Issue 7 / 1 March 2024

DIY electronic goodness... Album Of The Week: The Home Current + Martin Jensen interview, Track Of The Week: Looper + release round-up including Ian Boddy, Fred Und Luna krauty compo and much more...

Mar 01, 2024

The snowdrops are out so it must be spring. Doesn’t seem much like it out there though does it? It has been known to snow on my friend’s daughter’s birthday in early March. It’s a date that has got a bit St Swithin’s Day. Get to her birthday without any snow and it’s spring ahoy. Think we need to work on a snappy rhyme before it can pass into folklore.

Lots of news this week. Iklectik hit their £55k target on Monday, a whole five days ahead of schedule. We’re really pleased for them and are looking forward to seeing their next steps. We need places like that to keep all this going. Don’t forget the Castles In Space fundraising compilation gets deleted when the crowdfunder closes later today. If you want it, better grab it now.

We set up Moonbuilding book shop with bookshop.org this week too. Not sure anyone is getting rich off affiliate deals, but I like that bookshop.org are trying to do something about the online dominance of you-know-who by actively supporting independent book shops. You’ll find our new shop here. We’ll keep adding to the shelves, it’d be great if you wanted to buy your books through us.

That’s all for now. Got a weekend to glide gently into. Happy reading.

Neil Mason, editor
moonbuildingmag@gmail.com

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THE HOME CURRENT ‘Tales From The Leisure League’ (Woodford Halse)

There was a time when releases from The Home Current were backed up as far as the eye could see. Copenhagen-born, Luxemburg-based Martin Jensen was prolific. And the quality was sky-high.

The first time I heard The Home Current it was either his 2018 Polytechnic Youth-released ‘Another Way Of Falling Apart’ or ‘The Splendour Of Change’ on Static Caravan, which has a nice syncronicity about it because THC have just released a lathe-cut seven-inch with the ’van, his first outing with the label since ‘The Splendour Of Change’. Funny how all this falls together isn’t it?

Whatever I heard, wherever I heard it, The Home Current rang my bell. Martin’s thing is a properly on-the-money 90s throwback. It’s kind of post-rave, full of sharp digital sounds, but with a lot of soul. There’s a real warmth and a proper funk to The Home Current. There’s a couple of belters that came out on Castles In Space in 2019 that get aired regularly at Moonbuilding Towers. ‘An Evening With The Home Current’ and ‘Palermo Traxx Vol 2’ are particular favourites.

And as easily as Martin rolls out the bangers, he can do different too. Check out ‘Controlled Sparks’, his collaboration with writer/spoken word artiste Peter Wix on Spun Out Of Control (lovely artwork from Kevin Foakes too) or there’s ‘A Tribute To Hip Hop’, his, well, nod to the genre he’s loved since a teenager. More recently he has calmed down on the release front, gone is the deluge and in has come a more considered approach. A release from The Home Current these days is something to look forward to rather than to keep up with.

Which brings us to ‘Tales From The Leisure League’, a record almost guaranteed to resonate because it’s about amusement arcades, the hallowed halls of our youth that fizzed with the future. A good chunk of my formative years were taken up with Pac-Mac, Space Invaders, Defender and Asteroids. I remember going on holiday (staycations, but we just called it going on holiday) and sniffing out arcades. My dad loved a bit of Asteroids so it became a family pursuit for a while.

Martin’s memories of growing up in Denmark are much the same. He talks about “the magical machines and their flashing lights and colours”, but more importantly he talks about the sounds, which he describes as “a mesmerising cacophony of bleeps, small synthetic melodic sequences, voices and effects playing randomly at the same time, creating an otherworldly soundscape unlike anything I had ever heard before”.

And it’s these sounds that have stayed with him over the years and it has all, clearly, fed into his musical world. He points out that ‘Tales From The Leisure Lounge’ isn’t a gaming soundtrack, of which he is a keen collector, but you can hear how all those blips and bleeps have seeped into almost everything he does.

Opener ‘Dusty Arcades’ sets the scene here with its 8-bit Pong-like twitching. It’s the sound of those rooms interpreted by Martin who lets the whole thing rip with the thud of a bass drum, the snap of a snare and soaring melody to go. He doesn’t stay in 8-bit mode for long – don’t think this is The Home Current doing a game soundtrack or recreating the sounds of the arcade, it’s not. This is his response to the nostalgia of those rooms – the flashing lights, the cacophony of noise, the glowing screens – and the impact it had on him.

There’s a deeply satisfying Flat Eric bass rumble on ‘Because Tangled’, while ‘Anyone?’ sounds like it could be the backing to a Wipeout type of game, you can almost see a free-flowing space racer flashing through neon tunnels. The melodies, as is always the case with THC, are strong, whether that’s the mewling synths on ‘Kitty Cops’, the swirling machine music of ‘Impossible Breakthrough’ or the rave-like twangs and choral stabs of ‘Myth Of Flesh’. The epic seven-minute closer, ‘Horse, I Think We Are Stuck’, is very much worth hanging around for. It feels like Martin kicking back, jamming his way to the conclusion with its lazy beat, gravelly drones and sounds from his rave toolbox fighting for space.

Martin Jensen is a man who has music in his bones and it has to come out somehow. I for one am glad to have been on the receiving end over the years. As he reveals in our interview (scroll down) he’s heading into a Home Current hiatus, let’s hope it doesn’t last all that long. [NM]

‘Tales From The Leisure League’ is out now on Woodford Halse

THE HOME CURRENT

With the release of his new album, a celebration of the video game arcades in all their flashing light and blipping and bleeping glory, we knuckle down to some serious old school game chat with THC’s Martin Jensen

Photo: Laura Herpoel Jensen
Interview: Neil Mason

Hello Martin, how’s things? Keeping busy?
“All is indeed well. The days are getting longer and the spring migration has begun in earnest. A huge flock of north-bound cranes has just flown over our house. It’s a great time of year. Music-wise, I’m working on a couple of collaborations, but I’m generally taking it nice and easy. How about you?”

All good here thanks for asking. I’ve been writing about you for a while, right? At one point it was like you had a new record out every other day. Did it seem like that to you?
”Your kind and ongoing support has been invaluable over the years, and it has no doubt helped pave the way for further THC releases, which indeed at some point saw them going off left, right and center. Coming to think of it, I blame you!”

Do you know how many albums you’ve released?
”I had to look that up on Discogs, which says enough doesn’t it? The count apparently stands at 15 ‘solo’ albums, excluding my collaborations with Peter Wix, the singles compilation and various side projects. ‘Tales From The Leisure League’ will be THC album number 16.”

Why so prolific?
”Good question... I don’t know for sure, but when THC first started out, I’d been dreaming of maybe one day being able to release my own music, so I guess that when an opportunity finally, and unexpectedly, came up it was like the ketchup effect. I was also lucky in that it turned out there were actually quite a few labels out there willing to embrace my stuff.”

Why so quiet recently? A touch of writer’s block?
“I’ve never found it difficult to start new music, however finishing it can often prove quite the challenge. Having said that, the reason behind the slowdown in releases is deliberate as I think everyone, not least myself, needed a break after the release tsunami. At this point, if you can believe it, I don’t have any future solo releases in the pipeline. So ‘Tales From The Leisure League’ will be the last THC release for the foreseeable future.”

You know when you meet someone at a party and you say you make music and they say, ‘Oh, what sort of thing?’, what do you tell them?
”Ha! This must be one of my least favourite situations right there. My music making is something I generally try to not bring up in conversation if I can avoid it. I have often found it rather awkward to try to explain what it is I do, probably due to the fact that I always carry with me an emotional suitcase filled to the brim with imposter syndromes in all sizes and shapes.”

This is your fifth outing on Woodford Halse, one of our most celebrated cassette labels. What’s the appeal of tapes for you?
“I love cassettes. Alongside records, they were an integral part of my childhood. I remember getting a tape deck as a child and it was the best thing ever. Also, I found out how to make mix tapes using the cassette pause button on our family hi-fi system when I started to buy dance 12-inches in the mid-80s. It was only many years later that I realised that fellow bedroom DJs around the world had simultaneously worked out the very same routine back in those days. Fascinating! I think the value of cassettes has changed over the years. Where it was once a prominent release format, these days they represent a great, and less expensive, alternative to vinyl. Cassettes are brilliant for labels who like to release physically, and for music lovers who care about having something tangible to hold and play without having to remortgage the house. Having said all this, I should probably mention that ‘Tales From The Leisure League’ is released as CD/DL.”

Do you think there is general retro feel to your work?
”Most definitely. My ‘sound’, if such a thing exists, has never been a conscious choice as such, it’s basically what I’m able to create with my skill set and approach. Also, probably more than anything it’s the result of my musical upbringing and any residue that might have left in its wake.”

‘Tales From The Leisure League’ is your homage to the birth of video games...
“Yes, indeed. It's an attempt to pay some kind of homage to those early video games, which had such an impact on my teenage years. The game Pong was released by Atari in the early 70s, but I only discovered it in the 80s where it blew me away as some kind of exotic signal from the future.”

Your first experience of video games came via the Commodore 64, didn’t it?
“Even though I had already come across Pong, my first ‘proper’ video game experience came via the Commodore 64. I went to an after-school club for kids from the estate where I grew up. There was one computer and we would queue up for our turn to play. I remember the lines moving across the screen when a game was loading and everything was super exciting and so incredibly futuristic. We were all trying to make it to the club after school as fast as we could in order to be first in front of the computer.”

You soon progressed to video arcades. Paint me a picture of the ones you used to visit?
“The main arcade I remember was inside Tivoli, an amusement park in the heart of Copenhagen. This arcade was hidden inside another arcade and you had to climb a set of stairs to get to it. When you entered through the wooden doors, you were met with a sensory overload of lights, sounds and stale smells. The floor was wall-to-wall carpeted, a thick carpet saturated with all sorts of spilled beverages and popcorn. It was a rather dark place aside from the flickering machines and in a corner there was a dimly lit glass booth were a person sat who would change your money into tokens you could then use for the different machines. The models on offer were mainly slot and ping pong machines, but then there was the real pull, the video games like Donkey Kong, Defender and Pac-Man. It was always a bit daunting to enter, but once you were there and had disappeared into the many different universes it was equally a bit daunting to exit into the fresh air and sunshine again.”

Did you have any favourite games?
“I think that if I had to pick one, it would probably be Ghosts ‘N Goblins. It was pretty much everybody’s favourite game in the after-school club.”

What was it that drew you to video games?
“I think that initially it was probably the sheer novelty of it all and the exclusivity and future-ness that video games represented, but it quickly became more about the sounds and the sonic atmospheres they emitted. I never had a Nintendo pocket console myself, but on the trains and buses there were plenty of kids with consoles around me, so a daily highlight would be to sit and listen to the sounds they made on my way to and from school. Often it would be a mess of sound, but every so often some kids would play the same game, and so you would have the same music from two different consoles looping in and out of sync in all sorts of ways. At other times the music from different games would suddenly blend in a way that created something else entirely. I found that very intriguing.”

You talk about the sounds of the arcades creating an otherworldly soundscape…
”Like the hand-held gaming consoles, the arcades with all their different machines, making all sorts of different sounds – be it small melodies, tinny sounds of exploding bombs or spaced-out arpeggios – the cacophony they created represented some form of ‘temptation’ to me, as well as a never-ending promise of something fantastic always lurking around the corner, if that makes sense?”

How much do you put down what you do today, musically, with hearing those sounds?
”No doubt those sounds have played a big part in paving the way for my continuous curiosity in terms of music, be it as creator or consumer.”

You say that over the years you’ve found yourself acquiring more and more gaming soundtracks. Tell me a little about those? Any favourites?
”Over the past few years I’ve kept an increasingly keen ear out for gaming soundtracks – it’s unreal how much is available out there. And while, like with any other genre, there’s much that slips under my radar or I fail to connect with, I’ll occasionally come across a gem. There are too many to mention really, but my nine-year-old daughter, Laura, has a favourite: Raphaël Gesqua’s soundtrack to ‘Mr Nutz’ from 1993. It was released with newly illustrated artwork by its original creator, Philippe Dessoly, as a gatefold LP on Wayô Records in 2021 and it’s indeed wonderful – huge recommendation and as brilliant an entry point into the world of gaming soundtracks as any, I should think.”

If you could soundtrack a game, which one?
”Please bear with me, that pesky imposter syndrome is acting up again...”

What’s next for The Home Current?
”As mentioned earlier, ‘Tales From The Leisure League’ will be the last THC album for a while. I need a break and I need to get out birding far more than I currently do, I’ve been slacking. After the summer, I’m planning on giving my ageing recording set-up a much needed overhaul and I’ll see where I go from there.”

Thanks very much for your time, any plans for the rest of the day?
”I need to pick up Laura from school and then head straight back for a parent information meeting on some spring camp they're doing in April. But first, it’s time for a brew and for spinning a couple of new records… non-gaming related.”

For more of The Home Current, click here

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LOOPER ‘Dave The Moon Man’ (Scott Twynholm Remix)

Bands you really like, but have completely forgotten about, no. 236. Belle & Sebastian offshoot Looper were, to my ears, much more interesting than the mothership who were all bit too indie for me. Formed in 1997 by B&S bassist Stuart David and his wife/video maker Karn, Looper’s debut album, ‘Up A Tree’, was released in 1999, which makes it 25 years old and of course the anniversary is being marked with a reissue.

It’s a great little record. “Technology had just reached a point where I thought it might be possible to make an album entirely on the PC,” says Stuart of the release. It’s a statement that tells you much. ‘Up A Tree’ sort of has the feel of early Beck/Money Mark if they stalked the corridors of Glasgow art school. It’s the sort of the thing the Beastie Boy’s Grand Royal label were mad about.

Looper are still in business, which means I’ve got some catching up to do. In the meantime I’m very much enjoying this new remix of ‘Dave The Moon Man’ that former member Scott Twynholm put together especially for this release. There’s a bunch of other remixes on CD version of the reissue, do look out for ‘Up A Tree (The Chocolate Layers St John’s Ambulance Mix)’, which I somehow know is a Pulp remix. Anyway, ‘Up A Tree’ is great and it’s re-released by Mute on 8 March.

looper.bandcamp.com

The first Friday of the month you say? That’ll be Bandcamp Friday when the site waives its royalty putting more £££ in the pockets of the artists and labels. My inbox explodes as Bandcamp Friday approaches, my apologies that I can’t cover more releases. I could sit here all day and half the night and it still wouldn’t be long enough.

Got an upcoming release? We’re all ears. Find us at moonbuildingmag@gmail.com

Words: Neil Mason

GOOD STUFF #1
IAN BODDY ‘Modal Operandi’ (quiet details)

Another quiet details release. They do seem to be getting there when it comes to aligning with Moonbuilding’s weekly schedule! Still, you can’t complain when the quality of this label’s output remains so consistently high. What’s more, they’re pulling really masters of the art out of the bag on a very regular basis. This one features an actual grandmaster, Ian Boddy, at the wheel. Apparently, ‘Modal Operandi’ is constructed in the key of C Major, with each of the seven tracks moving through the seven modes of the scale, each track title is one of the modes, so Ionian, Dorian, Phrygian, etc. I have no idea what I’m talking about, but it all sounds very clever. And of course a meeting of musical minds between Ian Boddy and quiet details is always going to demand your full attention.

GOOD STUFF #2
VARIOUS ARTISTS ‘Future Sounds Of Kraut Vol. 2’ (Compost)

I’ve had this one on the listening pile for quite a while. Compiled by Fred Und Luna, who are a fever dream in the imagination of German musician, author and filmmaker Ranier Buchmuller. They’re actually two mannequins who live in the window of a fashion store in Karlsruhe. Long story. The music Ranier makes as Fred Und Luna, he calls it krautelektro, deserves much wider attention. There’s four albums to fill up on, the most recent is last year’s ‘Im Funfminutentakt’, where each track is exactly five minutes long. Why? Who knows. Anyway, here we have a cracking second volume of contemporary krautrock. You get a lot of these sort of collections trawling back into the past, but here it’s bang up to date. There’s names you will know for sure, like Tim Gane’s Ghost Power, Thomas Fehlmann formerly of The Orb and DJ/producer Roman Flugel, but there’s a mountain of other stuff here that merits investigation. Our current favourite is the very brilliant ‘Your Pulse’ from Tokyo’s Minami Deutsch.

GOOD STUFF #3
KEITH SEATMAN ‘Finding Our Way Around’

“In early January 2024,” writes Keith Seatman, “I caught Covid and was laid up for a week. As I gradually felt better I started tinkering with some music. After a while of messing about with some sounds, voices and laughter, I realised I might actually have a new tune/track. I then just carried on recording and recording and tinkering until I finally stopped. So here you have it at 15 minutes 37 seconds long, ‘Finding Our Way Around’.” Blimey eh? It’s a heck of thing, it sounds like it’s tuning in from a galaxy far, far away. Or it’s coming in to land, TARDIS-like, after a little jaunt round some distant nubula. If we did take a trip, say to the newly opened Virgin Records shop on London’s Oxford Street in 1971, I’d wager Richard Branson would be waving a chequebook at this. It’s all very Keith Seatman. Expect fresh fruit from him including a seven-inch EP and LP later this year on Castles In Space.

GOOD STUFF #4
PULSELOVERS ‘Day Zero’ (Woodford Halse)

Originally recorded anonymously for Frome’s Colander label by WH label boss Mat Handley, ‘Day Zero’ was released in 2022 on CD-R and billed as “The pulsebeat of another kitchen person, square dance music for septupeds”. Here it has resurfaced as a Pulselovers release in a new edition of 100 tapes, which – just checking – aren’t quite sold out yet, but they flipping well will be so get a shift on. There’s a track here called ‘Time Machine’ that contains elements from a one-off cassette sold on eBay by Tape Noise, the late David “Dex” Wright, who was one of the leading figures in the Lincolnshire underground music and art community. Let me tell you, Dex, his Wired Garden live music event and the Decimal Place artspace is a wormhole I just disappeared down for some time. Anyway, a rip of his original tape can be heard here.

GOOD STUFF #5
VARIOUS ARTISTS ‘L Series #6’ – Justin Hopper & Folclore Impressionista / The Hardy Tree / 30 Door Key / Fogroom (Russian Library)

Lisbon’s Russian Library Music label serves up another volume of their “L Series” of 10-inch short-run lathe-cuts with a full-blown haunty six-tracker that is home to ‘Lily Of The Valley’, a lovely new track full of twittering birds from Frances Castle’s The Hardy Tree. It also features, and this really tested my knowledge of the European hauntology scene, Justin Hopper & Folclore Impressionista (Folclore Impressionista is label boss João Paulo Daniel, who is also a member of Beautify Junkyards, author Justin Hopper you will know as the narrator from Belbury Poly’s ‘The Path’), 30 Door Key (Italian kosmische library artist Alessio Bosco, last spotted on Dom Martin’s Feral Child label), Fogroom (German outfit fronted by Jörg Follert, aka Mimsy), Nu no & Folclore Impressionista (Nu No is, I think, label boss João again) and finally Demónio António (who I think is Portuguese artist António Caramelo). Phew eh? Some fine obscurities right there that I will be fully filling my ears with this afternoon. In other news, Frances Castle has had a busy week uploading a shit-ton of Clay Pipe releases to Bandcamp. There’s some exciting stuff on there – there’s vinyl of Cate Brooks’ ‘Easel Studies’, Gilroy Mere’s ‘Adlestrop’, the ‘Tyneham House’ 10-inch, Vic Mars’ ‘Inner Road And Outer Paths’… it’s a treasure trove! Find it all here.

russianlibrary.bandcamp.com

Let’s see what else we can round up before we have to press send. The excellent Charlotte Hatherley has recently seen ‘Grey Will Fade’, her debut solo album from 2004, reissued by the Last Night From Glasgow label who just seem to be reissuing absolutely everything these days. She was still in Ash when she made this and it’s a cracker, filled to the gills with new wave songmongering if you like that sort of thing. Which I do. And ‘Bastardo’ is a killer pop song. She’s quite the talent is Charlotte. Do check out her ‘True Love’ album if you want to hear what she can do with electronics.

charlottehatherley.bandcamp.com

Blackpool’s Neil Scrivin (The Night Monitor, Phono Ghosts, etc) says his Fonolith label has a few releases line up this year, which is really good news. First out of the traps is a new Doomlode EP, ‘Doomlode 1’, which will see a second installment follow later in the year. Neil says, “It’s the first in a series of EPs exploring a dystopian sonic landscape of technological paranoia, urban decay, environmental degradation, and nuclear fear”. So you know, it’s so far up our street it’s let itself in the back door and is making itself comfy in the front room and asking us to bring it snacks.

doomlode.bandcamp.com

Psychogeographical label/artist Site Nonsite have a double-bill of ‘The Japan Series’ and ‘Remixed’ out now for your listening pleasure. The work of Nottingham-based Simon Collison, ‘The Japan Series’ gathers his individual location-based EPs, so ‘Hiroshima’, ‘Kyoto’, ‘Osaka’ and ‘Tokyo’ which were made from field recordings during trips to Japan in 2016 and 2018, and serves them up in one nicely packaged C90. ‘Remixed’, also on cassette, well, you can guess what that is. There’s some great reworks here including tracks from Veryan, Paul Cousins, 99 Letters, Karen Vogt and more.

sitenonsite.bandcamp.com

Stone Giants ride back over the hill with ‘Metropole Remixes Vol 2’ (Nomark), the second volume of remixes of the same track generated from the label’s Discord group. The total number if I remember correctly stands at 19 across these two volumes. Bold stuff, but this is Amon Tobin.

stonegiants.bandcamp.com

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OH SO PRITT-Y

The printed version of Moonbuilding (a new issue is in the works, no really, more news about that soon) is a publication that unashamedly draws on the rich history of music fanzines. Top of the pile is Mark Perry’s punk zine, Sniffin’ Glue, which ran to a dozen issues across 1976-77. Of course, getting your hands on an original copy (Issue 1’s print run was 100 or so) is almost impossible. There is a full set on eBay for $20,000, but for those without the cash to burn Omnibus Press’ 2009 compendium helpfully collected all 12 issues… but even that’s pretty hard to find at a reasonable price.

Thankfully, the publishers have seen fit to reprint ‘Sniffin’ Glue And Other Rock ’N’ Roll Habits’ so we can all enjoy this classic publication again without breaking the bank. It features a great overview by Perry where he talks about how each issue was “typed out on an old children’s typewriter that my parents had bought me as a Christmas present when I was about 10. The headlines and limited graphics I scrawled out in black felt-tip pen.” While it might have been raw, it celebrated the DIY ethic and summed up the punk message perfectly. It also struck a nerve because it was phenomenally successful, shifting 20,000 copies of the final issue.

Each of those issues are reproduced here in their entirety. The great thing is, and I was only talking about this earlier in the week, music writing is at its very best when its immediate, pieces that are written in the heat of the moment, and Sniffin’ Glue is just that. It’s full of Perry’s reaction to what was happening at the time. In Issue 7 he reviews Buzzcocks’ ‘Spiral Scratch’. “This group is the new wave. Buy it, if you don’t you shouldn’t be reading this mag.” The piece goes on to say if you can’t get EP in your area send £1 (plus 10p P&P) to New Hormones, 182 Oxford Road, Manchester. If only. All this and so much more is here. Essential stuff.

Omnibus Press / Buy from Moonbuilding’s new bookshop

SWITCHED-ON BOOK

Just when you think you can’t get any more niche something comes along to prove you entirely wrong. Setting a new high-water line is a really excellent and hugely welcome new book called ‘Switched On: The Dawn of Electronic Sound By Latin American Women’. Published by Berlin-based Contingent Sounds and edited by Buh Records’ Luis Alvarado and multimedia artist Alejandra Cardenas it “presents a collection of perspectives, essays, interviews, archival photos, and work reviews centered on the early electronic music production by Latin American female creators, who were active from the 1960s to the 1980s”.

The editors set the whole thing up by saying the history of 20th century avant-garde electronic music has been almost exclusively told from an Anglo-American/western European mostly male perspective. They’re not wrong. I know from experience that if you dial down that male noise and dig a little deeper you will be richly rewarded with female artists fighting the good fight. And so it proves here.

This book does the digging for you and sheds much new light. There are few artists here I’ve heard of beyond the amazing Beatriz Ferreyra. I’m especially looking forward to finding out more about Chilean-German composer Leni Alexander and her experimental radio dramas, heading into the the Venezuelan electronic music scene of the 1980s (checking out Oksana Linde’s ‘Aquatic And Other Worlds’ along the way) and delving into the contribution of women to “sound-technological experimentation” in Central America.

The more of this sort of work we can get out there the better. Do let me know if you come across anything along these lines. I’d love to cover more stuff like this.

contingentsounds.com / YouTube playlist

STATION TO STATION

Pretty sure this isn’t what David Bowie had in mind, but the service stations that smatter the UK’s motorway network are rather special. Most of them for all the wrong reasons. Apparently, according to watchdog Transport Focus’ annual survey, Moto Rugby at Junction 1 of the M6 in Warwickshire is the best, while Welcome Break’s Hartshead Moor East on the M62 between Manchester and Leeds is one to avoid. Whatever, these are places to marvel at. Those dizzying covered foot bridges where you can look down on the multiple lanes of speeding traffic, the charming architecture, the queues for the toilet, the bewildering choice of fried food, the sights in the car park. All of human life is here and now it’s a handy card game. This Motorway Service Stations “card stealing” game (I guess the lawyers are hovering) is bound to become a fixture in the glovebox of all discerning Moonbuilding readers as you go head-to-head over categories that include ambience (Fleet, 4A-5 M3 is a 9, no Eno required), number of food outlets (you do wonder what the three at Gloucester Services are) and total parking spaces (Cobham, J9-10, M25 has 4,620). Happy travels.

bubblegumstuff.com

A MESSAGE FROM THE MOTHERSHIP

The current issue of MOONBUILDING is full to the gills with the good stuff. On the cover, star-in-the-making Maria Uzor, we profile label-of-the-moment quiet details, there’s an incredible interview with Captain Star creator Steven Appleby, and Ghost Box’s Jim Jupp gets busy with our There’s A First Time For Everything questions.

We review a big pile of releases from labels including Castles In Space, Woodford Halse, Persistence Of Sound, Assai, Ahora, DiN, Werra Foxma, Ghost Box and many more. There’s a column from The Orb’s Alex Paterson and the world-famous Captain Star cartoon strip.

This issue’s CD is ‘The Moonbuilding Miscellany – Volume One’, which is put together by CiS supremo Colin Morrison. It’s a belter featuring tracks from the likes of Lo Five, Lone Bison, Twilight Sequence, Ojn, NCHX and more.

Buy your copy now at moonbuilding.bandcamp.com