Issue 72 / 27 June 2025
Your bumper end of term DIY electronic music beano – Track Of The Week: Pneumatic Tubes + Good Stuff: 'Junkshop Synth Pop 1978-1985', Cate Francesca Brooks, Hawksmoor, Fragile X, Psychic TV + more!
I’m feeling rather light-headed as school’s out here at Moonbuilding HQ. This is our last newsletter before we take an extended break and I’ve turned in a proper bumper read for you. I was looking at the release schedule earlier this week and there are some belters heading your way next month. So right at the bottom of the newsletter I’ve included a coming soon section full of upcoming releases.
While I might be taking a break from this, there’s no sitting around. I suspect you’ll find me on Bluesky with release news, Issue 6 of the print mag needs to go to the printers and I’ve a couple of other projects need tucking up. The plan is to be back in the weekly groove on 1 August, but who knows? Anything could happen!
OK, so we’re just about done then. I am around, drop me an email if you need anything. It’s the office cat’s birthday today, so I’m off to give him a birthday scratch and a tasty stick. He’ll want his lunchtime biscuits early, but then he does most days.
Happy reading. See you later.
Neil Mason, editor
moonbuildingmag@gmail.com
Issue 72 Playlist: Listen on Buymusic.Club
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PNEUMATIC TUBES ‘Yellow, Green And Gold’ (Belbury Music)
Photo: Kate Booker
We get music about all sorts in our DIY electronic corner of the world, but running does not tend to be well covered. Bucking that trend is Pneumatic Tubes’ Jesse Chandler, who as well as lending his considerable keyboard and woodwind skills to the likes of Midlake, Mercury Rev and Beth Orton happens to be a keen runner.
“I go out running almost every day,” he says. “My favourite runs are always when I’m on a tour and can go out and explore whichever place I’m in.”
The album, ‘Runner’s High’, follows 2022’s ‘A Letter From The Tree Tops’ and is released by Ghost Box offshoot Belbury Music on 22 August. More about the LP nearer to release, but needless to say I’m loving this swerve into some new subject matter as I’m a runner too. Lovely photos by my pal Kate Booker, shame they aren’t of Jesse on a run. I’d have liked that.
Anyway, I know all about ‘runner’s high’. It’s a sweet spot you tend to arrive in at some point during your run where everything feels easy, nothing hurts, your breathing is steady, your body is free flowing, it’s Zen-like, everything in balance and you feel like you could go on forever. Of course, it doesn’t last, but it is a moment worth holding on to.
The album is actually a double and comes with an ambient set, ‘Warm Up & Cool Down’, which is intended to be used for pre/post-run sessions. It’s very good, I’ve been listening to it a lot, must take it out with me on a run before I review eh?
Got an upcoming release? We’re all ears. Email moonbuildingmag@gmail.com
Words: Neil Mason
GOOD STUFF #1
‘ALL THE YOUNG DROIDS: JUNKSHOP SYNTH POP 1978-1985’ (Night School)
While this is the last newsletter before our summer break, I couldn’t not point you in the direction of this peachy number that’s out on 11 July. Put it in your diary, because it’s an essential purchase if you ask me. I’ve also, very kindly, rounded up the key July releases for you below… keep scrolling, but only once you’ve read all this.
I do love a decent formative electronic music compilation. Cherry Red are good at them, the ‘Noise Floor’ series is excellent, anything Veronica Vasicka’s Minimal Wave label does is great too. To the list we can now add ‘All The Young Droids: Junkshop Synth Pop 1978-1985’. It’s compiled by Philip King who has form having put together the RPM collections ‘All The Young Droogs, Glitterbest’ and ‘Boobs – The Junkshop Glam Discotheque’. His is a name you will might recognise as Lush had a bass player called Phil King. He is one and the very same.
“Featuring rare tracks of auto-didactic progressive pop music, proto-techno punk, shoot-for-the-stars-land-in-the-gutter chart flops and heralded, underground synth classics,” say the notes for ‘All the Young Droids’, “it paints a picture of beautiful failure.” True, none of these acts struck a match close to the Top 40, but failure? Good heavens no. Listen to this stuff will you. It is magnificent. This is the sound of electronic music beginning to shape my world when I only just in my teens.
It’s also the sound of musicians getting their mitts on new-fangled kit for the first time and letting rip. It’s the very start of the whole DIY scene, people setting up in their spare rooms and finding out what these machines can do. As the notes would have it, “the music here connects the dots between DIY synth enthusiasts grappling with new, cheap synthesisers at the tail-end of punk and wannabe, jobbing songwriters enthral to the new music pioneered by Gary Numan, Depeche Mode and Mute Records.”
There is something almost visceral for me about this super obscure work. I don’t know if it’s because I may well have heard some of these tracks once and only once on John Peel 40 years ago, or read a line or two in NME about them and my brain is making distant pings of recognition or what.
And of course, with anything like this, when you look down the tracklisting and recognise almost none of the names, you have to ask if it’s all a conceit. Were all the tracks made just after Xmas by the same person? Phil King is a musician after all. It’s not impossible, look at ‘Jack The Tab’ or ‘Street Sounds UK Electro’ or countless more recent DIY albums that profess to be something they’re are entirely not. But that is very much not the case here.
This is the real deal. I’m quite impressed that I know three of the names here. Gerry & The Holograms, who are way too famous to feature. The line was that the Manc duo were Frank Zappa’s favourite band. There’s the brilliant Die Marinas and ‘Fred Vom Jupiter’, Hamburg schoolboy Andreas Dorau and pals serve up a ridiculously infectious warm synth line, bright tsk-tsk drum machine and an absolute killer singalong chorus, which was subsequently licensed to Mute. It appears here in its English version (guess what it’s called?). The third track I know is the clattering drum machine and wonky melody of Disco Volante’s ‘No Motion’. It sounds like ‘New Life’ getting a back bedroom remake. It was reissued a decade ago on synthwave label Medical, which is why it could be tugging my chain.
Elsewhere I’m loving Billy London’s ‘Woman’, the sort of catchy number BA Robertson would land himself in the charts with. The Microbe’s ‘Computer’ is magnificent. Like The Buggles with a Motown drum rattle and delightful lyrics. “I am a computer / Dancing to the beat / I am a computer / Don’t let me overheat”. There’s some big pomp moments, Alastair Riddell’s ‘Do You Read Me’ is sophisticated stuff, a proper synthy wigout. Love the bonkers middle eight, while ‘John Springate’s ‘My Life’ is nuts, it sounds like something from ‘Proto Synthpop – The Musical’, which I guess a lot of this work in the first flushes of the electronic music revolution does. Because it could. You couldn’t do that sort of bombast with three chords.
You also hear what you think is the influence of the electronic acts who made it overground everywhere. The Human League, Numan, Soft Cell, OMD, Depeche, Yazoo and so on. But that influence isn’t so much the lack of ambition as the ubiquitous sounds coming off the budget kit that almost everyone suddenly had their hands on. In the liner notes there is a list of synths used by various artists – Casio, Wasp, Korg MS-20, Micro Moog, Prophet-5, Roland CR-78, 303, 808, Yamaha. It’s a list worth pouring over, you’ve got to respect the classics. There’s even a Fairlight in there, which was the price of a modest house. The notes are great, written by Phil and running through the tracklisting artist by artist with much great info.
The one thing that leaps out is the compilation seems almost entirely devoid of women. Which is a common issue with this sort of stuff. I spent nearly a decade at Electronic Sound trying to address the imbalance with varying results. There’s the schoolgirl vocalists on ‘Fred Vom Jupiter’, while Peta Lily & Michael Process’ ‘I Am A Time Bomb’, which comes on like a dramatic, slightly less bonkers Lena Lovich, is a “feminist synthpop song” and there’s Sole Sister’s ‘It’s Not What You Are But How’. They were an all-female act who featured on the Treble Chants label’s ‘Scaling Triangles’ compilation alongside The Petticoats and Sub Verse, all female-fronted acts.
That said, you can’t ignore just how much good stuff there is here. John Howard’s ‘I Tune Into You’ sounds like it should have been a hit, kind of like Cliff’s ‘Wired For Sound’, damned by faint praise eh. The opener, Design’s ‘Premonition’, really sets the stall out well, quirky vocals that come on with a German speaking English twang like Kraftwerk and a great synth line. I suspect it’s a Moog, has to be a Moog with a richness and warmth like that. There’s Richard Bone’s soaring, swishing ‘Alien Girl’, The Warlord’s ‘The Ultimate Warlord’ sounds like it could be from a back bedroom ‘War Of Worlds’… I could go on and on.
This is exactly the sort of music that seeped into me all those years ago and got my all fired up about electronic music in the first place. It is also the very building blocks of Moonbuilding. This stuff is in our DNA. It is what we are made of. It is brilliant stuff.
GOOD STUFF #2
CATE FRANCESCA BROOKS ‘Lofoten’ (Clay Pipe)
It seems like Cate Brooks has been on a bit of secret mission this year. The eagle-eyed among you, or anyone who reads Moonbuilding Weekly regularly, will be aware she has been serving up some might fine releases, but not via her usual channels. They aren’t coming from Ghost Box or Clay Pipe, nope. They’ve just been cropping up on her personal Bandcamp page at catebrooksmusic.bandcamp.com
There was ‘Advisory Circle – Archival 1’ in May which featured a whole bunch of high-quality outtakes from sessions between 2007 and 2001, there was an especially good tai chi-inspired album in April called ‘The Scissor Cuts The Silk’ and in January there was the mysterious off-kilter delights of ‘Randomcat’s ‘EP1’, which may or may not be Cate.
Which is all well and good. Anything from Cate is very, very welcome. But what we want is her releasing on Ghost Box or Clay Pipe. I don’t know why, but it just feels right. It’s those releases that feel like the putting down of markers. And oh look, here’s ‘Lofoten’, a full-blown release on Clay Pipe. Swoon.
Lofoten is a Norwegian archipelago located north of the Arctic Circle some 1,500 miles from the North Pole. The islands are awash with open seascapes, snow-capped mountain peaks, secluded bays and distinctive fishing villages that dot the coastline. Cate though has never visited. “The project began when Cate listened to a narrated ‘sleep story’ set in the islands,” explain the accompanying notes. “Intrigued, she researched the region and found herself drawn to its stark beauty. ‘I fell in love with creating an impression of somewhere I would probably never visit, but felt a real affinity with,” she explains.”
The album has a very particular sound across the board. The project began to take shape around the Covid lockdowns. "I had taken the opportunity of having some extra time to learn a new method of synthesis,” says Cate, “that of the Synclavier, which uses one aluminium wheel and an array of buttons to control every parameter of the sound. I took to it with intrigue and before I knew it, I had built up hundreds of original sounds, many of which were perfect for the textures I could hear in my head for Lofoten. So that, along with a Prophet synth and a TR-808, became the sound world."
And what a world it is. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve listened to this since the promo arrived from the label back in May. I’ve listened to it so much that a track like the delightful ‘Aspect From The Windows’, which could a theme tune for the islands, is so familiar I feel like it’s something I’ve been listening to for years. ‘Polar Day’ is a reprise of ‘Aspect From The Window’ fitting this time round with a church bell peel and chime. It’s brighter, more twinkly, if that’s even possible.
The whole thing is a delight. It’s so gentle, so sparkly, so still and quiet, much like you’d imagine sitting outside one of the archipelago’s distinctive fishing huts and taking in the night. Or not, I don’t imagine it gets dark that far north for half the year. The soundtrack to that would be the whole album, but the closing ‘Polar Night’ sounds like stars pricking the sky as a whale breaches out in the bay. Like Frances Castle’s perfect artwork.
The relationship between Cate and Clay Pipe is very special. I think Cate has released her best work on the East London label. Bearing in mind her only other releases with third parties are as The Advisory Circle on Ghost Box, that really is a high bar. This is exceptional work, as always… from both the artist and the label.
GOOD STUFF #3
HAWKSMOOR ‘An Aesthetic – Experiments In Tape’ (Lunar Module)
Previously on Lunar Module… The Castles In Space CD offshoot label finally launched last month with Gordon Chapman-Fox’s ‘Very Quiet Music To Be Played Very Loudly’. Some two years in the planning (Colin has mentioned it once or twice in the last couple of years), the label brings you fresh work from old and new names alike, and often it’s not what you’ll be expecting. Gordon’s album, for example, is four long-form cinematic string-filled, orchestral ambient pieces. Yup. Warrington-Runcorn it is not.
So here was are with Season One, Episode Two. I don’t know why I’m naming these releases as if they’re a TV series, but I quite like it, the label are calling these releases Season One, so let’s go with it, eh? Like Gordon’s opening shot, ‘An Aesthetic – Experiments In Tape’ isn’t what you’d expect from Bristol-based James McKeown’s Hawksmoor project either. It is, as the title suggests, experimental tape work. “The album,” says the notes, “transports listeners into a realm where buried melodies meet avant-garde creativity creating a journey through sound, texture, and atmosphere”.
The tracks are titled ‘Aesthetic I’, ‘Aesthetic II’ and so on, so few clues there as to what to expect. The notes go on to say that James takes the concept of his hauntology “further than before and into a liminal space of sonic saturation”. And there’s talk of “exploring the boundaries of sound”. Big talk, that. But James is equal to it. It’s a builder is this. The opening track, ‘Aesthetic I’, is gentle. A wobble of a tape loop that slurs and hisses quietly, a tip-tappy rhythm gently introducing us to what we are about to receive. It reminds me a little of Peter Gabriel and his deconstructive work on the ‘Birdy’ soundtrack, where he picked apart his back catalogue to produce something new. ‘An Aesthetic’ has that sort of vibe.
By ‘Aesthetic III’ we are tuning into slivers of melody that drift in an out, they’re almost ghostly the way they evaporate leaving you wondering if they’ll return, they do, but they’re garbled and find it difficult to escape, almost swamped as they are in the background noise. The noises are so dense in places it’s a wonder the sounds underneath are unable to escape. You know the frankly terrifying “electronic voice phenomena” and that ‘Voices From The Dead’ record that shat up an entire generation when it came as a flexidisc iwith the 1980s Unexplained magazine? It has that sort of spooky, otherworldy feel. As if a voice is just going to appear from nowhere with a message from the beyond.
This week the label announced that Season One, Episode Three, out in July, is Bartholomew’s ‘Subterranea’. A new artist, Newcastle-based Chris Bartholomew came to the attention of the label after he shared a live bill with Warrington-Runcorn. It’s terrific cinematic soundtrack-y stuff. I had a track from Bartholomew on the Electronic Grassroots issue CD back in Jan. Finger on the pulse me.
GOOD STUFF #4
FRAGILE X ‘Curves And Calculus’ (Bricolage)
Even after a decade at the coalface, Glasgow’s Bricolage label still seems to be a best-kept secret. I don’t really understand why people aren’t shouting more about this great label. And that goes the same for Bricolage big chief Jon Gorecki, whose work as Fragile X has been consistently excellent.
You can hear in his work why he likes and releases what on his does on the label. You can hear exactly why he was drawn to Sarno Ultra (which you will know is Bristol duo, Kayla Painter and Jilk’s Jon Worsley), which is sitting pretty high up our Album Of The Year long-list at the year’s halfway mark. Jon says the label specialises in “distinctive sonic adventures”, which is a broad brush. What the label brings you is edge of the dancefloor stuff. It’s not dance music, but it is adjacent. There’s a beat, a groove to much of the work, have a listen to the lovely ‘Four Chambers’ album by Sulci from this Feb or the warm wooze of Belial Pelegrim’s ‘The Astronaut’s Last Polaroid’ from last year. Very different records, but there is a definite thread that holds them together. This is a label with purpose. If you’re the sort of person who was bang into your dance music in the late 90s, this is the label for you. It’s a kind of grown-up,
And so to Fragile X’s ‘Curves And Calculus’. Jon has released half a dozen or so Fragile X albums outside of his label, and I make this album number seven on the label, which is quite the body of work. It would seem that with numbers like that Jon is rather prolific, but this latest album has been some years in the making. Inspired by “a long-term obsession with fractals and their never ending possibilities”, Jon says the record has “morphed and splintered in many directions to allow all the parts of the puzzle to fall into place”. The least we can do for a record eight years in the making is listen. The result is rather wonderful, you can hear the repeating tumbling patterns of fractals everywhere, from the opening dream-like ‘Infinite Symmetry’ to the expansive burbles and swirls of the trancey ‘Clouds Are Not Spheres’. It’s a release that’s described as “A symphony of infinite equations”. Perfectly summed up. If you don’t know Bricolage, this release would act as an ideal introduction. There is a decade-long back catalogue to catch up with too.
GOOD STUFF #5
PSYCHIC TV ‘A Prayer For Derek Jarman’ (Cold Spring)
This Psychic TV collection of work for Derek Jarman’s films has been unavailable in its own right for nearly 30 years, so you know, this is a pretty welcome reissue. I struggle with the fact that 30 years ago was only 1995. Seems like the other week, and yet a million years ago all at the same time.
It does seem like such an obvious/compatible pairing and here we have a collecting together of the soundtrack work created by Genesis P Orridge’s Psychic TV for the films and videos of Derek Jarman. These are lengthy cuts, of the six tracks here two are under eight minutes, nothing else is under 10, with ‘The Loops Of Mystical Union’ and Prayer For Derek’ clocking in at 17 minutes + apiece. The latter is the centrepiece of the set. Intended as “an invocationary prayer, based on Tibetan rituals”, it’s a rather glorious collage of sounds recorded at Jarman’s home at Prospect Cottage in Dungerness in Kent. Waves rhythmically lap on the shingle, birds twitter, planes fly overhead. These are the sounds that would’ve filled Derek Jarman’s ears on an ordinary day. There’s something rather special about that. Because this is Psychic TV, the whole thing becomes something more with the unsettling addition of crying babies and ritualised chants “to aid the late film director in his after-life journeys”.
There is some lovely work here, ‘Elipse Of Flowers’ is almost ethereal, such a gentle musical incantation, almost shoegazey in places, while ‘Mylar Breeze (Parts 1 & 2)’ is very composerly, there’s some lovely piano work, even when it become discordance in places. The opener, ‘The Loops Of Mystical Union’ is the kind of thing you’d expect from Psychic TV. Consisting of tape loops made up from avant-garde electronic composer Alexander Scriabin’s ‘Poem Of Ecstasy’ it is a wild ride. The CD comes with of very intense sleevenotes written by Gen in 1997. This particular piece was written, as requested by Jarman, for a section of his ‘Home Movies’ video journals. In the notes Gen says there is a long-form video of the project that uses this piece as the soundtrack but has never been publicly released. He also notes that “my personal master video of this work is presently languishing in black plastic bin liners wherever Scotland Yard store their ill-gotten archival gains from bogus political intimidation of convenient cultural scapegoats”. Life was never dull when Gen was around.
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THE ROUND UP’S HANDY ROUND UP
L’Eclair’s fourth long-player and first for LA-based label, Innovative Leisure, ‘Cloud Drifter’ is quite the piece of work. It’s Bulgarian brothers Stef and Yavor Lilov who, it says here, “were shaped in a myriad of unseen ways by the centuries old folk music that filtered through their daily lives”. I mean, I’m no expert on Bulgarian folk music, but I bet it doesn’t sound like this! You can hear it swirling on a track such as ‘Replica M001 (Ft Pink Siifu)’ but the track also owes much to acid jazz or even trip hop. There’s a real synthwave sheen to a track like opener, ‘Memphis’, while when the vocalist guests arrive, like Gelli Haha on this track, things do move up a notch. The vocal guests are departure for the brothers’ instrumental roots. It does suit them, although when they are sans vocals, such as on ‘Vertigo’ which has a really great, rather grumpy sounding overdriven guitar part trying to tear the track apart, you can feel their experience shine. This though, their new direction, does feel like a solid, coherent body of work in line with artists like Pepe Deluxe. Very decent indeed. Love the artwork too.
Newcastle’s Jayne Dent has been on my radar for quite a while now. I’ve been following progress as Me Lost Me since her excellent sophomore album, ‘The Good Noise’, in 2020. With each release she seems to be sharpening her electronic folk leanings to a finer and finer point. But this isn’t folktronics, this is folk music made with a very contemporary bent. Her fourth long-player, ‘This Material Moment’ (Upset The Rhythm), is “emotionally raw album, her most honest and vulnerable yet”. She talks about how she has used automatic writing techniques she picked up during a workshop with Julia Holter and how the process has drawn her writing in new and different directions that includes using poetry, psalms and mesostic poems and phonetic translations to generate words. BUT. “Despite the chance-based writing strategies throughout,” says Jayne, “it feels like the most emotionally raw album I've ever made. I wanted to hide in stories, but I saw things plainly when I tried to write.” It’s one of those records, like Kate Bush’s finest moments (pick one, eh?), that benefits from being listened to, hard, from start to finish. The power of ‘Compromise!’, which is only the second track, suggests that you’ll be wanting to be buckle in for the ride here.
Kaj Duncan David is a Berlin-based British/Danish experimental composer and performer of “sci-fi chamber music exploring language, human development, machine intelligence, altered states of consciousness and more”. AND MORE? What more do you want. That is one heck of a list. He had me with sci-fi chamber music. And then doubled down with the title of his new album. ‘Only Birds Know How To Call The Sun And They Do It Every Morning’ (Hyperdelia). I mean, they do. This is properly avant-garde work, the kind of thing you’d find on Non-Applicable usually. Here he works with Danish MIDI ensemble Scenatet. I barely know what I’m saying here, but I do like the sound of it. “Employing voice (vocoder, talkbox), synth, EWI (electric wind instrument), MIDI guitar and MIDI percussion, ‘Only Birds Know How…’ is focused on a timely conceptual premise, one that imagines what the linguistic progression of machine intelligence would sound like if guided by play and experiment rather than input data. In other words; the sound of machine intelligence learning to speak just as a human does.” I mean, you can hear that in tracks like ‘Ave Sideral I’, it’s almost as if it is learning while it goes along, while ‘Ave Sideral II’ sounds like it’s learning to be Daft Punk. I do like work like this, it keeps us keen and makes us think at the same time.
We featured the one of the singles from Herbert & Momoko’s ‘Clay’ (Accidental/Strut) as our Track Of The Week a while back. It is of course Matthew Herbert who here teams up with drummer/vocalist Momoko Gill to make a long-player that reminds of Herbert’s ‘Around The House’ opus from the late 90s. When everything was better. It just was. The album is a really intimate affair, rhythmically rich but led by Momoko’s lovely gentle voice. It’s full of found-sound rhythms too, “from Japanese kotos to basketballs”, not that you’d go, oh, that’s a basketball. Although it does sound like it might be one bouncing on the chirpy ‘Mowing’. I’ve found that this record is a real grower, the more you listen the more it reveals, the more it reveals the more I like it.
Fancy a bit of Tangerine Dream to finish with? Stupid question, eh? I do find it quite mad that Tangerine Dream are still a going concern without even a sniff of an original member, which would be pretty tricky in the case of founder/the only continuous member Edgar Froese because he died in 2015. But then again, I do sort of like the idea that the band transcend even death. “There is no death,” is his famous line, “just a change of our cosmic address”. Which brings us to ‘From Virgin To Quantum Years: Coventry Cathedral 22’ (Kscope). In 1975, the Tangs (Froese, Peter Baumann and Christopher Franke) performed their legendary live show in Coventry Cathedral. You’re a step ahead of me here aren’t you? Nearly 50 years later, in 2022, the current incarnation (Thorsten Quaeschning, Hoshiko Yamane and Paul Frick) played an “era-bridging” live show at the same venue, which is what this release is. I am surprised that the world didn’t fold in on itself with such a cosmic event to be honest. The original 1974 show was two lengthy improvised untitled pieces, which obviously the new line-up didn’t perform, instead they delivered a “sweeping setlist that reaches back to classic Virgin tracks like ‘Stratosfear’, ‘Cloudburst Flight’ and ‘Love On A Real Train’. It’s a shame they didn’t recreate the original set live, I suspect it would have opened some kind of hole in time and space had they.
COMING SOON…
Here’s a quick whizz through July’s highlights so you don’t miss out while we’re on our summer break. There are some excellent releases heading your way let me tell you…
There’s a double-bill of David Best releases coming this month. The Fujiya & Miyagi frontman sees the release of his eponymous Mouth To Mouth album, a collaboration with Insides’ Julian Tardo and friends. It’s his long-awaited, seven years in the making, electronic disco project. Very good it is too.
mouth2mouthgroup.bandcamp.com
Following that, on 10 July, comes the posthumous release of his friend and former bandmate Matthew Collins who sadly died from cancer in January 2024. David and friends took all the music files Matthew left behind and created Monte Carlo’s ‘Monte Carlo’ (In Suspended Animation). Very good it is too.
montecarlo5.bandcamp.com
The spectacularly brilliant Jo Johnson arrives on quiet details with her contribution to the ongoing monthly series. Released on 2 July, ‘Escape Now’ is only Jo’s third full-length solo release. For those counting, ‘Let Go Your Fear’ on CiS last year was album number two, which came a mere decade after her first solo outing, ‘Weaving’. This is an occasion and should be treated with the sort of excitement that deserves.
quietdetails.bandcamp.com
The Moscow-based Gost Zvuk label celebrates its 10th anniversary with an extensive compilation called, not unsurprisingly, ‘Gost Zvuk 10 Years’. Released on 4 July, it’s a whopping 33 tracks that head all over the place. Dancefloor to experimental to spectral pop, hip hop, ambient, space rock and all points in between. It’s got the lot. Grab the 4XLP set for 120 minutes of on-the-edge-of-your-seat Russian electronic mischief.
gostzvuk.bandcamp.com
Morgan Szymanski / Tommy Perman release the wonderful ‘Songs For The Mist Forest’ on Blackford Hill on 10 July. Old school friends, the pair explored the sounds of the Scottish woodland where they grew up on their debut album ‘Music For The Moon And The Trees’ in 2022. Here they travel to Morgan’s ranch in the mist forests of Valle de Bravo, Mexico, to shine a light on the ecocide that’s happening there. The music was inspired by a soundtrack they made for documentary film ‘El Dragón de los Bosques de Niebla’ (‘The Dragon Of The Mist Forest’), which looked at the “overdevelopment destroying the forests that are home to Abronias, beautiful small reptiles native to the region and the ‘dragons’ of the film’s title.”
blackfordhill.bandcamp.com
There’s a fresh reissue of The Beta Band’s peerless ‘Three EPs’ (Because Music) on 10 July. This is absolutely one of my very favourite albums ever. Those EPs dazzled. The debut album, not so much. “The worst record we've ever made”, I mean, they weren’t wrong. Those first three EPs though. Phew.
thebetaband.bandcamp.com
The excellent Orbscure label from The Orb’s Alex Patterson springs back into action with the release of DF Tram’s ‘Bittersweet Afternoon’ also on 10 July. The album is deliciously quirky, full of asides and loops and sounds off, it’s almost like it could have been sliced out one of Alex’s mammoth DJ sets. It also reminds me of BC Camplight. There is a lot to love here.
theorb.bandcamp.com
Moving deeper into the month, Ultramarine release ‘Routine’ (Blackford Hill) on 18 July. The album is a whole bunch of tracks recorded around the same time as their outlier album, 1998’s ‘A User’s Guide’. “These tracks are drawn from the daily working practice adopted by the duo at their studio on Coronet Street, behind London's Hoxton Square. Often the result of a single day’s work, these pieces find Ultramarine developing their palette, experimenting with sounds, treatments and techniques”. It’s very much the more dance end of what they. Comes with liner notes by, erm, me.
blackfordhill.bandcamp.com
Hannah Holland’s ‘Last Exit On Bethnal’ (Prah) is “a soundtrack for a fantasy club underworld”. The opening track, ‘Biker’ sounds like exactly that. Chainsaw synths, panel thumping beats and a Duane Eddy guitar twang. It’s proper industrial, like it should be making itself at home in 1980s Belgium.
prahrecordings.bandcamp.com
The hits keep on coming… Field Lines Cartographer returns to Ian Boddy’s DiN label with a second full-length, ‘Resplendent In The Light Of The Universe’. Get that title. You know what you’re getting with Mark Burford, and musically this is equal to that brilliant title.
dinrecords.bandcamp.com
There’s a Library Of The Occult double-bill heading you way on 18 July. ‘Dream Division Presents “Una Rosa Nel Giardino d’Inverno: Il Ritorno”’ and Garden Gate’s ‘Canyon Of Blood’. The former is a reimagining of Dream Division’s 2024 giallo film score-inspired album with a host of remix-y pals including Project Gemini, Ivan The Tolerable, Timothy Fife and Burning Tapes, who we’ve not heard from in a while. The latter comes on “blood marble” vinyl and see Timmi Meskers serving up a brand-new set that feels like “the darker corners of Morricone scoring a fever dream rather than a duel”. Bloody hell, eh? There’s a lot of blood in this paragraph.
libraryoftheoccult.bandcamp.com
We’ve mentioned this once already today, but Season One, Episode Three of Castles In Space’s Lunar Module CD series is Bartholomew’s ‘Subterranea’ and that’ll be with you on 25 July. I’ve had it a while and it is a cinematic wide-screen treat brought to you by the keen A&R ears of one Gordon Chapman-Fox.
lunar-module.bandcamp.com
The same day, so that’s 25 July, sees the release of Dot Allison’s ‘Subconsciousology (Lomond Campbell Remixes)’ (Sonic Cathedral). Guess what? Yup. It’s a total remix of her ‘Consciousology’ album in the hands of the brilliant Lomond Campbell. Great stuff it is too, some absolute bangers within. I interviewed Lomond recently as he’s got an Edinburgh Fringe show coming up in August called MŮO, which involves a custom-built machine that uses muon detector technology to harness radiation in the atmosphere and create sound and visuals from it. Oh yes. More details here.
dotallison.bandcamp.com
Finally, for now, I know they’ll be loads more, but coming your way on 28 July is Plant43’s ‘Feeding The Machines’ (Plant43). In case you didn’t know, Plant43 is Emile Facey who is the partner of Jo Johnson. There is a preposterous amount of talent in that house. This new offering, his 10th long-player, marks the 20th anniversary of his very first release and it’s ripe Plant43 clobber, full of warm melodies and sharp, snapping beats.
plant43.bandcamp.com
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
When it comes to the end of year vote on best albums I would be very surprised (and disappointed) if LOFOTEN wasn't up there! (And I was right about VOLTA last year!)