Issue 73 / 1 August 2025
Your essential DIY electronic music lowdown: Track Of The Week = House Cloud + Album Of The Week = Polypores + Sabres Of Paradise, David Boulter, Ramones children's book + more...
Welcome back to us, eh? You’ve missed all this haven’t you? We’ve had a lovely break thanks doing very little… oh, except publishing a new issue of Moonbuilding, the print version. Hurry though, it’s a short run and is selling like hot cakes over at moonbuilding.bandcamp.com
The newsletter has had a little spruce. Along with the usual Track Of The Week, the Good Stuff picks and our occasional Book Of The Week (there’s one below and it is a corker), we’ve added an Album Of The Week recommendation. We used to do AOTW when we first started doing all this along with an interview, but it proved such a time hoover it had to stop. But Album Of The Week is back. Maybe the interview will make a return too… one day.
Happy reading. Same time next week then?
Neil Mason, editor
moonbuildingmag@gmail.com
Issue 73 Playlist: Listen
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HOUSE CLOUD ‘Edi (Feat Emily Doyle)
I’ve been very much enjoying this first outing from Birmingham-based outfit House Cloud, who come out of Matters, another Birmingham band I’ve been partial to over the years. A two-piece consisting of Stuart-Lee Tovey and Brid Rose, Matters released a raft of hugely under-rated offerings on Static Caravan, a label with a fine pair of ears. They’re kind of a dreamy/psych combo that spin tracks out over lengthy stretches, proper moody builders that are akin to Spiritualized if they didn’t do songs, or a 21st century Hawkwind perhaps. I’d recommend their ‘Echolocations’ album on the Supersonic Festival’s label from 2023 or the Static Caravan cassette remix EP (with LED) ‘The Square’ from 2019. I mean, it’s all good.
House Cloud is the work of the Stuart half of Matters and it feels like a different take. First fruit ‘Edi’ is much more electronic, solely electronic, whereas Matters is much more organic.
“I didn’t want to use guitars,” Stuart says, “I need to save that for Matters, so this is a chance for me to be unrestricted and able to make any sound I can imagine.”
He tells me Matters has been moving into a more electronic sound overall.
“There’s a new Matters album in progress,” he says, “that feels adjacent to the House Cloud stuff, but it sounds like Matters seeing as Brid is involved and we have a natural push and pull.”
There’s an Orb-y/Sendelica-like feel to this lone House Cloud track that features synths and vocals from Emily Doyle, one half of fellow Brum outfit Monoxide Brothers, who Stuart also works with as a producer.
“I imagined her voice on ‘Edi’ as soon as I had it in its initial structure,” Stuart tells me. “She sang all of the words backwards and then the recordings were reversed, which gives the whole thing quite an otherworldly feel.”
As a first glimpse of what’s to come from House Cloud, ‘Edi’ is very promising. There’s an album on the way, which I’m very much looking forward to.
“The bulk of it is near completion,” says Stuart. “There are a couple of tracks that need more time in the writing stage, but I’m mixing as I go so I am aiming for a September release. It’s a self-imposed deadline as I need to move onto the next Matters album around then.”
Which is welcome news. When that House Cloud album (and indeed the new Matters offering) lands, rest assured I will be writing about it.
POLYPORES ‘Ong’s Hat Complete – Official Soundtrack’
Yes, I know this soundtrack was released earlier in the year, but it makes the jump to Polypores’ Bandcamp page this week and very much deserves a revisit. Stephen Buckley first mentioned ‘Ong’s Hat’ to me when we were talking about his 2024 CiS album ‘There Are Other Worlds’ for Moonbuilding Issue 5. He said it was a big influence, not just on that album, but on his work in general.
What is it? Well, ‘Ong’s Hat’ is a “multimedia fictional narrative” created by Joseph Matheny that went on to become an online phenomenon. It was one of the very first online alternate reality games. For fear of getting bogged down before I’ve even got to the music, an ARG is an interactive online multiplayer game that takes place in the real world, involves different forms of media, unfurls in real time and is influenced by player involvement.
The game started with the discovery of an 1980’s brochure for The Institute of Chaos Studies and Moorish Science Ashram. Ong’s Hat professed to be a lost town in the mighty Pine Barrens forest of New Jersey and was where a group of outcast Princeton professors retreated, setting up an ashram from where they discovered and undertook inter-dimensional time travel. Through player embellishment the game took on mythical status with many believing the stories being spun. There’s a great piece on gizmodo.com that brings home just how effective the storytelling was with Matheny’s life, even today, plagued by people wanting answers to what is one of the internet’s earliest conspiracy theories.
On a lighter note, the influence of Ong’s Hat resonates right through our musical world too, from Pye Corner Audio’s ‘Black Mill Tapes’, through the entire output of labels like Ghost Box and Clay Pipe to tales of Abul Mogard being a retired steel worker from Gdansk and even Stephen Buckley’s own story of the legend of Stefan Bachmeier.
So back to the matter in hand. Back in January, Joseph Matheny released a completist’s guide to ‘Ong’s Hat’. Called ‘Ong’s Hat: Compleat’, natch, it’s a book and lengthy audio series, but in fine Ong style the audio version, available on Audible and Bandcamp, is 14.5 hours of discussions that use the book as a jumping off point rather than being an audio version of the book. It fair blows the mind. Which I guess is the whole point. Anyway, Polypores was asked to create the soundtrack to the audio series, which makes perfect sense. But how did such a turn come about?
“I was already talking to Matheny a bit when ‘There Are Other Worlds’ came out,” reveals Stephen. “I’d made him aware that his work had an impact on me, but I never dreamed in a million years that he’d be interested in any sort of collaboration.”
Stephen explains he got cracking on the work almost as soon as he was asked if he was interested. He talks about leaning into the concept and using those idea to determine how he worked.
“I was using a lot of unusual techniques to make things happen,” he says. “The soundtrack was created using a modular synthesiser I put together for the occasion, relying on a number of techniques including chaos, random generation, feedback loops, tarot, the I Ching, cybernetic systems, self-generation, The Gateway Tapes, and automatic writing, among others. I felt that was really in the spirit of the ‘Ong’s Hat’ project and I needed to embrace that if I was going to do it justice.”
Has he done it justice? What do you think? The fact the soundtrack sits pretty on the audio version of Matheny’s latest journey into his world speaks volumes. For the most part, the album feels like one of the more mellow Polypores offerings. ‘Formless Ocean Group’ is a beautiful almost ambient drift poked with gurgles and swirls and the deep bass note twangs and warm chords of ‘The Metamachine’ make for a delightful swirl of sound.
A lot of the tracks here are brief, minute-long sketches. It’s unusual for Stephen to distill ideas into such compact packages, but they work perfectly punctuating the album’s longer tracks as if you were peaking behind the curtain somehow, looking into a sketchbook, or ideas pool. ‘Receiver Of The Stories’, for example, is a mellow drift that undulates towards its dubby feedback and abrupt tape slurred ending. Polypores distilled!
‘Acid Code’ taps out a rhythm, as the most wonderfully warm backing shimmer gathers pace underneath, ejecting squibs of electricity as it grows. Much of the work on ‘Ong’s Hat Complete - Official Soundtrack’ does have the feel of older Polypores releases, like ‘Flora’ and ‘Azure’. There’s a mellowness here and a melodic sensibility that could have been distilled from that classic duo of releases.
“While I don't really like going backwards, musically, it does feel a bit more akin to some of the older Polypores material like ‘Flora’,” says Stephen. “That wasn’t intentional, it just turned out that way. Whatever I channelled seemed to want it to be that way and so it was!”
As usual, as always, ‘Ong’s Hat Complete – Official Soundtrack’ is another wonderful chapter in Polypores’ most special of musical worlds. What gives it that extra umph is the doubling down effect of Stephen working on a project that resonates so deeply within his own world and, hopefully, will resonate with other ‘Ong’s Hat’ fans who aren’t yet familiar with him.
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GOOD STUFF #1
THE SABRES OF PARADISE ‘Sabresonic’ / ‘Haunted Dancehall’ (Warp)
Only one place to start this week and that’s with this brace of Sabres reissues. When they landed first time round, so that’s 93 for ‘Sabresonic’ and 94 for ‘Haunted Dancehall’, it was a heady time for releases that changed the direction of things. For me, these two albums, both stone-cold classics, sit alongside Underworld’s ‘Dubnobass’ and Aphex’s two volumes of ‘Selected Ambient Works’ as dance music releases that were proper albums, with beginnings, middles and ends, records designed to be listened to from start to finish, rather than just collections of tracks, which a lot of dance music LPs at the time tended to be. These albums are, of course, what the late great Andrew Weatherall did, along with Jagz Kooner and Gary Burns, after shaking up the world with ‘Screamadelica’. Indeed, ‘Still Fighting’, the opening cut on on ‘Sabresonic’, was created from ‘Don’t Fight It, Feel It’, which Weatherall felt still had legs. They are two very different offerings. While I love ‘Sabresonic’, how can you not love a record that features the utter classic ‘Smokebelch II’, the leap they made from there to ‘Haunted Dancehall’ is impressive. The second outing is bigger in every way, the sounds crisper, sharper, funkier. Where ‘Sabresonic’ was understated brilliance, ‘Dancehall’ struts. Just listen to that programing on ‘Bubble And Slide II’. Epic. The live instrumentation lifts it too. Sabres by this point were a fearsome gigging outfit, featuring Rich Thair from labelmates Red Snapper and Phil Mossman later of LCD Soundsystem. ‘Dancehall’ is very cinematic, indeed the ‘Haunted Dancehall’ of the title is inspired by the ballroom in The Overlook Hotel in Kubrick’s ‘The Shining’. The album also came with snippets of a novel of the same name in the sleevenotes. It was a London noir thriller by James Woodbourne, except he didn’t exist. It was all Weatherall, of course it was. ‘Ong’s Hat’ once again touching our world. Both these albums have been out of print on vinyl and CD since the original release. There is going to be one almighty bunfight for these new pressings. Form an orderly queue.
GOOD STUFF #2
DAVID BOULTER ‘Whitby’ (Clay Pipe Music)
The excellent David Boulter reappears on the equally excellent Clay Pipe with another location-based release. This one is a little different though in that unlike ‘Yarmouth’, ‘The Factory’ and ‘St Ann’s’, David has no ties to the North Yorkshire seaside town of Whitby. Indeed, while nearby Scarborough and Filey were familiar to him from his childhood, Whitby didn’t figure until he visited with his family in 2024. David talks about being sat on a deserted beach, halfway between Whitby and Sandsend, and how the absolute beauty of the place and how alien it seemed hit him. “It was quite a stormy day,” he says, “grey skies coming in off the North Sea, sun breaking through. The way the light hit the rocks, scattered across the beach; the waves crashing. Walking up to the ruined Abbey at sunset, again almost deserted. I imagined human life disappeared.” You can almost hear the album that resulted from this evocative explanation before you’d played note, eh? Despite raging wars and humans pushing the planet to the edge, David talks about how in that moment he felt “such calm and connection to the landscape and how simple beauty can be”. Indeed, and he is the absolute master when it comes to rendering place in sound. While he initially made field recordings of locations, he chose to reinterpret them musically and to great effect. ‘The Cinder Track’, titled after the path of a former railway line in the area, is pure Boulter. The melody is gorgeous, the violin picking a path over the top, played by Calina de la Mare, is sublime. When Whitby gets mentioned round these parts as subject matter things do tend to get a bit Dracula. David doesn’t even hints at the Count, not even on ‘The Abbey At Sunset’, which is refreshing.
GOOD STUFF #3
BARTHOLEMEW ‘Subterranea’ (Lunar Module)
This is the third release in Castles In Space’s new CD label offshoot and following the big guns of Gordon Chapman-Fox and Hawksmoor it’s great to see the label going with a new name. Newcastle-based Chris Bartholomew brings some real drama to the fledgling series with ‘Subterranea’. Which perhaps isn’t a surprise when discover Chris is a composer and sound designer for theatre productions with his scores being aired in places like The Barbican and The Bush Theatre. Lockdown allowed him to focus on making music for himself, the result of which was ‘Moorbound’, an homage to Town Moor, a huge area of commonland that skirts the edges of Newcastle, which awas released on Wormhole World in early 2023. ‘Subterranea’ kind of picks up where ‘Moorbound’ left off. Chris says that he always tries to make music about things. His first album, ‘The Daily Exorcise’ from 2016, was a break-up record that used plunderphonics to reclaim the music he thought he’d lost with the ending of a relationship, ‘Moorbound’ was the land that “provided a sanctuary during the Covid Pandemic”. ‘Subterranea’, Chris says, covers off stability, which isn’t something that comes naturally to him, a point he proved while making the making album. “My life felt like it was falling apart,” he says. “I lost a major client. I had a traumatising first session with a new therapist. A minor speeding offence ballooned through Kafka-esque bureaucracy into a court appearance… the notion that ‘Subterranea’ could be celebration of the stability I’d constructed felt hollow.” From a safe distance he can now see the album is about stability, but it’s also an acceptance that “however hard I work or how strict the controls I put in place, I cannot guarantee myself the balance that I want.” Musically, he talks about inspirations being the triumvirate of Zimmer, Hecker, Frost. And you can hear that. This is detailed work, careful in its construction and often grand in scale. ‘Land Fracture’ really catches you between the eyes. There’s a huge choral swell at the beginning that gives way to electronic beats, deep, dark rhythms that let strings build underneath until it all drops away exposing the orchestral roots, whereas something like the lovely titled ‘Worm Knitting’ is more playful, in an Eno or Nyman kind of way, with pokey string sounds jabbing over fuller bodied string swells. It is impressive stuff.
GOOD STUFF #4
DF TRAM ‘Bittersweet Afternoon’ (Orbscure)
If you know your Orb, you will know that Orbscure is Alex Patterson’s label. You will also know the label has been quiet for a while. This return to action, from LA-born producer, artist and DJ, isn’t perhaps what you’d be suspecting from the label. The opening track, ‘Ana Turn The Lights On’, with its almost vocal peel, sounds more like something The Beta Band would turn in than The Orb. But then that’s the beauty, right? Alex is nothing if not diverse in his tastes. Sure, by day he’s the ambient house grandmaster, but by night the rich musical history cast in his wake makes Obscure the delight it is. It’s a record that reminds me of BC Camplight, only darker, more quirky and decidedly more left field. It has the same sort of bounce, that kind of invention and that knack for tune. ‘He’ll Become A Buddha’ is great, a deep growling bassline swirls, while the breathless vocal has the skip of the ‘Top Cat’ theme tune about it. It’s very neat. It says here that DF Tram “seamlessly blends ambient, sampling, spoken word, vocals and psychedelia into genre-defying sonic journeys”, which is more than fair. As a whole there’s an atmosphere here that looms large and in and around it Tram weaves his journeys. Many of the tracks are distant lullabies, gentle tunes with Tram’s even more gentle vocal sitting atop often squally electronic backings. I love the acid squelching of ‘Separate Ways’, the lengthy Terry Riley-like twinkle and church-y vibes of ‘Fourteen Pilgrims Over The Sava’ and the delicate melodic storytelling of ‘The Librarian’. There are a handful of tracks that feature Alex himself and The Orb’s extended family as guests, there’s two tracks with the violin work of Violetta Vicci and two with Alex. ‘The Shiver’ is appropriately titled, its spooky cinematic refrain repeating over and over with, you suspect, Alex filling the gaps on sample/DJ duty. He also features on ‘Sally Satellite’, which comes with a marching beat, a delicate melody, rafts of spoken word and what sounds like a theremin dancing in the back garden. And there’s an interlude towards the end that involves mention of a cup of tea which is pure Paterson. This is not a record that should pass you by that’s for sure. I said earlier that it’s probably not what you’d expect from a label run by The Orb, but it is so delightfully quirky I think it is exactly what you should expect. I’ve had this one on a lot.
GOOD STUFF #5
ADRIAN LANE ‘Where Once We Danced’ (Whitelabrecs)
I’ve been listening to ‘Where Once We Danced’ a fair bit since it landed before our summer break. It’s gentle, melodic piano stuff that very much reminds me of Clay Pipe output. It has that same contemporary pastoral feel. Adrian is a Southend-based composer/visual artist who has cropped up on Whitelabrecs previously on a number of occasions with his “modern classical and ambient repertoire”. I love the inspiration behind this one. When his car stereo developed a fault, he found himself only able to listen to Radio 3. Which is no bad thing. This enforced listening led to Adrian wanting to make work that could be seen as notable. Not formal scores, but still work with the weight of Chopin, Schubert and the Schumanns. The result is what he describes as his most classical record to date. There’s a track called ‘Floating In The Memory Upon The River’ which is very beautiful, but much of the record is like that. It really catches you, you feel like refrains or phrases are something you’ve perhaps heard before but before you can get hold of them they’re off on the wind. Lovely stuff.
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‘GABBA GABBA WE ACCEPT YOU – THE WONDEROUS TALE OF JOEY RAMONE’ by Jay Ruttenburg and Lucinda Schreiber (Drag City)
In a stroke of good luck, I noticed Jay Ruttenburg’s book the day before he was due to do a talk in Rough Trade on London’s legendary Denmark Street. I’ve been to talks there on a few occasions now, the lines ups are excellent and the events are always intimate affairs. This one was no different.
I do like going to Rough Trade’s newest outpost as Denmark Street is steeped in history. Known as Tin Pan Alley, it has been home of various music publishers, recording studios and music shops across the decades. Melody Maker had an office there once, The Sex Pistols lived there, Elton John and Bernie Taupin wrote ‘Your Song’, their first hit, there and the Stones recorded their debut album in Regent Sound Studio there. It is a street that has music coursing through its paving slabs.
Anyway, Jay was great company and long over-ran his 30-minute slot. He’s a New York-based music journalist who has worked as staff writer at Time Out New York, music editor and writer at The New Yorker as well as having his work in the New York Times and The Village Voice in his time. He also runs the excellent Lowbrow Reader comedy journal, which I’d fully recommend.
The Ramones, of course, are New York through and through. Jay explains their appeal in terms of them being one of his musical big loves – The Beatles are at one end of the potion and The Ramones at the other. The Beatles being the beginning of something and The Ramones providing the full stop. I’d also argue they were the springboard for post-punk/new wave too, but that’s what happens when you get two music journos in the room.
So NY dwelling Jay writing about NY legends makes sense, right? But the book isn’t a weighty biog, or a considered reflection on the global influence of one of rock and roll’s finest. It’s a children’s book that tackles a number of themes, top of the heap is the importance of being your own person.
Beautifully illustrated by Brooklyn-based artist/animator Lucinda Schreiber, ‘Gabba Gabba We Accept You’, which is of course a line from The Ramones’ 1977 track ‘Pinhead’, is an absolute treat.
“My daughter just turned 11,” says Jay about to echo what many parents have thought over the years. “and it occurred to me that a lot of the life lessons I’ve been trying to teach her weren’t learned through my family or school, but through punk: the importance of being your own person, following your own radar, embracing uniqueness… The Ramones, and in particular Joey, seemed like the perfect embodiment of that.”
It’s an incredible tale. The story goes that Joey – Jeffery Hyman – had a tough start to life. He was born with a incomplete parasitic twin growing out of his back that had to be surgically removed. He grew up in the leafy New York burbs of Forest Hills, Queens, where he was a loner and misfit, a gangly glasses-wearing Jewish teen who was diagnosed with OCD and schizophrenia at 18. Jeff though had music. “He had yet to find his super power – the little bit of magic buried deep inside each person that lets the world catch a glimpse of the greatness lurking within us all,” writes Jay.
I mean, those with children should be saluting him immediately. His message, even viewed from this side of the pond, is loud and clear when he says that over the years he’s read his daughter “97 books about Abraham Lincoln and 12,984 about Ruth Bader Ginsburg”. Having read many, many children’s books during my time too, Jay not only nails the tone here perfectly, but the messaging is delivered with Luke Littler-like precision. The positivity pours off the page. “Jeff never curved to the world,” writes Jay, “Jeff curved the world to him.”
And he did. Despite the sets backs, despite the challenges, Jeff found his own path and his own way to not just fit in, but to rule his corner of the world. Gabba Gabba, we accept you indeed.
“My big hope for the book,” says Jay, “is that it tells the story of Joey Ramone, but also, in kind of the biggest way, of what punk rock means, and how it might help a little kid wade through difficult social waters and be their own unique person.”
I wish this book had been around when mine were little. No harm in getting them to read it now I guess. It’s never too late to appreciate what The Ramones did for us.
MOONBUILDING ISSUE 6 … OUT NOW
Holy cow. MOONBUILDING Issue 6 has arrived. This new issue is out now and available from moonbuilding.bandcamp.com
Our cover star, illustrated by the peerless Nick Taylor, is the unstoppable force that is LOULA YORKE. In our bumper interview we talk about how she got here and where she’s going. As usual, it is an in-depth piece that lifts the lid on the brilliant mind behind the excellent music.
We met Loula at her home in Suffolk where we have a proper rummage around in her world, musically, humanly, psychologically, probably even a bit metaphysically. It is a cracking read and really opens the doors on what makes this most remarkable artist tick.
As always the issue comes with an accompanying CD. This one is a Loula Yorke collection called ‘How Did We Get Here’, which is compiled by artist herself and charts her rise and rise. The resulting 11-tracker will take you on a journey through her career to this point and it is utterly, totally, absolutely, exclusive to Moonbuilding.
Elsewhere, there’s a great chat with Clay Pipe Music supremo Frances Castle as we profile her wonderful label, A’Bear 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, which feature Loula Yorke, Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan’s Gordon Chapman-Fox, Cate Brooks, 30 Door Key and Sarno Ultra.
We talk to ‘This Is Memorial Device’ author David Keenan about ‘Volcanic Tongue’, his debut collection of music writing. He is one of the last generation of music writers who could actually call themselves as journalists. He talks a lot of sense and his work is a shining example of what music writing should be. It’s an unmissable interview.
Elsewhere, we round up an absolute mountain of recent releases and point you in the right direction of some mighty fine independent magazines and books. The Orb’s Alex Paterson tells us about his ‘Top Of The Pops’ experience when he appeared on the legendary show performing ‘Blue Room’ in 1993. I say performing… There’s a new Captain Star cartoon strip from the brilliant Steven Appleby. I constantly have to pinch myself that this strip, that I first read in the NME in the early 1980s, is now in our little magazine.
The shop doors are open at moonbuilding.bandcamp.com for your pre-ordering pleasure. This issue has a short print run and will sell out fast. Do not hang about.
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