Issue 64 / 2 May 2025
Your essential DIY electronic music beano – Track Of The Week: Me Lost Me + Good Stuff: The All Golden, Brandon Invergo, Xqui, Karen Vogt, The Balloonist + Studio Electrophonique book + more...
I don’t know if you saw the news this week, but the good folk at the Make Much Wenlock Weird night in Shropshire have thrown in the towel. They’ve cancelled all future events. They have ceased to be. Which is terrible news. They’re gutted, understandably. You can read their full statement here.
People aren’t daft, there ain’t no one here who thinks they’re getting rich out of any of this, not artists, labels, promoters or publications. We’re doing it out of love for the most part, but it would be nice not to lose money. And that seems to be happening far too often. Why? I really don’t know. There is money out there, maybe there’s just too much “stuff” vying for it. As Make Much Wenlock Weird, a respected promotor who put on shows by the likes of Loula Yorke and Field Lines Cartographer, has proved again it really is use it or lose it.
In other news, I’m getting asked when our next print issue is due. Well, it’s on its way. My old pal Finlay Milligan from the Happening Again newsletter is helping out and we think Issue 6 will be with you in June. It’s looking lovely. More news soon.
One more thing before I go, we do still have ad space for the whole of May. If you want to get your wares in front of over 1,400 engaged, pro-active Moonbuilding readers looking for cool stuff to buy, do drop me a line. If it helps, how about we do a buy one get one free offer on all ads for the rest of the month.
Happy Friday, happy reading.
Neil Mason, editor
moonbuildingmag@gmail.com
Issue 64 Playlist: Listen on BNDCMPR
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ME LOST ME ‘A Painting Of The Wind’ (Upset The Rhythm)
photo/video: Amelia Read
‘A Painting Of The Wind’ is a second single from the new album, a fourth, by Newcastle-based Jayne Dent who plies her trade as Me Lost Me. There is something totally otherworldly about Jayne’s work. I first clocked her with the release of her sophomore album ‘The Good Noise’ in 2021, which quite rightly made Electronic Sound’s Albums Of The Year list. She has this way of sounding both of another world and utterly slap-bang up to date when she gets tangled in electronics. O’ve always thought she occupies land at the folk end of what Gazelle Twin does. They’d certainly make a cracking double bill live.
The new album, ‘This Material Moment’ is set for release via Upset the Rhythm on 27 June and it’s quite a listen. More about it nearer the time, but it sees Jayne putting into practice “automatic writing techniques she developed during a workshop with Juila Holter”. There are a lot of comparisons between the two artists so this approach is of interest. The resulting work saw her with “an unexpectedly personal album on her hands”. Which all sounds rather interesting.
The new record also sees her employing the use of live drums (from Pigs x7’s Ewan Mackenzie) to go with long-time collaborators John Pope’s electric/double bass for the first time. There’s some belters on the album utilising this approach.
The single is rather gentle and finds Jayne looking at “how artists try to express abstract things in mediums that can’t ever really wholly grasp those depths of human emotion… and yet we still keep trying, in fact I’d argue we can’t really help ourselves”. It looks like for a track called ‘A Painting Of The Wind’ she summonsed the wrath of the stuff for the video, shot by her friend Amelia Read at Raby Castle In County Durham. It looks soooo windy up there.
‘This Material Moment’ is released by Upset the Rhythm on 27 June
Got an upcoming release? We’re all ears. Email moonbuildingmag@gmail.com
Words: Neil Mason
GOOD STUFF #1
THE ALL GOLDEN ‘Chambers’ (Woodford Halse)
Woodford Halse, even by its own lofty standards, is having one heck of year. This is release number seven on the main label and each one has been excellent, two of them – Conflux Coldwell’s ‘The Sunshine Miners’ and Field Lines Cartographer’s ‘Solar Maximum’ – will, no doubt, be riding high in our Albums Of The Year countdown, which will be on us sooner enough judging by the breakneck speed 2025 is moving at. May! How can it be May?
And here comes another contender in the shape of ‘Chambers’ by The All Golden, who you should know by now is former Kenickie drummer Pete Gofton, aka Johnny X aka J Xaverre. The All Golden is my favourite incarnation of his though. Not familiar? Try last year’s ‘Sympathetic Magic’ on the New York-based Island House label who said the release reminded you “how vital the alchemy of solitary musical creation can be”, which I think is a compliment even if it does sound like being damned by faint praise. Quality gear I said, which was more to the point. ‘Yestereven’, also on Woodford Halse, from 2023 found Pete digging in his own archive that stretches a loooong way back looking for work that needed finishing off, creating new tracks featuring stuff like his 12-year-old self on drums and him aged 25 on guitar. There’s also ‘Pagodas’ on Modern Aviation from 2021 where he again works with his teenage self to great effect. All caught up? Good, good. So to ‘Chambers’.
“It’s about memories of the now demolished Civic Centre in Sunderland and the psychic death of the future,” offers Pete. “You know, toe-tapping shit.” Which made me laugh. Sure, you won’t be disco dancing to it, but it is by no means a doom and gloom record. People writing music about buildings is a recurring theme round here, only last week we had Perrache’s ‘Mt Rubble’ about an artificial hill built from World War II debris and a few weeks previous we had Warmfield’s ‘Saver Strip’ about growing up in 1980s Wakefield. Not so much dancing to architecture as composing for it I guess.
Sunderland's Civic Centre was designed in 1965 by the renowned Brutalist architect Sir Basil Spence. His most famous work was the rebuild of Coventry Cathedral after the original was almost totally destroyed during the war. The notes accompanying ‘Chambers’ explain how the Civ, which was demolished in 2022 and replaced by some faceless smoked glass effort, loomed large in Pete’s life. “He passed it on the way to school. He inexpertly skated its steps. His mother was a councillor there for over a decade. The last time he went to it was to register the death of his father. Having long left his hometown, PG wanted to honour a lost place he still felt a connection with.”
The notes says the album is constructed to echo the shape of the building, “larger spaces (and a rumoured nuclear bunker) connected by airy glass corridors and open courtyards”. The track titles suggests the music is a kind of walkthrough of the building, the descending calm of ‘The Garden’, the sweeping strings and marching rhythms of ‘Mezzanine’, the drifty tinkles of ‘Corridors’.
And the album does feel open and airy, the title track is the centrepiece and reminds me of Joe Duddell and Mike Garry’s ‘St Anthony: An Ode To Anthony H Wilson’ from 2015, which itself is based on New Order’s ‘Your Silent Face’. There’s a really great Weatherall remix here if you don’t know it. Anyone channelling New Order, and doing it this well, should be saluted in my book. ‘Chambers’ is such a great tune and all the better for clocking in at nearly 10 minutes long so you can just bathe in it.
I’ve heard and enjoyed a lot of Pete’s work over the years, this though is probably his finest hour. So far.
GOOD STUFF #2
JO JOHNSON ‘Alterations 4: Hiding The Knot’
FIELDS WE FOUND ‘Resolve / Relate 04’ (quiet details)
LOULA YORKE ‘Megamixtape’ (Truxalis)
I knew this would happen at some point and here it comes, our three most prominent artists on a monthly release schedule all end up syncing in the same week.
Track number four from Jo Johnson’s slow album, ‘Alterations’, which is being composed, recorded and released a track at a time and will see a full outing when it’s complete at the end of the year, is really beginning to reveal the album now. ‘Hiding The Knot’ is a real bubbler of a track, that swells and builds as it reaches its rather dark, sinister crescendo in what sounds like a rain storm.
As always there’s some great notes that accompany it. She adds a summary of the full project so far, which totals about an hour and 15 minutes of music so far. I really look forward to the fresh installments, not just as standalone pieces but as part of a bigger picture and now with four offerings we are starting to see that picture emerge.
For this tack Jo talks about the blind hem, or invisible stitch, a tailoring trick that ensures stitches are entirely hidden, the first step of which is to hide the knot. She applies this thinking to the current political climate and the way lies are used to hide the truth. There’s a lovely diary with this month’s outing, all of which gives food for thought while you’re listening to Jo’s wonderful music.
Fields We Found’s latest outing, the fourth, in their ‘Resolve / Relate’ series is, like Jo’s work, building into an interesting catalogue, even though I don’t think that is the intention here. These tracks, just to remind you, are long-form takes designed for “deep and close listening” by quiet details big chief Alex Gold. They are performed live in one go directly to tape from his modular system/ARP 2600m/effects. There’s also a shorter “stasis dub” version of the track too. They are made for listening to. Properly listening to. We all need a bit more time for doing that, right.
The biggest news here I’ve saved for last. Loula Yorke’s monthly mixtape series is a year old this month, which is hard to believe. To celebrate Loula has relevelled ‘The Book Of Commonplace’, which has a number of elements that are going to reveal themselves over the next few months. First up there’s an hour-long megamix, which she explains is a reworking of some of the best bits from the last year. There’s also a double album of music she’s created for mixtapes coming down the pipes as well as a zine that presents all the written and visual material from the project so far. The megamix comes with bumper liner notes as you’d expect and later this month it will be available on cassette (pre-orders open on 23 May). Don’t hold me to this, but I believe the double album will be available in early July. This is properly exciting stuff. Stay tuned.
GOOD STUFF #3
BRANDON INVERGO ‘Here, Beneath the Ash-Choked Sky’ (Moon Atlas)
Brandon Invergo of Chicago’s Moon Atlas label popped up on my radar a couple of years back when he released his first EP of dance music in a decade. When people from Chicago make dance music I do like to listen, even if it is only by osmosis as Brandon is the label’s UK branch, based in Exeter. The EP, ‘Four Lamentations For Dancefloors’, is a cracking piece of work, kind of downtempo-y tech-house-y shapeshifting. It’s a sophisticated piece of work that very much appealed. We picked up on him again last year with ‘Bringing On the Eschaton’ which the label itself admits wasn’t the friendliest greeting. “That release was,” they say, “well, pretty intense”. Here he returns with ‘Here, Beneath the Ash-Choked Sky’ which they tell me is a different beast entirely. So different that while the label say it isn’t ambient they went to Alex Gold at quiet details for mastering as someone “we could trust to get the best out of it”.
You do see what they mean. It’s not ambient, but it is adjacent, dark ambient I’d say, like something you might hear coming out of the excellent Cold Spring stable. It has that sophistication that Brandon seems to be able to show no matter what he’s doing, noise, dance, this. ‘Act II, Scene 1: The Wandering’ is my current favourite track, a near 10-minute ebb and flow that sounds like the wind or the waves. ‘Act II, Scene 2: We Fall’ is similarly captivating, a long deep judder of a drone that is hypnotising in its rumbleyness. The tracks are titled like it’s a play or drama, from ‘Prologue’ to ‘Act III, Scene 2’ and the titles – ‘Last Gasps’, ‘We Fall’, ‘Gray Dawn’ are tantalisingly dramatic. I love the drama of the closer, ‘Gray Dawn’, which rattles to a crescendo before one of the longest fades you’ll ever hear. This is excellent work. If Brandon Invergo isn’t a name you know, he really does bear further investigation.
GOOD STUFF #5
KAREN VOGT ‘Haunted Woodland Volume Five’ (Wayside & Woodland)
THE BALLOONIST ‘Dreamland’ (Wayside & Woodland)
I really love the notes that accompany Karen Vogt’s contribution to Wayside & Woodland’s ‘Haunted Woodland’ series. Previous incarnations of the series, which started in 2010, have included work from The Toy Library (Rob Glover who co-founded the label and plays in epic45), Charles Vaughan, Surfacing and our friend EL Heath, whose Plenty Wenlock label we were writing about a lot last year.
The ‘Haunted Woodland’ series “sets out to chart the history, myths and atmospheres of specific woodland”, it was originally very specifically woodland in the Staffordshire/Shropshire area, but I think that might have fallen by the wayside. The Fourth volume, by Surfacing, was about Duke’s Wood, home to the UK’s first commercial oilfield, in Nottinghamshire. And Karen lives in Paris and talks about a cluster of trees she passes on her walks along the Marne River, which is a tributary of the Seine. The trees are neatly arranged as a group of six. “Two rows of three, or three rows of two? Why were they planted this way?,” asks Karen. “Huddled so close together, like a small audience bearing witness to the humans, animals, and the river passing by.” She talks about people being haunted and how “we leave our thoughts and feelings in certain places more than others” before pondering about the people who thoughts, hopes and fears these trees had absorbed over the years, centuries even.
Trees are like that. They’re incredible and the older they get the more valuable they seem. I write this as the trial of the two men accused of chopping down the Sycamore Gap tree that had stood for more than 100 years in a dip on Hadrian's Wall in Northumberland is in full swing. It makes no sense that something so beautiful could end up like that. If we discover why that would help I guess. You wonder what stories that tree could’ve told, stood where it was, seeing what it saw.
Anyway, back to Karen’s record. Six lovely tracks made “with guitar, vocals, and a few effects pedals, with bass on one track, and a couple of field recordings made near the six trees”. It sounds so simple doesn't it? And it comes across like that. Just a sigh of record, so simple, so effective. You can almost feel the swish of leaves as branches sway on a track like ‘In Another’. ‘Love Comes’ and ‘Air On My Skin’ are both spoken word/sung pieces starring Hamish Mackintosh to great effect, while Karen’s own delicate vocal crops up too. There is a reason her dreampop band Heligoland was produced by Cocteau Twin Robin Guthrie.
If that puts you in the mood for more of similar vein, you are very much in luck because also out on Wayside & Woodland today is The Balloonist’s ‘Dreamland’. The Balloonist is the label’s other co-founder, Ben Holton, also from the epic45. I love the webs we’re weaving here and the paths you can wander off down if you are liking this stuff. And why wouldn’t you? ‘Dreamland’, Ben’s third as Balloonist, is ridiculously evocative. It’s properly haunty, “indulging in an escape into memories of childhood summers… that only existed for moments but seem like lifetimes in retrospect”. We all know summers like the one Ben describes. “Travelling the open roads and back lanes, maybe en route to a holiday in Wales. Stopping off here and there to stretch the legs in a remote cornfield, under a blazing sun”. He talks about feeling safe on the backseat of the car, “the radio on low or encompassed in a headphone world of 80s pop and tape hiss”. I’m there. Right there. Ben talks about “ghostly echoes of Prefab Sprout, Pet Shop Boys and other smudged 80s/early 90s sounds which all add the mix. It’s a release that becomes all the more poignant as Ben’s dad sadly died during the production of the release in 2024. It reminds me of St Etienne’s ‘I’ve Been Trying To Tell You’, a sample-based album, “about optimism, and the late 90s, and how memory is an unreliable narrator”. It’s that kind of hazy, half-remembered/misremembered, idealised world slots perfectly into woozy production, the tape slurs and the degradation of sound that is present in Ben’s work. While the weather is this steamy treat yourself to crash course in this most wonderful label.
waysideandwoodlandrecordings.bandcamp.com
GOOD STUFF #5
XQUI ‘The Colour Of Spring’
Here’s an eye-catcher from the anonymous Xqui. It’s an ambient/drone collection of new work that pays tribute to “the incredible talents of Mark Hollis and Talk Talk”. I can’t tell you how much I love Talk Talk, especially ‘The Colour Of Spring’. There was a phase I went through when I would listen to it on my commute twice a day. Without fail. I’ve still got the cassette, which I recorded from the very fine CD collection my good friend, the late great Chris Starling. His work as Starlings is something I still reach for fairly often.
I have to say I hesitated before playing this. Some things are just supposed to be left alone. Talk Talk cover versions could never, ever match up to the original or offer anything new, so why bother? I’m pleased that the route Xqui has taken is homage rather than covers. While the tracks are named after the originals, the aim is to evoke the spirit (Of Eden). There’s two here named after tracks from ‘The Colour Of Spring’ – ‘Life’s What You Make It’ and ‘Chameleon Day’ – and the other track titles draw from the Talk Talk canon.
The whole thing has that Talk Talk shimmer, the drones here do feel like they’re from a similar place, don’t know how or why that works, but it seems to. It flits from light to dark too, from the squally ‘Eden’ brooding away to the almost metallic resonance of ‘Renée’. The album’s title track is especially effective, it feels like a very long intro sweeping in and out as it teeters on the brink of exploding into a song, for over seven minutes.
As I’ve said before, I really like an ambient album on the Moonbuilding stereo when the world is just waking up. It’s especially effective at this time of year when the windows are open too allowing the outside sounds to mingle. This feels like an album made for that purpose, that it draws on the considerable licks of Talk Talk only adds to its appeal.
Also out today, Xqui releases ‘Capitulation’, a two-disc set comprising of a reworked version of the 2019 album ‘Capitulate’ and a set of remixes by the likes of The Both And, outside the glitch and Heavy Cloud. Busy person.
THE HANDY ROUND UP
JakoJako’s ‘Tết 41’ (Mute), the debut full-length from Berlin-based modular synthesist Sibel Koçer, feels like it’s been a long time in coming. We had ‘Kumquat’ as our Track Of The Week a while back when May seemed a long way off. And now here we are. The album from the Berghain resident was recorded during a trip to Vietnam and her experience of the vibrant Lunar New Year celebrations. “I wanted to collect the atmospheres of Vietnam, and strip it back to my language – electronic music,” she says. “I don’t have huge ties to the traditions of my Vietnamese family, 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.” This is very much a record that belongs in Moonbuilding world. Her adventures in modular synthesis feel like a more delicate version of Polypores’ progtronics. She works with the focus on just one machine, a Waldorf Iridium Core, where all the action takes place. “The more you play with a single machine the more you get to know it,” she explains. “You’ll get muscle memory and play it more like an actual instrument, instead of treating it as a tool.” Sibel creates a complex musical world, but it’s stacked full of melody and warm, bright sounds. The production here is top notch. Even listening to it as a compressed stream coming off Bandcamp it just feels so vibrant.
Phantom Islands’ ‘Celestial Navigations’, from Cardiff-based Leone Vuetivavalagi, caught my attention. That’s a heck of surname and it turns out he has Fijian roots. Which is interesting because up the road in Bristol, there’s Kayla Painter whose mixed Fijian heritage feeds into her work. I’m sure there’s probably a vibrant Fijian electronic music scene, but it’s most likely 10,000 miles from Cardiff or Bristol. I mean, two independent DIY artists just up the road from each other making similar-ish niche experimental music and both with Fijian heritage. Why not of course, we live in a diverse country, but I do like the serendipity. I’m looking forward discovering there is indeed a vibrant Indian Ocean electronic music scene in and around the Welsh borders. Tell me about it. “The album artwork features the patterns found on a Masi cloth,” he explains, “which is traditionally given as a gesture of kinship upon arrival after a journey. It felt like a meaningful symbol. This marks my first solo project under the name Phantom Islands in 10 years, so it feels like the right moment to share my music with the world again.” ‘Celestial Navigations’, released on his own Future Artefact label, was, he says, written over the past year and is “a study in contrasts – momentum and stillness, ancestry and futurism, the known and the unknown”. Big stuff. There’s a dancefloor-y leaning to his work, the deep rumble and rhythmical rattle of ‘Varavura Taocoko’, the smooth swoops and rich sweeps of ‘Save It For The Washdown’. I especially like the juddery ‘Mare Tranquillitatis’. This is very decent stuff. Looking forward to further mobilisation of the electronic division of the UK Fijian massive.
One more for today. Rural Tapes, Norwegian composer/multi-instrumentalist Arne Kjelsrud Mathisen, is a big favourite round these parts. His ‘Contact’ album from Feb 2024 really chimed with the Moonbuilding massive. On ‘Alien Territories Vol.1’ he sets up a new dynamic, a series of cassette releases that feature two long-form tracks made with “a four-track cassette recorder, an old EXO tape echo and a Revox A77 reel to reel tape machine”. There was a mailout recently from Arne warning that “if you don’t like the more experimental tracks on the RT albums, this might not be for you, but if you enjoy the far side of RT, you might be interested in the sounds on this cassette”. I will tell you what, I love it all. Give me songs, give me experimental. The two tracks here are, I’d guess, loops that morph and build over 17 and 15 excellent minutes respectively. It’s an edition of 40, which remarkably isn’t sold out. Come on people, do the right thing. “More ‘ordinary’ songs are scheduled for release this fall,” adds Arne. There is nothing ordinary about you, sir. Keep up the good work. Love this.
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‘STUDIO ELECTROPHONIQUE – THE SHEFFIELD SPACE AGE, FROM THE HUMAN LEAGUE TO PULP’ Jamie Taylor (Manchester University Press)
“The star of this story is Sheffield,” says author Jamie Taylor in the introduction to his book. He’s telling a great tale about how Steel City panel beater Ken Patten and Chuck Yeager, the first pilot to break the sound barrier, were cast from the same mold (it’s good, you need to read his thoughts). Ken Patten is a name those round here will know. If you don’t know the name, buckle up, you’ve got a book to buy very shorty. Even if you do know the name I’d say you’ve got a book to buy. Read on…
‘Studio Electrophonique – The Sheffield Space Age, from The Human League To Pulp’ is the second volume in Manchester University Press’ ‘British Pop Archive’ series and follows Patrick Clarke’s excellent ‘Bedsit Land – The Strange Worlds Of Soft Cell’.
It’s kind of the book of the film, which is called ‘A Film About Studio Electrophonique’ and was directed by Sheffield native, former school teacher turned writer and director, Jamie Taylor, and produced by his pal, another former teacher, James Lessley. The film, released in 2022, told a tale that is known in passing in electronic music circles. Ken Patten’s Studio Electrophonique was where early versions of The Human League, ABC and Pulp recorded demos. That the studio was in his semi-detached on a Sheffield housing estate makes the tale all the more incredible. The full story unleashed here is mind blowing.
Jamie Taylor’s book is a kind the behind the scenes version of his film. It’s a total labour of love, funny, insightful, very well written and most of all, it lays the whole incredible saga out in front of you. The nitty gritty gone into here is to be admired.
While Ken’s name has come up as one of a band of innovative hobbists, very little is known about him and as Jamie points out, “Ken’s experiments on tape after the war, and later with Studio Electrophonique, seemed to reside in an even deeper seem of obscurity. The mission to excavate the details of his life’s work was left to us.”
And thank goodness, because what a job this book does. Ken arrives via the pages of BMG magazine from December 1960. BMG, that’s banjo, mandolin and guitar. Jamie, a Sheffield native, explains how he’d spend his lunch hours in either the Western Bank Library or Central Library digging through microfiche in search of Ken.
The BMG article describes Ken’s competition-winning tape recording “recreating the sound of a rocket launch using a pencil and a bike pump”. The article said that it was “made with some imagination and a great deal of trickery” by Ken who had returned from RAF service in the war “with a love of music and radio technology” swapping his banjo for a guitar and teaching himself to play. He joined a local guitar club but found he was more interested in recording than playing and began to amass kit.
Meanwhile, the story picks up now-familiar names such as Martyn Ware and Chris Watson. For any one whose ‘Mastermind’ specialist subject would be the electronic music of Sheffield 1977-1982, some of the stories here are familiar, but they’re still very welcome. I never tire of Martyn Ware’s story about being invited to a party in Chris Watson’s garden in 1977 and hearing the sound of ‘Trans Europe Express’ for the first time. Imagine if Martyn didn’t go to the party… the chapter entitled ‘Untrained/Undaunted’ is spectacular in its detail. It’s where Richard Kirk and Stephen Mallinder meet, it’s where Martyn Ware and Philip Oakey meet.
Of course, we’re looking here at proper big bang moments. These are the sparks that eventually ignited and turned Steel City into a musical hotbed. Meatwhistle, the council-run youth theatre group that acted as an incubator for the Adi Newton, Martyn Ware, Ian Craig Marsh and Glenn Gregory gets in on the action, as does the Rare And Racey independent book and record shop on Devonshire Street that “filled three Victorian storeys with enough print and vinyl ammunition to fire a dying industrial city into creative orbit”.
And we’re not even at the main attraction yet. That semi on the Ballifield estate in Handsworth where for the princely sum of £15, which in the late 70s would have been a fair amount of cash, a who’s who of future heroes turned up to record demos. I’ll not spoil the tales awaiting, needless to say they are the stuff of legend. There is one I’ll leave you with. Because Studio Electrophonique was in a suburban semi, a proper drum kit would’ve upset the neighbours. If you’ve ever heard a drum kit being played in a house you’ll know what I mean. So for practical reasons Ken had an electronic drum kit in the master bedroom that bands used and that’s pretty much how the sound of an entire scene was shaped.
“The star of this story is Sheffield” and it totally is. This book tells you all you need to know about why the Steel City is such a special place. This is an essential read. If you don’t find yourself wanting to stand up and clap and cheer at least once while reading this I’m afraid we can’t be friends anymore. I’m sorry. Brilliant, brilliant stuff.
manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk
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.
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Thanks Neil for including resolve / relate 04 - great to be mentioned alongside Jo and Loula!
Also great to see Brandon Invergo’s new one included - lovely album I mastered here at quiet details studios!