Issue 65 / 9 May 2025
Your essential DIY electronic music beano – Track Of The Week: Matthew Herbert & Momoko Gill + Good Stuff: The Advisory Circle, Dave Clarkson, Library Of The Occult double-bill, Kara-Lis Coverdale...
Seems there was a fizzle of excitement over Jamie Taylor’s ‘Studio Electrophonique’ book last week (our review is here if you missed it). Jon at the excellent Sheffield label Do It Thissen got in touch. “I put together an 80 minute mix of Ken Patten-produced tracks a while ago,” he said. “Here it is!” And indeed here it is for you.
Many of the tracks are as mysterious as Ken himself. Jon has helpfully provided a tracklist, drop me a line if you’d like it too. Jon has been collecting records and tapes by Sheffield artists for as long as he can remember and is something of an expert, so much so he helped out with Jamie’s original documentary that inspired the book. “I’m especially keen on ‘Night Dreams’ by Passing Strangers,” he told me, “which is the final track on the mix, made in 1982.” Enjoy.
I’ve got a bit of a book backlog at the moment, my enjoyment of the Sheffield-tastic Studio Electrophonique book held me up a little. I have just started the late Darryl W Bullock’s Joe Meek book, which is a mighty tome. I’ll tell you all about that soon. And there’s the small matter of Moonbuilding Issue 6 that seems to be consuming me at the moment. We’re looking at a June publication date, but don’t hold your breath!
OK, that’s me for another week. Happy reading.
Neil Mason, editor
moonbuildingmag@gmail.com
Issue 65 Playlist: Listen on BNDCMPR
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HERBERT & MOMOKO ‘Need To Run’ (Strut / Accidental)
photo: Manuel Vazquez
I’ve really been enjoying the Matthew Herbert and Momoko Gill album, ‘Clay’, from which this new single is taken. I’m a big Herbert fan, his ‘A Nude – The Perfect Body’ is a recording that still haunts me. Released in 2016, it’s eight tracks and all of them are a portrait of a body in sound, actual recordings… ‘Is Sleeping’, ‘Is Awake’, ‘Is Grooming’, so far so good, it’s ‘Is Coming’ and ‘Is Shitting’ that cause uncomfortable listening. It shouldn’t, it’s all normal stuff, but listening to someone else on the toilet. Well, that’s the thrill of Matthew Herbert.
He’s always been at it. Even when he was making dance music he couldn’t help it. Herbert’s ‘Around The House’ is your actual house music. Music made from everyday objects in a house, while ‘Bodily Functions’, by no means as visceral as ‘The Body’, took sounds made by a human body and filled dancefloors. Concrète house the cool kids called it. I loved his work as Wishmountain, which is proper Moonbuilding stuff, experimental electronics at its finest, it was concrète techno I guess. It was very minimal, great stuff.
Here he works with Momoko Gill, a drummer/singer/composer who cut her teeth in “South London’s multi-disciplinary music scene” collaborating with the likes of contemporary jazz types like Alabaster DePlume. Her and Herbert have worked together before, there was their debut collaboration ‘Fallen’ from last year and Momoko remixed ‘The Horse Is Here’ from Herbert’s re-issued ‘The Horse’ album, where he looked for the largest animal skeleton to “explore sonically” alongside the London Contemporary Orchestra. Guess what the largest one was? Yup. Horse.
This is their first full-length though and it’s a lovely sounding record, very summery, kind of like Herbert’s early work, mellower, but with that kind of vibe. ‘Need To Run’, the second single upfront of the album’s release via Strut and Matthew’s own Accidental label on 27 June. Momoko’s voice is beautiful, as are her rhythms. There’s a kind of edgier, 21st-century Everything But The Girl to vibe there. It’s a wonderfully drifty shimmery kind of track. “We often think of states as binary, awake/asleep etc,” says Herbert. “But much of life is spent in a state of not knowing quite where you are or where you fit. ‘Need To Run’ takes place somewhere within one of those moments”.
‘Clay’ is released by Strut/Accidental on 27 June
Got an upcoming release? We’re all ears. Email moonbuildingmag@gmail.com
Words: Neil Mason
GOOD STUFF #1
THE ADVISORY CIRCLE ‘Archival 1’
I spend quite a lot of time rummaging around on Bandcamp looking for stuff. It’s a very helpful site in that regard. In the early days of the internet, before even MySpace, I’d have lists of artists, who was where online and when I last looked to see what was new with them. Napster was very helpful during those days I have to say. There was a democratisation at work that everyone was starting to embrace. The idea that you could share directly with fans was very new, it was a gift to us music hacks and a worst nightmare for the record label gatekeepers.
These days, not wishing to give away trade secrets, it’s way easier. With Bandcamp, you “follow” artists you’re interested in and sign up for email updates. I have an entire email account just for this purpose. I’m looking at it now, even though I tidy up regularly, there’s 18,520 messages from artists/labels I follow, which at the last count was over 1,000. I mean there’s a lot of music out there as you know.
The point is, while finding great music is easier than it’s ever been, you have to be on your toes these days or you’ll miss absolute gems like this.
‘Archival 1’ is a collection of unreleased archive material by Cate Brook’s The Advisory Circle, recorded in sessions between 2007 and 2011. It’s a digital-only release, there’s no physical product, no label involvement, there’s no input from the mighty Ghost Box machine who released The Advisory Circle albums, all of which makes it feel like quite the find.
It’s released directly from Cate’s personal Bandcamp. Which if this was the old days I would very much be keeping an eye on. This year alone she’s snuck out a Randomcat EP and an album called ‘The Scissors Cut The Silk’. Randomcat is more experimental and may or may not be Cate, while the album, released as Cate Francesca Brooks, is “sculptural, elemental and balletic, taking inspiration from the fluidity of Tai Chi”. Prime Cate.
And it seems she’s on a roll, because this collection is a delight. There’s little information to accompany the release so I caught up with Cate and asked why now for an archival collection?
“It feels like a good time to start exploring those tracks and putting them together with others,” she explained. “It’s having that distance which is really beneficial. I can be more objective with hindsight. Sometimes you just need time. It was a really nice process to go through the archives and pick out some choice pieces. The majority of what I found was, as expected, half-baked rubbish, but there are many tracks that were really complete and sound good as a set. So it’s not so much a random compilation, but seems to have formed its own narrative in a way.”
So what are the tracks? I assume from the dates, 2007 and 2011, they’re outtakes from the Ghost Box albums, ‘Others Channels’ and ‘As The Crow Flies’?
“Some were outtakes that just didn’t make it to an album,” offers Cate, “other tracks weren’t outtakes as such, but were written purely because I would have an idea about doing an EP, based around a particular track... and then promptly get diverted into doing something else. Such is my brain. Hence ending up with quite a few tracks without lives of their own.”
The curio among the set is ‘As The Crow Flies’. It’s not the title track track of the album, or even a version, but an entirely different track with the same name.
“With that particular track,” says Cate, “it would have taken the album length further than I would have liked. It was actually aired, just once, on BBC 6 Music as I was still putting the album together. Pretty sure it was Huw Stephens who played it, but that’s obviously a long time ago.”
I assume by the title ‘Archival 1’ there’s plans for more archive releases?
“There are definitely plans for an ‘Archival 2’, she says. “I’m slowly putting that together, but of course, these things are always a moving target, so it’s not exactly imminent.”
The release works so well as an album in itself. You’d sort of expect a collection of unreleased tracks to be disparate due to their very nature, but listening you get the feeling there’s a fair few tracks here that were originally intended to go together and Cate does a lovely job collecting and sequencing these tracks to make them work as a whole. The last four tracks, the aforementioned ‘As The Crow Flies’, the minute-long shimmer of ‘Gog’, the lovely warm Rhodes-y keys of ‘In Cogges’ and ‘White Fields And Frozen Trees’ would’ve been a brilliant EP around the release of the ‘As The Crow Flies’ album. It’s very evocative, very haunty, it feels rather wintery with a light dust of frost. Elsewhere, I love the initial crackle and thrum of ‘Citadel’, which explodes into a synthwave-y belter, the siren call of ‘Life Chimes’ that morphs into a beautiful xylophone-like melody and the gentle tip-toe Buchla tones of ‘Gullbos Pattern’.
This is wonderful stuff, the fact it’s something as notable as The Advisory Circle and it doesn’t just land in your lap makes it all the more exciting. There’s gold out in them there hills, you just have to know where to dig. Fortunately for you, Moonbuilding has a map.
STOP PRESS: There’s a listening party on Bandcamp tonight, 9 May, 7pm (BST) for ‘Archival 1’. Join Cate TONIGHT and chat about the album. RSVP here. Don’t miss!
GOOD STUFF #2
DAVE CLARKSON ‘Was Life Sweeter?’ (Cavendish House)
Dave Clarkson has been the whole way on this DIY journey with me. The frontrunners to his ‘Pocket Guide’ series of releases were among some of the early doors DIY outings I was writing about on the pages of Electronic Sound. I think the first one I clocked was probably ‘A Red Guide To The Costal Quicksands Of The British Isles’ in 2017. There was ‘Music For Lighthouses’ before that in 2014, and work like ‘A Blue Guide To Shore Ghosts And Sea Mystery’ followed. They are field recordings made on location all over the UK augmented by additional instrumentation, including percussion, guitar, a VCS3 and an MS20. He describes the works as containing “natural source sound ingredients, some left pure, some processed, some mangled, some untangled. Field recordings … plus voices, instrumentation and electronics”.
More recently, he’s kind of branched out, excuse the pun, from ‘A Pocket Guide To Wilderness - Deep Forests And Dark Woods Of The British Isles’ to ‘A Pocket Guide To Dream Land - Faded Fairgrounds And Coastal Ghost Towns Of The British Isles’. And this latest offering seems to be an extension of the latter rather than the former.
‘Was Life Sweeter?’ “is a journey through vintage confectionery from childhood to present day ghosts of childhood”. There’s more than just a blush of nostalgia for old sweets. It’s big business. We were only telling our teen the other day about going to the sweet shop and buying sweets out of jars in quarter of a pound measures, which was in itself prompted by a Haribo find that threatens to get out of control at Moonbuilding HQ. They do a new bag called Nostalgix. They’re chewy versions of the Rhubarb and Custard, Pear Drops and Cola/Pineapple Cube boiled sweets. They taste just like the olden days and we’re going through bags of the blooming things at the moment.
Anyway, Dave taps straight into all that here. He talks about nostalgia, about how the world has changed and whether we want our memories “to become real again in our future”. Nostalgix? It’s interesting, especially when you look at that idea through the medium of sweets. I’d expect nothing less from Dave. So here he visits chocolate and sweet factories (‘Bournville Model Village’, ‘Ye Olde Sweet Shop’) with his recorder and uses the sounds of sweets (see ‘The Wonder Of Space Dust’), fizzy drinks (‘Drowning In Pop’) and ice cream vans (‘Ice Cream Wars’) to ask these questions. Rather cleverly, the penultimate track, ‘Decay And Loss’ features a dentist’s drill, which is where most of us who grew up in the 80s were on the end of.
As ever it’s excellent work from Dave. It’s very musical, using the field recordings very much as jumping off points, see the familiar crackle at the start of ‘The Wonder Of Space Dust’ or the clanky chimes of ‘Three Blind Mice’ opening up ‘Ice Cream Wars’. It’s followed by a very sinister ‘Teddy Bear’s Picnic’ refrain. Not sure I’d be buying from that van.
What’s more it comes in two special editions – a chocolate bar style cassette, five of which feature a golden ticket, which is “a free download code library to previous releases” and a sweet tin CD. Editions are limited, so if you have a sweet tooth and ear for fine electronica, best hurry.
GOOD STUFF #4 / #5
VARIOUS ARTISTS ‘Edgar Allen Poe’ (Library Of The Occult)
SERMONS BY THE DEVIL ‘Exorcismo Electronico’ (Library Of The Occult)
I love it when Tom from Library Of The Occult drops by. He’s got a little job for me and he also mentioned a couple of releases heading your way that should catch the attention. Caught mine. The first is a compilation to accompany the poems of Edgar Allen Poe. “Very on brand I know,” laughs Tom.
It’s a seriously impressive collection of artists, each offering up two tracks, more about which in a moment. You’re looking at the likes of Garden Gate whose two tracks are glorious, ‘Spirits Of The Dead’ is soaked in very Michael Nyman-like strings, while ‘Dream Within A Dream’ has a beautiful melody that feels almost Bond like, you know James Bond. Delighted to see Hologram Teen here with two tracks from a dark side that I never knew she had, but she does dark with the best of ’em. Everyday Dust are here, as is Ivan The Tolerable, Tom’s musical division and LOTO house band Dream Division show how it’s done with two graveyard stalkers, ‘The Raven’ and ‘For My Mother’. The Heartwood Institute are here as is Klaus Morlock who closes proceedings with two absolute corkers. ‘The Sleeper’ and ‘Bridal Ballad’ are both upbeat outliers of the collection. Not entirely up to speed with Poe’s poems, so I looked them up. ‘The Sleeper’ is a love poem to Irene… who of course is dead. Cheery stuff all the same, musically at least.
There’s a reason each artist has two tracks. While the release comes on vinyl and cassette, you can also pick and choose a limited edition, artist-specific lathe-cut. How brilliant. Numbers are already tight, there’s single-figure quantities of most, and a handful are already sold out. Not surprised really. Such a great idea.
There is one more artist lending two tracks, Sermons By The Devil, who is a newcomer to the label. I left him to last because his album ‘Exorcismo Electronico’ is also out round about now. It’s the work of New Jersey’s Tom Hall, who rather neatly on his Bandcamp page includes the line “Official House Band Of The Apocalypse’. He’s been on the block a little while, five years or so and there’s a slew of work to catch up with if you like what you hear on this, which appears to be his 10th long-player. You should like what you hear because it’s rather excellent. While, yes, it is nicely dark, there is a funk there, a groove, that is undeniable. “Beat-heavy analogue grooves” is how Tom, label Tom, not artist Tom, describes the work. The record is full of locked-down grooves that stretch themselves out over the entire tracks. ‘Voice Of Doom’, ‘Electroshock’ and ‘Sleep Eaters’ are very Cabaret Voltaire-like titles and the music is often Cabs-y too. The bassline on ‘Voice Of Doom’ is very Stephen Mallinder and the repeating melody is not unlike something from their later years. I love the acid squelch and the bright rasps of cuts like ‘Electroshock’ and ‘Spasms’, while the seven-minute+ closer, ‘Dangerous Advice From The Grave’ is a pot-simmerer with a spooky Theramin-y shiver running right through it.
And it would all work if it were needed to underpin an impending apocalypse. I mean we’re not far off with the way things are looking right now are we? Righto, I’m off to explore the back catalogue while there’s still time. No one start WW3 while I’m gone. Oh, a worriedaboutsatan / Sermons By The Devil split release would be good, right?
libraryoftheoccult.bandcamp.com
GOOD STUFF #5
KARA-LIS COVERDALE ‘From Where You Came’ (Smalltown Supersound)
I had a chat with Kara-Lis Coverdale for the Brief Encounters column in this month’s Electronic Sound (out yesterday). Again, giving away trade secrets and all that, but those interviews are done via email Q&A. I write a bunch of questions and pass them on. The artist answers them and passes them back. There’s no back and forth, you ask what you ask, and get what you get. In the old days you’d avoid doing interviews by email like the plague. You didn’t want to let artists off he hook like that. You wanted to see the whites of their eyes as you asked difficult questions. The world has changed and its much more about hearing from the artist than grilling them. The email Q&A is quite an art these days if I say so myself.
Kara-Lis was rather brilliant and set me up so nicely for a great line in questioning it was almost as if I planned it. I spotted a photo of her and forklift truck, which struck me as interesting so I asked if it was hers. “The forklift belongs to my family,” she told me, “we work with heavy metal.” Answers on a postcard for my next question, which admittedly was further down my list when I asked it, but I had to move it.
Anyway, the reason I was talking to Ontario-based Kara-Lis is ‘From Where You Came’ is fantastic. It’s her first album in eight years, which seems impossibly long. She is really interesting, recorded a couple of tracks in famous European sound studios, GRM in Paris and Elektronmusikstudion EMS in Stockholm, places where you can feel the weight of history. Especially Paris, it’s the studio Pierre Schaeffer set up, the birth place of musique concrète. There was lots to talk about, she’s big into 19th century programmatic music and mid-70s jazz, two ends of a pretty broad spectrum there. Programmatic music is a musical style that attempts to render a narrative, like Prokofiev’s ‘Peter And The Wolf’ and we both find it interesting how instrumental music can have a narrative, so we covered that off and then talked about Miles Davis, who in the 70s got experimental and went mad on booze and painkillers.
I very much liked the breadth of her chat. She’s one of those people who seems extra thinky, a mind pinging around like multi-ball on a pinball machine (I used to play a ‘Star Wars’ machine where Yoda introduced such events with the line “multi-ball you have”). The takeaway though this is a record of “nocturnal transmissions”. I spent quite a lot of time listening to it at night, tracks like ‘Flickers In The Air Of Night’ just fizzes with the energy of the dark. I asked her if the record was made at night, and it mostly was. “I usually work at night on my own music,” she told me, “Night has a particular draw due to its ability to enhance hyper focus, and as you can hear in the music, it results in a particular density.” Which is such a perfect answer. It does have a particular density.
There’s a great deal of beauty here. A track like ‘Daze’ is so full of melody it almost spills over the edges. I mean this isn’t songwriting, this is composerly and there’s such delicacy at work and such skill. Not to mention the cello playing by her great friend Anne Bourne. I don’t know what it is about the cello, but it just feels nighttime.
‘Problem Of No Name’ is a stunner, really beautiful, like extraterrestrial forces are trying to communicate. Kara-Lis is also an aficionado of the pipe-organ and you can hear that influence everywhere, that warm sort of drone-y swell is here and throughout. I’d suggest lining this record up at dusk and letting it play out as darkness descends. You will reap such rewards.
smalltownsupersoundofficial.bandcamp.com
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THE HANDY ROUND UP
A truncated round up today as I ran out time! Anything I missed, I’ll try my best to get into next week’s mailout. I loved BUNKR’s ‘Antenne’ (VLSI) from last year. It was about a mysterious pirate station that transmitted 24/7 “devoid of any human voice to provide us with clues, o big ups for the SW9 crew, no ads for the turbo-sound rave with 30-colour laser show down a local disused warehouse” just a seemingly unending broadcast of “widescreen techno, breakbeats, ambient washes and occasional forays into obscure German synth music” until early one November morning in 1996 it abruptly stop broadcasting. Seems it’s back on the air now with ‘Antenne (Remixed)’, a collection of seven reworks from the original outing that open with a belter from Warrington-Runcorn. ‘Oriam Speedway (Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan Guzzoline Mix)’ is very cool indeed, a thrumming, low rumble of a track, very electronic, very moody, very ‘Drive’ before it erupts into a pots and pans melodic whirl. Elsewhere ‘I Feel Eye See (Faex Optim Remix)’ is nicely Hopkins, another take on ‘Oriam Speedway’ sees it get some tasty drum ’n’ bass treatment from Mattr and another version of ‘I Feel Eye See’ gets a slightly heavier jungle rerub in the Polyop remix. There’s also mixes also from Alphabox, Masefield Labs and Echaskech, all of which add to the idea the station is back on the air for one night only. Sounding almighty from where I’m sat.
Dialing the mood right down, or maybe taking the reins for the back to mine session, our great friends at Past Inside The Present show little sigh of letting up their impressive release schedule this year with ‘Heilun’ by Hyldýpi. Which I’m really glad I’m typing and not having to pronounce. We started with a Herbert and so we’re finishing with one, Herbert Már Sigmundsson, the man behind Hyldýpi, is of course Icelandic, which bodes well for a start. There is something in the air in Iceland, or in the water, the standard of ambient music coming out of there has always been sky high. The standard of music coming out of there full stop has always seemed pretty high. ‘Heilun’, which translates as “healing”, follows three earlier full-lengths and a series of long-form works, but it’s his first outing on PITP. These seven lengthy pieces, clocking in at over an hour and half, are created with guitar and “a modest selection of hardware”. It is, as is the way with PITP, lovely stuff. I fell into my usual routine with this, early morning listening, windows open and letting the inside and outside melt together. I do enjoy the descriptions that come with PITP releases. “The album’s centerpiece, ‘Faðmur’,” the notes say, “is a sprawling, diffuse drone accented by mantra-like strums that develop with the pace of a flower following the sunlight.” You know exactly what that sounds like don’t you?
While I’m on the subject of PITP, can I point you in the direction of Cynthia “Marine Eyes” Bernard’s Cloud Collecting Substack. As you should know, Cynthia is a part of the PITP family and her female-focussed ambient music newsletter is rather excellent, especially when it comes to highlighting new talent. There’s a new issue out today featuring a great interview with 18-year-old British pianist Alanna Crouch. Cynthia also does the monthly Women Of Ambient of mix, which I’ve mentioned once or twice before and is well worth investigating.
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 mention of cloud collecting and women of ambient! i always look forward to reading your rec’s and words!
That Kara-Lis track is stunning!