Issue 99 / 13 March 2026
The essential DIY electronic music lowdown: Track Of The Week: Cholly + Album Of The Week: Wizardmaster + Animal Deities + Ian Boddy + Names On Tapes + more...
Can I just say a huge thank you to those of you who have taken out a £3.50 monthly subscription to Moonbuilding Weekly. I had a little moan last week about the lack of ads in the newsletter. I pointed out that for the first time since I started Moonbuilding Weekly two years ago, we had no adverts last week. I said, “If the labels/artists we write about don't think we're worth supporting, I think we might have run our course”.
So what happened? Well, you lot, the readers, stepped up and showed that what we do here is of value. There was a flurry of new, paid-for subscribers. Not loads, but enough. Thank you. Honestly. You will be rewarded for your kindness as we’re busy lining up some subscriber-only live session downloads, which will be with you soon.
What else? Oh yes. The new issue of Electronic Sound came out yesterday with my Cabaret Voltaire feature on the cover. That’s two issues in a row featuring Sheffield bands, both written by me. It’s that sort of thing that makes me happy. The new issue sees me join the rebooted Cabs on the road at a bunch of their phenomenal live shows. They are one of my absolute all-time favourite acts, so my job doesn’t get much better really. I hope that’s reflected in the piece.
Righto, that’s me then for another week. Happy reading.
Neil Mason, editor
moonbuildingmag@gmail.com
Issue 99 Playlist: Listen
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CHOLLY ‘Fungus’
So Cholly is a name you will probably be aware of. You should be as the High Wycombe-based Chloe Tennant is a tireless exponent of DIY electronics. If she hasn’t appeared in your social media feeds you’re doing something wrong. She’s been popping up all over the place of late with live shows galore in readiness for this week’s release of her new ‘Octopoda’ EP.
I like Chloe’s description of what she does – “pulsing electronica, wistful future garage and lo-fi art-pop grooves”. Much of the music we cover round here tends to be instrumental. Adding vocals is a very tricky business. Not only does Cholly have a great voice, it’s all breathy and brimming with quality, but she also messes with it too. You can hear a hint of AutoTune, which gives proceedings a kind of fuzzy garage edge, but it all comes soaked in this melodic synthpop melodic nouse. Pop songs with a twist if you will.
She’s been quiet since her debut album ‘Anomaly’, which came out on the much-missed Werra Foxma label in 2023. There’s been a track here and there, so this five-tracker is a welcome return. It seems like there’s been some fine tuning going on too. This EP feels like a step up, like a more polished version of Cholly. It’s more confident somehow too, more assured. Cholly 2.0 if you will.
Cholly is described as a “singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and electronic producer” and on ‘Fungus’, the opening track on the EP, she really brings the multi-instrumentalist to the fore with some delicious multi-tracked violin playing. The track drips in strings. It’s one of those songs where you don’t quite know where the electronics end and the acoustic instruments start. There’s more along those lines on the ethereally explosive ‘Shape’ with its guitar samples (or the real thing? or samples of the the real thing?) and on the really great ‘Pick Up The Phone’ where saxophonist Rosie Robinson puts in a star turn that has echoes of Hazel O’Conner’s ‘Will You’ or even something like Soft Cell’s ‘Say Hello’ about it. And yes, I know that’s a clarinet, thank you.
Really looking forward to Cholly’s next move.
WIZARDMASTER ‘A Dwelling of the Mind Protruding Through the Head’ (Old Technology)
Words: NEIL MASON
As you will know, here at Moonbuilding Weekly we do not shy away from the wonderfully weird shit that’s out and about. We positively make a beeline for it in fact. Exhibit A, the wild offering that is top of our pile this week.
It’s the first release of the year from Dan Bean’s excellent Old Technology label and it’s a cracker. Wizardmaster are two shadowy characters who reside in Oakland, California. My super-sharp journalistic skills reveal they are Mark Stramaglia and long-time collaborator Oliver Kollar. They were members of a 90s Pittsburgh outfit called Operation Re-Information who, it says on Wikipedia (I know, I know), were “recognised for pioneering the genre of laptronica”. The Wiki entry is unusually thorough. I got a bit lost in the rabbit holes it sent me down.
I don’t know about you, but laptronica passed me by. It happens. It’s a movement where laptops are used as musical instruments. There’s a “laptronica” tag on Bandcamp, which shows what I know. The revival starts here I guess. More exploring to be had there I think. I’ve also stumbled across laptop orchestras, which I really am going to have to investigate. That’s when a bunch of laptop musicians get together to form an ensemble.
Anyway, Operation Re-Information, or ORI or Revo as they were known, were active between 1996-99. They dressed in suits and ties and used keyboards worn like guitars and connected to their laptops to trigger samples. You can imagine.
It’s interesting when, as a music writer you come across something you don’t know too much about. I’ll just pull the journalism curtain back here a little for you here. In instances like that, you start looking for a peg to hang your coat on, something to hook the reader in. You’re looking for anything that rings a bell. An artist they might have shared a label with, a name of someone connected to them… anything.
ORI released on San Diego noise/punk/wotnot label Vinyl Communications whose in-house band were the excellently named Tit Wrench. It was also home to several works by Merzbow and a 1999 offering by Friend Of Moonbuilding Robin “Scanner” Rimbaud and renowned Hollywood media artist GX Jupitter-Larsen’s noise outfit The Haters. Sure Robin will tell us more once he sees this. Which kind of gives you an idea of the ORI ballpark. Dan from Old Technology chipped in with a peachy piece of info too. Had I clocked the connection with influential Washington DC hardcore outfit Nation Of Ulysses? I had not. Turns out Mark has worked with Phil Manley, who is in The Fucking Champs with Tim Green formerly of Nation Of Ulysses. It seems they all grew up together in the DC area. Successful poking around there I thought. Curtain closed with a sliver of insight into the origins of Wizardmaster. Back to the matter in hand.
The notes for this release are not helpful. “To name the cost is to shape it” they say. “This protrusion of agreement, embodied, becomes a mouth of dollars and cents”… “A problem displaced by its own posture”. It’s like it’s been created by AI or Burroughsian cut-ups or something… what the notes do say is that “this release has been committed live using Wizardmaster’s handcrafted generative-performative WMCP software synthesizer and SWANK modular synthesis array”. Which is custom hardware and software. All of which makes sense considering where these guys came from, right?
I found some other notes, lurking, that say, “The album uses only homemade musical instruments, including the WMCP generative software synthesizer, the BackToBasics sampler, and a custom modular synthesizer and pedal array”. So there you go. It also says “This release features improvised electronic recordings focused on mood, texture, and tonality, incorporating noisy synthesis, found and appropriated sound, irregular rhythms, and narrative structures inspired by soap operas”.
And indeed, there is all sorts going on here, blips and beeps, plinks and plonks, buzzes and clanks. There’s even some melodies, like on ‘In Our Movements Thoroughly’, which sounds in places like a xylophone jam in an empty warehouse. I say in places because these tracks tend to unfurl. Punk rock this ain’t. Across nine tracks there’s nothing under six minutes and plenty in double figures, peaking with the closing trio of tracks that run to a total 40 minutes.
It’s all very gentle, not ambient, but pretty mellow with a dark underbelly. And yet it is one of those records that could knock you back a step or two at volume. I’ve had it on for much of the week and it gets more captivating with each listen. I especially like the really long tracks, the shimmery squalls and creaks of ‘Embrittlement’ sound like a ghost ship slowly making its way to really frighten some people as it emerges from the fog. I like the electrical buzzes and dark drones of ‘The Clawed Ends Of Their Feet’ and the Penguin Cafe after one beer too many of ‘Those With Legs’ with its little patches of melody that peak out, like the sun from behind the clouds.
The 10-minute ‘Maturity In The Entire Absence’ is great, it sounds like there’s a electronic fanfare played on a siren and it slowly builds from there, drones appearing and disappearing, new sounds adding to the pile-up of noise. There’s an almost tune starts to arrive, repeating over and over and the whole thing seems to start to shimmer. Like light glinting off a reflective surface. I love the bright, clanking melody that swirls out of ‘To Smell What We See’, imagine it’s like a factory with delicate robot arms swing backwards and forwards, building something intricate on a conveyor belt. Yeah, I’m out on a limb there, but then so is this, and wonderfully so.
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Words: Neil Mason
GOOD STUFF #1
ANIMAL DEITIES ‘The Map Comes Alive’ (Patchworks)
This debut album from Hastings-based Steve Cragie is a goodie. The Brighton-based label say it has “elements of both punk experimentalism and haunting aesthetics”, which, as they rightly predict, is right up my street.
It does the thing all good albums do, it draws you in. There’s a pace to it, with each track leaving you wondering what’s coming next. In just the opening two tracks it veers from the delightful tape slurs of ‘A City Out At Sea’ to the full-blown mellow synthpop of ‘Sleep Hall’, which is quite the wow.
It’s always good to see reference points, pegs to hang your coat on, in the notes. I know it’s probably my job, but I do appreciate the thoughts of those close to the music. There’s mention of Robert Wyatt’s “melodic sensibility” here, which is what I was thinking listening to ‘Sleep Hall’. The vocal has a little of the Wyatt twang to it. ‘The Mildew Man’ too comes on like that. It’s a spooky tune, all tremolo, verging almost on the Tom Waits-y, only not so growly. There’s a lovely violin-y melody that kicks in towards the end that’s very cool indeed.
The sounds throughout are great. It’s kind of macro, you know, zoomed in or contained in a small space. It’s almost like you’re looking at this world Steve has created through a magnifying glass. His world is all about maps, but we’re not talking about getting from a to b type maps, it’s “shaped by absence and amnesia, where beauty and trepidation sit side by side”, a “sonic cartography” that charts “a journey to places both real and imagined”.
So the titles act as markers on the trip. It’s all quite dreamy, almost haunty as you try and place everything in time and space. There’s a lightness of touch that I really like in tracks like ‘Horsefly Hill’ that tinkles and twinkles away, buzzing gently as it goes and that same touch is also there in the fabulous driving motorik of ‘See Around Corner’. Making motorik beats with a lightness to them, a gentle kind of flow, is quite the party trick. The sinister film sountrack-y ‘Sing Cuckoo’ is something that would’ve had Hitchcock’s ears pricking up, while you would think twice about hiding in the squally ‘Hiding Place’ with its ghostly vocals off over there somewhere. But it’s all ok, as closer ‘Homecoming’ is really lovely. It soothes right up to the end of the record with its sweet melody and no surprises.
This is quality work, make no mistake. It is absolutely something you’ll be making repeated visits to. Keen to see where Animal Deities go next.
GOOD STUFF #2
IAN BODDY ‘Drive’
Here’s a side to DiN’s Ian Boddy you don’t hear too often these days, or indeed ever really. ‘Drive’ is a very early release (his second outing on the Surreal to Real label in 1991) and it shows off his compositional side. The title track is great, it sounds like a demo track for an instrument manufacturer. There’s so much going on in it. There’s a breakdown a couple of minutes in where it gets a little ‘Wrote For Luck’. There’s jazzy melodic solos, featuring the “electronic instrument playing” of Julian Maynard-Smith, tight rhythms, big chords, low-slung bassline…
The reason it sounds like a demo disk is that it sort of is. At the time, Ian was working for Akai as a sales rep, demonstrating and selling their legendary studio sampling kit. Which, he explains, gave him access to some series gear, like the MPC-60 drum sampler and sequencer. It was a piece of gear designed by Roger Linn of Linn Drum fame and it’s one of those box of tricks that, despite looking like a cash register, shaped the sound of dance music. And it’s all over this. As you will know, Ian isn’t really one for floorfillers, but that doesn’t stop him giving the MPC-60 a rigorous workout.
There are some ridiculously upbeat workouts including ‘Freeway’ that springs along like some roof-down excursion along the desert road on the cover. The seven-minute ‘Analogagogalog’ is a real chirpy charmer. It’s so cheerful and comes with some cracking sounds fizzing off all over the place.
There is also plenty else on show here too. ‘Heaven’s Gate’ is very filmy sounding, all big swoops and huge chords climbing the scales, while ‘Crucifixus’ is a synthy arrangement of the classical work by Italian Baroque composer Antonio Lotti. Yes it is.
Ian says the release’s opening trio of tracks became mainstays in his live shows around this time. “There are three bonus tracks from around the same time period,” he writes in the notes, “with ‘Disconnect Me’ being a fun piece with a sampled voice I’m sure some of you will recognise. Both ‘Prodigal’ and especially ‘Crimekiller’ are unreleased demos for a couple of computer games I worked on in the early 1990s.
Those last two are my favourite tracks here. The latter is especially great, a sort of pseudo cranked up BPM acid house number that really rattles along.
This is a real blast from the past. What makes it all so interesting is that we know where it all ended up some 35 years later. I think a lot of people would shy away from issuing early work, but not Ian. He lives and breaths this stuff and has the stories to go. Why not get it all out there. You can’t take it with you when you’re gone that’s for sure.
GOOD STUFF #3
NAMES ON TAPES ‘Fossils’ (NoInputRecs)
Damn these guys are on a prolific streak. This is album number three in under six months. There was last October’s ‘We Weren’t Programmed For This’, ‘After The Fact’ in December, and now there’s this.
The duo of Neil Kleiner and Stacey Hine find themselves getting more instrumental, so using instruments, while still maintaining that electronical spirit. I like that in the notes it says it’s “a project uninterested in slowing down for the sake of content strategy”. I am right with them on that. We live in a world that allows people to work and release when they like. Let’s get that work out there as and when, no messing around with best times and schedules.
The record really flies in the face of the here and now too, it was “born out of boredom with infinite choice”. Tell. Me. About. It. They’re talking about music making (“an era of endless samples and frictionless digital tools) rather than trying to buy a zip-up jacket, I know, but clothes shopping makes my head spin. I did get a nice jacket though. In the end. Anyway. “This one feels like the cleanest break from the digital grid yet,” says Naomi from the label. “It’s a bit more percussive and cosmic, drawing on some Sun Ra influence.”
It is those things. To get there they imposed limitations, they stripped back their palette to a small set of core sounds. “The result is a record that feels physical and human,” say the notes, “often closer to a band in a room than a composition assembled on a screen.” Which is all good with me. Did you see the Holy Fuck live sessions last week? Four ‘At Work’ sessions showcasing tracks from their new album ‘Event Beat’, which is out at the end of the month. Those films are here. Their aim was keep everything as live as possible “emphasizing improvisation and raw percussion”. Utterly brilliant. This is that kind of vibe.
“I was done with the safety of the digital grid for a while,” says Neil. “I wanted to get back into a free jazz headspace, melodies or rhythms that refuse to sit neatly. It’s messy, chaotic, and sometimes accidentally funky. It’s the sound of people making decisions in real time rather than clicking a mouse until everything feels correct.”
“I wanted the guitar to sound like it was actually in the room,” adds Stacey. “Not polished or tucked away. If it doesn’t feel a bit dirty, it’s not finished.”
You know when people talk about not wanting to know how sausages are made? I always think, ‘Well, I do’. I’d love to have seen Names On Tapes showing us their workings out for this. Seeing it happen live. As it is we can only listen. Ears at the ready.
The balls of them to open with an 11-minute track! ‘Unattached’ is great though. It starts out as a real rattling thrummer of a track and then gives way to some really shimmery synths, which you think is the way things are going, before it clanks back into life again.
‘Last Light’ has sort of slow-mo rave chops among the clanks and the bright, clean almost C&W guitar sound. ‘Brass Knuckles’ is noisy, discordant stuff, a messy drum machine pumps out beats, a sequencer seems to be trying to keep up while guitars pick away over the top. ‘Silt’ has a Herrmann/‘Taxi Driver’ sleaze to it, while the title track shimmers, glistens and shivers, while the closer ‘Small Objects’ is a cacophony, a track that feels like it needs winding up. It rattles and clanks, twangs and pings until it gets swamped in noise rushing in like a wave.
I like these two. They’ve got a plan. It’s a plan I like.
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THE ROUND UP’S ROUND UP
I had to drop Michael Shambolic from The Music Liberation Front Sweden a line when I spotted this new release. ‘Shamstar: Pete Voss’ is a six-tracker loaded up with three and four minute tracks, the titles of which, if all run together, sound like a great chorus. ‘Beatnik’ / ‘Boppers’ / ‘Suede’ / ‘Heads’ / ‘Rockers’ / ‘Stars With Scars’. Singalong now. It’s a very funky record, full of acid lines, rattling beats and big hands in the air melodies. The electo-ish ‘Heads’ is my favourite, or maybe the gentle throb of ‘Rockers’ is best. It’s all good and nice 20 minutes diversion for your day.
The reason I dropped him a line? Pete Voss? Former frontman of NME darlings Campag Velocet, surely not? The very same says Michael. “He’s an old friend and lives just down the road from me”. It transpires that there are few gigs being lined up for The Music Liberation Front Sweden this summer featuring various friends, Pete Voss included. Not to be confused with Tim Vass, who was in Razorcuts… and is also part of the live bonanza that Michael promises will be “quite loud and shambolic fun”.
Our great pals at Indiana’s Past Inside The Present label have been soundtracking the more chilled moments in the Moonbuilding office this week with the release of anthéne’s ‘perennials’. I’m a big fan of Toronto-based Brad Deschamps, his ‘cloudburst’ album on Home Normal a little while ago (just checked, it was August 2024!) was great. His work really pushes at the edges of what you can do with a guitar. I don’t mean to sound churlish, but guitars aren’t the most versatile of instruments. For the most part, they tend to produce the sound of a, well, guitar. The reason I like synths so much is the sounds are endless, there are limits as to what you can do with six strings. Anyway, Brads work, working with guitar, sampler and a “modest cache of pedals” is lovely. Here he also brings “an innate sense of harmonic layering to create an impression of seasonal cycles”. So something like ‘shades of night’ is a drifty tremble that echoes how peaceful the night can be. Opener ‘winter chords’ is a drifty hibernation of a track where “overlapping arcs of guitar drift across a grey-blue sky and bare branches scrape at the windowpanes”. You get the idea. It’s one of those releases I’ve had on regularly at Moonbuilding HQ this week as things are getting up and running in the morning. Lovely stuff.
I really like Innis Chonnel & Loris S Sarid’s ‘Looking For Mount Sylvan’ (12th Isle), which is a second album from Loris, a Glasgow-based artists from Rome, and Innis Chonnel, which appears to be a small rocky island in Loch Awe in Argyll. There’s a castle there, 13th century ruins. Sounds very romantic. There’s an earlier release, ‘Where The Round Things Live’ in 2022, where they talk about recording in a wood workshop and Innis’ “horsebox / studio” and how “saws sang and flutes flowed through watering cans”. I do like this sort of talk. Who knows what’s going on though. While I might be diligent with odd artist names, I read the title too quickly and thought it might be in some way a David Sylvian/Japan thing, but no, it’s a trip undertaken by fictional character Moshi, “a ship-to-shore excursion across mountains, encountering deep-breathing bohemians, shaman shoes and butterfly towers along the way”. And they do that with “eight tracks of drifting ambient-not-ambient, downtempo electronic jazz stylings and nods to cinematic synth scores and 90s techno trance futurism”. I mean who wouldn’t want to listen to something described like that, eh?
Let’s finish up this week where we started, with the weird. Brion Gysin’s ‘Dreamachine’ (Wewantsounds) is the first-ever vinyl release for this late 80s/early 90s recording by French producer and musician Ramuntcho Matta, whose archives the excellent Wewantsounds label have been rummaging around in. Matta had already produced Gysin’s ‘Junk’ album that featured Don Cherry and the brilliant Lizzy Mercier Descloux, a Parisian who was knee-deep in New York’s no wave scene. Gysin is, of course, a counterculture pioneer working across literature, sound, performance and visual arts and a huge influence on the likes of David Bowie, Laurie Anderson and Genesis P Orridge. He was one of the Beats and great pals with William Burroughs who gets a second mention of the week. So ‘Dream Machine’ is a work in five parts, a “hypnotic 32-minute piece built on minimalist repetition” that echoes the Dreamachine, Gysin’s stroboscopic light art device that he built with Ian Sommerville in 1959. Basically it’s a cylinder with shapes cut in it sat on record turntable spinning at 78 or 45 RPM. ‘Dreamachine’ is one long very mellow groove, with flickers of afrobeat and juju, and featuring Gysin telling a story that phases in and out throughout. There’s also a bonus track, ‘The Door’, that features legendary saxophonist Steve Lacy.
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 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.
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