Issue 56 / 7 March 2025
Your essential DIY electronic music beano – Track Of The Week: JakoJako + Kayla Painter, Loula Yorke, huge Healing Sound Propagandist compile, Whitelabrecs double bill and more, more, more!
March eh? There’s daffodils in the Moonbuilding office, which means we made it through the winter, well done everyone. Spring is most definitely around the corner and with it we’ve had an advert up-tick, must be something in the air. Thanks to a rush of brilliant advertisers we have one slot left this month and are now booking into April. Don’t delay if you want to advertise, space is limited and if this week is anything to go by it’s selling fast.
If you haven’t got anything to advertise, but want to support Moonbuilding Weekly you could chip into our fighting fund. Our new bright idea went quite well last week, if we could do the same every week that would be nice. A few people who donated have pointed out the huge cut PayPal takes, and Stripe isn’t much better. I don’t know what the answer is to that. If anyone has any suggestions do let me know.
The upshot is we’re getting closer to some sort of sustainable model for all this, which is great. Right then, enough of the business talk, let’s get down to, erm, business.
See you next time.
Neil Mason, editor
moonbuildingmag@gmail.com
Issue 56 Playlist: Listen here
Advertise: Info here
Support Moonbuilding: The fighting fund
***ADVERTISE HERE***
email moonbuildingmag@gmail.com
JAKOJAKO ‘Kumquat’ (Mute)
Photo: Katja Ruge
JakoJako has been on our radar for a little while. Berlin-based modular synthesist Sibel Koçer has served up a slew of cracking EPs and now were in the final run-in for the release of her debut album ‘Tết 41’, next month.
She recorded the album with a minimal hardware set up of Eurorack and a Waldorf Iridium Core, which is a rather natty looking machine, no idea about these things, but it does look nice. “It’s small and handy,” says Sibel, “but feels solid and sounds big.” And indeed the latest offer from the album, ‘Kumquat’, like ‘Lì xì’ the first fruit from the LP, sounds great. I’m so used to that flat, compressed sound that comes with listening to way too much stuff via streams or MP3, but this track just pings. It’s so bright and warm, even coming off a YouTube stream. Can’t wait to hear it properly on CD or vinyl when it’s finally out.
Thematically, the album was created in Vietnam on a trip there with her mother to take in the Lunar New Year celebrations, Tết Nguyên Đán or Tết for short. “I don’t have huge ties to the traditions of my Vietnamese family,” she readily admits, “so being able to experience them with my mother, and then bring the Lunar Celebration – the colourful flowers, food and customs – back to Europe through music has helped me realise how important this side of my heritage is.”
The album, which we’ve had burbling away all week is excellent. Her people say it’s a record that is “driven by a desire to document the potentials of analogue and modular synthesis, and to consider new contexts within which these could exist. It’s also a bold and generous vision of new sonic worlds”. Phew. More about all that when it gets released in April.
And of course, all this comes with the seal of approval from the Mute big chief Daniel Miller who himself is deep into his own modular adventures with Sunroof these days. What is not to like?
‘Tết 41’ is released by Mute on 25 April
jakojako.bandcamp.com / muterecords.bandcamp.com
Got an upcoming release? We’re all ears. Email moonbuildingmag@gmail.com
Words: Neil Mason
GOOD STUFF #1
KAYLA PAINTER ‘Ambient Owl Core Vol.3’
The recent slew of artists going above and beyond just releasing an album in favour of doing something that properly fires the imagination gathers pace with this, a third volume of Kayla Painter’s excellent ‘Ambient Owl Core’ series.
In recent weeks we’ve mentioned Jo Johnson’s slow LP project that sees her releasing a new album a track a month along with a raft of supporting material, notes, bonus tracks and the like and regulars round these parts will be no stranger to quiet details’ lovely CD releases and big chief Alex Gold’s new monthly modular sessions as his musical alter ego Fields We Found. You will not be unaware of Loula Yorke’s mixtape series either, which we’ve shouted about until we’re a little hoarse (pony!), the latest one is reviewed below. To that already impressive roll call we should add Kayla and ‘Ambient Owl Core’. Yes, sure, it’s an occasional series with Vol 1 coming out in October 2023 and Vol 2 in July last year, but it fits the bill nicely.
The whole idea started out a bit tongue in cheek. It’s a play on the fact anything can be shaped into a genre if you see fit. “There’s something called Pet Metal,” she told friend of Moonbuilding Ben Murphy in his excellent ‘Ears To The Ground’ book, “which is literally people with their parrot in a band making music. It’s cool, you can do whatever you want, you can do Ambient Owl Core.” And of course, at its heart there has to be owls. And there is owls. She started to notice them increasingly, not quite to the Harry Potter sort of extent, but here and there. One night, in her urban home, she heard one outside, opened the window and recorded its soothing hoots. The recording worked its way into ‘Your Echoes’ from ‘Vol 1’ and the rest, well, you know there rest.
Kayla’s work has long mixed music and field recordings, but the sense of purpose behind ‘Owl Core’ seems to give these pieces a little more edge. This latest Owlcore outing is also different from the first two. Indeed, Kayla notes that “the artwork and the tracks take a departure from ‘Vol 1’ and ‘Vol 2’, more instrumentation (eg I’m playing saxophone and recorder on this record), more owls.” More owls! Musically it’s a really coherent six-tracker that builds from start to finish. It works really well as a suite. From the gentle start (and the gentle hoots) of ‘Oscar Loves The Rain’, a track that is drawn from Kayla visiting an owl sanctuary where she met Oscar, an Eurasian Eagle Owl, who you can hear hooting away here. The track also got an airing on 6 Music’s ‘New Music Mix’ on Wednesday. Surely only a matter of time before Tom and Deb discover Moonbuilding Weekly and start playing the bejesus out of our recommendations and saying how great we are, right?
From there we build peacefully through the musical plinks, hoots and whispers of ‘They Danced By The Light Of The Moon’ and the beautiful shimmering drone of ‘The Space Between Land And Sky’. ‘Rulers Of Darkness’ changes up a gear with its rich arpeggiation that builds towards a crescendo before giving way to the centrepiece of the record, ‘Secrets Of The Night Brook’. You can feel the track emerging, building. There’s a distance bass drum thud of a beat, a tambourined hi-hat arrives, there’s a cymbal crash, and there’s the promised sax. It’s like the whole thing is soaring, it is really excellent stuff. It makes way for closer ‘Spun Of Silver And Gold’, which drifts us gently back down to earth.
With every release Kayla just gets better and better doesn’t she? She has come such a long way since gracing the cover of Moonbuilding Issue Two and you get the feeling she is only just getting started. ‘Vol 1’ and ‘Vol 2’ both sold out before Kayla sat down for lunch on their respective release days. Don’t let her down this time round, although she says the run is larger this time AND there is the addition of a CD that covers all three volumes. You want one of those, right? Form an orderly queue.
GOOD STUFF #2
LOULA YORKE ‘March Mixtape’ (Truxalis)
Another month, another almighty mixtape. She played a live set the other week at Synth East in Norwich, which I was lucky enough to catch. The show was at Norwich Arts Centre, which is such a lovely venue, a deconsecrated church with a high vaulted ceiling and surprisingly good sound. Loula used simple shafts of white light and lots of dry ice to create a real atmosphere around her modular explorations. I’m so out of practice writing live reviews. It used to be a total staple of my work, I’d write a load of them each week and now, well there’s nowhere left to publish them so no one writes them anymore. Monthlies tend not to as it dates them and they’re already in an uphill battle to look current. It’s a shame, there’s so much great live stuff you should be able to read about it somewhere… yes, yes, live reviews in Moonbuilding Weekly, I know. The weekly churn is prime for them. It’s worth thinking about…
So anyway, Loula’s mixtape. Again, we’re looking at a shorter set here, but it’s not less rich for it. 30 minutes in Loula world is 30 minutes very well spent. If you’ve been following her on this journey you will have started to hear her soundworld opening up via these mixtapes. Towards the end of last year she was showing flashes of beats in her work, those flashes have started to become something more rooted recently. The live show featured beats as does this latest version of her mixtape.
Here we have ‘Untitled #29’, a work in progress as her untitled cuts tend to be. “Come and be subsumed by sounds!” she exclaims in her comprehensive accompanying liner notes. “Enveloped by undulations! Waves upon waves upon waves! High drama.” It is! It squidges and blips and bleeps and bubbles all over the place. In her accompanying notes she says of ‘#29’ that she “felt it worth sharing where I’d got to with this one before it shapeshifts beyond recognition, lost to the wind”. And it will pop back up at some point, whether you recognise it or whether it does shapeshift is TBC, which is the joy of all this. And then we’re in Loula’s kitchen, the clank of cutlery, the ping of bowls, the loading of the dishwasher (a recurring theme). The notes take an aside here for the “music production enthusiasts”, while writing about ‘Untitled #30’, she says she’s been listening to Burial’s ‘Untrue’. And it’s where we get the beats. The squiggles and sweet melody sounds very Aphex to me. I’m expecting to hear more work like this from Loula, the beats are coming. Mark my words! From there it’s gardening, lots of gardening actually as the season changes. Chopping foliage and bees and birdsong and even a boiling kettle for the cuppa afterwards.
These mixtapes really are gems of sound, shining examples of what’s possible and just what a brilliantly creative mind is at work here. Like I’ve said before, please support her and her work if you can, this month’s mixtape will cost you loose change, or you can sign up to her Cottage Studio subscription service and get everything. I’d recommend getting the whole lot. Loula Yorke is flipping amazing and she just seems to get more so.
GOOD STUFF #3
VARIOUS ARTISTS ‘Healing Sound Propagandist – Retrospective [2019-2024]’ (Healing Sound Propagandist)
Here’s a real motherload of sound for you. You should, and I would heartily recommend it, head straight for this outing once you’ve finished reading this. I mean get to the end of the newsletter first, but you know. You’ll need to head over the chop-chop if you want to hear all the tracks before you have to go to work on Monday as there’s 74 of the buggers clocking up a runtime of over a week. Nah, not really. It’s five hours, which is still a goodly chunk of anyone’s time.
So Healing Sound Propagandist, as you might know, is a sub-label of our great friends Past Inside The Present that “further explores the sounds and textures that PITP has become known for”. The label has a back catalogue of nearly 100 releases from a smörgåsbord of emerging and established artists who all work in the mellower end of things. And for this retrospective, you’re in the excellent hands of PITP’s Zake Frizzell, aka zakè, who is also chief bottle washer over at HSP. He curates, compiles and mixes this whopping collection. “Across its many topographies and tonalities,” it says in the notes, “‘Retrospective’ is a (relatively) concise distillation for the familiar fan, and only a tantalising toe in the water for the uninitiated.” Whatever you are there is going to be much you’ll like here and hopefully it’ll send you on a fresh voyage of discovery.
Where to start? If you can pick out half a dozen names you recognise I’d say you’re doing well. Mostly it is a leap into the unknown, which is gloriously exciting. You do kind of wonder how on earth you curate a collection like this. I’ve compiled a fair few CDs and pulling together even a quarter of this number is a feat enough. And the paperwork, my god the paperwork! Sequencing is tough too and here Zach talks about how there is “a gentle and effective pacing that more than justifies its overall span, while venerating the sheer variety of approaches to curative music”. It is one heck of an ambient DJ set that is for sure.
I love Aaron Bianchi’s deeply resonant ‘Earth’, which butts up to ‘Never Alone’ from PITP’s masterful James Bernard, which itself eases into OORA’s ‘Averti Accanto, Ma Non Vederti’. You see here what Zack means about the “gentle and effective pacing”. Each one of these tracks is neoclassical in flavour, but each moves the set forwards in their own way. It’s very clever, very well done and a collection that you will be returning to time and again I think.
The release also comes as a physical outing consisting of four glass-mastered, silkscreen-printed CDs in an eight-panel, 300g satin cardstock Digipak. Shrink-wrapped too with clear CD trays. IKR. The whole CD thing is a bit of a treat as the releases are pure digital/cassette only, so for many of these tracks it could be the first time you’ve heard them in their full glory. It is also an edition of 200 and I wouldn’t hang around if want one as there aren’t many left.
healingsoundpropagandist.bandcamp.com
GOOD STUFF #4 + #5
ALEXIS DELZANNE ‘Acclimatation’ (Whitelabrecs)
FIRST SNOW OF THE YEAR ‘Norwegian White’ (Whitelabrecs)
For nearly a decade, Harry Towell’s Lincolnshire-based Whitelaberecs is an imprint that has quietly been going about its business of turning out high-quality releases with little fuss or fanfare. You might know Harry for his work as Glåsbird, most notably his eight-album set ‘A Sonic Expedition’ from 2018. That’s one to check out if you don’t know it already. Each release is focussed on remote geographic locations, which Harry thoroughly researched and explored from the comfort of his own home. It started in the North Pole, descended through Greenland, the Norwegian fjords, Siberia, Himalayas, the Pacific Ocean and the South Pole. Glåsbird happened to be an anonymous project that Harry managed to keep under wraps until last year when he outed himself in a video interview. That’s not a bad run for keeping hush-hush.
Anyway… when you step back and survey the DIY electronic music landscape, you do tend to start noticing the ebb and flow, especially when labels are on the up. Whitelabrecs seems to me to be a label that has been coming up on the rails for a while. I’ve been noticing it increasingly over the last few months and this year Harry has upped his game again. Here we have a brace of fine releases on the label’s digital only eRecords side division that runs alongside their schedule of physical releases. “These editions,” say the notes, “aim to transform the digital format into something that can be experienced in a similar way to a listener’s interaction with a real vinyl record”. Chief to that idea is the conceit that each release comes with a “PDF scrapbook including Polaroid and liner notes” but those note and images are only available to subscribers. Given how much we all seem to like (I say “we”, I mean “me”) liner notes and seeing how these releases are only a fiver, it sounds like a no-brainer to me.
First up is Alexis Delozanne’s ‘Acclimatation’, a gentle burble that clocks in at a very pleasing 35 minutes. It’s very musical, melodic, reminds me of a very minimal David Boulter. Alexis is based in Paris and his CV includes being one third of Paris’ Antipodes, a much dancier outlet, and a member of Full Orchestra, which is such an interesting project, an open source kind of affair where, among other things, members compose from the same sample each month and share the results.
Next up is First Snow Of The Year’s ‘Norwegian White’ from Belgium-based Erik Sevenans who spends his time making soundtracks to “accompany him through the cold winter months”. His inspiration includes “long walks alongside frozen rivers, subway commutes through the city and a heavy dose of Murakami novels”. Again, here he does a lovely job across 27 minutes and 45 seconds. There really is something in this less is more approach, both musically and time-wise. I really love this move towards 30-minute pieces. I’m starting to find something each day to sit and listen to, no distractions, so I’m a fan of what is going down here.
These releases are eR033 and eR034 respectively which suggests you have some catching up to do it you’ve not been aware of this project until now. Happy listening.
THE HANDY ROUND UP
Righto, as per I’m fast running out time and still have a pile to get through. Here goes… Only the other week we were writing about Dustopian Frequencies and their double header with Giants Of Discovery and label chief Everyday Dust. Here they serve up a second volume of their various artists collection that “explores the deepest darkest depths of the sea and the mysteries contained within”. ‘Fathoms 2’ has some deeply dark work waiting to be discovered. Dave Clarkson follows his interest in all things watery that has seen him release several of his “Guide” series relating to sea-based goings-on. ‘The Drowning’ is pretty creepy I have to say. There’s also cuts here from The Both And, The Slow Engineer, and Berlin’s Laura Mares, which is especially effective in a foggy sort of way. There is, of course, a contribution from Everyday Dust, ‘The Bathysphere’ sounds like creeping through an abandoned boatyard at witching hour. All good stuff, but I wouldn’t want to be listening to any of these on my own at night. Brrrrrrr.
dustopianfrequencies.bandcamp.com
There’s something afoot with Lee Nicholson’s Test Card album ‘Signals’ (Home Service). I’d recognise that artwork anywhere. It’s by Moonbuilding illustrator Nick Taylor and looking down the credits I notice the release is mastered by Antony Ryan from RedRedPaw. That combo usually spells a Castles In Space release. Here’s the interesting thing though, while Lee lives in Canadian Canada, his early 00s psyche indie outfit Formula One hailed from Preston. I knew the name rang bells. That could explain the Nick Taylor connection and I’ll speculate Nick put Lee in Antony’s direction. It’s like Mr Marple round here. Formula One had two cracking singles - one on Fierce Panda called ‘Start The Ball Rolling’ in 1996 and one on Shifty Disco, a label I had a real soft spot for, the double A-sided ‘The Future Has No 23’ / ‘Inside Your Room’ from 2000. Anyway (I’m saying anyway a lot this week, bad sign), ‘Signals’ is rather lovely. It’s all instrumental with some cracking track titles like ‘There Are Years In October’ and ‘Mono Valley Kids Delight’. Chief among them though is ‘Hush Now Warm The Intercom’, which with its spooky theremin and slow-mo Art Of Noise-y clank is my favourite track at the moment. Musically, it’s a refreshingly original sound. There’s a Clay Pipe-y neo-pastoral vibe and flecks of the sweet melody of David Boulter perhaps. It’s not in a hurry that is for sure, and it has an assured less is more feel, and yet it’s not minimal. It’s very clever, and very good. What’s more, it was Album Of The Week at Norman Records and those guys do not have cloth ears. They said ‘Signals’ is “by far our favourite work of his to date”. Highly recommended.
testcardmusic.bandcamp.com
Socool & The Lonely Bell is such a great name… except this is a split release from Canadian producer Socool and Scottish-Filipino songwriter/musician The Lonely Bell. Socool is Emily Sobool, which made me laugh. Don’t get me started on where people got their names from stories. The Evel Knievel tale is just the best. I must have told it here before. Must’ve done. If not let me and I will tell it with pleasure. I met Evel Knievel once. I’ve written about it quite recently, it’ll be coming down the pipes soon. I’ll let you know. So Emily has hooked up with The Lonely Bell, who is otherwise known as Ali Murray (nope, no mileage name-wise there) for ‘Another Kind of Earth’ (Moolakii Club) in two parts, and amazingly they both manage to clock in at 19.47. A fix or something spooky in the air? I really like long-form work like this, it’s what I tend to reach for first thing in the Moonbuilding office. Socool’s ‘Another Kind Of Earth Pt. 1’ is such a shimmery piece of work, it comes at you in waves and there are distinct movements as it ticks along. It very much has a warm embracing feel, which is very welcome. Meanwhile, on ‘Another Kind Of Earth Pt. 2’, The Lonely Bell does this really interesting build to a climax around the three and half minute mark, before it fades away to almost nothing, like that’s the radio edit, and then it starts all over again, but this time building so very slowly towards a mesmerising conclusion some 15 minutes away. Excellent work from both parties and hats off to Moolakii Club for releasing such finery. moolakiiclubaudiointerface.bandcamp.com
Temporary Bodies’ 'Transformations in K' (Utopian Mechanics) came to me in a lovely email from label chief Mike Warburton who told me his imprint specialises in short-run physical releases “covering techno, ambient, drone, noise, industrial and a bunch of other stuff”. Always keen on what the bunch of other stuff is. Anyway, he focuses on artists from Preston and the North-West, which as we all know is some sort of DIY electronic music leyline Grand Central. And of course, Mike is pals with Polypores. And as we know, anyone who is pals with Polypores is very much alright with us. So Temporary Bodies is Mike himself, why have a label and bark yourself. Is that the right expression? Probably not, but I’m running out of good words to use today. Mike says the release is “an hour of single take, improvised pieces that use keyboards, pedals and field recordings and is thoroughly imperfect in every way. It’s loosely inspired by artists like Grouper, MJ Guider, Ezekiel Honig, Deaf Centre, early Fonal Records releases and a bunch of other stuff”. See, there it is again, that mysterious bunch of other stuff. Liking this though, very nice it is too.
utopianmechanics.bandcamp.com
Really wanted to get a quick mention in for ‘Composed With Sound Pt 1’ (Accidental), which is a collection in collaboration with Sound Of The Year Awards, one of our more out-there award line-ups. It’s an open submission competition celebrating “sound in all its forms and from all corners of the world” that is “judged by a panel of leading lights from the international sound community”, the chair of which is Matthew Herbert. Among others Kate Carr is on the panel, as are Martmos, journalist Anton Spice is there as is Jez Riley French who is described as “Artist, Listener, Curator, Microphone Builder”. That’s a heck of an intro. The award categories are really great - Best Natural Sound, Disappearing Sound (v important that one), Sound Of The City, Best Imagined Sound, and everyone’s favourite, Most Unpleasant Sound. I notice my old paymasters are media partners this year, which is great. I always loved the out-thereness of it all. There’s a Composed With Sound category, sponsored by Accidental, which of course is Matthew Herbert’s label, and ‘Composed With Sound Pt 1’ is a collection of some of the best winners and nominees since the awards began in 2020. Composed With Sound is a very Matthew Herbert award and looks at compositions that have been made “using recorded or found sounds rather than musical or electronic instruments”. There’s some proper goodies here too. Owen Duff’s ‘Cut And Splice’ sounds like it was made in an amusement arcade that had a piano in the corner, Geo Aghinea’s ‘Co-existing With Sound Via Hearing Aids’ is an incredible piece of work that tackles the artist’s experience as a hearing-impaired musician, while Jake Perry’s ‘The Grain Of A Voice’ is build around a recording of his great grandfather Jim Cunningham taken from a ‘talking postcard’ made during the Second World War. It’s all great stuff and well worth a listen. This year’s winners will be announced in May.
accidentalrecords.bandcamp.com / soundoftheyearawards.com
***ADVERTISE HERE***
Email moonbuildingmag@gmail.com
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