Issue 84 / 17 October 2025
Your essential DIY electronic music lowdown: Track Of The Week: DIMITRI + Album Of The Week: The Orb + Rural Tapes + Nightbus + Joe Harvey-Whyte & Paul Cousins + more
I am feeling in a Sheffield sort of mood as the live return of Cabaret Voltaire shimmers into view. Hands up if you’re going to the show next Saturday? I’ll see you there. Don’t know about you, but it’s almost one of those my-work-here-is-done moments. My experimental music journey began when I bought ‘Red Mecca’ in 1981. It was The Cabs’ fourth album and the last one to feature Chris Watson so we will kind of come full circle when Chris and Mal take the stage as The Cabs once again next weekend. I’m hoping it’s going to be one of those rooms that’s a living, breathing who’s who of electronic music. I will report back.
Right, won’t keep you. There’s some really great releases below just waiting to be discovered. Happy reading.
Neil Mason, editor
moonbuildingmag@gmail.com
Issue 84 Playlist: Listen
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DIMITRI ‘Regeneration Breeds Regeneration’ (Do It Thissen)
And talking of Sheffield, which we were just a little bit earlier, I’m always delighted when Jon at the city’s mighty fine Do It Thissen label gets in touch. He popped in this week with some new electronic music from the Steel City. This two-tracker by DIMITRI is rather good, both tracks have a strong 80s vibe and flecks of spoken word Pet Shop Boys. DIMITRI has also introduced me to a new quote concerning the music/architecture/dancing axis.
Halfway through ‘Regeneration Breeds Regeneration’ comes the line “Architecture is frozen music”, which on investigation is a line from German polymath/influential writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832). The full quote is even better. “Music is liquid architecture and architecture is frozen music”. Beats music is like dancing to architecture doesn’t it? I warn you, looking up the Goethe quote will send you spiraling down an intellectual wormhole. You have been warned.
Pretty sure Johann wasn’t thinking about DIMITRI’s brand of breezy electropop, but he would have no doubt approved, especially of this title track. The grooves are smooth, the basslines slow and low, the squelching joyful. The tracks come from a wider project apparently called ‘Exploring The Relationships Between Buildings And The People That Use Them’, which I very much look forward to hearing.
doitthissenrecords.bandcamp.com
THE ORB ‘Buddhist Hipsters’ (Cooking Vinyl)
There can only be one Album Of The Week when there’s a new full-length by The Orb doing the rounds. ‘Buddhist Hipsters’ is, by my counting at least, their 19th studio album. Which is some going. While there is no such thing as a bad Orb album, the Cooking Vinyl years – which began in 2018 with ‘No Sounds Are Out Of Bounds’ and take in 2020’s ‘Abolition Of The Royal Familia’ and 2023’s ‘Prism’ – are especially rich. It is a purple patch for Alex Paterson and current partner-in-crime, Michael Rendall, whose arrival at the start of the Cooking Vinyl years is clearly reaping rewards. So now we welcome ‘Buddhist Hipsters’ to the party and the headline is they very much keep their streak going with this valuable addition to the canon.
As Alex helpfully points it out in the press notes, “overall, the length, arc, and energy of ‘Buddhist Hipsters’ energy mirrors one our fans’ faves, ‘UFOrb’”. And it very much does. We open with ‘Spontaneously Combust’, which clocks in at 10 minutes and 24 seconds and is not unlike the title track from ‘UFOrb’, with that same sort of drift-y beginning before it springs to life. The addition of Steve Hillage on guitar and his System 7/life partner Miquette Giraudy on the EMS does kick things up a gear and makes for quite the opener. There is also apparently a “top-secret” sample on the track suggested by Michael King, top chap and owner of West Norwood’s famous Book & Record Bar, who purloined said secret sample from his “basement vaults”. I have been in that basement, it is mindboggling quite how many records are down there.
You have to love the pacing, the record flows like one of Alex’s DJ sets, the first two tracks – the aforementioned ‘Spontaneously Combust’ and the groovey drum and basser ‘P~1’ set the scene, a 16 and half minute intro that welcomes you in nicely, and the last two tracks lullaby you out of the record over 22 minutes. ‘Under The Bed’ and ‘Khàron’ are ambient with knobs on. A wonderful way to close proceedings. They are The Orb boiled down to its very essence. Like ‘UFOrb’, there is a wealth of longer tracks here. Three over 10 minutes, another three over seven, nothing else under five.
It is also an album that is full of stories. My word is it full of stories. The title itself comes from a dream Alex had. “In this dream was an escalator descending out of the clouds,” he says, “upon which were Buddhists and hipsters travelling downwards, and beckoning me down from the top, was Roger Eno. When I woke up, I had a text from him, asking if we fancied more collabs, so he’s on the record, amongst other friends.”
Roger appears tickling the ivories on the aforementioned space-y closer ‘Khàron’, a glorious 12-minute ambient drift. ‘A Sacred Choice’ is a proper uplifting reggae stomper full of old friends. It features Alex’s old school pal Youth on bass and Killing Joke’s Paul Ferguson on drums, Andy Falconer on “atmospherics” and vocals by Eric Von Skywalker. It is a belter. Interestingly, Andy Falconer is another line back to ‘UFOrb’, which he worked on. After an excursion with Alex as Sedibus on the ‘SETI’ album from last year, here he is back on the mothership, appearing on the 10-minute mellow adventure of ‘Under The Bed’.
The two most interesting stories we of course have left until last. First up there’s the appearance of lovers rock legend Trevor Waters, who Alex met in hospital, he was in the bed next to him following an op last year. Or was it the year before? Time flies. I mean you couldn’t make it up could you? Trevor’s big song was ‘Love Me Tonight’, the vocal from which has been turned into the showstopping garage banger ‘The Oort Cloud (Too Night)’.
And then there’s rapper Rrome Alone lending his skills on the eastern-flecked orchestral drama of ‘Arabebonics’. Rrome Alone is on death row in North Carolina. Now in his 50s, Alim Braxton has been in jail since 1993 for a double murder during a robbery. He is a changed man these days, he converted to Islam and uses music, in particular hip hop, as a form of therapy releasing an album last year, ‘Mercy on My Soul’, which is the first-ever rap album recorded on the phone from death row. I know right.
With all the lines being drawn between this and ‘UFOrb’ do not make the mistake of thinking ‘Buddhist Hipsters’ is a faint copy of past glories. The Orb have a habit of regenerating and Alex’s finger-on-the-pulse ability to stay fresh, vital and relevant over a decades-long career is no accident. It does seem daft to draw compassions with ‘UFOrb’. I mean, were are talking about a stone-cold classic. One of the greatest electronic albums of all-time. But the fact that 30-odd years down line Alex can still wow like he does on ‘Buddist Hipsters’ speaks volumes.
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GOOD STUFF #1
RURAL TAPES ‘Oneiric’ (Clay Pipe)
Frances Castles’ Clay Pipe label does it again. But then doesn’t it always? As Frances herself will admit, the label might not be prolific, but when she releases something it doesn’t half hit the target. And that’s the case again with this fourth album, and Clay Pipe debut, from Norwegian producer and multi-instrumentalist Arne Kjelsrud Mathisen.
I’ve long been a fan of Rural Tapes, I reviewed his debut self-titled offering in Electronic Sound back in 2021 saying that “from the first notes you’re in for a treat”, I called his work “rich, warm, Technicolor soundtracks” and summed up by saying “it really is delightful stuff”. Music writing doesn’t get more incisive does it?
Arne has a contemporary pastoral sound, the sort of thing that sits front and centre in Frances’ own Hardy Tree releases. Which is worth thinking about. A Norwegian making a very British kind of sound. I think he comes at pastoral like Beautify Junkyards, from Spanish Spain, come at pastoral. There is certainly that kind of quirk on show. His people describe the record as one “for the dreamers, a trippy cosmic aural experience”, which it absolutely is. Arne himself talks about how he has put together music to soundtrack dreams. “I love the way a dream can be so bizarre and yet still feel so natural, and I can relate to that otherworldliness in the way I compose and put together musical pieces.”
It’s such a listenable album, weird and woozie in places, clear and direct in others. Just like your dreams. It’s a 12-tracker that clocks in at a little over 35 minutes. I’ll wager you’ll find yourself listening to it two or three times in a row the first time you put it on. I love the intro, the squiggle tape loop-like ‘NREM’ that shudders into the breezy 60s-fuelled ‘Flower Lab’. You can hear exactly why Frances snapped this up.
‘Hypermnesia’ is excellent, a buzzing amp and an electric guitar picking out a melody over and over with a voice, which I assume is Norwegian, narrating. A shuffling drum beat arrives, there’s some brass, and the whole thing builds, strings appear, and it’s pedal to the metal for the last, very beautiful, couple of minutes.
And a track like, ‘Lingering Souls’, the penultimate track, is also typical of the sort of audio mugging that this record is capable of. I’m not the hugest fan of vocals, but the appearance of Gary Olson from The Ladybug Transistor really takes you by surprise. The track is a proper 60s twanger, the sort of thing you half expect Roy Orbison to strike up on. It starts so minimally, and builds almost behind your back. The melody is a joy, the shuffle of drums, the swell of strings, a delicate keyboard picks out a tune, by the end it has swollen right up. You’ll need to listen a few times to work out where it all comes from.
Wonderful stuff. We shouldn’t be surprised that ‘Oneiric’ is so good. It’s on Clay Pipe, a label that you should know by now does not mess about.
GOOD STUFF #2
NIGHTBUS ‘Passenger’ (Melodic)
We featured Nightbus a while back as ‘Ascension’ was our Track Of The Week. They have this great sound, it’s kind of shoegaze-y, in a Cure sort of way, full of reverbed to buggery guitars that threaten to engulf everything if you don’t keep a hold of them. But you also get so much more going on here. There’s a wealth of influences that the Manchester-ish duo of Olive Rees and Jake Cottier seem to soak up from the city’s pavements and give it back on their own terms. So you can hear ACR and Joy Division for sure. But there’s also everything from Durutti Column to K-Klass to Dislocation Dance.
The instrumental ‘Somewhere, Nowhere’, the opener on this, their debut album, has ‘A Forest’ in its bones. Likewise, previous single ‘Angles Mortz’ has a real future-retro almost synthwavey feel about it, like it could be from the ‘Drive’ soundtrack. And then something like ‘False Prophet’ soars like a house anthem, Olive’s voice showing off its full power, but Jake’s production, full of choppy hands-in-the-air chords, is notable for being up to the job, matching that voice step by step. There’s also such a groove here, I love the breakdown on previous single ‘Ascension’ where the whole track seems to pause as Olive whispered vocal holds court. You can hear an arpeggiating synthline swirling underneath and then it all just explodes.
The centrepiece is live favourite ‘Host’. It starts like Massive Attack, a simple beat, a deep bass ping. Olive’s almost spoken word vocal begins very Robert Smith-like and then suddenly soars… and as quickly as it swells it melts away, until it goes again, this time with Led Zep kind of drums and a siren. A siren! “It makes you wait, and more songs should have sirens,” offers Olive. It does, they should. From there the track almost disintegrates into guitar noise over that solid, repetitive beat.
The more I listen to this the more I like it. Keep an eye on these two, by rights they should be going places making music this good.
GOOD STUFF #3
JOE HARVEY-WHYTE & PAUL COUSINS ‘In A Fugue State’ (None More)
If you have caught “tape loop sound scientist” Paul Cousins live, and I’ve been lucky enough to see him twice, which is the exact number of times he’s played live, you will perhaps know what you’re about to get here.
As well as Paul’s incredible tape loops, live-wise he teams up with real-life musicians. It’s something that works incredibly well. His mesmerising, musical loops seem to melt seamlessly with the live brass expertly played by Vincent Curson Smith and pedal steel from supremo Joe Harvey-Whyte. And it’s Joe that he enlists here for an entire album.
I guess it’s a logical step that he should be recording with these artists, but the interesting thing is this album was recorded before the live shows. “It’s just taken a long time to finish and release,” laughs Paul. “This recording session was like the third time we’d met I think, but we have become firm friends and frequent collaborators since.”
They describe ‘In A Fugue State’ as “a warped ambient excursion into the subconscious”. The eight tracks explore “the concept of memory and time”. The album came from a two-hour improvisation session on ‘The Dream Stream’, Joe’s Soho Radio show that focuses on ambient/field recording/drone music and is designed to help those with insomnia. No one is falling asleep to this stuff though, it’s utterly captivating. That original session was “intuitively framed” and mixed down to the eight tracks that make up the album.
Of course, the pedal steel is ingrained in the mind as an essential tool when it comes to ambient music thanks to ‘Chill Out’, so we’re already primed to receive this. And of course it is utterly lovely. The thing I love about Paul’s tape loops is that he makes no attempt to hide the fact they’re loops. He uses the edit, the join, as part of the sound. So here, prominently and throughout, you can hear a jump, or a gap, as the edit passes across the tape head. It’s especially striking on opener ‘Lift’ and closer ‘Flood’. These gaps, dropouts, are like a tape slur (of which there a few here), a reminder that you are listening to a physical format, and a fallible one at that. It does make me twitch a little I have to say. The teen in me knows the beginnings of a sound that means a tape is about to get chewed. You did learn to move quite fast at that sort of cue.
Paul’s loops here are very ambient, they’re all grand swells, drones and lilts, that he plays with some skill as Joe shimmers away on his pedal steel around them. I especially like the glitchy ‘Recur’, there’s a kind of “key change” moment where everything drops down and starts again, only more gravelly, or the sparkle of ‘Recall’ that just feels shiney.
This is great stuff from an artist who is, it has to be said, something of a quiet genius.
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THE ROUND UP’S ROUND UP
While all this feels like it’s some laidback shooting the breeze about new releases, underneath it’s like a swan, or probably a duck actually, with a petrol engine. Everything is against the clock, which has always been the thrill of a weekly deadline. I rarely get through all the releases I’d like to each week so I’m going to break with tradition and see if keeping the Good Stuff recommendations down to three frees up time to rattle through a few more offerings each week. I’ll report back.
Right, start the clock. James Stevens’ ‘They Came From Beyond Space’ (Buried Treasure) is an absolute hoot of a record. Before you’ve even heard a note you kind of know what this is going to sound like, right? And it delivers! The sleevenotes by Buried Treasure chief Alan Gubby are a treat. The film that this is the soundtrack to is classic low-budget b-movie madness, “the wobbly meteorite sequence must have had Gerry Anderson’s effects team howling with laughter” writes Al, but the soundtrack is of the highest quality.
A decidedly jazz-influenced affair by British composer James Stevens, it’s a grinning joy from start to finish. Stevens isn’t perhaps a name you know. As Alan says, he was “highly regarded in serious music circles but failed to gain wider acclaim during his lifetime”. Following his death in 2012, he left a sizable body of work to the British Library where Alan found what’s believed to be the only surviving copy of this score on a fragile 1/4-inch tape. After a careful transfer by the library’s Save Our Sounds project and some painstaking restoration by Alan and Matthew Boardman, here it is for the world to hear.
Head straight for ‘3M6 The Crimson Plague’ for two-minute romp through what this composer was capable of. Oh and there’s a track called ‘Moon Music x 3’ which would be Moonbuilding’s theme tune if we had one. ‘8M2 Follow Me’ is a pretty good theme tune too. What do you think?
Martyn Ware’s Illustrious spatial sound production house project release their second long-player of the year, ‘Mesmerine 111™’ via the excellent Cold Spring. Illustrious is Martyn and Charles Stooke, his rather talented in-house composer, and this is a 3D soundscape based on/inspired by the frequency 111Hz. It is apparently the point at which the brain switches off the “prefrontal cortex… inducing a state of meditation or a trance”. The title plays on the use of sound as pharmacology and offers up two 50-minute doses that are “long enough to induce a true trance-like state”. “Safe when used as directed,” say the notes. “Recommended optimal dosage: 30-60 minutes at <70dB, delivered by Illustrious Labs 3D AudioScape system or binaural through your own headphones”. If you give it a go, do let us know what happens?
Good to see no one is wasting time on titles or names for this release. TUFT ZONGS ‘TUFT ZONGS’ (TUFT ZONGS) is all very easy to remember, if not a little shouty. All the energy has clearly gone into the tunes, which are something of a treat. TUFT ZONGS is the new alias of NOCHEXXX’s Dave Henson so you should be aware of the ballpark we’re in here. This new outlet came about as Dave “needed space for my electronic dubbisms”. Very nice they are too. It seems fitting that this has popped up the same week that the new album by The Orb is our Album Of The Week. It has that sort of vibe, with wonks on. I love ‘Crown Princess (Watermark Dub)’, which feels like something that’s coming at you from both the past and the future. It’s a real bag of tricks, a mish-mash of all sorts. Dubby techno-ish acid-y house anyone?
White Noise Sound are one of those acts you either know about or you don’t. If you know about them you’re going to be pretty excited about what I’m going to tell you. If you don’t know about them, well. So White Noise Sound hail from the mountains of South Wales, or Swansea if you prefer. They make this krauty/psychey/shoegazey sound, think Spiritualized’s little brother, scuffed knees, a mop of hair and a 303 under his arm. There’s two albums, the one people get very hot under the collar about is 2010’s self titled debut outing on California’s Alive Records label. It was reissued recently by the excellent Rocket Girl label (now there is a label that needs more love, long running, influential, fully DIY, all hail). Here, in what is described as “the second transmission in the triptych of releases” from the label, we have ‘Fold-In Time (WNS1 Remixed)’ a reimagined version of that debut album with remixes from Sonic Boom (natch) and Super Furry/Das Kolies’ Cian Ciaran, who both found themselves involved with the band’s albums. Most interestingly there’s remixes from Phil Kieran, Sean Johnson and Timothy J Fairplay who were all part of Andrew Weatherall’s gang at his Scrutton Street studio. There’s some cracking stuff here needless to say.
The third part of the Cars From The Future project from Andrew Spackman and Richard Davies undertakes another “wild drive through an electronic landscape infused with jazz melody”. ‘Cars From The Future 3’ (Irregular Patterns) sees Andrew’s beats and electronics merge with Richard’s sax melodies. It’s clearly a day for cross-pollination following the Paul Cousins album earlier. There is always something about people working electronics and live instrumentation that seems incredibly forward facing, like it’s a challenge. It always works incredibly well I think, this is no exception.
Really been enjoying Will Sōderberg’s ‘let the machines sing... [2] of desire to salvage’ (Machine). Will has been releasing work since the mid-80s and has a substantial catalogue of experimental electronic outings if you fancy doing some exploring. This offering is inspired by an 80s industrial noise outfit called Hunting Lodge who hailed from Will’s hometown of Port Huron, Michigan. They’re an interesting bunch, read more about them here… anyway, they used to talk about how they would “let the machines sing”. “I liked the phrase,” says Will, “and thought I would like to do something with that idea in mind. I made a bunch of recordings and tried to cull the ones that seemed to speak. And tried not to interfere with anything good that was happening.” There’s some great stuff here. I especially like the sweeping drone of ‘solenoid’ and the rather funky ‘élhórrend sphinctr’. As always with Machine releases there’s an excellent interview with the artist over at the Bandcamp page. Will talks about his jounrey into sound starting with a Say It! Play It! looping tape recorder as a Christmas gift. My word, check that out here…
Looks to me like I’ve been neglecting Kate Carr’s excellent Flaming Pines label of late. There’s quite a few releases on their Bandcamp that have safely sailed on by. I am sorry. Very amiss. On my listening pile now there’s Mark Vernon’s spoken word ‘Magneto Mori: Brussels’, where speakers tell fragments of stories and they’re presented mangled by all sorts and ‘Cassette Album’, a tape score compilation featuring sonic responses to work by Salomé Voegelin, an actual Professor of Sound. But today though is Quartz Sand’s ‘Stratigraphy’, which is two long pieces by Kate Carr and Cath Roberts. “A churn of electronic noise is flung into dialogue with the smeared and manipulated bleats of a seagull horn” say the notes. The pair it seems are jiggering with time itself, there’s chimes, jangles and squeals, as well as loops, backwards noises, resonanace and feedback. As always, interesting work from Flaming Pines.
MOONBUILDING ISSUE 6 … OUT NOW
STOP PRESS: DOWN TO OUR LAST 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
FFS Neil, how many rabbit holes can you take me down in one week!? DIMITRI to BUG via Do It Thissen Records and back to The Orb and Rural Tapes and I'm only halfway down the page!!! Thanks. I think!! Brilliant episode! And OMG the original of Sunset by White Noise Sound!!!!