Issue 86 / 31 October 2025
Your fright night DIY electronic music lowdown: Track Of The Week: James Adrian Brown + Album Of The Week: Maps + Hilary Woods + Dressel Amorosi + Bird Battles + more...
Did I mention I was going to The Cabs show in Sheffield last weekend? What a night it was, they were quite good. All the pre-match chatter was what were they going to play? Chris Watson and Mal, two thirds of the classic line-up, hadn’t been on a stage together for nearly 45 years and Chris left the band in 1981 after ‘Red Mecca’, so would the set be all early work that he had a hand in? Or would it be more bigger picture? And if so, how far into the catalogue would they venture? Turns out it was the latter. The cornerstone of the set was ‘The Crackdown’ album from 1983, but we ran from ‘The Set Up’ taken from 1978’s ‘Extended Play EP’ to ‘Easy Life’ from 1990’s ‘Groovy, Laidback And Nasty’, which spookily I speculated was as far as they’d go.
Talking of spooky, it is of course Halloween and today’s newsletter has as spine-chilling releases theme. If you released a record today and it wasn’t a bit on the frighty side, A) whatever were you thinking? and B) I’ll probably cover those next week.
As always, so much good music awaits.
Neil Mason, editor
moonbuildingmag@gmail.com
Issue 86 Playlist: Listen
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JAMES ADRIAN BROWN ‘Generator’ (Castles In Space)
Bloody hell, feels like we’ve been waiting a while for this news to land. ‘Generator’ is the first fruit from ‘Forever Neon Lights’, the long-awaited debut album proper from James Adrian Brown, which arrives via Castles In Space on 30 January. Gawd, are we talking about 2026 already? Best get the 2025 Album Of The Year list moving eh?
The pre-cursor to this release was the excellent ‘Terra Incognita’ from last summer, which was originally intended to be James’ debut album. At six tracks though it was too long for an EP, not really long enough for an LP. Described by his people as an “electronic odyssey delving into Brown’s psyche during a challenging period”, it seems his fug lifted during the making of the record and the collection of tracks felt like a fully realised piece of work as-was. “It just felt artificial to force additional pieces to complete a full record,” James said at the time. And so that was that. A six-tracker, a brilliant one, but one that fell between the single/album stools.
There was also another moving on. A live session recorded at the end of November 2024 for KPISSFM saw him arrive into 2025 with a clean slate. He saw the session as an opportunity to play the live set he’d been working with since 2023 for the last time. “It felt like a nice idea to release the live session I recorded, that way it’s gone, but not forgotten… a parting souvenir.”
Those palette cleansers have cleared the way nicely for the what next. The album has had quite an airing at Moonbuilding HQ this week. Happy to report it is a corker, and like the Maps release (see Album Of The Week) it’s a record that builds to total boiling point. There’s an incredible track called ‘Up In The Nest’, which is the apex of the release, and it is going tear places apart live. For now there’s this first single ‘Generator’, which will give you a good of what to expect from the record as whole – there’s a dark, resonant beauty at work, it’s melodic and squally, but it feels like it radiates good vibrations.
The album is inspired by James’ formative memories of visiting the Blackpool Illuminations as a child, which he came to see as a “personal symbol of hope, possibility, and escapism”. “’Generator’, he says, “is about creating your own momentum and powering through life’s challenges. Just as the illuminations need a generator to shine, we all have to find and build our own energy source to keep moving forward. For me, it’s about resilience, staying true to your dreams, and making them real.”
He might have a point about the illuminations. You know that both the late great Dave Ball and Chris Lowe hail from Blackpool. Much more about the album nearer the time, meanwhile, there’s a bunch of remixes of the single from Warrington-Runcorn, Field Lines Cartographer, James Welsh and a return to service from the Werra Foxma boy that should keep you going for a bit. The remixes won’t be available on streaming services, CD only for those. Chop chop.
MAPS ‘Welcome To The Tudor Gate’ (Mute)
Maps’ James Chapman is a man who seems to go about his business with the minimum of fuss while producing maximal musical excellence. After all, you don’t get signed to Mute for no reason. There is so much fine work in his back catalogue that it’s a question of where to start really. If you need pointers, I’d go for his 2016 collaboration with Polly Scattergood, On Dead Waves. You can pick up any of the full-blown Maps albums, but 2019’s ‘Colour. Reflect. Time. Loss.’ Is especially good. There’s a lovely piece he did for Mat Smith’s Mortality Tables label last year as part of their Lifefiles series. Called ‘A 4’33’’ Walk To Woburn Sands Station’, it is every bit as good as you’d image a track that knowingly nods at John Cage should be. There’s a remix he did for Moonbuilding fave Seagoth of a track called ‘Methuselah’ that you’ll find on her Bytes-released ‘How To Stay Awake’ album that is rather worthy of the ear time. I mean, anything with his name on really, but that little lot should keep you quiet for a while.
‘Welcome To The Tudor Gate’, Maps’ sixth long-player by my reckoning, is a soundtrack James made to a half-remembered film. You may recall that the lead track, ‘Chapter One’, was our Track Of The Week back in the summer. The film in question was a horror flick he watched late one night and forgot about until years later when scenes started to pop back into his head. Despite his best efforts, he was never able to work out what the mysterious film was so he set about making a soundtrack to try and sate the gaps in his recollection.
“The ‘Tudor Gate’ of the title was originally envisaged to be a ‘community’ or ‘cult’, influenced by films like ‘Blood On Satan’s Claw’ and ‘The Wicker Man’,” he explains in the release notes. “The music itself is influenced by 60s and 70s horror soundtracks to films by Dario Argento and John Carpenter, but also to writers like HP Lovecraft and the world of ‘weird fiction’.”
And it’s not only a lost film soundtrack, much favoured round these parts, but a lost, lost film soundtrack. It seem James recorded it back in 2014 and the tapes have laid undiscovered until now.
Over eight pieces, or “Chapters”, it runs a little shy of 40 minutes (perfect length, one side of a C90, right?) and is intended to be listened to as one long piece that follows the film’s hero from “the ominous start to the journey, which will eventually end with a triumphant return, before disappearing into the night”.
Boy, it doesn’t half work when you listen to the whole thing in one go. You’ll see what I mean when you hear it. It starts with the woozy ‘Chapter One’ that slow, surely builds to a crescendo with ‘Chapter Two’. It feels quite krauty, there’s a locked-down groove that hypnotises you as it swishes and swirls as it expands and contracts before your very ears and, as it morphs into ‘Chapter Two’, it ups the tempo and climbs the scales as it reaches its conclusion. At six and eight minutes, that’s a near 15-minute opening shot. Phew-wee.
I love how ‘Chapter Two’ first speeds up and then slows like a music box winding down and before you know it you’re into ‘Chapter Three’ which sounds like those wonderful lulls Faithless were so good at early doors but stretched right out, expanded and worked hard. There’s an orchestral thrum to it, a pulse, a ripple of something almost sinister that seems to billow like smoke.
I’ve said before that this sounds more like something you’d expect to find at home on the Library Of The Occult label. While it is Maps-y, it is a different sound for James. There’s an edge of dark menace to it and indeed he has talked about how it’s influenced by 60s/70s horror soundtracks by the likes of Dario Argento and John Carpenter. You can hear where he’s coming from. If you know Argento’s 70s classic ‘Suspira’, this work has echoes of that, or maybe ‘Inferno’, the repetition, the way the tracks build, the feeling of doom, or menace, or both. Carpenter-wise, take your pick really, but ‘The Thing’ or, in places the sheer drama of ‘Halloween’ is evident here. Something like the very 80s sounding ‘Chapter Three’ could come straight off a Carpenter soundtrack.
The album as whole, as a listen from start to finish, is compelling. More often than not I find myself getting completely caught up in it. You really get lost in it all, the great flurries of sound, the swirls and ebbs and flows, the what’s coming next. It feels like watching a gripping tale, only in sound. Which is no mean feat. You even get a little 30-second interlude in ‘Chapter Five’ to give you a breather.
‘Chapter Seven’ is the “triumphant return” and perhaps the centrepiece of this whole shebang. It’s a proper steamer, rolling to the boil over six-odd minutes, building and building and building. It is something of a shoegazy belter. It repeats over and over, adding layer upon layer upon layer until it’s huge, a vast tower of sound. It has that major chord euphoria, proper feel-good stuff. It absolutely soars. And then, suddenly, it doesn’t. It stops, shimmers out of view, like it’s caught on the breeze, like it’s slipping through your fingers, floating, flittering away as it morphs into closer ‘Chapter Eight’, which is a searing finale, a bubbling cauldron into which James throws everything he’s got.
“I set out to create a mysterious, strange and uneasy soundtrack, with a nod to the fantastical,” he says in the release notes. “I imagined a protagonist venturing into a foreboding land of immense forests, filled with mysterious beings – where magic is real, and witchcraft is feared.”
He has done that, absolutely. Halloween is it? This is a proper spooker. Back where we came in, when I was saying about James making a minimum of fuss, he often seems to be operating under the radar when we should be cheering on what is clearly a very large talent.
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GOOD STUFF #1
HILARY WOODS ‘Night CRIU’ (Sacred Bones)
Hilary Woods, as I’m sure I’ve mentioned before and I’m also pretty sure she wishes people would stop mentioning, was the teenage bass player in early 00s outfit JJ72. I only mention it for context. I was at NME at the time and we were big fans of the Dublin-based band. I’ve always found that people who were in good bands don’t tend to go on to make bad music. And, even if it has taken her a while, Hilary does not fly in the face of that particular truism.
I’ve talked before about the live sessions we used to do at NME.COM. It was nothing swish, just a camera and a band doing a short, acoustic set. Properly live. We were huge fans of I Am Kloot and they played for us in the basement bar of our local, The Brunswick Arms. The Brunswick was actually The Melody Maker pub, but I carried on going there when I moved to NME. Old habits and all that. It also happened to be home of the local freemason lodge. I was never invited to join despite spending a fortune in the pub and being called Mason. Anyway.
The reason I mention JJ72 in relation to Hilary is the musical swerve she’s made from there to here is considerable. And very pleasing. Lurking inside her all that time was a dark, left field songstrell. It’s been a slow burn from her debut solo EP, ‘Night’ in 2014 to this, her fifth full-length, but it’s been one heck of a journey if you’ve been following along. Particularly affecting is her second album, ‘Birthmarks’, which was recorded while she was heavily pregnant in the winter of 2019. It is such a powerful piece of work, “its eight songs traverse planes of visceral physicality, stark tender space, and breathtaking introspective beauty”, which they do. The cover stays with you. It’s an image of her naked, pregnant body covered in earth, like she’s lost and trying to dig her way out of the woods, no pun intended, but then maybe… it is such a visceral piece of work both aurally and visually.
Her latest outing ‘Night CRIU’ is her best yet. Which is how you want an artist to be, moving forwards and improving with every release. Unlike 2021’s ‘Feral Hymns’ and 2023’s ‘Acts Of Light’, which were experimental in nature, this latest outing sees her dealing in songs, delicious melodies with singing and everything. The album also features a children’s choir and a brass band. All of which is catnip to my ears. The whole thing is great, it has the charm and sophistication of peak Talk Talk, not in sound especially, but in spirit. ‘Faults’ is utterly glorious, especially when the brass band (The Brighton-based Hangleton Brass Band) strikes up. I’ve said it 100 times, but the combo of brass and electronics are something pretty special. I think ‘Taper’ might be my favourite track, it has a tang of ‘A Horse With No Name’, a clip clop beat that stops you in your tracks when the children’s choir opens up.
The whole record is like this, such a heady brew packed full of tension and emotion and such beauty in the songs. In the notes there’s a whole list of the many influences the record was “inspired and energized by” including “a personal history of attending parades… the joy in dance… the immediacy of sound… the present collective standing up for what it means to be human in the face of tyranny and oppression”. I mean this is how you want your artists, right? Thinky, well-rounded, curious, skilled, quite angry and making records like this as a result. This is wonderful stuff.
sacredbonesrecords.bandcamp.com
GOOD STUFF #2
DRESSEL AMOROSI ‘House Of Dolls’ (Library Of The Occult)
As you might have noticed, it is Halloween today and we hope that our recommendations here reflect that. It’s certainly no accident that these records are being released on all-hallows eve. We’ve mentioned Tom McDowell’s excellent LOTO once today in our Maps Album Of The Week review, which is only right and proper. They are the label this day was made for. Probably the other way round, but you know.
So when a label like LOTO chooses to release something on fright night, you know they’re not going to be messing around. Dressel Amorosi are Italian duo of Valerio Lombardozzi (also known as Heinrich Dressel) on keys, synth and programming, and Federico Amorosi on bass. To give you an idea of what to expect here, I was catching up with their debut album, 2018’s ‘DeathMetha’, and the influence list attached to that is like a red rag to a bull – John Carpenter, Goblin, Fabio Frizzi, the Canterbury scene and Tangerine Dream. Yup. It originally came out on the Giallo Disco label in 2018 and was reissued on cassette by Spun Out Of Control in 2021, so they should be familiar to you in name if not in your ears. But you do need to get them in your ears.
I make this their third album and it follows sophomore offering ‘Spectrum’ from 2023. Tom from LOTO told me it “sounds like it was pulled right off a VHS copy of an Argento movie”. A second mention for Dario Argento this week then, things are going spookily well eh? We’re certainly hitting all the right markers considering the occassion.
You’ll have noticed that Federico is credited as the bass player and a very nifty one he is too. This whole thing rumbles with his work. Bright, intricate 80s style playing ahoy. The opener ‘Radio Metha’ sets the scene nicely. A gentle voiceover introduces the House Of Dolls, a place located up in the mountains in small town in central Italy where a group of kids would spend the summer away from the heat of Rome. “The gate was mysteriously decorated with dolls, dirty, half broken… sometimes screaming could be heard coming from inside the house… they never walked through the gates except that very night…”. Brrrrrr. The tune builds slowly, a synth apreggiating away, the bassline bright, and off it kicks, a bright beat arriving and the bassline dancing all over it. You can see the long tracking shot up the mountain road to the house that this music accompanies. ‘Escape’ has a great, frantic bassline, not unlike Flora Purim’s 1976 version of Chick Corea’s ‘Open Your Eyes You Can Fly’, which you will probably know as the bassline sampled in Bomb The Bass’ ‘Bug Powder Dust’. ‘Woodland Whisper’ has a little something of the ‘Tubular Bells’ about, a none more Halloween-y tune thanks to ‘The Exorcist’, while the soundscape-y ‘Until That Night’ that turns into a tense thriller soundtrack is a real highlight, properly scary. Oh and ‘House Of Dolls’ comes, of course, on deep red vinyl. Great stuff.
libraryoftheoccult.bandcamp.com
GOOD STUFF #3
BIRD BATTLES ‘Into The Unknown Twilight’ (Sleep In The Fire)
Goodness me, Bird Battles ‘Into The Unknown Twilight’ is such a whisper of a record. It’s almost not there, and yet the way it holds you in its thrall is magical. It is the work of Scottish composer Euan Alexander Millar-McMeeke and US-based multidisciplinary artist Jesse Narens and it is a proper curio. We’ve featured Euan before when he released his debut solo outing ‘All Weather Of The Human Heart’ back in June, which was just as lovely as this, just as enigmatic too. He came my way via Alex Gold of quiet details, which was an excellent tip, thanks Alex.
Like that debut solo album, the thing about ‘Into The Unknown Twilight’ isn’t that it’s almost not there, it’s that it sounds like that. It is very much there. The opening track, ‘Moth River’ spreads itself thin over seven, fragile minutes. It’s all quiet, quiet, quiet. A delicate tune, like butterfly wings flexing, it is topped by Euan’s voice that is so frail you’d need tweezers to pick it up. But don’t get lulled into a false sense of security by this record. Some five-odd minutes in to this first track an electric guitar buzzes to life, all interference, all overload. But not like say Dinosaur Jr, this is very much noise on Bird Battles’ own terms. Quiet noise if you will. So that guitar is there, squally, in the background, but not dominating. And then it turns off. Totally gone.
But like I say, don’t get lulled. The title track comes at you like a rasping Massive Attack thrum, a dark wall of electricity, while something like ‘Act Of Distress’ floats in gently on the breeze, like smoke, but it’s followed by the deep sinisterisms of ‘oVo’, a really unsettling outing that sits as the record’s centrepiece with guest vocals from Vanessa Farinha.
“Bird Battles,” say the accompanying notes, “invites listeners to step into a world where silence is just as vital as sound – and where the unknown becomes a space of creative revelation.” It does, it is. What isn’t there is almost a spooky as what is.
sleepinthefirerecords.bandcamp.com
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THE ROUND UP’S ROUND UP
It’s hard to ignore the new reissue of Soft Cell ‘The Art Of Falling Apart’ (Universal). That it comes just a week after the death of the band’s Dave Ball makes it all the more poignant. Their back catalogue beyond their debut often gets overlooked and it really shouldn’t. I always like that ‘Falling Apart’ wasn’t the album that saw them actually falling apart, that was the record that came next. This album was the equal, if not the better, of that epic debut. Here it comes in super-deluxe 6CD boxset, double LP and double CD varients. Across the various formats there’s a remaster of the original album, an instrumental version, a bunch of remixes, extended version and demos, live rarities, and so on. In total it offers up a “whopping” 35 unreleased tracks (the whopping there is the label’s word, that’s a proper writer’s word). The advance digital promo clocks in at 90 tracks! 90. At the time of release, 1983, the pressure was on the duo to match their debut success and they really delivered. ‘Falling Apart’ features epics like ‘Numbers’, ‘Where The Heart Is’ and ‘Loving You, Hating Me’ and fan faves like ‘Kitchen Sink Drama’ and ‘Martin’. Fittingly, it’s the album that Dave Ball thought was their best. You’d be hard pushed to disagree. Where ‘Non-Stop Exotic Cabaret’ is undoubtedly a classic, it was more a collection of hits than a complete album. Fine lines for sure, but ‘Falling Apart’ is Soft Cell at their dramatic best. It works so well as a listen from start to finish. The strings on ‘Kitchen Sink Drama’, the thrill of ‘Numbers’, the sheer beauty of Marc’s voice and Dave musically stretching out on the brilliant ‘Loving You’. I mean, you don’t need me to tell you just how great Soft Cell are. Last week’s news of Dave’s untimely death was a tough one. These two changed lives with this music. This is the first time I’ve listened to Soft Cell since Dave went. Good grief, what a legacy. softcell.co.uk
Our great friends at Cold Spring are well known for their second-to-none reissue programme, so when they stick their neck out and release a new album you’d be wise to listen. Chimehours’ ‘Underneath The Earth’ is the debut album from the duo of Beck Goldsmith and Jon Dix who brought the record together between London, Margate and Derbyshire. It’s a very Cold Spring sort of release. It has that dark ambient edge of many of the label’s rereleases, but it also gathers up “folk-horror, ghost stories, retro cinema and British landscape lore”. They come with a rather neat line of influences – Liz Fraser, Broadcast, Beth Gibbons, Bibio and the late great Johann Johannsson. It reminds me of Rebecca Denniff and David Owen’s On Bonfire Hill project. Something like ‘Greentree’ has flecks of ‘Tubular Bells’ about it. It’s proper Halloween album is this. Get a speaker out the window with this on tonight and scare the bejesus out of the trick or treaters. Fine stuff from these two and Cold Spring.
And talking of ambient, Forest Dweller’s ‘Forever Elusive’ landed in the inbox recently and it’s been spinning at Moonbuilding HQ several times this week. It’s really lovely, but there is more to it than meets the ear. The work of Julien Demoulin, who is based in Brussels, Belgium (as opposed to Brussels anywhere else!), it has this deep bass thrum throughout that gives it an intiguing edge. It’s another one of those like Bird Battles where “the silence between the sounds is as important as what you hear”. What’s really interesting though is the track titles and artwork are all inspired by the famous 1967 Patterson–Gimlin bigfoot film. You know the one. The line in the notes that says “the woods at dusk, slowly revealing their mysterious, magical powers” really does take on a fresh meaning when you are equipped with this information. I very much like how Julien has chucked a proper curveball into his musical equation. Once you know this information you will be thinking about this record quite a lot. I know I have been.
As I mentioned earlier, I’m trying hard to keep this week’s listening pleasures on the Halloween-y side of things. It’s tricky though, you wouldn’t believe how many releases, coming out today, aren’t spooky at all. I know, right. Come on people, play along.
That said, there’s a double bill coming out of the Okla label in Kraków, Poland, that I liked very much, but needed to suspend my believe a little to be able to inlcude them here. I mean they are both spooky, in their own way, especially Tomáš Šenkyřík & Pavel Zlámal ‘306’, which is really starting to play on my mind. Last year, in the beautiful Besední House in Brno in the Czech Republic, musicians from leading Czech ensembles and symphony orchestras gathered on the stage. They sat quietly, with their instruments, for an hour and half and not a single note was played. “Soft sounds spread like fog through the hall and fed the rich acoustics of the environment, creating spontaneous polyrhythms… the quiet moments allowed for outside sounds to bleed into the old concert hall where, gradually, the non-performing Philharmonic players merged with the audience”. The event was organised by experimental saxophonist and composer Pavel Zlámal and recorded by the leading field documentarian Tomáš Šenkyřík. But it’s not just a pure recording. Tomáš treated the sounds with guitar effects, granular synth and an old reel-to-reel, eventually returning to the venue and filling it with to fill it with Pavel’s saxophone playing. It is quite a piece of work. Halloween-y even, if you want it to be.
The second offering in the Okla double-bill is from Phexioenesystems, who I think you will be familiar with. ‘Empty Space Symbols’ has a very similar vibe to ‘306’ only much cleaner, purer. Dominic Thurgood calls what he makes in his audio practice “sounds gardens”, they’re an assortment of moments “as if caught existing spontaneously by themselves”. We’ve talked here about his work before. While abstract, it is incredibly warm, the sounds come at you like bubbles arriving from underwater, breaking the surface with a sort of glee. “Like looking at an old photograph when dreaming,” say the notes, “the flow of sonic vapour is at the same time familiar and new, again and again”. You’re not going to hear the milkman whistling this work, but it is captivating all the same. It would scare the shite out of the trick or treaters on the speaker hanging out the window that is for sure. The lovely thing about Okla is that they batch up their recordings. These two are Batch 6, both albums on cassette for €15. What is not to like.
MOONBUILDING ISSUE 6 … SOLD OUT
Holy cow. MOONBUILDING Issue 6 is totally sold out, so it isn’t available from moonbuilding.bandcamp.com Sure someone will try cash in via Discogs soon.
Let’s look at what you missed, although it is still available digitally of course. 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 my little magazine.
Find us at moonbuilding.bandcamp.com. This issue had a short print run and is now sold out. If you hung about, you missed out. We are sorry.
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