Issue 82 / 3 October 2025
Your essential DIY electronic music lowdown: Track Of The Week = JQ & Richard Pike + Album Of The Week = Scanner + Future Children, Nala Sinephro, Camp Of Wolves, Alpha Seven and more...
This weekend would usually see Synthfest taking hold of Sheffield. While they’re having the year off, the Sensoria festival that sensibly happens at the same time will be in full effect and runs until Sunday (5 Oct). Details of their always excellent programme is here.
If you happen to be in the area, electronic/psyche folk duo Polyhymns will be premiering ‘Peak Tracks Quadraphonic Soundscape’ as part of the festival at the Millennium Galleries. As you might have guessed, it’s a quadrophonic installation that delivers a real-time soundscape celebrating the Hope Valley train line between Sheffers and Chinley on the edge of the Peak District. The journey takes 41 minutes and “each stop is represented by a combination of improvised music, field recordings and oral history clips from people who have lived and worked along the line”. Sounds great. Let me know if you make it along?
STOP PRESS! Thought you might like to know that Kraftwerk have just announced their first UK tour in nearly 10 years. There’s 15 dates across the UK and Ireland in May/June 2026. Tickets on sale next Friday (10 Oct). Details here. Form an orderly queue.
Righto, bumper week of releases incoming. Lots to read about, best make a start eh?
Neil Mason, editor
moonbuildingmag@gmail.com
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JQ & RICHARD PIKE ‘Tessera’ (Salmon Universe)
JQ and Richard Pike’s Salmon Universe label has been very quiet of late. The last release was back in May, which isn’t so bad. It’s felt like a lot longer. That offering, ‘Endless Joy’ from Luke Abbott, Lotte Betts-Dean and Jack Wyllie was proper send-a-postcard-home release, well worth the ear time if you missed it. The London/Ramsgate-based cassette label is one I’ve been keen on since its beginnings in 2018. It very much has its own identity, sound-wise. Not wishing to stereotype, but generally speaking the label has a hardware sound, a kind of clean digital edge and comes at you from an experimental/jazz angle. “Future music” they call it, which is about right.
So ‘Tessera’ is the first collaborative release from the big chiefs, which surprises me. They clearly work well together as their fine label shows, and they’re two-thirds of jazz-ish new age trio Forgiveness so playing together isn’t entirely new either.
I’ve been listening to ‘Tessera’ a fair bit this week and it strikes me there’s a kind of very, very left field, Orb-like sensibility here in the way tracks ebb and flow. There’s deeply ambient sections filled with sound that give way to beat-driven humdingers, like this first release, ‘Tessera (Suns)’, which begins with whispery squibs and expands into its shoes with a deep thud of a beat, a soothing subby bass and the warmest synth washes. It’s like there’s these moments that the record builds towards and then ebbs from. ‘Tessera (Suns)’ is certainly one.
I’d say it bodes well for the full-length, but I already know how good the full thing is. Mark it on your calendar, ‘Tessera’ is out on 24 October.
SCANNER ‘Forces, Reaction, Deflections’ (quiet details)
We’re now into the fourth year of releases from Alex Gold’s quiet details label and he’s still hitting it out of the park. It staggers me how he does it. I’ve said it before, but the temptation with a label like this, one that invites guest artists to contribute to the ongoing series on the theme of “quiet details”, must be to front-load the schedule with work from the big guns. And in the world of ambient music there are some sizable arsenals, but here we are, 40 releases in and out of the hat comes Robin Rimbaud, Scanner.
I suspect this is by design rather than accident. I’d imagine the label has been working to an ever-growing list that morphs and shifts as time goes, as people’s schedules fill up and empty out. I mean, you don’t just wake up in the night in a cold sweat because you’ve forgotten about Scanner and think you better ask him chop-chop if he can rustle something up do you? You do wrack your brains for who, after 40 releases, hasn’t passed through the label yet… well, I do at least… and it always comes as a surprise when Alex serves up an A-list outing. And Scanner is very much A List.
I first encountered Robin through his 1993 Ash International debut, ‘Scanner’, which led to various visits to his monthly Electronic Lounge nights at London’s ICA throughout the 90s. I knew what a club night looked like in those days, but this was something else entirely. Alongside Robin as resident was Tony Morley (these days of The Leaf Label, but back then he’d have been 4AD PR or setting up his own PR agency No.9). Tony is someone knee-deep in that early ambient scene – he was tangled up with the Telepathic Fish folk who wrote about here – but rarely gets the credit he deserves.
Electronic Lounge was hugely influential and introduced me to all manner of wormholes to disappear down. You can read a little more about it on Scanner’s website here. There’s a great flyer for the night there, love that it ran from 9.02pm to 1.02am and was £1.50 to get in!
All hail Robin basically. Without him I suspect various routes to discovery for many of us would have taken a lot longer. I hesitate to call him our generation’s Eno, it’ll go straight to his head, but he kind of is. I wasn’t fussed about Eno back then. I got it, ‘Music For Airports’ and all that, but my mission was hoovering up the new, Robin and the like were the new, what’s more they pointed people like me in the direction of the new too. They made Eno look like an old hippy. Which of course he was.
All of which hopefully puts Robin into a bit of context and you can see why ‘Forces, Reaction, Deflections’ is such a big deal release for qd. “Never losing site of the experimental joy that he’s always harnessed,” say the label of the release, “his album for quiet details is a stunning example of this love of sonic exploration”. And what is he sonically exploring you wonder? “Composed entirely from seismic recordings of the architectural marvel that is the steel staircase in his home, he’s created something that’s as musically beautiful as it is texturally rich”.
Well, well. Not so much Music For Staircases as music from them.
“This album is forged entirely from the resonant clangs, echoes, and whispers of a stainless steel staircase at home,” states Robin, “transforming everyday architecture into an unexpected orchestra. No synthesisers were used in the creation, only the natural sound of the staircase using a geophone seismic microphone and the gentle assistance of the occasional resonant filter and sample software.”
Which is impressive as it sounds. You’d never know that this wasn’t composed in some way rather than wrought from the sounds of steel. It begins with ‘Start Moment’, a swell of a drone interspersed with the gentlest of punctuation, a droplet almost, as the track builds. A deep, resonant bass cuts a melody of sorts, an almost tune emerging from among the echoes.
The five tracks here are all lengthy pieces, the shortest is a tad under seven minutes, the longest a little over 13, in total the whole thing runs to a little shy of 45 minutes. The perfect length, which of course is determined by if it would fit on one side of a C90. ‘Riser Beam Connection’ builds on the opener, there’s a little more menace here, what sounds like a bass drum pounding out time as the sound swirls and rises like water rushing in. It too feels incredibly tuneful, almost filmic in its quality. ‘Base Plate’ is the track where you can most hear where all this comes from. There’s a circular grind of metal, very industrial, very dark.
‘Grain Stress’ is excellent, it sounds like the staircase is almost being played, plucked somehow, like a giant, deeply resonant string instrument while the closing ‘End Moment, Wires’ feels hectic, chaotic even, with sound scattering all over the place as it comes at you in bursts that often make you jump. I was thinking a photo of the staircase would be helpful, to gauge size, scale, to actually see what is making the sounds you can hear, but that’s not the point. We talked last week about Brunhild Ferrari and Annette Vande Gorne and the idea of Pierre Schaffer’s acousmatic music, where sound alone is doing the heavy lifting leaving the listener to imagine the source. And that’s what we have here. Scanner’s staircase is not on view, what he does with it is.
Scanner has been at the electronic coalface for four decades and shows little sign of slowing down. On the strength of this, he certainly isn’t getting any less inventive. Or any less vital.
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FUTURE CHILDREN ‘A Disorganized Body’ (Astra Solaria)
I’ve been sat on this release from Bernard Grancher’s totally excellent Astra Solaria cassette label for what seems like ages. I’ve been very keen to share it with you and finally I can! If you’ve not come across Bernard’s label, do make a beeline. He’s turned out some really great stuff this year, treats galore await.
Ohio’s Future Children, a music and film project from “bedroom silver surfers” CC Sheehan and Kevin Coral, serve up the latest offering on the Rouen-based label and it’s one of those records that really deserves some proper attention. Let’s see if we can give it a decent outing. Tell your friends, the ones with good music taste, won’t you? Tell the others too, see if you can’t turn them around.
The release itself is a whopper, 27 tracks, many of them cues, as it purports to being the soundtrack to a short film ‘Mme X’, about the strange case of 19th century French woman who presented herself to Dr Jules Cotard claiming she was nothing but “a disorganized body” with no organs, just skin and bone. She claimed to be immortal believing she could not die a natural death, but “will live forever unless she is burnt, fire being her only possible end”. She claimed she had no need to eat because of the lack of internal organs. Turns out she starved to death, which is a lesson to us all. And no, crisps are not a meal.
I don’t know, but this has my “hang on a minute” alarms bells ringing. While I can find no trace of a short film, Dr Jules Cotard seems to be real. He had a delusion named after him, Cotard’s syndrome is a mental disorder where the patient believes that are dead, do not exist or have no blood or internal organs and is incapable of dying… which must be tricky if you think you’re already dead. The case of “Mademoiselle X” also seems to be real and there are several contemporary references to the condition. It’s mentioned in TV and film dramas, but can you believe everything you read eh? The plot thickens.
Musically, ‘A Disorganized Body’ is great. ‘Discotecque Manzarine’ is superb, a 60s swirl of a tune infused with a taut krauty beat, it also comes in a “redux” version. There’s lots of tracks that come in various parts. The piano chime, discordant electronics and birdsong of opener ‘New Mythology’ is reprised three times, the almost song of ‘Partial Phonologies’ for times and the sturm und drang of ‘Fire Being Her Only Possible End’ comes in three parts. It’s interesting to listen to them as complete movements as well as in the order intended here.
‘A Disorganized Body’ sounds incredibly good, not just compositionally/songwriting-wise, but sonically. It seems the pair utilised an almighty synth collection at the Vintage Synthesizer Museum in LA. There’s a nice kit list on the release page that list the firepower, there’s a CS-80, MS-20, Juno 60, Jupiter 8, an AKS and Polymoog among others. It’s quite the guestlist.
This is great stuff, one I’ve had on repeat for a while and now I’m sharing it with you.
astrasolariarecordings.bandcamp.com
KELLY MORAN ‘Don’t Trust Mirrors’ (Warp)
NALA SINEPHRO ‘The Smashing Machine’ (Warp)
Warp has always been such a great label. It’s come a very long way from its beginnings in a back room on Sheffield’s Division Street that is for sure. The label has two albums out this week that are kind of polar opposites and I can’t stop listening to either.
Kelly Moran’s ‘Don’t Trust Mirrors’ is such a hands in the banger. Well, compared with her previous outings at least. The New York-based multi-instrumentalist is a prepared piano sort of gal, but with this album she talks about how when she was touring her 2018 ‘Ultraviolet’ album she found herself playing a lot of festivals and early slots at that. Which was ok because she got to enjoy dancing late into the night, which in turn made her want to write a more groove-based record. And, after a hiccup or two, like say covid, here it is.
The piano is still front and centre, but she brings her electronic production licks to the fore. ‘Echo In The Field’ arpeggiates like crazy, as what you think is an intro builds and builds. You want the drop, but Kelly stamps her mark with an emergent melody, no drop required. While it is clearly inspired by dance music, Kelly makes it her own by creating rhythms from her acoustic instruments rather than machines. It’s brave when you have a reputation to swerve like this. This is adventurous stuff and a swerve well worth making.
The main Warp attraction this week is Nala Sinephro’s soundtrack to ‘The Smashing Machine’, the Benny Safdie-directed biopic about UFC fighter Mark Kerr. That’s not “smashing” as in Wallace & Gromit, that’s smashing as in built like brick walls and snapping people in half over your knee.
Like Kelly, Brussels-born, London-based Nala is a ridiculously talented multi-instrumentalist, but her musical egg is experimental jazz shaped. Don’t let the “experimental” put you off there. Her two artist albums, 2021’s ‘Space 1.8’ and last year’s ‘Endlessness’, are really excellent. There’s such warmth to her work and I think that comes from her ensemble approach. Noodling this is not. As well as contributing sax, harp, synths, modular synths and piano herself, she enlists a multitude of stupidly talented collaborators – drummers, brass, bass, guitar and so on. You can feel the gang mentality, there’s a joy to her work, and from that there’s a musicality you don’t find in some of the more out-there experimental jazz outfits.
For this soundtrack she has “collaged” her own playing – synths, harp, modular and a harmonium – as well as drawing on sessions with her trusty collaborators. The title track here is a total showstopper. Just shy of nine minutes it begins with drummers Morgan Simpson (formerly of Black Midi) and Natcyet Wakili responding live to a fight scene from the film. Do give it a listen, it’s really great. The super-fast bass drums really pack punch.
While Nala’s music, described as “meditative, ethereal, and vast” by her people, might seem at odds sat in a film that features slab of a man Dwayne Johnson beating seven shades out of similar man mountains, her work picks up on the “hidden softness and emotions with the story”. It is after all a love story of sorts, starring Emily Blunt as the fighter’s wife Dawn Staples. When a director like Benny Safdie, who came out of the left field, brings in a composer like Nala it’s not by accident. Music was important in the making of the film. The director worked with a huge playlist that he shared with the actors for inspiration and likewise, you can hear how Nala’s work fits, highlighting the more tender moments, but also picking up on the broader themes of angst, addiction and tempestuous relationships.
This album is barely 30 minutes long, but it makes for a great listen and it’s a very welcome stop off on the road to album number three from Nala.
CAMP OF WOLVES ‘Bear Creek’ (Lunar Module)
I don’t know if you’ve cottoned on to Castle In Space’s CD imprint Lunar Module, but you really should. We’re five releases deep, one coming at the end of each month, with this beauty from Vancouver-based David Salisbury the latest offering. You should be familiar with his work as Camp Of Wolves, there’s high-quality outings on Woodford Halse – 2021’s ‘The Lost Island’ and 2022’s ‘A Whisper Of Broken Things’ – as well as 2021’s ‘Green Timbers’ on Waxing Crescent.
His thing is environment, the world around him, exploring “stories within the psychogeography of untamed wilderness, towns and remote outposts”. You can feel the vibe already. In 2023 he released ‘The Northerner’ on the CiS Subscription Library where he talked about the “ambivalent beauty” of British Columbia, the “inhospitable resource towns dotting the long, lonely highways, with their dark, complex stories of humanity contained within”. Even if you’ve not heard a note of that, or any of his offerings come to that, you really want to. And you’d be right to.
This latest release deals with the big stuff, his return to where he grew up. “I wanted to give the album a warm, handmade feel as though it were cut from construction paper, coloured with crayons and held together with paste like some sort of weird childhood diorama imbued with a lingering sense of the ‘other’,” he writes in his release notes. He talks about how it’s a “sort of Lynchian love letter to my childhood home”. I think we all think of where we grew up a bit like that, so this should really resonate. I’m back in darkest Lincolnshire, the first house I remember living in and how it had private woodlands owned by a US army base on all sides. The Lincolnshire poacher was busy round our way. Brrrr.
“The street I grew up on feels narrower,” writes David in his notes, “the trees smaller and the air heavier, like the town’s been rebuilt to look almost like I remember, just enough to make me question if I ever really left at all.”
A track like ‘Little Black Eyes’ feels very Badalamenti, the shivery string sweeps and synth chords coming at you in clouds. ‘Tumulus’ feels slightly scary and utterly huge with a bright very reverb-y organ-y sound swooping and sweeping, it’s almost pan pipes, but sounds great so can’t be pan pipes, while ‘Cross The Townline’ is a beautiful lament, the theme tune to all this almost.
Another high-quality offering from Lunar Module. Get onboard. Next up, R Seiliog’s ‘Dispatch All Gods’, then Lo Five’s ‘Superdank’… treats upon treats.
ALPHA SEVEN ‘The Haunted Testcard Tapes’
It’s must seem like I actually plan all this sometimes, but Alpha Seven provides me with another Scanner connection. London-based these days, Alpha’s Pete Roberts ran a Norwich club night called Sofa with my great friend Reg Tubby when we were all in a younger incarnation. I am pretty sure that me, Pete and Reg made the trek to Scanner’s Electronic Lounge nights on more than one occasion in the early days, so 1994. I moved to London in 1995 so it wasn’t so much of a hike. I suspect that those nights gave birth to Sofa, with us taking the message back to darkest Norfolk. I’m sketchy on details, but we also managed an ambient duo called Faceless, we were thick on the downtempo action, even if we were in Norwich.
So Pete has been at this lark almost as long as Robin. I think we all met via a compilation that both Pete/Alpha Seven and Faceless were on in 1994-ish. We knew Pete, he introduced us to Faceless is how the story goes. I really like Pete’s work, I’m sure I’ve mentioned it here before, he can really hold down a tune and there’s some crackers worth visiting in his back catalogue. Do check out ‘Great TV Masts Of The UK’, which incredibly is 10 years old this year. It’s been a little while since we’ve had a concerted Alpha offering, plenty of lone tracks, the last offering was a mini album in 2021 called ‘Music For Imagined TV Programmes’. You can perhaps see where he’s coming from. This new Alpha album follows in those lines and is called ‘The Haunted Testcard Tapes’ where he heads into haunty world.
He says the album “Imagines TV themes, incidental music and testcard melodies from an alternate reality, with inspiration ranging from lounge-style spy themes to the Delia Derbyshire days of the Radiophonic Workshop”.
Right up our street eh? Let’s get down to it. It’s almost a greatest hits+ as it collects a bunch of new tracks with remastered versions of previously released outings. Pete is handy with the old recycling and will create new versions, offering remasters or just sneak something old in among the new.
‘Greenwich Light Vessel’ appeared on a six-tracker in 2013, it may be even older as it crops up on a ‘Selected Early Works’ collection from 2019. Whatever, it had a remaster for that outing and here it gets a 2025 buff up. ‘Rain Chime’ also features on the same six-tracker and makes a reappearance here and in fine ‘Smokeblech’ style there’s a beat and beatless version, both lovely.
Of the new cuts I really like the blips and beeps and the soaring melody of ‘Strange Light Over Caldbeck’, which feels like the theme to a detective series. Pete tells me his personal faves are the bright shimmers, twinkles and laidback beats of ‘Reports Of Debris’, which has a great judder in the middle, and the last track, the delicate tip-toe of ‘Becalmed On The Mare Undarum’’, which is a lunar pool on the Moon, so you know, he has my attention at least.
I do like a catalogue that take a little exploring and Alpha Seven certainly has one of those. Enjoy!
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THE ROUND UP’S ROUND UP
Luke Knott’s ‘Through A Mirror’ on Finlay Shakespeare’s GOTO label is rather interesting. It comes from a place where “the brief but frenetic ongoing histories of electroacoustic and computer music meet” and “acknowledges the fundamental elements of electronic music history, but pushes forward”. For scholars of this sort of thing the label say you will be able to recognise techniques employed by the likes of pioneers such as French acousmatic composer Bernard Parmegiani, Luc Ferrari, Merzbau’s noise mongering Masami Akita, Tom Ellard from Oz’s pioneering Severed Heads and Editions Mego’s late, great Peter Rehberg to name but a few. Using a computer as his primary tool, Luke’s sound feels utterly contemporary even though he’s heavily hoovering up the past. The 10-minute+ ‘Control On The Way Down’ is a mesmerising piece of work. Fascinating stuff all round.
Names On Tapes’ ‘We Weren’t Programmed For This’ (No Input) comes with some seriously lovely artwork and a quote from the artist that should have you pressing play chop-chop. “We wanted to make something that sounded like it was disappearing as you listened,” they say, “songs that felt like they were found on a damaged tape, but still carried warmth, fragility and connection”. You’re in already aren’t you? Names On Tapes is a London-based collaboration between Neil Kleiner, Four Tet cohort and Lo Recordings’ Dark Captain Light Captain, and experimental guitarist Stacey Hine from the long-lost The Sailplanes. And guess what? Yup, it sounds just like they say. Mostly. Opener ‘End Scene’ seems to evaporate as the sound grazes your ears, while ‘Monolith’ feels like waves washing gentle on your shores. But it’s not all like that. They say “Listen quietly. Preferably late”, but if you did that with some of what’s here you’d fair shit your pants. Some of it loud and noisy, like ‘In Case You Come Back’ which crackles and glitches as if it’s plugged in somewhere with a dodgy lead that could drop out at any moment. There’s a great distant guitar twang and very cool synth swell on ‘Dead Language’ a track that is theme tune-ready, while ‘Default State’ exudes a glitchy sort of peace and calm before a tune, tugging a lovely beat with it, wriggles from its grasp. Love this.
I know Martin James from my editor days at Muzik and Melody Maker and boy did he go on to finer things. He’s an actual professor of, well what? Professor of Pop? Cabaret Voltaire’s Stephen Mallinder is similarly distinguished, not quite as lofty as Martin, he has a mere doctorate, a Doctor of Disco his family call him. Martin set up and ran the Music Journalism course at Solent, but he’s safely stepped away from all that now so he’s able to run his State Of Bass label with a little more gusto. He’s got a decent schedule heading our way too, not least the launch of Stateless Bass, an ambient/instrumental/experimental sub-label. First up though is Nostalgia Deathstar’s ‘They Kill The Flame’. The duo is Martin, who records as Mothloop, and fellow academic Sean Albiez, who is also ghost elektron. I was only saying last week, in light of talking about Colin Newman (fourth mention in as many weeks for him), that there’s not nearly enough raging against the machine in music these days and here come Nostalgia Deathstar with just the ticket. Their second outing is an “angry album that charts the rise of anti-intellectualism in the destructive face of rampant marketisation within the academy”. They’re talking about how universities are at the mercy of market forces these days and how that leads to the closure of courses “deemed irrelevant to our prosperity”. They talk about how these courses support a microcosm of creatives in teaching roles allowing them to make a living and produce art. It’s a win-win or a lose-lose if things go on the way they are. It’s good to have discourse on these matters, do take a few moments to read the notes on the releases page. That it comes with some rattling beats is a bonus.
I’ve been enjoying Bird Of Peace Orchestra’s self-titled album on their own Do You Have Peace? Imprint. The offshoot of the Bristol-based Jabu three-piece have made a record created in the moment, made up from “a series of one-take recordings, jams, and largely unedited in-the-room practice sessions”. The band talk about sitting in a room “listening for hours to eight bar loops… influences blending to create a strange mix of bedroom soul, shoe gaze, folk and rap”. If you think back to a world where you had to be on the inside of the record industry if you were going anywhere and how the cycle was record, release, tour and repeat until you fell apart, the way people work these days is so much better. That an artist can make and release something like this is so refreshing. It’s sort of like looking at an artist’s sketchbook, all those ideas laid out. I really like the gentle lilt of the shoegaze-y ‘Ties’ with its chime-y effect-soaked guitars, while ‘3am Blue Velvet’, another shoegazer with gentle tic-tic-tic drums and whispered Cocteau Twin vocals, is lovely.
Righto, running out of time as always, just need to quickly mention another couple of releases. First up comes the 10th anniversary reissue of Rafael Anton Irisarri’s ‘A Fragile Geography’. It comes remastered for the occasion and there’s a trio of Reworks from KMRU, Abul Mogard and William Basinski and Gary Thomas. The original album marked something of fresh start for the US-based composer. Not that he chose to make a new start. The record was born out of the loss of his entire Seattle studio in a devastating theft just days before a move to New York. He lost everything, instruments, recordings and his archive. Starting again from scratch, ‘A Fragile Geography’ was the result. If you’re not familiar with Rafael’s work, start with the epic eight-minute thriller ‘Empire Systems’ here, which is the powerful centrepiece of the record. It turns out the record was all about beginnings. Rafael went on to set up Black Knoll studio where he engineered recordings for everyone from Terry Riley to Grouper. “I don’t experience this album as a document of grief anymore,” he offers. “I hear adaptation and I’m reminded that when everything falls apart, something meaningful, maybe even beautiful, can emerge.”
Flaer ‘Translations’ on The Leaf Label offshoot Odda is a record I’ve had on rotation for while, but haven’t managed to write about for some reason. I think I might be subconsciously wanting to keep it as a best-kept secret. It is gorgeous stuff. We’ve got the decorators in at Moonbuilding HQ so the windows have been open a fair bit and this is one of those records I like to have on in the early mornings mingling with the outside sounds (and power tools). Flaer is Cornwall-based Realf Heygate, who makes stunning work with a piano and cello. He talks about found sounds and field recordings that include “the starlings which can be heard signing through the open window of his studio”. His starlings singing with the birds in my garden then. Wonderful. As is the whole project. It is dedicated to Realf’s mother Emma, a linguist whose heart lay in music. After she died he picked up her instruments and Flaer began. When you know that, you’ll understand just how this work is so staggeringly beautiful. With its expansive orchestration, a track like ‘Our Hands’ starts out a fleck of a song before taking to the air, while the track that follows it, the plaintive ‘Air Loom’ is just as powerful but achieved through a minimal piano/cello approach. There is some skill on show here that is for certain. While this is his debut album, there is a previous mini-LP called ‘Preludes’ that is also worth checking out.
MOONBUILDING ISSUE 6 … OUT NOW
STOP PRESS: DOWN TO OUR VERY LAST FEW COPIES, HURRY!
Holy cow. MOONBUILDING Issue 6 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.
Copyright © 2025 Moonbuilding
Thanks Neil!
Thank you so much for the lovely words and making qd40 Scanner album of the week! Big shout-out in my newsletter today :)