Issue 89 / 21 November 2025
Your essential DIY electronic music lowdown: Track Of The Week: Alex Dragonetti + Album Of The Week: Loula Yorke + The Black Dog + 'From Hatch & Friends' compile + From Overseas + more...
It’s getting to the time of year when I feel like I’m running out of words. I’ve published 41 issues of Moonbuilding Weekly so far this year. Each one is roughly 5,000 words so that makes 205,000 words, and that’s just this newsletter. Issue 6 of our sister mag came out in the summer, which is another 30,000 words or so, and then there’s the freelance work… I know I can use words more than once, but still. I do write a lot of words.
In other news, the end of year lists are coming on nicely. I’ll be publishing those in a special issue of Moonbuilding Weekly on 12 December after which that’ll be us until the new year so I can recharge and stock up on words ready for 2026.
Righto, let’s get on with it shall we? There’s some cracking releases for you this week, as always.
Neil Mason, editor
moonbuildingmag@gmail.com
Issue 89 Playlist: Listen
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ALEX DRAGONETTI ‘don’t think ill make it (floppy version)’ (1.44MB)
I am a sucker for a retro format. There’s my love of the cassette for starters (if you’re releasing on tape you immediately up the odds of getting mentioned here) and those of you who’ve been with us since the beginning may recall we celebrated the world record set by Swansea’s Lavender Sweep label for the album released on the most formats (see Issue 1 of Moonbuilding, 21 different formats… can you name them..?).
Imagine my joy when Alex Dragonetti dropped me a line to tell me about his new Philadelphia-based label, 1.44MB. The sharper knives will already have clocked where this is going. 1.44MB is the amount of storage space on a floppy disc. In the old days, these things would be like confetti. Pre-internet, pre-email, a floppy disc is how we transported our copy. If you had a deadline, you’d need to bake in delivery time. You’d need leave enough time to physically take a disc to an office where an editor would copy over your file and hand the disc back to you. Delivering copy was also a good excuse to go to the pub, not that I really needed an excuse.
Anyway… Alex along with Adam Buffington have just unveiled their new label, 1.44MB, which, yup, releases music on floppy disc. The nutters. “This medium,” they say of the plan, “forces audio to be heavily compressed, creating both a challenge and tool for artists.”
The first five offerings are online right now and they’re a proper smorgasbord. The label focuses around reissues of Alex’s albums, 2012’s ‘Floppy’ and 2023’s ‘Floppy II’, which are both corkers. You’d imagine with such limited space it might be all 8-bit chiptune-y sounds, but not a bit of it. It’s lo-fi for sure, has to be, but both albums are chocka with bright melody and a nostalgia-inducing warmth of sound.
Other delights on the label include underwater spooky weirdness from Godtrawler, Alex and Adam’s Lobster Opera Company who deal in found-sound experimentialisms and Andy Heck Boyd’s beyond weird ‘Jupiter’, which finds him playing Mozart’s ‘Symphony No. 41 in C Major’ on a drinking straw, which is about as lo res as anything gets. All the releases also come with compressed and uncompressed versions.
The future sounds interesting, with talk of working with live instruments. “The cool thing about this medium is that we can work with anything that can fit on a floppy disk,” says Alex. “A full band might not fit, but we’ve thought about doing a solo guitar floppy disk album… the built in warmth and compression is actually really nice. Audio is the most logical thought for us, but we’d love to produce a run of compressed visual media as well.”
This is a label that has been properly thought through and deserves your attention. Looking forward to seeing where they go with all this.
LOULA YORKE ‘Hydrology’ (DiN)
You should know by now that Moonbuilding is a big Loula Yorke fan. Her ‘Volta’ long-player was our Album Of The Year in 2024, she was on the cover of the now sold out Issue 6 of our sister zine and we do tend to wax very lyrical about everything she releases, because she is very, very good indeed.
One of the things I like so much about Loula is the way she presents her music. It reminds me very much of the old days music press. When our world was just radio, and only really evenings at that, when we had ‘Top Of The Pops’, but only the occasional act, in those days the written word seemed like everything. It’s how we knew what was going on, who was on tour, who was releasing what, when, and most importantly, what it sounded like. Back in those days, music journalists would write about music in a way that made you want to hear it. Loula’s own notes for this, her debut solo outing on Ian Boddy’s DiN, are like that.
“This album,” she says about ‘Hydrology’, “is made from water and electricity. An impossible crossing place of surges, currents and gyres; myriad synchronous lifecycles in states of ebb and flow… something oscillates, jostles and flares in and out of existence. Savour the sparks.”
It’s the sort of writing that makes you excited to hear a record. Makes me excited. That said, her name being on the cover is usually enough. What’s interesting here is that ‘Hydrology’ has been in the can for a while. Relatively speaking. I spoke to Loula about the release when we chatted for the Moonbuilding cover feature towards the end of last year. It’s not unusual for records to drag their heels. Labels have long lead times, vinyl takes a while, etc, etc.
The thing is we’ve grown used to Loula releasing work that is more immediate. Her monthly mixtapes were snapshots in time that came one after another in quick succession. She drew a line under that series with her two summer albums, ‘The Book Of Commonplace’, which was a “best of” the mixtapes collection, and ‘Time Is A Succession Of Such Shapes’, a compilation of the original music she created for the mixtapes.
So there are two sides to the Loula coin. There’s the more immediate work, the mixtape project, which was impulsive, experimental, had her on her toes, and there’s the more “traditional” releases, last year’s quiet details offering ‘speak, thou vast and venerable head’, the ‘Volta’ album on her own Truxalis label, and now there’s this, ‘Hydrology’, an album made from electricity and water. But can you hear the difference?
Here the label notes that “Never staying still at any moment, the music takes on the elusive quality of that most precious of liquids to create an album immersed in Loula’s unique sound world”. And Loula’s unique take on things too. ‘Hydrology’ opens with ‘SICL’, all 11 minutes and 50 seconds of it. It’s a bold move, but honestly, why not? Loula seems to always be pushing at the edges. The track itself is great. It starts with a fizzing of electricity, a deep cycle of notes, a repeating motif chiming over and over, swelling and shrinking as the track grows, adds elements, morphs… it’s rich in the Berlin School, the Tangs especially are here in the beautiful melodies. Around the 10 minute mark, it almost descends into song territory, but only for a blink, it is the merest of toe tips that sees a melody form from the button-bright sounds radiating outwards. And as quickly as it arrives, it’s gone.
I especially like the second half of the record. It’s six tracks, so we’re talking about three tracks, a suite of music that lasts 20 minutes, but what a time. ‘Walberswick Breaks’ is perhaps the standout, it’s certainly the crescendo of the whole thing. Walberswick is on the Suffolk coast, a stone’s throw across the River Blyth estuary from Southwold. It has the best fish and chip shop, Mrs T’s, a rowing boat ferry and a fierce crabbing competition in the summer. Come to think of it, that’s in Southwold. Anyway, the track starts with a swell that builds and builds, this isn’t a long track, five and a half minutes, but every second earns its keep. A glitchy beat arrives, a little Kraftwerk-y, ‘Tour De France’-ish, only with loose wires, and there’s the sea breaking on the Walberswick shore. An ethereal tone, a voice maybe, emerges, Aphex-y chords strike up and then in come the breakbeats taking the track into drum ‘n’ bass territory. Except it’s not going to get going, it’s drawing you in, you’re waiting for the drop, the bassline. There’s a nice snare, but no drop. There’s a flicker of bass, but again, it doesn’t land, it all fades into the waves. Lovely stuff.
‘Flumen’ opens with the sort of sounds that will have you pricking up your ears. It picks up on the previous almost dancefloor vibes and ushers in not exactly a rave tune, but a track that has the spirit of rave embedded in it. That warm synth sound, swirling, repeating over and over, is a blink away from letting rip and becoming hands in the air. And it has this great glitching about halfway through, like the track is short circuiting, it’s echoey and twitchy, with a little crackle, like water has found its way in and affected the inner workings. Closer, ‘Pressure Wave’ feels like the title suggests. It shimmers with electricity like a crackling pylon while around it droplets dance.
The more you hear from Loula Yorke the better she seems to get. Actually, there’s no seem. She just gets better and better. Doesn’t matter if its spur of the moment or more considered work, she is the best. Love this. Savour the sparks indeed.
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THE GOOD STUFF #1
THE BLACK DOG ‘Loud Ambient’ (Dust Science)
Sheffield again. Yup. This latest offering from The Black Dog has been getting some serious air-time at Moonbuilding HQ of late. It’s something of a departure from their ‘Brutal Life’ series which has been at the forefront of their output of late. There is a lot going on here, including the creating of 50 acrylic on canvas paintings by the band’s Martin Dust. The 8x8 works, each with their own title, come signed and numbered (1 of 1). The Bandcamp page for the release is lengthy and must’ve taken ages to upload! Anyway, Rothko was a major influence on the release hence the paintings. “His use of colour fields, blending, mood and scale really helped us build an album of tracks that could stand on their own and also work together as a coherent whole across all the tones we had been working with,” they explain.
Musically, it’s a return to the dancefloor for the Dog. The ‘Loud Ambient’ of the title is, of course, a joke. Although they have in recent times been more ambiently inclined, they started to notice they were making music that wasn’t on the chilled side. They say in their notes: “One of us would be working on something and someone else would say, ‘That is a Loud Ambient track’. The name stuck.”
These tracks were popped into the “Loud Ambient” folder and a release began to take shape. The remarkable thing, they say, is everything just fell into place. “The tracklisting never change,” they explain. “All the stars aligned and the confidence in this album is the strongest we have ever had.”
I mean, they’re right to have that confidence. It’s a great record. The opener, ‘They Came For My Head’ is properly ravey. There’s an intro with choppy notes swirling, and when the bass drops, well, you can imagine what that sounds like in a big room. ‘Several Rituals I Can’t Explain’ is another dancefloor slayer. On the surface it’s a pounding four to the floor, underneath there’s real warmth in the synth licks and some breakdowns that will have you whooping listening on your own let alone in a sweaty room. The whole thing just seems to crank up the energy from track to track. By the time we’re halfway, with ‘Double Drop Nightmares’, the Dog are really cooking on gas, all the rings are firmly a-blaze. Squirty snares, lava lamp-like gloops of synth, a deep rumble of bass keeping time. There are also some more mellow moments, like the delicate melodic tippy-toe of ‘Reality Comes Crashing Back In’. The thing is, this has come out of nowhere. They’ve not played live in some time. On the strength of this, I’m sure they’re thinking about it. I’m sure they’re wondering how it feels to drop some of these tunes to an eager crowd.
GOOD STUFF #2
VARIOUS ARTISTS ‘Rats In The Meter: New Music From Hatch & Friends Vol. 3’
While we’re in Sheffield (aren’t we always?), did you see the photo on social media this week of Martyn Ware, Philip Oakey and Glenn Gregory enjoying a pint at Fagans, an Irish pub in town. Well, Glenn was enjoying a pint anyway, looked like Phil had orange juice, Martyn had something in a big glass with a straw. Who knows. The story is the meeting was instigated by director James Strong for an upcoming doco called ‘The Last Temptation’. H17 were in town at the weekend playing a show and revealed onstage they’d invited Philip to sing on ‘Being Boiled’, which he agreed to, but not without a rehearsal, so that didn’t happen. Thanks to my ears on the ground in Sheffield for the info. Just a thought, but I know that Martyn and Phil have been on good terms for a while now and H17 did those ‘Reproduction’/‘Travelogue’ shows around COVID… what I’m trying to say is a photo like this says to me it isn’t outside the realms of possibility that a reunion could be on the cards.
I digress, I always do… so anyway, I enjoyed finding the various artists collection ‘Rats In The Meter: New Music From Hatch & Friends Vol. 3’ this week. Hatch is a Sheffield-based practice room/workshop/live music venue that’s within spitting distance of Bramall Lane (good joke there for Owls supporters) and is fully behind the city’s DIY scene. Or as they put it, “a loving home to a strange assortment of musicians, performance artists, budget drag characters and papier-mâché creations”. And that entire assortment features here on a third volume of the ‘From Hatch & Friends’ compile which is very much worth digging into. It’s 27 tracks and they swerve all over the show from “post-punk, weird pop, experimental electronics, noise rock, disassembled contemporary classical and even voyeuristic phonecall recordings”. Yup, I can confirm there’s phone calls. There are also plenty of electronic goodies to get your teeth into though. The Oram Award-winning Lou Barnell pops up with the haunting clank and grind of ‘Jane X Jane’, there’s the lost and found sounds of Lizard Quest, the rather funky ‘48kmph’ from Vernon Delph… do check out the brilliant Helka Fell, who we’ve featured before here. The Cabs-liked tsk-tsk-tsk of ‘Mummification Dub (Self Mummified)’ is the standout here. There’s some great band names on show. Horseback Jesus. The Jason Waterfalls Experience and the knowingly named The Margery Kempe Trio caught my attention. “Going strong for 14 years now,” write Hatch in the release notes, “the cursed industrial unit of 107a Harwood Street continues to offer up new treats. Dive in!” Do. I’d recommend it.
GOOD STUFF #3 / #4
The In-Sect ‘The All-Colour, High-Fidelity, Radio Cartoon’ / MCPM017 (Moolakii Club Audio Interface)
It’s always great when printed publications land on my desk and there’s a couple you should know about this week. The first one is a collage comic, ‘The All-Colour, High-Fidelity, Radio Cartoon’ by The In-Sect. It arrived at Moonbuilding HQ with Strictly Kev who is behind these 32 pages of utter bonkerness. “I really have no idea what it is,” offered Kev over a cuppa. The project was started during lockdown, so five years - on and off - in the making. It’s a collage drawn from the sort of comics you were probably obsessed with when you were just starting to soak all this stuff up. You know, the ones with mail order ads in the back for x-ray glasses and sea monkeys. What Kev is doing is Burroughsian cut-ups with visuals. In the comic he says “the gathering of materials is intuitive, based on visual or textural properties. These then naturally fall into groups: typography, comics, architecture, wireframe, science, pattern…”. He talks about how a group is then selected and “connections are made through colour, subject matter, perspective, visual similarities” and how slowly a narrative begins to form. He’s picks away at these pages, adding and taking away, “left then returned to, sometimes months or years later”, where fresh perspective shows the way forward until each page is “complete”. Knowing when something is done is an artform in itself. Is it ever really finished? Who knows!
The result here is delightfully mad. It looks like a superhero comic, but as you dig in you realise it isn’t at all. It’s like remixing comic books, there’s covers, which may or may not be made up. With all the exclamations on the cover… Blam! Pow! Whaaat??!… I’d buy ‘The Many Ghosts Of Doctor Destruction And The Troubleshooters’. There’s a great piece called ‘How To Write Comic Books’, which is full of amazing sound effects - Krash! Zam! Clak! Ding! Snap! Kablam! There’s a lot of comic book kissing being reworked, the tessellation on ‘Great Head Stories’ is mind-bending, looking like a snogging optical illusion.
Across the whole thing, the more you look, the more you see and there is so much to look at, to try probably fruitlessly, to figure out. Wonderful work. Oh, and the centre spread is 3-D of course it is. Glasses included.
Next up is Moolakii Club Audio Interface MCPM017, their summer into autumn issue, which features Deb Grant on the cover. It is particularly eye catching as it also has my name on the cover. Which surely must be some mistake, but no, there is an interview with me inside. The issue meets “the bloggers, presenters and reviewers who platform and empower experimental artists”, which is why I’m joined one the cover by my great pal Claire Francis, who is the reviews ed at Electronic Sound, and multi-instrumentalist/experimentalist Tony Njoku. My chit-chat aside, it’s such a bold issue. Jez Thelwell at Moolakii really gets down to business with his line of questioning and it is, from start to finish, a fascinating read. There’s chats inside with Trevor Lewis of Trevlad fame, Mariana Timoney, senior editor at Bandcamp Daily, and Justin and Rob from Front & Follow. There’s reviews, a history of glitch, a big piece on synth solos… it also comes with a cassette full of music, split into ‘Side Rhythm’ and ‘Side Rest’. This is very nice work and I really appreciate the coverline.
moolakiiclubaudiointerface.bandcamp.com
GOOD STUFF #5
DANIEL VINCENT ‘Means Of Escape’ (Burning Shed)
You may know London-based producer Daniel Vincent for his work in The Resonance Association and Decommissioned Forests and indeed, he has an almighty back catalogue that stretches back some 22 years. His latest offering, ‘Means Of Escape’, finds him working with “cult art-music label” Burning Shed, who I know well from my Norwich connections. When something lands on The Shed you know what to expect and this is indeed in that ballpark. “It’s a bit prog, a bit electronic, even a little abstract/experimental in places,” Daniel tells me. “I’m sure you’ll find something to enjoy in there.” Indeed.
There is an undercurrent of Shed co-founder Tim Bowness/No-Man here and with artwork from Carl Glover, who has produced sleeves for Porcupine Tree, Marillion, No-Man and King Crimson, you start to firm up an good of what’s in store. “With everything that is going on in the world,” writes Daniel, “we are all becoming increasingly reliant on our little escapes and distractions. Sadly even these distractions leave us more and more isolated.” As such, the messages within are “about living the life that we have, and not spending too much time worrying about the things you can’t change”.
Something like ‘Obfuscation’ is bombastically large, guitars leaning at 45 degrees big. The refrain repeats over and over, like it’s coming at your from a modular synth rather than coming off six stings. More up my alley are ambient outings like the two-part ‘Means Of Escape’, the melodic drift of ‘Hubris / Defiance’ or the standout ‘Boy In Space’.
There is special Burning Shed edition that comes with an exclusive download EP that concludes with a track called ‘Burning Shed Have Come For Your Biscuits’, which, at nine minutes odd, is perhaps something you need to hear. Their biscuit of choice? The M&S milk chocolate round if you were wondering.
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THE ROUND UP’S ROUND UP
A couple of ambient lovelies to start with in our round-up in a round up. First one comes from our great friends at Past Inside The Present and it’s a second long-player from ambient guitarist Kevin Sery. From Overseas’ ‘Thinking Like a Mountain’ follows 2020’s ‘Home’ debut and it expands on the themes and finds Kevin pondering several life changes, including “transcontinental relocation”, graduation from his studies in Environmental Philosophy (which sounds like a great thing to study) and, the really big one, becoming a new father. The label talk of the opener ‘Appalaches’ having “post-rock grandeur with krautrock pulses”. Which is alright with us. Because Kevin is a guitarist, a track like this comes on like Can, which is very much alright with us. We were talking earlier about Loula Yorke having a way with words, I like the work of PITP, they describe ‘Breathe” as having “a glittering backdrop of aqueous drone”. I might be borrowing that at some point.
Next up is Kara-Lis Coverdale who is really taking the piss. In May we got her first new album in eight years, now with ‘Changes in Air’ (Smalltown Supersound), we’re getting her third LP inside eight months! Not complaining, a lot of thought and energy has gone into these releases as each one is different. That first release, ‘From Where You Came’, “a series of nocturnal transmissions, altered-state refinements, and vivid stories”, is the pop record (relatively speaking) of the bunch, full of melodic moochers built for nighttime listening. The second, September’s ‘A Series Of Actions In A Sphere Of Forever’, is a series of pure piano meditations, nocturnes (again) that were written and recorded during the winter in Ontario and now here we are with release number three, a work for “electric organ, modular synthesis and piano in five sections”. It was adapted from a work originally made for an installation in Oslo that consisted of “a floating sauna facing the expansive fjord which is heated by wood fire and solar radiation”. Five “materials” were an influence… guess what they were? Wood, water, sun, glass and metal. Can you hear what sounds like? Well, it sounds like this. The closer ‘Curve Traces Of Held Space’ is delicious. Kara-Lis Coverdale is one serious talent, let’s hope she keeps up this release schedule.
Enofa’s ‘The House By The Sea’ from last year on Subexotic made our Albums Of The Year list, which is none too shabby. In July, Imogen Hayley Baker released a follow-up, ‘Farewell, Rosey’, a tribute to her beloved dog who died in June. We totally missed it because we were on our summer hols. Selfish I know. I am sorry. It’s very good, a mini album, rather lovely. Now she follows that with ‘Life’s Too Short To Watch The Cremaster Cycle’, which is quite the curio. It’s labelled as an “immersive 1.5D sound installation” where you can “explore the following environments”… the album is 25 tracks, the list is of 25 environments, neither of which tally up, but the track titles read like cryptic crossword clues. So opener ‘Concrete Pillars’ is the Brutalist environment. ‘But A Mixtape Is More Romantic’ is Romantic Car Journey… there is a lot of fun to be had there, clearly. It’s a digital album and there is a lot of music. It’s much more uptempo than ‘The House By The Sea’. Lots of beats and everything from the proggy guitar riffs of ‘Big Meat River’ to soundscapes like ‘The Mip Trail’ and ‘Fully Experienced Rambling Hiker’ to edge of the dancefloor missiles like the tsk-tsk handclappy tech-house of ‘Pint Of Techno’ and the squidgy funk of ‘Celebrate The Square’. Lots to discover.
Our pals at Buried Treasure have very much been a roll this year with some cracking releases under their belt. Tim Hill’s ‘Leviathan Whispers’ is no exception. Tim is “an inspirational figure within the UK arts, jazz, noise and improv world” who has been operating since the 1980s as a “shapeshifting maverick, fearlessly exploring Britain’s diverse musical traditions, from rough music to industrial folk, free jazz to dub, post-punk to avant-rock, incorporating electronics, hymn, noise and drone”. Here we have the darker side of his work, inspired by Blake’s Albion and drawn from tracks created for installations, processions, solo performances and personal meditations, it’s described on the sleeve as “a delirium of conjurings, trances and laments, summonings and sermons, savage and sublime” and in the notes as “baritone, alto and soprano saxophones are mixed with tape loops, synths, recycled live recordings, industrial percussion, woodwind and reeds”. Head for the title track, which builds to a saxophonous squall of sound or check out the spooky lurker that is ‘Around My Shed They Began To Sing’. I really like ‘The Ghost Horn’, the piano part there seems to be channelling ‘Bohemian Rapsody’. It all sounds great, best just get in front of some speakers, Maxell style, start at the beginning and let it blast you.
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.
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