Issue 88 / 14 November 2025
Your essential DIY electronic music lowdown: Track Of The Week: Andrew Wasylyk + Album Of The Week: Field Lines Cartographer + Antoni Maiovvi + Trevlad + Sister Ray Davies + a real nun! + more...
Friday does seem to come round almightily fast. Soon be Christmas eh? Pleased to say that I got the Moonbuilding Album Of The Year list(s) up and running this week. I spent my formative years pouring over the music press end of year lists and much of my adult life submitting or compiling them. Even though they’re ingrained in my very being, I still sleep slightly easier knowing I’ve got them underway.
I’ve been meaning to say this for a bit, but Issue 6 of our sister mag is now officially sold out. Which is good news, but not if you planned on a buying a copy. Thanks to everyone who helped get us over the line. They’ll be another issue next year. Don’t ask when, it’ll be before Xmas. Probably.
Neil Mason, editor
moonbuildingmag@gmail.com
Issue 88 Playlist: Listen
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ANDREW WASYLYK ‘First Moonbeams Of Adulthood’ (Clay Pipe)
Video: Tommy Perman
Only last weekend Andrew Wasylyk and Tommy Perman played a final live show to mark the end of their ‘Ash Grey And The Gull Glides On’ project, and here we are already with fresh fruit from Andrew. ‘First Moonbeams Of Adulthood’ is the first single from his new as-yet-untitled album due on Clay Pipe in the Spring. I mean, it probably does have a title, but if it does he’s staying tight lipped.
Andrew gets better and better with each release, so news of a new record is exciting stuff. His last solo album, 2022’s ‘Hearing The Water Before Seeing The Falls’ also on Clay Pipe, was his finest moment yet. From the sounds of this first offering, the aforementioned album with Tommy Perman has only added to the pot. That record saw a meeting of Tommy’s almost Balearic beats with Andrew’s melodic sensibility and you can hear that influence shining through here.
Like ‘Ash Grey’, there’s beats here too, with the groove described as “Cymande-like”. There’s a sweet guitar lick at the start that the notes call “ECM-worthy”. Both those influences are notably 1970s-tinged and the track simmers with mellow British funk meets future-facing jazz. Chuck in washes of strings, plenty of brass and a soaring soprano sax and it bodes very well for the album. Can’t wait.
It’s also worth noting that Andrew will be on tour from 3 March, stopping off at Stirling, Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Dundee and then swooping down into England for shows in Leeds, Birmingham, Bristol, London and Newcastle.
Full tour details and tickets are available here. See you down the front.
FIELD LINES CARTOGRAPHER ‘Apeiron Anxiety’ (Castles In Space)
Let’s talk about primal chaos shall we? According to Greek philosopher Anaximander, who did his thinking in the 6th century BC, “apeiron” is key to his cosmological theory. “It is the limitless, undefinable everything from which all is created and the essential form back to which all will ultimately return,” explains the notes that come with ‘Apeiron Anxiety’, the second long-player of the year from Mark Burford’s Field Lines Cartographer and his first on CiS since 2023’s Buchla opus, ‘Phases Of This And Other Moons’.
“Apeiron constantly and infinitely creates the building blocks of everything,” continues the head-frying notes, “including all states of opposition such as heat and cold, dry and wet, only to then destroy and remake it all anew in a boundless, eternal cycle.” If that doesn’t blow minds enough, apeiron is generally understood as a sort of “primal chaos”. In Greek mythology, Chaos was the primordial void that existed in the nothingness from which the universe was created and apeiron is the substratum that supported the elements that allowed the universe to exist. I know right.
As usual then, we find FLC dealing with life’s trifling matters.
“It seems that humanity in the 21st century is living in a type of apeiron with our social, political, technological and economic structures,” offers Mark. “One crisis is seemingly resolved only to be replaced with another. We seem to be living in a permanent state of uncertainty and flux. We live in a state of perpetual confusion, the ebb and flow of humanity’s own apeiron.”
We do indeed seem to be doing exactly that and so Mark takes us on a journey through apeiron, of any kind, from emergence to dissolution. The opener, ‘Uncollapsing’ is ripe FLC. Nine minutes long, it twinkles like new stars being born, it shimmers and sparkles as it ushers forth new life. It does that FLC thing where Mark builds and builds sound to bursting point and then holds it right there, right on the edge, before letting it dissipate. Magnificent stuff.
There is this other level to Mark’s music that I’ve only recently started to appreciate. There’s a bunch of stuff tucked away that catch you when you’re not fully focused, when you’re letting your mind drift a little. Like on this opening track, there’s a deep rumble of a bassline, melodic and tuneful, that
‘A Summoning’ is more tense. And longer, 11 minutes this time. It’s like an avant-garde spy film theme, all rhymical and pulsing. It kind of twangs with menace as it builds. And what menace. I love the rasping, almost siren-like call as it fades over a couple of minutes. ‘The Wave That Breaks Us’ gets back to brighter territory, although the title would suggest otherwise. As I let myself drift, a beat caught my ears in here. A gentle distant thud-thud-thud, like a heartbeat. And yes, I rewound and I’m not just hearing things.
Back in full focus mode and you have to say that the sounds FLC wrangles from his machines are a real joy. There’s all sorts here – pulsing thrums, rasping basslines, bright tinkles, warm waves, engulfing washes. ‘Information Alchemy’ is deliciously tuneful, which seems like a strange thing to say. There are melodies in this work, just not like The Beatles used to do. This track though feels like Mark is making pop music in a way only he knows how. At a little under four minutes too, this is the single! Closer ‘Dying Embers’, with its huge, mournful sweeps, feels pretty Vangelis-y to me. Again, the sounds. The sounds! You don’t get this with our six-stringed friends do you?
Vast ideas and immaculate execution, you’d expect nothing less from Field Lines Cartographer. Nice one.
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GOOD STUFF #1
ANTONI MAIOVVI ‘Deathgames’ (Spun Out Of Control)
Going a week early with this one, hope you don’t mind. These things tend to sell out chop chop. I never know whether to write about releases when they go up on pre-order or when they’re actually released. I tend to favour covering stuff that is actually out so you can put your hands on it straight away, but some of the physical products are so good they’re long gone by the time the release date comes round. Sold out releases can only be a good thing, but you do need your wits about you to get onboard.
So anyway, this ripper from Connecticut-based “giallo disco maestro” Antoni Maiovvi is shipping next week. Antoni hasn’t been seen on Spun Out Of Control for a while, 2019’s ‘Where Dreams Go To Die’ to be precise, so this a long overdue and very welcome return. And those cassette variants are tempting – “Screaming Skull” Bone or “Big Apple Bloodbath” Red?
And of course there’s the scene setting. The story goes that after the flop of ‘The Great Tower’, “soon to be legendary” film director Mikkel Mannheimer needed a hit and he found it in the “cult horror classic ‘Deathgames’. Set in the sleaze of 1980s New York, it follows “savant ex-profiler turned true crime writer” Gil Wrexham who gets in too deep on an active case, so deep in fact that the killer is making sure all the clues point to Gil.
Antoni’s work always wows and here he tips beyond pure soundtrack with the inclusion of a full-blown song, ‘Colours Of Night’. I always liked a soundtrack that mixed songs and instrumentals, especially when you discovered the songs were integral to the film. This one sounds like a long-lost Depeche Mode dark period cut, something that would sit on ‘Violator’, and you can hear it playing out over a backdrop of a NYC grindhouse flick.
There’s some epically excellent work here. ‘Slashdance NYC’ is a mesmerising, uptempo swirler, ‘The Abandoned Hotel’ a menacing synthwave street creeper, ‘A New Day’ a soaring wall of synths and ‘Blood Rites’ also picks up on the Depeche-like feel, showboating that dark melodic 80s sound, which is perfect for following a deranged killer down 42nd Street in the dark.
This is classic stuff from one of my very favourite cassette labels, it’s also a pairing I think we’d all like to see more of.
GOOD STUFF #2
VARIOUS ARTISTS ‘Murmurs In The Mist’ (Trevlad Sounds)
You will most likely know the name Trevlad, but you might not know the extent of his work. I have to admit I didn’t. His main calling card is mixtapes. Trev was “one of those kids” at school who made mixtapes of music no one else had heard of. That was me and my old pals Cuz and Tudds. We were Peel-listening, tape making, music press-obsessed, gig-going, indie record shop loiterers. Going right back to his roots in Ireland, it’s something Trev’s kept up over the years via online mixes and podcasts and a couple of years back he returned to his mixtape roots with the Virtual Cassette Library, which is up to 142 episodes as of this week. Each episode has a title drawn from the What3Words geographical location stamps. The latest is ‘///patch.adults.pebble’. Trev makes tapes to listen to on his daily walks around the Stockholm area where he lives these days. He makes two 45 minute mixes, you know, C90 length, so he knows that at the end of the first side he needs to turn for home. This is the stuff, right?
The titles come from locations he comes across on his walks. He films these places and uploads the videos to YouTube. He also makes soundscapes that appear in the mixes and every 16 episodes he’ll collect them together for release on Bandcamp as Trev’s Virtual Cassette Library compilations. He’s currently up to Volume Seven there.
On top of all that, there’s Expansive Waves, a radio show he hosts dedicated to tracks longer than 12 minutes, and Modal Pact, a subscriber-only DJ mix of the more banging side of his tastes. While the mixtapes are very regular, there’s no schedule for the shows. “I want to keep them like that kid who just randomly pushed a cassette tape into your life back in the day,” Trev tells me. Just to push the regularity, there’s a new mix since I looked yesterday! ‘Ambient Cowbell’. I hope that’s what I think it is. You like this man, don’t you?
Gets better. He says despite the relative obscurity of his fine work (I know that feeling), he gets a lot of artists and labels sending upcoming releases and some even send exclusives just for the tapes. What if he did a compilation album he thought. He could collect together some of the best tracks to arrive in his inbox and maybe it would give the artists an opportunity to be heard on a different platform. You never know. So here we have the first volume of ‘Murmurs In The Mist’, a whooping 45-track compile that is right up the Moonbuilding street. There’s many names here you’ll know – Scholars Of The Peak, The Twelve Hour Foundation, The Music Liberation Front Sweden (hello Michael!), Audio Obscura, Moray Newlands, Ogle, Fragile X, autumna and so on, but as you’d hope there’s also plenty new to discover too.
There’s some lovely work from Sons Of Faust whose ‘Better Days (Orchestral Mix)’ is a delight and exactly what it says on the tin, the slow unravel of The Music Liberation Front Sweden’s ‘Murder In The Mist’ is a showstopper, while Daniel Vincent’s ‘The Mountain’ is an eight-minute gem of warm drones and murky spoken word.
Names new to me include rikardfvs, whose slow-mo nu-rave of ‘le brouillard’ is really excellent. That whistle! Belial Pelegrim’s nine-minute stalker ‘YHVH’ is ripe soundtracky stuff and Zazie Productions’ intriguingly titled ‘Paranormal Woodland Incident Of 03/03/2022’ is mighty fine too.
Just one more thing to mention. Trev also had a show called ‘For the Birds’, which ran to 37 episodes where every track featured birdsong. “My idea,” he says, “was that if I got enough subscribers to cover the cost of having the Mixcloud creators account I would buy birdseed for our feathered friends who I guess don’t get a lot of royalties. Reaching this goal never happened and I still don’t have enough subscribers to cover the channel cost.”
Which is a sorry state of affairs, but not one unfamiliar to anyone creating in this space. There is just so much amazing work going on out there that we would love if only we knew about it, which is part of the reason Moonbuilding exists in the first place. Trev admits that his shows are “generally unknown”, which is something we should try and put right I think. Please give him a look and listen. You won’t be sorry you did. You’ll find links to his work here.
GOOD STUFF #4
CLARK ‘Steep Stims’ (Throttle)
“Synth Love. Drum Machine Love. For Your Enjoyment” say the short but simple notes that accompany this latest outing from Chris Clark on his own Throttle label. It’s interesting when an artist who you see as “big” chooses to go their own way. Here is someone after all who has released work on Warp, and not just an album or two, I make it 10. His eponymous 2014 release was right up there in various Album Of The Year lists. What’s more, his film soundtracks are released on Deutsche Grammophon. That’s Deutsche Grammophon! He is a big fish is Clark. And yet here he is rubbing shoulders with Moonbuilding. Yeah, I know we’re bringing it up, but you get the point. I make this his third long-player under his own steam. Loved 2023’s ‘Sus Dog’, loved last year’s ‘In Camera’, I’m not going to be disappointed by this am I? I am not.
There’s an interesting warmth to this one, not that there isn’t warmth in Clark records, but this one glows. It seems he got his hands on an old synth, an Access Virus TI, which he found at MESS in Melbourne and used on all the tracks. He then sourced (“it took a while to find,” he says) and bought his own when he got back the UK.
The whole thing is a bit of a throwback record. Clark talks about how most of the tracks “capture the spirit of making music on old samplers, which don’t have much memory time”. As a result, much of feels rather ravey. It builds gently towards ‘Janus Modal’ a proper hands-in-the-air-choppy chords banger. I’ve been watching the BBC series ‘Industry’ of late and some of this stuff reminds me of the soundtrack to that by Nathan Micay, especially when it gets hands up tracks like the aforementioned ‘Janus Modal’.
It says in the notes that ‘Steep Stims’ has “plenty of oddball weirdness lurking beneath the dancefloor”. It does that. Just as you’re getting excited about rave tunes, he drops a very mellow, slightly ominous prepared piano track ‘18EDO Bailiff’, Hauschka style, that then melts into ‘Globalcore Flats’ adding a sparky drum ‘n’ bass line to the rumpus. Missed that piano drum ‘n’ bass crossover did you? Fret not. The piano is played straight, or straight-ish and the drum ‘n’ bass clatters and rasps away alongside. It is wildly inventive stuff. It then leans into ‘Blowtorch Thimble’, which seems to chuck the kitchen sink at proceedings. It rattles and squelches and clatters like something you might find on Planet Mu. Or The Prodigy if they hadn’t got so major label. There is a lot to like here and much more to love.
GOOD STUFF #4 / #5
SISTER RAY DAVIES ‘Holy Island’ (Sonic Cathedral)
SISTER IRENE O’CONNER ‘Fire Of God’s Love’ (Freedom To Spend)
I couldn’t resist this double bill. You’d think that I make these things up, but not a bit of it. Both released today in a stroke of good fortune for eagle-eyed reviewers everywhere… it’s probably just me, but let’s not hold it against everyone else eh?
Let’s start with the easier of these two. So that’s Sister Ray Davies’ debut album, ‘Holy Island’. Hailing from Muscle Shoals, Alabama, the duo of Adam Morrow and Jamie Sego have made a concept album about ancient religious outposts off the UK’s north-east coast. And they’ve done it in a shoegaze style. They love shoegaze, so why not, but the religious sites?
Adam was in tour in the UK with his friend’s band The Glory Fires. They’d played Newcastle and decided to take the scenic route to Scotland. “I suddenly saw a castle or fort looking thing across the water and dove into Wikipedia and discovered I was looking at something called Lindisfarne,” he explains. “I am, like most Americans, easily impressed by old things, so we decided to see if the causeway was open. It was, and we drove across to the island”.
He explains that the story of Lindisfarne, in a nutshell monks living a quiet spiritual life get massacred by marauding Vikings for no other reason than they were there, inspired the album. “I know it’s more complicated than that,” says Adam, “but I was still left with the idea that, in this beautiful, contemplative place, this catastrophic paradigm shift happened. And then history just kept on rolling. There was no going back. It really sparked the imagination.”
‘Holy Island’ became their way of making sense of their own moment in time and how that, in the face of a pandemic, the rise of the far right and living in a post-truth age, was not really what most people expected from of life in 2025.
The first song they wrote was indeed the driftily pensive ‘Lindisfarne’, which echoes the way Adam felt driving across that causeway and how it might feel to to be stranded there when the waters roll back in and how quickly you would “feel the weight of place”.
Essentially, they say, the record is about “the big questions in life and striving for transcendence before harsh reality crashes in”. “A line is drawn, and you can’t go back to the way things were,” says Adam. “I think that’s a pretty universal thing we encounter, as individuals and as societies.”
Musically it’s very cool. The krauty ‘Iona’ comes on like a long-lost Spacemen 3 outtake, I especially like the shimmery fuzz of ‘Aiden’ and the “delay pedal disco” of ‘Rowans’. “We want people to be able to engage with it regardless of whether they care about it as a concept record,” says Adam. “For me,” adds Jamie, “it’s just another reason to expand the pedalboard.” I like their style and it does indeed sound great even if you know nothing about holy islands…
Someone who might though is Sister Irene O’Conner. An actual real-life nun whose record is a proper mind-bender. It’s one of those releases you totally question. It can’t possibly be real, can it? The notes are incredible, explaining that Sister Irene O’Conner was an Australian nun who created the 1973 album ‘Fire Of God’s Love’, which was “a sincere, soulful, and unwittingly psychedelic song sequence devoted to self-reflection and awakening the spirit within”. The notes go on to say that it is “a collection of original folk spirituals written by and channelled through O’Connor with guitar, electric organ, drum machine and her angelic voice. The album was recorded and mixed in an “astonishingly futuristic fashion” by fellow nun and recording engineer Sister Marimil Lobregat. I’ll just leave that here for a moment… “fellow nun and recording engineer”. Yup.
It is an extraordinary record, the whole thing is played live in real time and her songs are lovely. Her angelic soprano is described as being held “exquisitely in a shimmering mosaic of reverb and analogue synthesiser hum, while momentously ringing out like a bell in the darkness”.
The two-minute twinkle of ‘Nature Is A Song’ has been stuck in my head for several days now. The sound of this release is ethereal, it really isn’t of this world. With its organ meets drum machine, ‘Mass – Emmanuel’ sounds like it’s something Suicide would have come up with given divine intervention, while the closer, ‘Keshukoran’, is properly out there. It’s described as a psych-pop devotional, yikes, and sounds like, oh I don’t know. Like nothing you’ll have heard before. There is such an otherworldliness about this whole thing it’s hard to understand what has happened here. If I find out it’s all a ruse I am going to be very cross indeed.
soniccathedral.bandcamp.com / freedomtospend.bandcamp.com
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THE ROUND UP’S ROUND UP
There is little point in running a label as good as Old Technology and not barking yourself now and again. Here label big cheese Dan Bean offer up ‘Bassduets’ and mighty fine it is too. Using just a bass and a 303 you’d be amazed at the breadth he squeezes out of them. “We assume these familiar tools have been wrung dry,” say the rather cryptic notes. Assumption is a dangerous thing. It’s interesting to note that this release has been mastered by Anthony Child, Surgeon to you and me, and man whose name is something of a seal of approval. Not that Dan needs approving of. His excellent label is all the approval you need here. ‘Armbands Refer’ is great, it’s almost like the intro to a track that it never reaches. It throbs and pulses away, growing into a a tune that repeats as it builds. You want it to keep going, to become something else, to become a song. The pop-length ‘Desmond’, all clanks and grinds over a delightful acid squelch is a treat, as is most of what we have here. Said it before already this week, but the noises, the sounds that so many of the artists we feature here manage to shape from the electricity coursing through their machines is a delight. I got bored of guitars a long time ago. There really is a limit to what you can do with six strings, with synths we know no bounds.
Another month, another quality quiet details release. It’s funny how these things take on a life of their own. I remember planning the first Moonbuilding Weekly, almost two years ago now. You’re aware you’re going to be committing to making more than one, but in that planning stage you tend not to think too much about how on earth you’re going to do one of these things every week. I suspect Alex at qd felt much the same. This is release number 42, so the label is nearly four years into the adventure now and not once in that time has the quality slipped. 36’s ‘A Warm Static Place’ is the work of “a master of wide-eyed cinematic soundscapes”, Dennis Huddleston. The label say ‘A Warm Static Place’ finds Dennis in “ultra-deep mode”. Indeed it does. There’s this gentle underlying hum or static present which is surprisingly comforting, like a warm blanket. Dennis describes it as a “private isolation zone between the listener and the outside world, which feels warm and safe inside” and talks about how the music slowly opens up purposefully revealing its “quiet details” that are often hidden deep within the loops. This is a deep listen indeed. Headphones out all.
Charlie Butler returns to his Colossal Letdown moniker following the release on Luddite Tapes earlier this year. Quick recap… Luddite Tapes is an offshoot of Woodford Halse that deals in short-run home dubbed tapes recorded only with equipment available in 1983 or before. My kind of label. A number of the releases are actually recordings unearthed from pre-83 world, but some, like Colossal Letdown are new recordings. “My Luddite Tapes release earlier in the year inspired me to continue working with the lo-fi aesthetic of my Tascam 4-track tape recorder, moving into a noisier, drum machine driven direction,” Charlie told me. ‘Mandragora’ (Rat Run) is two big tracks of “drum machine chaos, deep electronic drones and noise inspired by the dystopian and fantastic visions of 80s ‘Doctor Who’ comics”. Sounds very much ok by me.
You remember last week I was telling you about Andrew Plummer from Limited Noise, one of my favourite PR people? Well, he’s at it again, this time he’s putting Snorkel’s ‘Past Still Present Tense’ (Slowfoot) in front of my stupid face. The experimental south London outfit, based up the road from Moonbuilding HQ in Forest Hill, they’ve two albums under their belt, 2008’s ‘Glass Darkly’ and 2011’s ‘Stop Machine’ so nothing release-wise for a bit. They might have been quiet, but their Slowfoot label certainly hasn’t. Well worth an explore, link below. Making up for lost time maybe, Snorkel’s new offering is an expansive double that they says is “in certain respects” a retrospective collection that charts the group’s evolution across multiple line-ups taking in “dubwise electronic experimentalism, jazz/free improv, avant-funk and post-Krautrock propulsion”. Having a bit of that aren’t we? “It’s super,” says Andrew. You know what? It is. The first two tracks, krauty belters ‘Night Flight’ and ‘Ogotemmeli’, are quite the opening salvo. Deep grooves and shifting moods indeed.
MOONBUILDING ISSUE 6 … SOLD OUT
Holy cow. MOONBUILDING Issue 6 is completely 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 meet 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.
Moonbuilding Weekly is a Castles In Space publication.
Copyright © 2025 Moonbuilding
Cheers Neil and thanks for so many wonderful words.
thanks for including qd42 - 36 x