Issue 59 / 28 March 2025
Your essential DIY electronic music beano – Track Of The Week: Cosey Fanni Tutti + Good Stuff: Snapped Ankles, Labyrinthe Des Esprits, John Foxx + Book Of The Week: 'Ghost Of An Idea' by William Burns
It’s been a while since there was a print edition of Moonbuilding. Despite spending some time hoping a new issue might magically appear out of thin air, I’m having to get my hands dirty and so Moonbuilding Issue 6 is officially underway.
I’m telling you this because I’m sat on such a brilliant interview with David Keenan about ‘Volcanic Tongue’, his new collection of music writing, which is published by White Rabbit today. I figure if I say this out loud then MB6 becomes real and that interview moves one step closer to the being out in the world where it needs to be. More news when I have it.
A message from housekeeping. We’re currently booking ads for April. In March, all but one of the ad slots were gone before the first week of the month was out. What I’m saying is don’t hang about! Remember, advertisers are total heroes, they are the reason this newsletter remains free. If you could support our advertisers by clicking on their ads and explore their wares, that would be great.
Thanks for reading all this. Same time next week?
Neil Mason, editor
moonbuildingmag@gmail.com
Issue 59 Playlist: Listen on BNDCMPR
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COSEY FANNI TUTTI ‘Stound (Edit)’ (Conspiracy International)
Photo: Chris Carter
It’s really quite surprising when you clock that Cosey Fanni Tutti has only released three solo albums, 1983’s ‘Time To Tell’, 2019’s ‘TUTTI’ and 2022’s soundtrack to ‘Delia Derbyshire: The Myths And The Legendary Tapes’. It’s not like she’s been sat on her hands or is too busy doing the garden, there is plenty of Cosey out there, not least her two excellent books, ‘Art Sex Music’ and ‘RE-SISTERS’, along with much music working with her partner Chris Carter as Chris & Cosey, Carter Tutti and with Nik Void as Carter Tutti Void. It’s just that solo there’s only the three. I say only. They’re all essential. It’s all quality not quantity when it comes to solo eggs from Cosey.
She has just announced a fourth solo long-player, ‘2t2’, which will be released on her and Chris’ Conspiracy International imprint on 13 June. The album continues the themes explored in ‘TUTTI’, hence the title, and finds Cosey in reflective mood, “making sense of some very tough years, dealing with personal bereavements alongside swingeing world events that have impacted us all”. One side is “rhythmic”, while the flip is “more meditative”. Both though are “connected by an overwhelmingly positive mood”, as evidenced on first track, ‘Stound’.
“My overtone chanting on ‘Stound’ was part of that,” says Cosey, “tapping into the inner self, to the core of your being, emotionally, physically, allowing the sounds to permeate and soothe as well as create a sense of power, resistance and resilience to what we face.”
We’ve had a sneak peak and the first side is indeed very beat driven, it has the sort of chug present on the Carter Tutti powerhouse ‘Coolicon’. There’s vocals too and trumpet, of course there’s trumpet, while the second side reveals real beauty in its melancholy. Cosey talks about how the recrod is an “acknowledgment that it’s alright to be sad, but there is so much joy too in our memories of people we lose and in the moments we share with each other. Joy is our resistance”. ‘2t2’ is a powerful piece of work, a real tour de force. Roll on June.
‘2t2’ is released by Conspiracy International on 13 June
Got an upcoming release? We’re all ears. Email moonbuildingmag@gmail.com
Words: Neil Mason
GOOD STUFF #1
SNAPPED ANKLES ‘Hard Times Furious Dancing’ (The Leaf Label)
Last week we were talking about the long-standing Erased Tapes label and how it blazed trails, this week it’s the turn of Tony Morley’s The Leaf Label that deserves a big hand. I first came across the label in the mid 90s when it was just starting out. In the early days it was run by Tony, at the time a 4AD press officer, and my old friend Julian Carrera, who was himself a PR, but these days it’s just Tony. That indie spirit massively appealed to me in the 90s. When hasn’t it appealed to me to be honest? Back in the 90s major label excess and money sloshing around was everywhere so to find labels like this was treat (it wasn’t the only one, John Jervis’ WIAIWYA was also up there) Their early discography is a treat - there’s two O Yuki Conjugate offshoot releases by The Sons Of Silence and A Small Good Thing, Faultline, who still release on the label today, and a raft of Susumu Yokota releases licensed from his own Japan-based Skintone label. Of course they went on to champion Dan Snaith first as Manitoba and then as Caribou and they’ve left a trail of excellence ever since spanning the decades of their existence.
The main attraction these days is London-based Snapped Ankles whose Bandcamp genre tags are a treat – “fence post punk”, “woodwave” or heavy logtronica as they like to call it. They’ve come a long way since the conceit that they are just simple woodwose, wild men of the wood, for their first LP ‘Come Play The Trees’ in 2017. The message there was “when the city starts to encroach on the forest, nature will find a way to reclaim what is rightfully hers”. ‘Stunning Luxury’ was about their resistance to property developers, ‘The Forest Of Your Problems’ tackled the stench of greenwashing. On album number four, ‘Hard Times Furious Dancing’, they “hold up a mirror to the absurdity of modern life once again. The only sane response is to dance”.
In a world where shrugging your shoulders at everything like there’s nothing you can do, this lot are a breath of fresh air. We can all do our bit and their bit is laid bare here. And yet none of it feels like tubthumpy agit-prop, it’s all done with such swashbuckling panache you want to soak it all up.
It really helps that The Snapps’ message comes in loud clear on the back of some of the most deliciously funky music you’ll have heard in some time. It reminds me of Tackhead or the work of Michael Franti, artists who mix the political with thunderous floorfilling beats. “Personal responsibilities don’t apply to very large companies” they chant on the throbbing floorfiller ‘Personal Responsibilities’. This really is music for furious dancing, with the emphasis on the furious. And it doesn't let up for one single second. That title by the way comes from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alice Walker’s 2010 poetry collection ‘Hard Times Require Furious Dancing’ (it’s worth reading this piece by Alice here).
The band’s current bête noire is the how the cost of living crisis is putting the squeeze on the arts and particularly how Brexit has only made things worse especially for touring bands who are finding life on the road “almost impossible to sustain”. The lead track, the effervescent ‘Pay The Rent?’ tells it how it is. And guess what? Yup, the Snapps are on tour. To prove their point they’ve published their UK & EU Tour March/April 2025 spreadsheet in the name of full disclosure. So that’s a blow-by-blow financial account for five-person touring party playing 14 shows in 17 days. It projects a turnover of £30k with a loss of £1,700. Extraordinary stuff. They’ve had a Kickstarter up and running to plug the shortfall, what they’re calling GoFundTrees, and it’s worked, there’s an extra £6k in the fund to help them on their way, raised in exchange for some outrageously great rewards.
There is also a great deal of fun on show here too. The driving motorik of ‘Smart World’ is an imagined conversation about AI between Brain Eno and Conny Plank (“The rapture for technology is where I really wanna be, said Brian”) and comes complete with a stand-up-and-applaud-when-it’s-finished AI video of the pair having that chat (watch here). Genius. ‘Raoul’, with pulsations akin to the BBC News theme, is another conversation this time about “geopolitics between unreliable narrators over buzzing synths and howling dogs”. The unreliable narrators? Fictional creations… Hunter S Thompson’s ‘Fear And Loathing’ lunatic, Raoul Duke, and Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote. Of course! Double genius. ‘Dancing In Transit’ paints quite the picture too, it’s the true story of meeting a bunch of ballroom dancers while “stuck in post-Brexit Eurotunnel customs purgatory and getting an impromptu tango class in the middle of the mayhem”.
This is saying something for a band whose output so far hans’t put a foot wrong, but ‘Hard Times Furious Dancing’ is their best work to date, which is how you’d want things to be, getting better and better with each release. The sky is the limit for the woodwose.
snappedankles.bandcamp.com / theleaflabel.bandcamp.com
GOOD STUFF #2
LABYRINTHE DES ESPRITS ‘The Cosmic Hunt’ (Spirit Duplicator)
A quick catch up if you don’t mind. There used to be a lovely cassette label called Miracle Pond. Small and perfectly formed, it was the work of Paul Bareham and Nick Taylor. Paul you will know as the brawn behind Beam Weapons and Nick is the design genius behind far too many record sleeves and all the Moonbuilding front covers. The releases sounded great, the artwork looked great, what more could you want? And then, after nearly 20 outings that included work by Luke Sanger, Polypores, Time Attendant, Kyron (Beautify Junkyards’ Joao Branco Kyron), Plastic Moonrise, Beam Weapons (of course) and Nick’s musical wing, Pictogram, the label went on hiatus in 2022 from which it has never returned.
All was not lost though as the baton was handed to London-based printing press Spirit Duplicator whose cassette division keeps the spirit alive. I’ve written about most of their post-Miracle Pond releases, it’s worth checking out if the more experimental side of life is for your thang. There’s a release I did miss towards the end of last year, ‘Electronic Music For Dracula’ by Paul Bareham / G Zammit, a 29-minute suite that marks the premier of Hamilton Deane’s adaptation of ‘Dracula’ in Derby in 1924. You can find out more about the project at Facebook and derby.ac.uk
Their latest release is rather brilliant and selling fast so be quick if you want one. I’ll wait… that was bold of you. Buying a cassette before I’ve even told you how good it is? I like your style. I’ve seen projects like this before. There was one fairly recently were an artist had a residency in secure unit, he’d sit in corridors and play and invite patients to join in. I’m struggling to recall what it was called. My old brain will get there. This one is an ambient album created “collaboratively by patients in an NHS medium-secure forensic hospital in the south-west of England”. The project is driven by by Technical Instructor Matthew Smith who uses field recordings made by patients on leave from their unit augmented by “experimental sonic textures produced using modified four-track cassette loops” and with contributions from musicians Peter Blasser, Nick Lesja, Anthony Tang, and Ashes Wednesday. There’s all sorts here, from modular squiggles and squibbles to buzzing bees and church bell chimes with arcade machines, chatter, running water, synths and general ambient soundscapes along the way. It comes scattered with narration along the way from a gent who worked in a secure unit. Robin Rimbaud has called it “a joy to behold”. He says that “it proves that music remains an empowering outlet for patients with mental health challenges, uncovering the inherent musicality within us all.”
GOOD STUFF #3
JOHN FOXX ‘Wherever You Are’ (Metamatic)
I was lucky enough to see John Foxx being interviewed at Synth East the other week by Adam Buxton. Foxxy is a captivating interviewee and could have talked all night, I’m sure most of the audience would have sat and listened had he. It was a really free-flowing chat about his time growing up in Chorley, Lancashire, about his dad being a coal miner and boxer, his mum’s job as a mill worker, his time at art school, both in Preston and at the RCA, and of course his musical career, which could easily have taken up several more hours.
He is a hard man to keep up with release-wise. There’s reissues, collaborations, band projects and new solo works, not to mention the recent-ish addition of two publications- ‘The Quiet Man’ book of short stories, and ‘Electricity And Ghosts’, the first collection of his artwork going back to his collage days, in collaboration with designer Jonathan Barnbrook. Since his last solo piano outing, ‘Arcades’ in March 2023, Foxxy has released a further seven albums, ‘Wherever You Are’ makes eight. If his energy and enthusiasm at the age of 76 doesn’t put you to shame, that sort of work rate should.
While the piano has featured in his work, most notably with the Harold Budd and Ruben Garcia collaborations, ‘Wherever You Are’ is only his second solo outing featuring the instrument. These recordings were made at his home in the early hours following a rare live performance at Kings Place in London in October 2023 as part of a BBC Radio 3 ‘Night Tracks’ event, which happened to be presented by his bandmate in The Maths, Hannah Peel.
“Around dawn is the best time to play piano,’ says Foxxy. 'Self-critical mechanisms mostly dormant, so I’m free to invent and enjoy for a while. The piano faces a window overlooking a valley surrounded by hills, where the sun comes up. There’s often an early mist in the valley – and quite often, it rains. Some notes and sounds resonate with remembered experiences and you get glimpses of times and people. It’s valuable. Quiet. Free association, myriad moments orbiting – and off you go.”
Which is about as lovely a description of these fine recordings as you’ll need. I’ve often talked about how this kind of most gentle music fills the Moonbuilding office in the early morning. There is something utterly pure about the sound of the piano. It’s not like any other instrument, it’s a sound that I find deeply affecting. If I could play one instrument (I currently play none – yes, I know, a music critic who doesn’t play music? That’s like a food critic who doesn’t cook, or something *rolls eyes*) it would be the piano, no question.
Foxxy also talks in the notes about the title. He talks about how we get formed by other people, how everyone we know or knew affects the way we see things and how how all those voices “remain in a sort of lifelong conversation”. “I hear them all the time,” he says. “It’s not at all frantic, it’s more oceanic – calm and pleasant and it eventually makes us the way we are.”
He talks about how he seems to have met, and continues to meet “mostly good, generous, bright people and I’m still learning a great deal from all of them. They give you the touchstones, the maps, the weather. It’s how we find our way. So – simply, thanks. Wherever you are.”
There really is something very pure about listening to music made like this. Just one person and a piano. It’s work that armed with context lets you drift off on a sea thoughts. You can almost see Foxxy looking out on his valley, with the mist and the rain. You can almost hear the room resonating with it all. His room and yours when you listen. Wonderful stuff.
GOOD STUFF #4
NATASHA BARRETT ‘Toxic Colour’ (Persistence of Sound)
I had to look up when the last Natasha Barrett album on Persistence Of Sound was because I could have sworn, so fresh is it in my memory still, it was much more recent than October 2023. It was ‘Innermost’ a rather wonderful split release with Beatriz Ferreyra. “Acousmatica” the label calls it, acousmatic being hearing sounds without seeing the sources that produced them. Which would be all records, right? Except we know what a drum kit and guitar look like. On the musique concrète created by people like Beatriz Ferreyra, who let’s not forget worked with Pierre Schaeffer in Paris in the early 60s, and Natasha Barrett, a renowned field recordist who talks about her work in terms of “hovering in that point between something from the real-world and the totally abstract”, our imaginations are working overtime with the sounds heading in our direction.
On ‘Toxic Colour’ Natasha collects together work from “environmental sounds” recorded using 3D ambisonic mics. “The recordings have been deconstructed, processed, and composed into abstract musical journeys that no longer transport the listener to the original recording locations. Instead, they tell stories, partly of human-made dystopias and partly in search of a melancholic beauty in what the future may hold.”
It opens with Impossible Moments from Venice 3: The Other Side of the Lagoon, the first two appearing on her earlier release ‘Reconfiguring The Landscape’. I seem to recall that album featured work from site-specific, outdoor sound installations in public spaces for time periods ranging from a few days to months. As this work is acousmatic there’s no way of knowing what was recorded when or where, unless of course there’s some handy notes about the Venice series, which I was very happy to discover there was.
“These compositions,” writes Natasha, “take the listener to a fictional location beyond the reach, as if in a dream state that nevertheless appears to be totally real. The watery reality of Venice is counterpointed by curious sounds we rarely hear. The work draws on the sound of Venice before the tourists awaken, contrasted by iron piers rolling on the waves, motorboats resonating across the Lagoon, and a sense of decadence sitting uneasily against the reality of the rising tides.”
It’s really interesting to listen along with her notes, which can be found under each individual track. So for ‘Ghosts Of The Children’ she writes about how “the sensory presence of spirits is deeply embedded in the cultures that have shaped history”, going on to say that why she doesn’t believe in ghosts, in this track “the spirits of lost children linger on, mainly as abstractions, playing in a frozen world that gradually warms with their presence”. The track itself does exactly that, chilly sounds, like shards of ice shimmer as the warm chatter of children appears dropping in and out among birdsong.
Fascinating work as always from this thought-provoking artist.
persistenceofsound.bandcamp.com
GOOD STUFF #5 / #6
JO JOHNSON ‘Alterations 3 – Gathering’
FIELDS WE FOUND ‘Resolve / Relate 03’
Last up today before I get into how many round-up reviews I can write before it’s Friday morning are two of our regular customers with new excursions into their respective sound worlds.
First up there’s the wonderful Jo Johnson with the third part of her “slow album” project, ‘Alterations’. I think we’re starting to get into the swing of this now there’s a third track. If you’ve been collecting the releases, and only subscribers are able to do that, you can listen to the three tracks back-to-back, which will start to give you an idea of the direction of travel. You will also notice that there is only ever one part live on her Bandcamp page at one time, making that subscription vital if you’re following along. She’s asking £3.80 a month for her sub, which seems a small price for her high-quality output.
Jo told me earlier this week that she was working hard to get the new package ready for Friday morning. These monthly deadlines come round faster than you’d think. She reveals that ‘Gathering’ was recorded on the 19/20 March and arranged on the 24 March, which was Monday. I got the track on Tuesday and the ‘Remnants’ track, new work that she’s molded and shaped from discarded audio that forms part of the process of getting to the main track, arrived yesterday. By now there will also be accompanying notes waiting for subscribers. All coming together in the end is a feeling I know only too well. This newsletter is very swan-like, seemingly serene as it glides across the water at 10am on a Friday, paddling like mad underneath the rest of the time, not to mention the hissing and spitting if anyone gets too close.
Musically, there’s real drama afoot in ‘Alterations 3 – Gathering’. It builds over nearly seven minutes, from minimal, very restrained reverberating notes to a howling squall that ends really abruptly. That ending is very satisfying I have to say. Excellent work. I love the ‘Remnants’ track this month too. A mix of bird-y field recordings and deep, resonant electronic bleeps and blips, like water shimmering in the spring sunshine. Looking forward to reading Jo’s notes probably at the same time you do.
Finally, there’s ‘Resolve / Relate 03’, the third part of Fields We Founds’ long-form deep listening pieces from quiet details big chief Alex Gold. Following serious illness last year, through which he ploughed on sticking out great releases on qd like nothing was happening, Alex vowed that this year he would do what made him happy. Making music happens to be one of those things, luckily for us. And the man is on fire. Not only has he released one of qd’s finest outings so far with the recent Polypores record, he’s doing these monthly long-form pieces and there’s the freshly minted dancefloor flecked beat-driven quarterly series, ‘Rhythm Structures’.
Like the Foxxy album earlier, I like to reach for this kind of work, the ‘Resolve / Relate’ pieces, when the Moonbuilding office is just coming to life in the early morning. I say coming to life. It’s just me and the cat, but I do like a soundtrack to the first cup of tea of the day, which is often pretty early doors. Unlike Foxxy, these pieces are modular jams - one take, recorded to tape “from the heart”. They are, I know, hugely cathartic for Alex and you’d need a heart of stone not to feel the energy in this work.
Again, Alex is using the subscriber model for this work. It’s crucial that after decades of the internet telling us everything is free, creators can begin to make a sustainable living from their craft. Alex says that none of this work will be on streaming platforms “to reinforce the importance of buying music if we want artists to keep doing what they do”. Well said, sir. Right behind you. My New Year’s resolution was to buy at least one offering a week. I’m doing well so far.
THE HANDY ROUND UP
Right. Quick quick. First up is ‘Volcanic Tongue – A Time-Travelling Evangelist’s Guide to Late 20th Century Underground Music’ (Disciples), which is the soundtrack to David Keenan’s first volume of music writing of the same name. Volcanic Tongue, as I’m sure many of you will know, was an incredible Glasgow-based mail order/record shop that he ran with partner Heather Leigh for a decade from 2005-2015. This soundtrack is made up from tracks that were “Tip Of The Tongue” recommendations David made in the shop’s unmissable weekly newsletter. Always trailblazing is Keenan. Anyway, the release is jammed with curio obscurios, lots to discover and love here.
disciples.bandcamp.com
‘C(or)N(e)T’ is a wild collaboration between “cornet players, inventors and virtuoso musical wizards” Louis Laurain & Pierre Basitien (Rose Hill Records). The label is really interesting, it forms part of a Brighton-based venue and studio space, the “360 ̊ Rose Hill platform” as they call it. This release is, as I was saying, wild. It was recorded at Rose Hill Studios in 2023, I guess it’s taken this long for them to get over the utter madness of it all. “Their set up,” explains the label, “is wildly creative and full of modified objects: automaton cornet mutes, underwater trumpets, revolving wooden utes, coat hanger harps and paintbrush heads that rotate and play ‘brushes’ on contact-mic-drums to name a few”.
rosehillrecords.bandcamp.com
I honestly don’t know how some of this stuff finds us. In the days of MySpace I had a theory that good bands were always friends with other good bands so I would spent a lot of time delving into the “friends” sections at the bottom of the artists’ pages looking for more music to like. Same goes on here I guess. People must read the newsletter, like the what they hear, get in touch and they turn out to be as good as what I’m writing about each week. There’s been a run on artists getting in touch who are entirely new to me and rather good indeed. The latest is Linear North who is based in Augusta, Georgia. He dropped me a line out of the blue with a link to his latest album ‘Spaceshift Vol.2’ and rather fine it is too. It comes as a long-form video, 25 minutes+, as well as cassette (“high-bias sonic red tint cassette tape with full color obi strip in a deep-red case”). The artwork is very striking, the music is none to shabby either. “Visions of Earth from a distance” he calls it. The video is a great watch, full of old cartoons, documentary footage, ads, idents and so on. ‘Blackthorn’ comes on like it’s been plucked from an 80s film soundtrack and messed around with, while ‘Manfred Time Slip’ feels a little Berlin School gone minimal. On the strength of this, sure we’ll be hearing more about Linear North.
linear-north.bandcamp.com
Last one for this week. And it’s the Italian Buchla master Giulo Fontana with his second Ogle release of the year, ‘Moon Ritual’ (Moolakii Club). His first outing of 2025 was ‘The Blue Window’ on Preston Capes, which came out on New Year’s Day. You are forgiven if you missed that one. Giulo explained that it was dedicated to his son and was “a soundtrack for the imaginary journey of a boy who’s been catapulted into a fantasy dreamscape of perilous quests and odd encounters with strange creatures”. At the time I said he had a similar vibe to Polypores, both in the thinking and the execution. He does. This release just compounds that thinking. I love the sound of the Buchla, it’s so distinctive. Here I especially like ‘Silent Pond’, a one-minute sketch that sounds like those animations you see online of balls bouncing down on xylophone plates and playing tunes as they go. The whole album is brief, it’s 10 tracks nothing over three minutes. You know my thoughts on short albums. Love them. This is a beauty. The sounds are so bright and positive. Proper spring soundtrack.
moolakiiclubaudiointerface.bandcamp.com
‘GHOST OF AN IDEA – Hauntology, Folk Horror, and the Spectre of Nostalgia’ by William Burns (Headpress)
One of my favourite books from last year was Stephen Prince’s ‘Wyrd Expectations’. It collected writings from the first decade of his A Year In The Country project that has “explored and documented the interconnected rise of interest in the wyrd, eerie and re-enchanted landscape, folk horror, the further reaches of folk music and the parallel worlds of hauntology”. The book itself contained revised and extended work from the project’s website and his assorted books as well as previously unpublished pieces from the archives. It charts Stephen’s personal journey through the “cultural undergrowth” taking in writers, film, TV, books, music, record labels and so much more. Even Moonbuilding gets a mention, which I was very pleased about.
With ‘Ghost Of An Idea’, William Burns occupies very similar territory. Under the banner of “a critical analysis of the 21st century fascination with the past, from horror films to haunted music” he delivers the sort of book that should get snapped up chop-chop round these parts. The author examines the concept of nostalgia in film, TV and music and asks if it is revitalising or killing 21st century culture providing plenty of fascinating examples along the way.
The danger with titles like this the potential for an academic dryness is never too far away. As with Stephen Prince, William Burns brings a friendly tone to proceedings and he really scores big by combining his own analysis with first-hand accounts from some key movers and shakers such as Hawksmoor’s James McKeown, Ben Holton from the epic45 label, Stephen Stannard’s The Rowan Amber Mill and the illustrious folk singer Angeline Morrison.
The contents page sucks you straight in and will have you itching to get started with headings such as “Is It Future? Or is It Past? ‘Twin Peaks: The Return’” and “It’s Like She Never Left: ‘Blair Witch’”. There’s some great ‘Star Wars’ stuff in the chapter entitled “Is nostalgia counter-revolutionary?”, which tops out rather brilliantly with a section on ‘Toy Story 4’! There’s a lot of talk about found footage, including that ‘Blair Witch’ chapter. It’s a film that had such an impact on me, that hand-held video aesthetic compounded the idea of authenticity and it made my blood run cold. Watching it for the first time on my own in a middle American hotel room after spending days stranded in Minneapolis (long story) was the icing on the cake.
There’s some good lists, discographies and so on, that crop up and will be of help if you’re new to all this. The musical references alone would make for an especially good playlist. Particularly interesting is William’s list of horror films released in the 2010s. There’s loads! He believes that the last 15 years have been “one of the greatest eras in the history of horror media, a true Renaissance Age for the genre”.
And if you are new to all this, his opening chapter, ‘Today Is Tomorrow’s Yesterday: The Philosophy Of Nostalgia’, will set up nicely. It’s described it as a “primer” and breaking everything down into sections, TV, film, music, and offers up a very thorough introduction to all things haunty. Many of the Moonbuilding world’s musical touchstones are mentioned - Ghost Box (of course), John Foxx, Buried Treasure, Concretism, Drew Mullholland, Mordant Music, A Year In The Country and many, many more. I mean, Moonbuilding isn’t mentioned, but we’re sure that can be amended in the second edition. Otherwise it’s a fascinating piece work that should be flying off the shelves and into the reading piles of Moonbuilding subscribers everywhere.
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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
Thanks so much for the great review Neil. Although Moonbuilding isn't mentioned directly, (I do mention Castles in Space!) it had a definite influence on the music section. I would have never had heard of Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan without the essential Sprung 2023 issue.
lovely stuff neil! thanks so much for the inclusion and section the rec for jo's sub!