Issue 77 / 29 August 2025
Your essential DIY electronic music lowdown: Track Of The Week = Nightbus + Album Of The Week = 'Sounds From The Flightpath Estate Volume 2' + Pulselovers + Fled Astray + EX! zine + more, more, more
The new issue of Moonbuilding, the print version, is teetering on the brink of being sold out. If you want one, get over to moonbuilding.bandcamp.com quick! We found a few pristine copies of Issue 1 this week, we’ve just put them on Bandcamp, there’s SIX copies up for grabs. Chop chop…
If you’re in London this Sunday night (31/08) can I point you in the direction of the album launch party for ‘Telepathic Fish: Trawling The Early 90s Ambient Underground’. The compilation, which we’ll review in next week’s mailout out, tells the story of this famous early 90s South London chillout club, which is being revived for one night only for the launch party in Brixton. Expect to be entertained by our pal DJ Food, Coldcut’s Mat Black, Mixmaster Morris and a special appearance from the mysterious KiF Productions. Kick off is at 5pm and it’ll all be over by 10pm. What a treat. Tickets here.
Righto, that’s me for another week then. Happy reading.
Neil Mason, editor
moonbuildingmag@gmail.com
Issue 77 Playlist: Listen
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NIGHTBUS ‘Angles Mort’ (Melodic)
Melodic again. The long-running Manchester label does seem to be something of a dark horse and it really shouldn’t be. It’s a label I always have half an eye on and for good reason as recently they’ve been hitting it out of the park. They have WH Lung, who are great, there’s Lili Holland-Fricke & Sean Rogan album ‘Dear Alien’ which I banged on about last year and most recently they’ve served up Stokes new waver three-piece Formal Sppeedwear (yes, two ps) who we all need to keep a very close eye on. And now there’s Manchester/Stockport duo Nightbus.
Following the release of a clutch of well-received singles, Olive Rees and Jake Cottier are shaping up for the release of their debut album, ‘Passenger’, which is released in October. October! How did this happen. I’m not done with summer yet and we’re looking October square in the eyes.
The first track, ‘Ascension’ (see video above) was good, a pensive, thoughtful paean on “death, suicide, and legacy around who or what we leave behind”. Musically, it’s “a noughties club banger by way of NYC beats designed for those who like to stay out a little too often and too late” say their people, who align their sound with the likes of Everything But The Girl, The Knife and Chromatics, as well as early Cure, which is where this stuff hits me.
The follow-up though, ‘Angles Mort’, is great. It’s a track that looks at “shame depicted through sex” and sounds like it’s casting back to my youth, the reference to early work by The Cure really resonates. It has that chiming guitar and insistent tuneful bass, nicely minimal and yet the gaps are where the absolute joy is. This isn’t music to be hurried, it languishes in the shadows, the sort of thing that watches the world go by out of a rain-streaked window, blurred neon lights trundle by, a bus window perhaps.
nightbusuk.bandcamp.com / melodicrecords.bandcamp.com
VARIOUS ARTISTS ‘Sounds From The Flightpath Estate Volume Two’ (Golden Lion Sounds)
It’s still such a tough one that Andrew Weatherall is no longer with us following his untimely death in 2020. When his name is mentioned, you still catch yourself forgetting he’s not here. But at least we have people like The Flightpath Estate to keep his trail a-blaze. They are a fine collection of folk, a Facebook group where all things Weatherall blossom and bloom. If you don’t know these guys and are even remotely Weatherall inclined you are in for a treat. They are also home to the legendary Weatherdrive – endless recordings of DJ sets, mixes and radio shows. Mind blown? It should be. Find the group here.
‘Sounds From The Flightpath Estate’ is such a lovely idea. As with all lovely ideas, when they are pressed to vinyl you’re going need to move pretty sharpish if you want in. It’s a compilation series, now in its second volume, that celebrates the world of Weatherall with a collection of exclusive tracks by artists in the Weatherall orbit and curated by The Flightpath Estate.
The first volume, released in 2024, sold out in the absolute blink of an eye, and little wonder as it featured a previously unavailable Swordsman track, Andy Bell’s cover of ‘Smokebelch II’ and exclusive cuts from Justin Robertson’s Deadstock 33’s, Timothy J Fairplay, Richard Sen and more…
So here we go again then with volume two. Thankfully the label, the excellent Golden Lion Sounds (run out of the famous Todmorden boozer of the same name), have bumped the pressing from 1,000 to 1,500, but still, it’s worth dropping everything to grab a copy before, well, you can’t.
So what do we have on show? It starts with a ridiculously brilliant 12-minute plus take of The Sabres Of Paradise’s long-lost ‘Lick Wid Nit Wit’, which is billed as the “From The Flightpath Estate Mix”. I must’ve listened to it for the best part of an afternoon before moving on. The track itself has only surfaced twice before, once in 1993 on a compilation CD that accompanied the quirky CD-sized music mag Volume (Volume Seven if you were wondering) and again on 12-inch in 2018 in its “Original Mix” with two mixes by A Sagittariun, a shadowy Bristol-based producer/remixer working out of his Elastic Dreams label.
This mix appears to be a whole new version or a long-lost version at least. On the original there’s a snake charmer of a melody, which you’ll more readily recognise as the refrain from ‘Wilmot’. This mix has the track’s bassline too. There is chatter that there was a version Weatherall dropped on his Sabresonic Show on Kiss in 1993 with the ‘Wilmot’ b-line…
Gawd, I’ve not even got past the first track, we could be here a while. David Harrow, who you will know from his multi-collaborations with The Orb as well as his work with On-U, chucks in a delightful acid-y blipper called ‘AanDee’ that sounds like it’s straight off Warp’s ‘Artificial Intelligence’ series.
There’s a trio of tracks from the Red Snapper stable, the synth thriller ‘Qraqeb’ from the mothership, which has a wonderful ending where the track evaporates to leave just the drums… Snapper drummer Rich Thair then wows again with ‘Large Bongos’ from his floorfilling Dicky Continental alter ego. And up he pops up again as A Certain Ratio, stone-cold Weatherall faves, get a “Rework” by Number, Snapper offshoot featuring Ali Friend and Thair. The tangled webs weave. Love it.
Elsewhere, a real standout on a record of standouts is Bedford Falls Players’ ‘In The Trees (It’s Coming Mix)’ a delicious synthwave-y acid house-fuelled banger featuring the instantly recognisable ‘Night Of The Demon’ sample from ‘Hounds Of Love’. Richard Norris dons his uptempo hat with ‘Brave Raver’, while Richard Fearless brings the banging techno, Detroit style, with the epic 10-minute ‘Haywired’. I’ve no idea who Unit 14 is, but they too bring the techno with the rattlingly good ‘Rough Spirit’. Could be anyone. Volume One had a track by The Light Brigade, who turned out to be David Holmes, so you know. Oh, and right at the end there’s a cover of Two Lone Swordsmen’s ‘Sick When We Kiss’ by Sleaford Mods. Yup.
The saddest thing about all this is we have to do it at all. In an ideal world, he’d still be with us, an NTS radio show here, a DJ set there, adding to the ever-growing catalogue of musical adventures himself. In his absence, who better than The Flightpath Estate to keep stoking that almighty legacy. This is first-rate stuff, a quality release of the very highest order.
mixcloud.com / goldenlionsounds.bandcamp.com
Got a release you need to tell us about? email moonbuildingmag@gmail.com
GOOD STUFF #1
PULSELOVERS ‘Northern Minimalism 4’ (Lunar Module)
Castle In Space’s Lunar Module CD imprint continues to gather pace. Slightly confusingly, I do have a very heavy does of summer flu this week, ‘Northern Minimalism 4’ is not only part four of the ‘Northern Minimalism’ project, but it is the fourth release on LM. I do feel like I’m being gaslit a little there. Pulselovers, as you will know, is the musical side division of Woodford Halse label boss Mat Handley that pays tribute to South Yorkshire’s industrial, post-punk and synthpop legacies. What are we talking about, exactly? The People’s Republic has much to answer for. A lot of reason I’m here doing this is down to the sounds coming out of Sheffield, same with Mat. With ‘Northern Minimalism’ he nods at The Human League, at The Black Dog, at The Cabs, Warp Records, LFO… you know, all them.
Mat being Mat though, the project has been spread, Virgin Prunes style across multiple formats. The first release a seven-inch, the second a 10-inch, the third a triple LP set and now, to draw the project to a close comes this double CD.
“This final volume,” explains Mat in the sleevenotes, “sees all tracks from the series remixed, remade and revamped by friends, heroes and legends”. And he is not kidding. All 14 tracks get a polish from the likes of Apta, Pefkin, Sulk Rooms, Lo Five, Field Lines Cartographer, Warrington-Runcorn, Revbjelde, Polypores and more…
It’s poignant, as releases that draw lines under projects tend to be, but if you’re going out, go out with a bang. And this collection bangs let me tell you. Grey Frequency vs Blue Room’s remix of ‘Gunrubber’ (the title of Paul Bower’s famous Sheffield zine) takes the swirling, glitchy original and adds a thumping beat turning it into a floorfiller. Not sure if Blue Room is a reference to The Orb or the Roswell inner sanctum that held alien artefacts, sure someone will tell me. The track does have a nice Orb-y like bassline though.
The eight-minute-plus sweeps and swoons of Sulk Room’s version of ‘Frames Of Reference’, which strips out the tsk-tsk beat of the original to make an ambient swooner. Lo Five take on ‘Orphans’, which starts out sounding like a run-down musical box version of ‘I Feel Love’ and blossoms into some heavily wonky melodies and almost cacophonous dark beats. If you’re looking for highlights, Field Lines Cartographer comes closest to a show stealer with his his mesmeric 12-minute rerub of ‘Shock Cubes’.
Also of note, there’s a couple of posthumous Fred Und Luna takes here from Rainer Buchmüller, the late Compost label boss and alter ego of showroom dummies Fred and Luna, who very sadly died last year. His takes on ‘Night Drive’ and ‘Danum Shield’ are exactly what you’d expect. Taut, precise and rather groovy. There’s a few dupes, which creates some good fun pitting them against each other. Is Fred Und Luna’s ‘Night Drive’ better than Polypores’ version and in turn is that better than Language Field’s remix? Does Warrington-Runcorn’s ‘1976 Mix’ of ‘Frames Of Reference’ pip Sulk Rooms?
You know what I’d do If I were you? I’d make a great big playlist of all the original tracks and all these remixes and stick it on shuffle and repeat all weekend. That’s what I’d do. Great stuff from Mat as always.
GOOD STUFF #2
FLED ASTRAY ‘Demagogogue’ (Wormhole World)
This is something of a curio, a charmingly quirky one at that and as you know, we’re all for charm and quirk round these parts. It’s the debut album from the duo of Alig Fodder and Syd Howells. Alig does the music, Syd the words. They have quite the tale to tell. Back in the day (they date their story by referring to MySpace, so late 90s/early 00s), Syd, a “welsh anarcho techno goth random noise merchant”, was in a duo called Steveless and Syd Howells who made a racket. They recorded a cover of a song called ‘Kisses’ by London-based 1970s “prog punk pop weirdos” Family Fodder. Keeping up? So Alig was in Family Fodder, heard the cover, liked it, the pair stayed in touch and a couple of years ago Alig asked Syd if he’d like to make an album. And so here it is.
“The words of this album are about the world you are all currently trapped in,” say the notes. “It is also possible you may recognise some of the thoughts and situations”. So we get “I need an eye test / My artistic vision is fogged / Fix me a prescription / Which makes it all clear” from ‘Mary Celeste’ or “You don’t care about our world / And why should you? / We’re watching it burn” from ‘Cath’, which I’m pretty sure is about a cat (“And when your mental clock says it’s time / You let me know this job is mine”. Yup.
It is an incredibly musical record, like on ‘Welsh Blanket’ where the piano playing is lovely, it has a skip in its step like Vince Guaraldi or on ‘Playground’, where they come on like a low rent version of Gorillaz or on ‘Nightjar’ which has a really pleasing chug to it. Lyrically, it’s rather pleasing too. There’s a lot of songs about the sun, or lack of it, which makes me think of that scene at the end of ‘Sunshine’, where the big orange ball lives to glow another day. Or as Syd would have it on ‘Welsh Blanket’, “As I scrape the frozen water from the windowpane / I dream of the orange orb again.”
GOOD STUFF #3
EX! Zine Edition 3 (Adventurous Music)
I love when I come across something that takes a little getting my head round. The third issue of EX! zine from Leipzig’s Adventurous Music label does just that. The 96-page zine comes in physical and digital format, both with a 12-track downloadable compilation featuring work by the issue’s audio-based artists. The mag itself is a treat, covering as it does experimental art in all its guises – audio, visual, text and so on. The idea of making a 96-page zine makes my blood run cold, the 48 pages of Moonbuilding are quite enough, thanks. The layout is nice and clean, it’s simple yet bold, with pull-quotes taking an entire page, white text on solid black backgrounds, which is really striking.
I’ve heard of few of the artists covered (although there is a Top 10 from Dark Train’s Kate Bosworth as well as some of her rather lovely artworks/poems), but no matter because EX! provides excellent introductions to featured artists before interviews are launched into. So we have a piece on Chantelle Gray, “an experimental sound artists from South Africa” who “in addition to her professorship in philosophy at the University of Johannesburg, she is involved in the artist collective SENSA to cultivate a regional community of practitioners of experimental music”. It’s great isn’t it? So many titles would just assume playing catch-up is de rigour.
There’s a lot of visual spreads, which perhaps accounts for the ability to run to 96 pages. These spreads aren’t connected to anything, to an interview or feature, they’re just engaging visual art, which I really love the idea of. Lydia Yakonowsky’s ‘Bouquet Statistique 4’ is particularly glorious. The original thinking behind Moonbuilding was that it would feature work from designers, illustrators, but the visual identity was so strong so quickly I was reluctant to rock the boat. I’m so pleased to find a mag that is happily rocking that boat.
There’s book and (loads of) album “recommendations”, an expression I like much more than “reviews”, there’s poems, artist and label portraits, and right at the back there’s a kind of directory pointing you at online resources for the featured artists. Musically, the compilation veers from the industrial glitch of Brine & Goblins’ ‘Wrong Side’ to the utter meltdown chaos of Marisadia’s ‘Mythborne Scrunity’ that sounds like every electrical appliance in your house has gone haywire at once to the rather shimmery drift of Narcoleptica’s ‘Elliptic’ which comes on like half hearing a Bond theme being played in the next room. Oh, and if you buy the zine you even get a free Yum code for an entire album, Substak’s ‘Periculum In Mora’.
And there’s even a few ads. It’s funny, adverts in this world almost act as additional content. You’re not going to be reading something like this by chance, so the ads and the people who chose to place them are going to be just as interesting. It’s a philosophy we share at Moonbuilding. If you like what we do, I strongly suspect you’ll enjoy EX! too.
THE ROUND UP’S ROUND UP
Bit Cloudy’s ‘US Nadir’ landed earlier in the month and it’s a “full length instrumental protest album” from London-based producer Martin Thompson. About what you might ask? Ha. “Troll, grifter, scammer, war profiteer” are all the notes say. This is a dark, angry record, the track titles incredibly evocative. I pretty much don’t watch the news these days for fear of what might have happened next in the States. Or what he’s said, which is just about as bad as anything he actually does. We’ve been watching ‘The West Wing’ instead of the news, from the start, just to make ourselves feel better. It’s the frustration with the situation that, I guess, has people like Martin making work like this. We just have to sit and wait. Not that it’s really any better in the UK with some proper right-wing dog-whistle politics waiting to take centrestage. You despair really. They were talking recently about instigating a full programme of fracking if they came to power. Hey, here’s an idea, let’s just get behind anything remotely controversial as a good thing. Track titles such as ‘Muppet Eagle’ and ‘Stars & Bars Petrol Tank’ just sound furious. But it’s not all doom and gloom, there’s light moment here, the filmic dreamlike ‘The Taint Of Florida’. I love how instrumental music can of course be the sound of protest.
Look, it’s not that I have some sort of bias towards music coming out of Sheffield. Oh, hang on, that’s right, I do. Sheffield-based Mark David Hadley has long been on our radar as he brings really beautiful modular electronics to the table and writes about it all so nicely in his studio journal Whirrings, which you can find here… This is where you’ll find Mark waxing about all sorts, there’s some thoughtful release notes about ‘Brittle Fractures’ in which he shares a common feeling. “The days following a release can be slightly disheartening,” he writes. “After a period of such intense ‘finishing’ work there is often a bit too much quiet, the odd tumbleweed even.” Totally. I think we’ve all felt the tumbleweed when we’d prefer trumpets and fanfares. Well, I would anyway. There was a mindboggling post this week from Steve Throp at Ziggy’s Lament here. It’s the second time he’s said such kind things about Moonbuilding. I can’t tell you how much hearing that sort of thing helps. Sometimes it’s all you need. Just one person standing up and saying they like what you’re doing.
Back to Mark and ‘Brittle Fractures’, which is exactly that, with the work dedicated to his friend Tim who died earlier this year. The pair, says Mark, “started out musical journeys together over 40 years ago”. Which is a while by any chalk. Here Mark uses “guitar, modular, fx pedals and software” to great effect. Again, instrumental music being used to convey emotion very effectively. It’s funny how wordless music can do that.
A quick mention for the Brighton-based Patchworks label who send over some of their wares the other week. Very nice it all is too. They say they’re more a collective than label and the strength of their latest compilation speaks volumes. The first volume was, they say, more “punk electronics”, this edition is exploring “twisted folk and creepy ambient stylings”. And it is all rather pleasingly haunty. ‘Metronomic Underground Vol.2’ is a 10-track collection that is held together thematically by a rather cool 36-page zine that explores the theme of The Missing, which is the musical collection is also sub-titled. They reference jumping off points as Durutti Column’s ‘Missing Boy’ about Ian Curtis, a BBC website article about the thousands of teens who ran away from home in the 1960s, “immortalised in song by The Beatles’ ‘She’s Leaving Home’” and Matt Wolf’s ‘Teenage’ doco that “explores the birth of youth culture right back to the early part of the 20th century. The musical contributors also add to the zine and the whole package is rather excellent. Musically, head for Em—’s ‘Slifer’ (yes, that’s an em dash typography fans, very clever eh?), which gives off digital concerto vibes in several moments packed into four short minutes. A label well worth an explore and one to keep an eye on for sure.
Last one for today as I’ve been doing this with a proper does of summer flu and I need a lie down. Feel like I’m working at about 40 per cent of my usual capacity so this has been slooooow goooooing. I hope it doesn’t show too much.
There does seem to have been a little gap recently where usually an avalanche of ambient work lives. I don’t know why. I miss ambient releases because as I’ve said before I do like to get the Moonbuilding office windows open in the morning and get something drifty on and let the inside and outside sounds melt into one. Buildings And Food’s ‘Provincial Park’ has been getting a few plays of late. Anyone naming themselves after a Talking Heads album is going to have my attention. ‘Provincial Park’ is the fifth full-length from Toronto’s Jen K Wilson, a classically trained pianist, visual artist and multi-instrumentalist, and is “a collection of ambient and IDM material created as a meditation on wilderness experiences in various Canadian Provinces”, which sounds a bit dry when the music is nothing of the kind. It’s her love letter to the Canadian wilderness, to the wonders “discovered through time spent in the backcountry”. There’s real soul here, you can feel the human warmth in a track like ‘Clear Skies’. In fact, you can feel that warmth throughout. It’s in the melodic churchy swells of ‘Maps’ and the celestial twinklings of ‘Stargazing’. It’s everywhere. This is a very fine record indeed.
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MOONBUILDING ISSUE 6 … OUT NOW
STOP PRESS: WE’RE DOWN TO OUR LAST FEW COPIES, TO AVOID DISAPPIONTMENT HURRY!
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.
Moonbuilding Weekly is a Castles In Space publication.
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Thank you so much!
Thanks for the write up Neil, really appreciate it! 😎