collaboration with his great pal Mark Shreeve who sadly died in 2022, and Sophis’ ‘Sending Signal’, which is a real gem from Ulises Labaronnie from Buenos Aires, Argentina.
When you put it like that, and see the riches on show, you know this collection is going be a very decent listen indeed. On top of all that, DiN86 happened to be the excellent ‘25 Years Of DiN’ collection, you try picking two tracks from that. Ian went for his own ‘Small World’ and Robert Rich’s ‘Ornament Drift’. Highlights? Tough one, but the Sophos stuff stands out, here ‘Unveil The System’ swoops and sweeps in all the right places. Of course I’m going to tell you the brace from Polypores and Field Lines Cartographer are the business. Both those albums were excellent, I particularly like FLC’s shimmering ‘The Sun In Splendour’ here. With Mark Shreeve no longer with us, ‘Slipstream’, from the live ARC set, feels pretty special too.
And here’s the thing, this is Volume 9. If you’ve catching up to do, you’re in for a treat.
THE HANDY ROUND UP
There’s a lot of looking at the clock this week. I’ve got a long list still to get through will try and get through as many as I can before I have to press send…
If it only seemed like last week that we were marking the second instalment of Field We Found’s ‘Resolve / Relate’ series that’s because it was only last week and here we are with the next quiet details release. It really is an impressive operation that Alex Gold has got going on over there and on top of it all he finds to time to earn a living too. The latest release on qd is Jordan GCZ’s ‘Hope isn't a Four Letter Word’. Jordan Czamanski is another one who comes at ambience from the world of house and techno, albeit that you’ll find his take on the left-field side of dancefloor. This release is described by Alex as a “psychedelic electronic excursion”. It has a slight jazz feel to start with, but soon descends into a world fans of Polypores would understand. ‘Pleasantly Disappointed’ is a prime example, fizzing and popping and burbling from start to finish.
quietdetails.bandcamp.com
When three labels gang up for a release, you better have a listen, right? Here we find Woodford Halse joining forces with Scottish label The Larvarium and Madrid’s La Rubia Producciones for the release of Maud The Moth’s ‘The Distaff’. A triple whammy. Maud The Moth is Spanish ex-pat/Edinburgh dwelling Amaya López-Carromero. She’s released on Woodford Halse previously, hence the involvement this time round I would imagine. You have to marvel at the tangled webs this world throws up don’t you? ‘The Distaff’ is intense. Her voice is incredible and, matched with much accomplished musicianship, it’s a ferocious piece of work. Amaya is down for playing piano, voice, psaltery… psaltery! I went to college on Psalter Lane, but have no idea what a psalter or a psaltery is… hang on… well, a psaltery is a Greek harp, so what’s a Psalter… gawd, that’s a book that contains psalms form The Bible, popular between 12th and 14th centuries. Amaya also plays “hyperpiano” which is… oh right… so you play the keys with one hand and the strings with the other, either directly or tooled up. A bit like treated piano on steroids. The album itself is rather otherworldy, the musicianship is off the scale, her voice ethereal. Something very different and well worth an explore.
woodfordhalse.bandcamp.com
Doing a little hoovering up as I missed this the other week and it deserves mention. Takahiro Mukai’s ‘Even Toned’ appears on Astra Solaria, which as you should know by now is Bernard Grancher’s label, the premiere French outlet since the very sad demise of ERR REC… who get name-checked here because Bernard first came across Osaka-based Takahiro on the much-missed Parisian label. He released two albums, ‘Cognitive Dystopia’ in 2018 and ‘Cumulonimbus’ in 2023 with ERR REC. His work is glitchy as hell, grimy as muck and quite delicious. He doesn’t name tracks, but does number them. ERR REC noted that there were 167 tracks between his first and second release with them (‘#386’ to ‘#553’). Here, ‘#586’ really carves out a groove despite, no, because it’s sounding like it has a loose wire or two. It’s eight minutes long and you need to soak up every last second. Really love this sort of thing. I miss ERR REC, ultimately, and I know I bang on about this, they couldn’t keep doing what they did and make so little from it. They did burn brightly though. I am glad Bernard has picked up the French baton and is now leading the charge. Don’t let him down.
astrasolariarecordings.bandcamp.com / takmuk.bandcamp.com
Another week, another release from our almighty friends braving life in Trumpworld. I can barely watch what’s going on over there. That you can say the first thing that comes into your head and everyone has to take what you say seriously is mindblowing. And we’ve only had a month of it. Thank goodness for arbiters of peace and calm like Past Inside The Present. Here we have ‘Azimuth’, a debut full-length collaboration from Tyresta & Simon McCorry (Chicago-based Nick Turner is Tyresta, while Simon is a cellist from Gloucestershire). With “swells of harmonic guitar with delicately composed strings and accents of modular synth”, it’s glorious, shimmery stuff feeling chamber-y, shoegaze-y and very, very peaceful all at the same time. I always like a cello up against electronics. The offspring of my very good friends is a cello-playing member of a number of folk-fuelled outfits in Norfolk (England rather than Virginia), the best of which is Murmurations, an all-female unit who are cool as hell, can whip up a real swirl of sound using acoustic, traditional instruments and aren’t shy of a harmonium drone either. Nothing on Bandcamp yet, but I do know they’ve been recording. There’s a session here from last August if you want a listen. They are building a head of steam, so when 6 Music start playing them you know they read about them here first.
pitp.bandcamp.com
From strings/synths to perhaps my favourite combination, brass/synths. There’s been some spectacular work in this area, not least by the joyous Hannah Peel. So I was all ears when Brussels-based Julien Demoulin dropped me a line with his three-part ambient suite for brass and synths. ‘A Trial Of Distances’ (Sound In Silence) is for trumpet, trombone, and flugelhorn (all played by Kelly O’Donohue) and synthesiser (from Julien) and comes with remixes, which is a nice touch. One of the remixes is by Zakè who, of course, runs PITP (see above). If only we just threw this newsletter together at the last minute instead of making all these crazy connections like we planned it or something. “I’d wanted to use brass instruments as part of my work for a long time,” says Julien, “there’s a warmth there that I don’t find in strings, which seem to be more widely used in ‘the scene’.” Controversial opinion ahoy. I know what he means. I do love strings, but there’s a power and a warmth to brass that is something else. Julien says he’s tried to incorporate this suite into his albums, but it never fitted anywhere. “I eventually had to accept it was just its own thing,” he says. It is very much its own thing. I’ve been held up here as I’ve had to listen to it more than once. It just has a wonderful calming warmth, ‘Part 3’ almost feels like it’s going kick off as the brass swells and then dissipates like waves on a shore. And the 30-minute Zakè mix? Yeah. Liking this.
juliendemoulin.bandcamp.com
Quick one, missed this the other week but it’s waaaaaay too good to ignore. Giants Of Discovery and Everyday Dust have come together for a splity, ‘Entities’, on Dustopian Frequencies. It’s a cassette release with each artist taking a side and filling it with one long-form track apiece. Kevin Downey’s Giants Of Discovery take “Side X” with ‘Night Visitors’, the latest installment in his off-kilter horror/mythology/modular soundscapes musical mission. This is the soundtrack to his short horror story of the same name, “a chilling tale of otherworldly encounters, cryptic visions and the liminal space between reality and the perilous realms of darkness”. It glistens, it lurks in the shadows, it creeps along gutter, I’m sure you can imagine. Meanwhile over on “Side Y” (equal billing, no bunfight over the A side here), Scottish producer/label boss Everyday Dust serves up ‘Jackalope Mountain’ “a musical recounting of a legend involving a traveller drawn to a mystical peak shrouded in madness”. You can almost taste the fog and the chilling fear of the shapes scrabbling around in it. Remarkably the £10 cassettes aren’t sold out. Edition of 70, I’d probably be quick about it.
dustopianfrequencies.bandcamp.com
A couple of things not exactly in our wheelhouse, but they share the same DNA. It’s also my newsletter, I’ll write about whatever I like. Parisian experimental/improv/noise guitarist Nina Garcia has performed for a decade under the name Mariachi, but here she debuts under her own name on ‘Bye Bye Bird’ (Ideologic Organ). It’s fascinating stuff. Thurston Moore is a fan, of course he is. I often talk about modular synths as machines that wrangle and shape electricity. You can hear the electricity buzzing and fizzing around the room here as Nina goes to work. It’s not that I don’t like guitar music, but with just those six strings it can often sound a bit limited in the wrong hands. I like synths because the potential of the outputting sound is almost infinite. Here Nina shows the art of the possible with a guitar.
ideologicorgan.bandcamp.com
I’ve really been enjoying Baths’ ‘Gut’ (Basement’s Basement), the work of LA-based artist/producer Will Wiesenfeld. This is his first long-player in seven years and it’s packed with deceptively simple songs full of wit and a deep vulnerability. Musically it’s cracking, kind of new wave-y/krautrocky, all with a razor-sharp pop edge. Opener ‘Eyewall’ has Will sounding a sliver like Pete Shelley and then, around the three-minute mark, the whole thing flicks into a rattling krauty belter for a two-minute wigout. It’s the opening track! You’d love to see that live. It’s one of those songs you find yourself listening to a couple of times before you can move on. The record is apparently more of a live offering than previous outings, featuring a real drummer on over half of the cuts. The lead track, ‘Sea Of Men’ doesn’t disappoint either, tight rolling bassline, snappy drum, a tsk of the occasional cymbal while Will sings, with brutal honesty, about his relationship with sex. ‘Eden’ is really great too, very electronic, very quirky. Enjoyable stuff, despite being a guitar band. I am going soft in my old age, clearly.
bathsmusic.bandcamp.com
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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 © 2025 Moonbuilding
Great edition, cheers for the kind words and including qd30 Jordan GCZ 🙏❤️
I felt sorry for Paul Hartnoll. His solo music was excellent and I had tickets for a cancelled gig. I wondered if his album and tour might have fared better under his own name, billed as Paul Hartnoll (Orbital), rather than the entirely new and unknown 8:58, which seemed to serve as both artist and album name. Anyways, things happen for a reason and Orbital have returned to form since.