Issue 62 / 18 April 2025
Your essential DIY electronic music beano – Track Of The Week: Death In Vegas + Good Stuff: Manifesto Of Bliss zine, Circles In Circles, Samuel AD Martín, Christian Kleine + 'Krautrock Eruption' book
Happy Easter! It is unusually quiet out there. Not many are braving a Good Friday release. It takes a lot of work to get your thang out into the world and I guess folk are having a lie-in and kicking back for the long weekend instead. But not us! Oh no. We’ve been beavering away all week looking for bits and bobs to keep you entertained over Easter.
Moonbuilding (print division) had a great time at The Tonic mag’s Indie Mag Fest at the Gipsy Hill Brewery last weekend. A huge thanks to everyone who came, especially those who were there especially to see us and bought rare copies of the mag. Issue Two, the one with Kayla Painter on the cover, is now totally sold out. I had a few cheeky copies on my desk, but not any more!
I’ve got one eye on next week’s schedule and I can report it is awash with releases, so normal service will be resumed.
Happy reading.
Neil Mason, editor
moonbuildingmag@gmail.com
Issue 62 Playlist: Listen on BNDCMPR
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DEATH IN VEGAS ‘Death Mask’ (Drone)
Photo: Elaine Kin
June will be on us before we know it and with it comes a new Death In Vegas album, ‘Death Mask’, their seventh, and first in eight years. I could’ve sworn there was an album more recently than 2016, but no, DiV’s sixth, ‘Transmission’, came out in May 2016. That is something of a gap. I was thinking of the Richard Fearless album ‘Deep Rave Memory’, which came out in November 2019. Why that wasn’t a DiV album I don’t know.
I love that people who back in the day were big news with a big recording contract to match still have the fire and are doing it themselves these days. The Fearless DIY years started in 2004 with ‘Satan’s Circus’, the fourth DiV long-player and first one on his own Drone label. While the first three LPs were mighty juggernauts, each one a law unto itself, it’s the Fearless DIY years I like the best, of course it is. Everything from ‘Satan’s Circus’ onwards got back to the clubs, and sleazy ones at that. I love the reference points too, says much about where his head was at. A couple of tracks on ‘Satan’s Circus’ borrowed from Kraftwerk (‘Zugaga’ lifts from ‘Trans-Europe Express’ while ‘Kontroll’ takes from ‘Kometenmelodie 2’) and on the last album, ‘Transmission’, there’s a Chris & Cosey remix of ‘Consequences Of Love’. Always a sign of quality when those two get involved.
Anyway, to ‘Death Mask’ which is due out on 6 June. More about it nearer the time, but the first fruit, the title track, is a really good taster for the whole thing. It proper rattles away and feels very Detroit techno-y to start with, and then, under the minimal groove comes a tune, a melody. It’s a kind of rave-like chime that starts way back and heads slowly, slowly towards the surface. Clocking on over seven minutes it’s not a track in hurry to reveal itself, but it is one that locks itself into a hypnotic, rather pleasing groove. And if you think that sounds good, wait until you hear the rest of the album.
‘Death Mask’ is released by Drone on 6 June
Got an upcoming release? We’re all ears. Email moonbuildingmag@gmail.com
Words: Neil Mason
GOOD STUFF #1
ERIN FARLEY AND STEPHEN CLARKE 1980 ‘Dancing Trees’ (Manifesto Of Bliss)
Colin at Castles In Space is an eternal optimist. One of his many truisms is about how you just need to have stuff out there. You never know what might happen, he says, but you do need to have stuff out for it to happen.
For example. There’s a “comments” section on Moonbuilding Weekly, it’s hidden away, but what is said there does tend to be quality. Andrew Mitchell read my review of David Keenan’s ‘Volcanic Tongue’ the other week and dropped in to let me know he’d been working on lino prints for a 10-inch lathe cut by Scottish storyteller Erin Farley and Irish writer and electronic musician Stephen Clarke 1980, which was set to be released by Manifesto Of Bliss. “There’s also a rather nice zine and a CD,” Andrew said and dropped me a link. I don’t need telling twice. I bought the second issue of the Manifesto Of Bliss zine and three-inch CD. The first issue came out last October and is long sold out. The three-inch CD is lovely, it’s such a great format. Frances Castle at Clay Pipe has been making good use of it and here, featuring four tracks and attached to a zine, it’s perfect. Think of it like those incredible EPs NME and Melody Maker used to cover mount in the good old days.
The disc that came with the first issue featured friend of Moonbuilding Richard Norris along with Will B Carruthers, Sulci and ‘Dancing Trees (Ritual Mix)’ by Erin and Stephen Clarke 1980. You see where all this is going. That last track has been spun off into a release all of its own, a limited edition seven-track CD and two-track lathe cut, which are both, staggeringly, still available. You need to have their arm off for this stuff. And while you’re at it pick up Issue Two of the zine, which isn’t sold out either. I mean, what is going on?
If you like Moonbuilding you will be into the Glasgow-based Manifesto Of Bliss too. “The Manifesto is made up of a growing collective that was first declared at a meeting with myself and David Keenan to create a manifesto of bliss for the unheard musical / artists / poets and counter culture defects that we know,” explains co-founder, DJ/radio show presenter Brother Joseph. David Keenan will be a name you recognise, author of ‘This Is Memorial Device’ whose recently published collection of music writing, ‘Volcanic Tongue’, we raved about a couple of weeks ago. “I guess like yourself,” co-founder David Scott told me, “our aim is to try and get the unheard, heard and while electronic music and the club scene is very much at the heart of things, with David Keenan on board our remit is to try and touch as many bases as possible across as many different art types that we can.”
This zine needs to be in your reading pile. The music they’re pushing out needs to be in your listening pile. The second issue is something of a Keenan special to mark the publication of his ‘Volcanic Tongue’ book. Volcanic Tongue was the name of the underground record shop/mail order business David ran with his partner Heather Leigh from 2005-2015. They had a weekly email that highlighted the best of the new releases written by David. Way ahead of the curve. Here we get a bunch of those old reviews along with their end of year list for 2014. As well as that there’s a chat with Jonny Halifax Invocation, who feature on the CD, an annotated Ride tour mixtape by Andy Bell, the second part of an interview with MoB in-house DJs, Death Wish & Blood Stain (Brother Joseph and Keenan again!) as well as the first installment of a three-part work of prose-poetry by Belfast author Wendy Erskine and more.
The CD is a cracker. It opens with the brilliant 30 Door Key and ‘The Autumn People’, a track from his long sold out Feral Child seven-inch from Feb 24. Acid-fuzzed cosmic blues outfit The Johnny Halifax Invocation are present with the Lincolnshire Poacher Mix of ‘Dead Swamp’ that comes on like Beck meets Alabama 3, while Ireless’ ‘PING-PING-PONG’ is a mellow Aphex-ish window-rattler (that bassline!). The centrepiece of an EP already stacked with quality is the aforementioned Erin Farley & Stephen Clarke 1980’s ‘Dancing Trees (Birnam Down The House Edit Mix)’. It’s an electronic-fuelled, spoken-word-driven pleasure. You have to love The Talking Heads sample hinted at in that title.
Manifesto Of Bliss is very much from the same world as Moonbuilding. Their notes explain that “the zine tries to capture some of the spirit and DIY culture that is invoked through a clear recollection and respect to a heritage now past, but with the instruction to get out there and do it”. Which is, in a nutshell, what I’m trying to do here. There was a world where musical discovery was everything, a place where you didn’t walk round with the entirety of recorded music in your pocket. You had to work at digging out the good stuff. Record shops, radio, music press, countless gigs, good friends and zines like this were key to your musical journey. And here we go again by the looks of things.
I’m delighted to see a zine like Manifesto Of Bliss out and about. Buy buy buy.
THE HANDY ROUND UP
Instead of the longer Good Stuff reviews, we’re on in our holiday setting so we’ve done a bumper Easter Weekend Round Up. Helpfully we’ve included a gallery of the sleeves and a player below each one for a listen. Should keep you quiet for a while. It’s what bank holidays are for, right?
First up comes Circles In Circles’ ‘Dyadic’ from Adrian Newton’s fledgling Evergreen Music, a cassette label with a difference. They use “upcycled cassettes” and hand-printed artwork “to minimise environmental impact”. The upcycled cassettes are interesting. “We use high quality cassettes by recognised manufacturers, but they are likely to be a few years old, and they will have been used previously, so they might show signs of wear and tear”. There is a quality promise, the releases are duplicated using professional equipment and if yours isn’t playing as you’d expect the label will replace it. It’s a lovely idea and one worth supporting. Release-wise, they’re slowly but surely building a roster of ambient artists worth writing home about. The latest offering is Circles In Circles’ ‘Dyadic’. Details are minimal, each piece is an improvised duet between two unnamed musicians “each playing a variety of electronic instrument processed through a number of loopers, delays and other effects”. Which doesn’t narrow things down an awful lot. The results are recorded live with no overdubs or edits and the whole thing is proper spring morning windows open stuff. Nice work all round really. evergreenmusic1.bandcamp.com
Since the sad loss of the Paris-based ERR REC label, Bernard Grancher’s Astra Solaria does seem to have expanded into the void it left behind. Copenhagen-based Samuel AD Martín’s ‘Two Butterflies Went Out At Noon’ is the label’s third release of the year, which is a decent output considering we’re only as far as April. Samuel AD Martín is a new name to me and comes with scant information. “Sounds/Visuals” it says on his Insta, which is two words more than on his Bandcamp page. There’s a link from there to a YouTube page, which is a track by Lena Platonos, a leading light in the Greek electronic scene in the 80s. Further investigation is required I’d say. The notes for ‘Two Butterflies Went Out At Noon’ are equally curious. Samuel talks about taking a nap and being led “into very, very deep paths of consciousness” and how that transforms “paradoxical sleep into an accumulation of misty layers which sometimes offers clearings of pastoral dazzlement”. Clearings of pastoral dazzlement. I am very much up for some of that please. Musically, it feels ‘Twin Peaks’-y if you know what I mean. It sounds otherworldly, or parallel world-y. The wobbly ‘Grasp’ has a sinister shimmer, while ‘Unfolding’ – the first half at least – sounds like it’s communicating with extraterrestrial lifeforms until it give way to a squeezebox sort of tune underpinned by a high-pitched whistling, or that may just be my tinnitus. The whole thing is weirdly wonderful. astrasolariarecordings.bandcamp.com
Can I point you in the direction of a mailing list I’m very pleased to be on. Anna Meredith’s Mulch mailouts are really great. They are few and far between, I think there’s been two this year so she’s not going to kill you with digital correspondence, but when they arrive they are a joy. Quite often these things are undertaken by minions, this one is obviously written by Anna herself. “Please forgive the indulgent/veering on smug reminiscences on recent weeks below,” she writes in the intro of the latest edition, “but after quite a long time slogging with hermit-esque intensity on various bobbins, it’s been amazing to peer blinking at the world again and have something I hear is called a ‘good time’…” It’s a mixture of news, events, announcements, some merch (ltd ed vinyl of ‘Varmints’ unearthed in this issue) and a whole hog of what’s been pressing her buttons of late. Eating, listening, watching, etc. This issue features what she ate on a recent trip to South Korea and there’s always something about board games (she’s obsessed). She is ace, I like all this very much. Scroll down to the bottom of the homepage of her website to sign up… annameredith.com
A second volume of Christian Kleine’s “prestine artifacts from his personal DAT archive” arrives today in the shape of ‘Electronic Music From The Lost World: 1998-2001 (Vol.2’)’ (ASIP). These lost tracks occupy a ripe period in time, not that you’d be able to pin them the the late 90s/early 00s if you heard them blind. They sound very contemporary. The notes are interesting, saying that the tracks “recall specific moments from Kleine’s time living in Berlin, an era of minimal comforts but maximal creativity, where all that really mattered was that the PowerPC, sampler, and synths kept running”. Berlin back then wasn’t the uber metropolis it is today. It was much more like Prague a decade earlier, a place to head for cheap rents, which would allow time and space to create. These tracks would have been made at the same time Christian was working as Herrmann & Kleine with Manchester/Berlin-based City Centre Offices label co-founder Thaddeus Herrmann (he set the label up with Boomkat founder Shlom Sviri which should tell you much). In the old days, we’d say that unreleased tracks are that way for a reason. Not any more. I’ve been doing some work with Ultramarine recently who are issuing an entire album of tracks made around the time of ‘A User’s Guide’ and they’re flipping brilliant. Same here. It’s hard to understand how a track like ‘Errance’, with its bright melody or the sleek groove of ‘A Direction’ didn’t make the cut for Christian’s 2001 ‘Beyond Repair’ debut on CCO. Nice. Do check out ‘Vol.1’ while you’re at it. astrangelyisolatedplace.bandcamp.com
Little Annie’s ‘With’ is a typical curiously excellent release from the Cold Spring label. Little Annie is a New York singer, artist, actress, poet, writer and performance artist who has quite a tale to tell. She moved to the UK in the early 80s and worked with Penny Rimbaud/Crass who took her on tour to perform her poems to backing tracks as Annie Anxiety. In the early 90s she became Little Annie while working as in-house singer for Adrian Sherwood’s On-U label, making a trio of solo albums and round that time recording with the likes of Current 93, Coil, Nurse With Wound, Lee “Scratch” Perry, Swans, The Wolfgang Press, Fini Tribe and many more. This is a collection of just some of those collaborations. While it’s easy to pin Little Annie as a torchsong chanteuse, and yes, the Marc Almond live track, ‘Yesterday When I Was Young’, is none more torch, but something like ‘The Weather The War’ with Bad Seed/Gun Club/The Cramps’ Kid Congo is a proper bawdy singalong. She has worked extensively with renowned pianist Paul Wallfisch who has worked with the likes of Love & Rockets, Swans, Ministry Of Wolves and his own band Botanica. There’s a couple of tracks here with him, unfortunately not their tremendous cover of U2’s ‘Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For’. coldspring.bandcamp.com
Talking of unreleased material, which we were doing above somewhere earlier, Vic Mars’ ‘Supplement B’ is a collection of work made in 2015/16. Of course, there is a ‘Supplement A’, which came out five years ago, FIVE YEARS AGO, and also collects work from 10 years ago. 10 YEARS AGO! Time really isn’t being kind here is it? How can 2015 be 10 years ago? Anyway, ‘Supplement A’ was a typically Vic Mars-shaped slab of bubbling synths and lovely tunes and, well, ‘Supplement B’ is more of the same. There’s a nice demo kind of sound to proceedings, tracks like ‘Biomes II’ are very minimal but utterly charming as on Vic Mars can be. You suspect they have that demo feel because that’s exactly what they are. I particularly like all one minute and 30 seconds of ‘Olchon’ with its feint ‘Tubular Bells’ kind of vibe. I like that people are brave enough to show their workings like this. ‘Supplement B’ is utterly charming, it’s almost like being allowed to look at his sketchbook. Vic is offering these seven tracks for £2. What can you buy for £2 these days that’s this good? vicmars.bandcamp.com
Judging by his press material, New Yorker Gryphon Rue’s music causes people to write quite a lot of guff. Pitchfork say he’s “a tripped-out spirit of wonder”, my old muckers at Electronic Sound, who have made it into Pseud’s Corner in Private Eye more than once, said he is “a conjurer in stereo”, but they only said it once, while The Quietus said he “evokes in sound the bold and playful paper creations of Kurt Schwitters... a kind of Merz converted into hertz”, which is quite clever if you know your art history. None of that really helps when it comes to his new long one, the brilliantly entitled ‘I Keep My Diamond Necklace In A Pond of Sparkling Water’ (a line from ‘Faberge’ by US poet James Schuyler. “I keep my diamond necklace in a pond of sparking water for invisibility”). What does help is reading Gryphon’s own notes, which I’ll tell you about in a moment. The album feels like a journey, a mixture of the electro and the acoustic although the proportions aren’t listed so you don’t quite know what it is you are listening to. The 13-minute ‘Jaeggy’ winds up with what sounds like someone turning on and off a huge buzzing electricity pylon, while in the middle it’s like a yappy bunch of winged puppies have escaped their captors and have taken to the sky. The bubbly ‘Blue Eraser’ sounds quite froggy, while ‘The Other Green Worm’, which is five tracks in, with two to go, reveals a beautiful melody for you as a reward for immersing yourself in this wonderful oddness. And then you read his notes. “This record was recorded in High Falls, NY, harvested from the surrounding wildlife,” he writes. “There are birds and insects recorded on Cortes Island in British Columbia. This is a woodsy record. Odetta Hartman and I recorded her violin in the cabin on Cortes where I was staying. There are also insects in Santa Rosa, CA, and humpback whales, provided by my father from a trip he took to Rurutu, Polynesia. People swim with the whales longing to communicate with them.” gryphonrue.bandcamp.com
Mein are a psyche supergroup. Maybe I’m too deep in DIY electronic world, but I’ve not heard of any of the bands this four-piece are drawn from. I am happy to give them the benefit of doubt because from the opening track, ‘Evil People’ onwards this is an excellent album. ‘Miien’ (Fuzz Club) is their sophomore album and it follows their eponymous 2018 debut, which is a proper music journalist sentence if ever there was. Hailing from Austin via Montreal, Mien do a very neat line in thrumming krautrock. They certainly know how to lock down a groove, the whole record is full of fluid basslines and taut drums… something like ‘Silent Golden’ sounds like Julian Cope in his pomp. This is the good stuff. Mein will be in the UK for a string of dates from 28 April. Tickets here. fuzzclub.bandcamp.com
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‘KRAUTROCK ERUPTION – An Alternative History Of German Underground In The 60s and 70s’ Wolfgang Seidel (Ventil)
There’s five quotes on the back of this book, three of them are from people I know well – David Stubbs, Electronic Sound deputy editor Mark Roland and Anthony Thornton, who is billed as being from Record Collector, but he was my editor at NME.COM during the wild west years. So, you know, I feel like I’m being targeted here. Oh and there’s an accompanying CD, which seems like the sensible thing to do these days. More about that in a bit, let’s tackle the book first.
Last year we featured Christoph Dallach’s oral history of Krautrock ‘Neu Klang’, which I enjoyed enormously. ‘Krautrock Eruption’ differs in that it’s told entirely from one point of view by Wolfgang Seidel, who was in the thick of it as a founder member/drummer in Ton Steine Scherben, who he left in the early 70s to join the Conrad Schnitzler-led outfit Eruption. He went on to work with Schnitzler right up until his death in 2011.
Wolfgang’s account, which was originally published in German and is translated here by Alexander Paulick of Düsseldorfian outfit Kreidler, is described as “fly on the wall” and that’s where it differs from Dallach’s book. Yes, while everyone who was involved in the nascent scene was “on the ground”, they didn’t all go on to be in Can or Neu etc. Which, I think, gives Wolfgang’s book a more gritty look at what happened, why it happened and who made it happen. While I’m a fan of oral histories and think a good one works really well, they can’t get into the kind of nitty gritty you can with one person telling a story.
And so it proves here. Wolfgang starts out talking about radio, which is never far away when you’re dealing with the birth of a scene. The radio was crucial for folk like Wolfgang as a child of the 1950s. He mentions his aunt had a portable radio that most likely came from one of the US soldiers stationed in West Berlin. “A huge display showed the shortwave band with the names of the distant places,” he writes, “and a world map with time zones was on the flipped-up lid. The radio was the promise that there was a world out there.”
And there needed to be some kind of hope for young people growing up in Germany. It was not a simple place in the immediate post-war years. How does a country even begin to recover from losing a catastrophic war that was intended to see them overrun an entire continent?
It was difficult for young people living in a country where the ghosts of the past still lingered, where authoritarian structures and nationalist ideology persisted despite everything that had happened. Harder to stomach was that those in power for the post-war recovery, “the minor authorities, the teachers, instructors, and heads of families” tended to be Nazi soldiers, survivors who had come home and picked up where they left off like nothing had happened. These people decided the way forwards was through “a disciplinary grip”, an ideology that “demanded submission and conformity form young people”.
You can see how out of this cauldron something had to come that would see the beginning of a cultural revolution. As you will discover, the origins of krautrock are many and various. At its heart though is what drives all musical innovations, disaffected youth. You can feel the change the air as the book progresses. ‘Krautrock Eruption’ takes you on a deeply satisfying, hugely thorough exploration of what went on in Germany that lead to the foundation of a musical movement that still endures today. Wolfgang really digs into where krautrock came from and recounts “the squats, demos and first concerts of bands such as Cluster, Tangerine Dream and Ash Ra Tempel”. He discusses the deep influence of jazz, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and the minimalist composers such as Philip Glass and Steve Reich. He traces a line across the country joining the dots in places such as the Ruhr, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Munich and crucially, West Berlin and examines how the synth became the “sonic hallmark” of all things krauty. It’s cracking stuff.
The book also features a list of 50 essential krautrock records, with notes from music writer/krautrock expert Holger Adam, which should keep you quiet for a while. And then there’s the CD. While it has the same cover as the book, it is an entirely separate offering, which seems like a trick missed. That said, the Disciples-released compilation that accompanied David Keenan’s music writing collection ‘Volcanic Tongue’ was a separate purchase to the book too, so. This set is subtitled ‘An Introduction To German Electronic Music 1970-1980’ and it’s a Bureau B-curated selection of 12 tracks that by are no means krautrock’s greatest hits, but it does offer a decent snapshot drawn from the Bureau B catalogue and the context comes from further excellent notes by Holger Adam. There are plenty of names here – Faust, Harald Grosskopf (most famously Klaus Schultz’s drummer), Cluster, Roedelius (on his own and with Eno and Moebius). You have to love ‘Emphasis’, from Grosskopf’s seminal 1980 ‘Syntesist’ album, Moebius & Plank’s ‘Rastakraut Pasta’, described in the notes as “instrumental-post-kraut-industrial-dub-spoken-word-whatever music” and Riechmann’s ‘Himmelblau’ from 1978’s epic ‘Wunderbar’ album.
I would’ve liked to see the book and CD as one package, for one price. Makes sense to me. Together or separate they are something very much worth reveling in.
‘Krautrock Eruption’ is published by Ventil and is out now. It’s available from the Bureau B shop here and the CD/vinyl is here
STOP PRESS: As a reward for reading this far, well done, you could be the proud owner of a free book. I was sent two promo copies of this so I’m giving one away. Just send me an email entitled “Krautrock Eruption” include your postal address and I’ll pick a random email on Monday morning and post a book out in the afternoon. This is a UK-only offer I’m afraid.
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 for the fantastic words regarding the Manifesto of Bliss! Thanks Neil.