The Doomed Bird Of Providence – Metoric Heralds Of Danger

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I have an awkward relationship with graphic scores. On the one hand, I can’t read music, so the idea of an alternative way of providing instruction to musicians that doesn’t use traditional notation really appeals to me. On the other hand, I find them utterly baffling. I can’t ever figure out what they’re trying to convey, whereas sheet music has at least a sense of order (unless you’ve ever tried to decipher one of Charles Ives’s scores). All of this is irrelevant because I can neither read music nor play an instrument anyway, though I find it pretty easy to follow the score for John Cage’s 4’33”…

I mention all of this because the fifth album from the London-based The Doomed Bird Of Providence makes use of an especially bewildering graphic score. “The scores are circular in shape,” writes Mark Kluzek (accordion, bass, glockenspiel, percussion). “They are split into rings which are the stages of the composition. The performer moves from the centre, outwards, through each ring and responds to the symbols assigned to them. The symbols are prompts suggesting a certain way of playing…”

I’ve followed this collective for a number of years. I’ve always found their semi-improvised music leans into a sort of sea-shanty style mournfulness, and in fact the first album of theirs I ever wrote about was inspired by stories from the sea. The jumping off point for Meteoric Heralds Of Danger was an 1874 prison novel by Australian novelist Marcus Clarke, For The Term Of His Natural Life. All the titles contain a nautical reference reflecting the fact that Clarke’s book details the horrendous treatment of a man transported by boat to Australia, his punishment for having been accused of committing a crime.

There is a curious sense of finality and hopelessness to these pieces, reflecting the fate of a prisoner doomed to spend the rest of his days in a penal colony. There are, however, moments of somewhat muted joy. The recurring violin and viola refrains by Joolie Wood and Rachel Laurence on ‘Darkly Rolling Waves Flashed Fire’ and the otherwise apocalyptic title track are two such relatively hopeful moments. Kluzek’s stirring Parisian bridge musician accordion on ‘A Long Low Line On The Distant Horizon’ is another.

There are four long-ish improvisations using the visual scores here, augmented by four shorter composed pieces. Without watching the musicians interpret the score in the studio, you’d be hard-pressed to know which was which apart from the lengths. Taken as a whole, Meteoric Heralds Of Danger is a remarkable collection, and exactly what I’d expect from them.

Meteoric Heralds Of Danger by The Doomed Bird Of Providence was released March 20 2026. With thanks to Mark.

Words: Mat Smith

(c) 2026 Further.

Xqui – Laying A Pipeline / Nocturnal Drift

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Two new releases from the anonymous and prolific Xqui highlight two different sides to the artist behind the mask – the noisy fan of processed found sound, and someone drawn to more melodic concerns.

Laying A Pipeline seems fully in thrall to Depeche Mode’s 1983 album, and explores Xqui’s fascination with field recordings. The primary source material for this, hence the nod to Construction Time Again, was a building site on the industrial estate where the mysterious Xqui holds down his day job (presumably in his mask, much to the amusement of his co-workers).

It’s an homage, of sorts, to the Depeche album, but also to the overall act of opportunistically making field recordings and then manipulating them into new shapes which render their source fairly unknowable. I guess that’s allegorical to what happens on a building site, where an empty space is transformed into something with definition and purpose.

‘Service Dust’ is the standout here, for no other reason than it shows Xqui at his manipulative best, building a weird and alien sound world out of heavily-disguised voices and what sounds like hissing steam from a dystopian Metropolis factory production line. If this had been the 1960s, someone would probably had this banned for containing subversive, mind-controlling messages.

And then there’s Nocturnal Drift, for which I was going to use the adjective ‘noir’ because of its evocative, Lost Highway-esque sleeve photography. Only that was me being lazy and I hadn’t even heard the album at that point (yeah, yeah – never judge a book by its cover etc etc). Instead, this finds Xqui in the same general vicinity of his Vince Clarke-tipped Hymns album.

Quite where Xqui sourced the sounds from here is, like everything he does, somewhat unclear, however it is presented as a melodic, often classically-minded suite, occasionally joyful and frequently contemplative. The centrepiece is ‘Progressive Modernism’, which runs for an epic 28 minutes and, despite very little fluctuation in its short looped sound, never seems to run out of steam. It rather reminds me of the Philip Glass Buddha Box I zoned out to during the work-from-home-torture of the 2020 lockdown.

It also reminds me of hours spent staring at Mark Rothko’s bleak Four Seasons series of paintings at Tate Modern until they moved them someplace else. Like Rothko’s impenetrably dark canvases, the conceit is the level of detail that reveals itself under close examination and intense focus. The pace of ‘Progressive Modernism’ may be hesitatingly slow, but there is extreme restlessness and volatility in its myriad surrounding textures.

I hate to call this profound, as that might give Xqui a big head. In turn, that would require him to buy a bigger mask. In spite of those concerns, I can think of no better or more fitting word to describe Nocturnal Drift.

Laying A Pipeline was released April 3 2026 by Eustress Tapes. Nocturnal Drift will be self-released on April 30 2026 through xqui.bandcamp.com

Words: Mat Smith

(c) 2026 Further.

Rupert Lally – Norden

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Remember that TV show It’ll Be Alright On The Night? It was hosted by a guy called Denis Norden, who would introduce gaffes and outtakes while holding a clipboard, looking less like a veteran TV presenter and more like a safety inspector in a factory. Well, this album by Switzerland-based sound artist Rupert Lally is a tribute to him.

Only kidding. It isn’t, though it would be kinda fun if it was. But it is a tribute – of sorts – to the Nord Modular G1 synth, which Lally used to create this album. It consists of five long tracks which find Lally in full-on, long-form experimental electronic territory. I’ve followed Lally’s work for at least a decade now, and it’s really interesting to hear him venture down this path.

There’s a sense of restraint, but also freedom, in these pieces. It’s like he’s symbiotically interfaced himself with the machine, building patches that rely on repetitions, subtle shifts in tone and slowly-evolving layered development. Outwardly minimalistic, each of these five pieces is actually a rich stew of interlacing ideas where a lot happens if you only listen closely enough.

Each piece here occupies its own unique sound world, but ‘Nord D’ is my personal favourite, specifically for the nostalgia its core bass refrain gives me for Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works 85-92, which runs for the first four minutes until a hesitant, oscillating melody ushers in the track’s discrete and mesmerising changes. And then there’s ‘Nord E’, a 27-minute epic that feels like a 1970s synth music experiment that has existed for fifty years in a undiscovered time capsule buried in Don Buchla’s back yard, all white noise percussion, pointillistic tonal sprinkles and dubby echoes.

Norden is an album with many such moments to explore, occupying a creative zone that I’d really like to hear Lally leaning into more – with or without a clipboard.

https://rupertlally.bandcamp.com/album/norden

Norden by Rupert Lally was released March 6 2026.

Words: Mat Smith

(c) 2026 Further.

Various Artists – Insects

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A warning: if you’re the kind of person that massively freaks out at the insect-based challenges on shows like I’m A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here or The Challenge, Insects is not the compilation album for you. Containing 12 tracks each inspired by insects, if you’re even remotely scared of humming, buzzing, flapping or the amplified sound of insectoid limbs scurrying across a kitchen surface, this is likely to send you into a complete panic. For everyone else, this is a sharply-executed curatorial exercise by the always-remarkable Dustopian Frequencies imprint.

Key tracks for this reviewer include ‘Anopheles Genus Takeover’ by BMH (WCR’s Kate Bosworth and Matt Jetten) which has the sinister nihilism of an imaginary soundtrack to Iain Banks’ ‘The Wasp Factory’, until Bosworth issues the line “There are no tin openers anymore,” which is a trademark bit of wry humour I’ve come to look for in BMH’s savagely inventive music. Dave Clarkson’s squelchy techno banger ‘Hive Mind’ is another, providing further evidence of an alchemical skill that Clarkson has for turning pretty much any sound – toys, sweets, fairground rides, caves – into electronic music gold, in this case imagining a swarm of killer bees descending on an illegal outdoor rave.

At the other extreme, Linear North’s beetling, sub-bass-heavy ‘Brains Nor Backbone’ has a weird mournfulness and sensitivity toward the insect population, with phrasing that pivots on a quote nodding in the direction of Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis.

A recurring memory kept popping into my head while writing this. It was of being in a room in London’s Natural History Museum when my daughters were very small, a curator pulling out drawer after drawer of glass topped boxes, each containing a selection of different insects. This compilation is a lot like being back in that room, only each successive display case is accompanied by a vivid, visceral and very occasionally panic-inducing soundscape.

Insects was released January 23 2026 by Dustopian Frequencies.

Words: Mat Smith

(c) 2026 Further.

Various Artists – Ephemeral Sounds Of The Gulf – Edition 1

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Ephemeral Sounds Of The Gulf – Edition 1 collates 13 tracks from artists either based in, or with links to, the Gulf region, and was compiled by VCUarts Quatar’s Erika Tsuchiya.

The album employs a wide angle lens as it surveys the sound art spectrum. We hear whispy, euphoric vocals on Ghayda Abdujalil’s sparse ‘Fast-paced Life’. We hear modernist, leftfield electronic pop on Khulafi’s ‘Touch Sand!’. We observe processed sound and field recording excursions on Toni’s evocative ‘Caught In A Sandstorm’, where you can almost feel the desert wind blasting your skin, and Sam Nester’s watery ‘Field Notes’. We hear playful, noisy, disruptive sounds from a train journey on TuaregBeats’ ‘Al Wakra Metro Station’. (I played the latter while on my commute home in England, and the interjection of train announcements on TuaregBeats’ track left me feeling utterly confused as to where I actually was.)

We also hear dark ambience on Salfeya Alblooshi’s ‘E-waste Contaminant’, which carries, on one level, a soundtrack-friendly brooding sense of threat and danger; on another level, it has a fragility, a barely-there lightness that recalls the near-silence of Thomas Köner. Its counterpart comes in the form of the dreamy ‘The Shand’ by WYWY, whose central melodic refrain and breathy vocal feel like they could have found a comfortable place tracking a scene of emotional uncertainty in Bret Easton Ellis and Paul Schrader’s The Canyons.

Tsuchiya appears her twice, under her 3R1K4 alias. ‘Compound’ clusters tinkly, bell-like notes and a 1990s Warp electronica sensibility before offering up a savage, stuttering bass shape that creates the notion of the track suddenly lurching into a blistering rage banger. That latency informs a pulse-quickening feeling of tension and drama which ultimately dissipates rapidly into gentle vocal loops and soft ambience. Her collaboration with mourad, ‘Sunrise Rain’, which closes the collection, leans more prominently into that ephemeral, textural sound, offering soft, shimmering notes alongside a field recording of a relentless, noisy rain shower.

A carefully curated and engaging collection of varied sounds and inventive ideas.

Ephemeral Sounds Of The Gulf – Edition 1 was released February 7 2026 through Ephemera Records

Words: Mat Smith

(c) 2026 Further.

f5point6 – In Retrospect

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In Retrospect collects together key tracks from the body of work released by f5point6 on See Blue Audio. The alias of visual artist R. Cleveland Aaron, the goal here was to pick a representative track from each of his 11 See Blue Audio releases, in so doing charting a course through his catalogue and his musical development.

The album concludes with ‘La femme au port’, an entirely new track that leans into a sort of jazzy freedom, which sounds unlike anything else on the album. It vaguely reminds me of what St. Germain might sounds like if he was performing an ambient set in a disused church. ‘La femme au port’ offers a glimpse of Aaron’s future directional shifts, a far cry from the more obviously ambient tracks that dominate his other releases.

Not that these are derivative, aimless ambient pieces. Far from it. Aaron has a particular way of framing and evolving these pieces which set them apart from some of the bland sonic wallpaper that the genre has often embraced. ‘It’s Perfect Here’ opens with a undulating synth note before colliding kinetically with other a panoply of other sounds, including one that seems to corkscrew slowly ground-ward. It is serene, volatile, subtle and poised between darkness and levity. Elsewhere, ‘Hexapod’ offers a rhythm formed by resonant pulses that becomes fringed by a squelchy synth pattern. This is Aaron in slow-build mode, nudging the track out of pure ambient drift to a sort of low-key, dreamy slow-motion techno.

My personal favourite track here is ‘Fertile Ground’, which could be the high watermark of Aaron’s ambient explorations. It is a collection of movements, ranging from dub-like atmospherics to a coda that sounds like a piece of minimal classical music for orchestra and electronics.

An illuminating career survey, filled with rich texture and stylistic unpredictability.

In Retrospect by f5point6 was released February 13 2026 by See Blue Audio.

Words: Mat Smith

(c) 2026 Further.

 

Jess Brett – Scorpion Bowl

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The latest track from Berlin-based Jess Brett recounts the primal energy of a new relationship, filled with excitement, anticipation and potential.

The song is delivered over a relentless EBM stomp, offset by a prowling bass line and swirling monophonic melody that uses a synth sound that could have been borrowed from the first Yazoo album.

Brett sets the song in a San Francisco tiki bar where the cocktail that gives the track its title – a massive sharing punch that fuses the almond flavour of the Mai Tai with the mind-numbing alcohol levels of the Long Island Iced Tea – acts as a trigger for the ensuing wild, hedonistic love / lust story.

The one-off single follows Brett’s brilliant EP, Belle Of The Ball, her first long-form release since moving to Berlin, representing an evolution of her sound toward something sharper and more decisive.

‘Scorpion Bowl’ by Jess Brett was released February 14 2026.

 Shhh…. Jess will release ‘A Baby With Your Name’, the next chapter of her San Francisco adventures, through Mortality Tables on February 20 2026.

Words: Mat Smith

(c) 2026 Further.

Piano And Patterns, London Institute for Mathematical Sciences (February 13 2026)

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What happens if the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing? What if there are two left hands and two right hands? What if both left hands don’t know what both right hands are doing?

I could go on subdividing this conundrum up a few more times, but I won’t. I won’t, because it’s irrelevant. Irrelevant because, having watched performances of Brahms’ Variations On A Theme By Robert Schumann, Schubert’s Variations On An Original Theme In A-flat Major and Leontovych’s Shchedryk by Ukrainian pianist brothers Alexei and Sasha Grynyuk – two pianists playing the same piano, together – what I witnessed was an example of complete harmonious synchronisation. Then again, the Grynyuk brothers are two esteemed, award-winning musicians, so nothing short of perfection should have been expected.

Watching their four hands frantically moving across the keys of the antique Steinway piano was a mesmerising display of dizzying dexterity. I watched Vanessa Wagner performing Philip Glass pieces at the Royal Albert Hall a few years ago and I was reminded of her lightning fast performance while watching the Grynyuk brothers as their hands raced at impossibly high speeds across the keys. It was like a display of kinetic energy; appropriate, given that the London Institute for Mathematical Sciences is located at the Royal Institute, where Michael Faraday conducted his pioneering experiments in energy.

It was also, occasionally, a little stressful to watch from a front-row seat that afforded a perfect view of those hands clustered at the centre of the keyboard. I watched, simultaneously in awe of what I could see, and strangely fearful that their hands might collide. It felt like there wasn’t enough space for their hands to co-exist at the instrument together. I anticipated moments of unintentional disharmony through some sort of mid-melodic crash, but, of course, there were none. See my previous comment about their award-winning status.

The two pieces were punctuated by a lecture by Professor Yang-Hui He, a Fellow at the London Institute for Mathematical Sciences (and self-proclaimed failed musician), who posited that the true architect of harmony was Pythagoras. Exploring the mathematical theory that explains the note intervals of scales and different harmonic patterns used in Chinese / Japanese, Western and Indian scales, I’ll be completely honest that I wished I’d paid more attention in both my music and maths lessons. It was just as baffling, to a maths novice like me, as trying to untangle the four Grynyuk hands as they played, but it involved fractions, and nothing is more likely to induce educational PTSD in me than trying to fathom fractions all over again.

Self-evidently, this piece is a departure from the usual words placed here on Further. It illustrates that I know very little about musical (or indeed mathematical) theory. Bearing in mind that my two careers – in finance and music writing – rely on a degree of knowledge of both of these, that’s a fairly brave admission.

It also illustrates that I’m more than happy to be put in situations where I am materially outside of the comfort zone in which I tend to operate. It also refutes, to my mind, the notion that your appetite for musical exploration atrophies as you get older. I’ll continue to seek out enlightening, enlivening and mind-expanding musical experiences like these until my ears fully fail me.

With sincere thanks to Katya Gorbatiouk and Sarah Myers Cornaby for the invite.

Words: Mat Smith

(c) 2026 Further.

 

Rupert Lally – Tiny Universes

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Earlier this year, my Mortality Tables collaborative project released Lunar Forms by Switzerland-based sound artist Rupert Lally*. That album found Lally at what I would argue was his most inventive, using a specific and quirky Eurorack module to trigger randomised rhythms on a daily basis, which he then used as the foundation for the pieces on the album.

The album also found Lally in deeply ambient territory. It’s an area of his work that I’ve always enjoyed, and for Tiny Universes, his latest album, we (pleasingly) find him going even further in that direction.

His choice of title is instructive, if somewhat consciously oxymoronic. These 11 pieces are like studying pinhead-sized universes through a microscope, revealing an incomprehensible vastness that would not be implied by their ostensibly small stature. Musically, there’s a whiff of jazzy Kosmische, a smattering of Vangelis-esque Bladerunner-y widescreen vastness and a determined melodic momentum that’s often missing from a lot of ambient music. Lally is not afraid of introducing unsettling, discordant textures, instilling a feeling of discomfort and uncertainty as much as they seem to evoke the idea of wide-eyed, slack-jawed wonder, surprise and incomprehension.

Lally has always been a masterful electronic composer and sound designer, capable of using an adaptable array of tools and techniques within his work. The sleight-of-hand he deploys here is the art of the slow build. His melodies begin as quiet, ruminative gestures, which coalesce and harden as they progress, often without you noticing. These magnificent, delicate, unexpected, low-key crescendos are critical ingredients of pieces like ‘Cosmic Countdown’, where that aforementioned sense of motion is most acutely felt. Elsewhere, Lally’s approach is to allow pieces to form stately, stirring gaseous structures out of oscillating, restless layers of white noise, lending a creator’s guiding hand while also allowing the tracks to evolve and develop by themselves.

Unlike Lunar Forms, there are no rhythms on Tiny Universes. None. Not even the slightest trace, inference or suggestion. Perhaps they haven’t formed yet in these universes that have caught Lally’s attention. It leaves his melodic and atmospheric prowess utterly naked and untethered; a brave move, for sure, but one that he is effortlessly capable of owning. The result is an album representing yet another high watermark in his expansive back catalogue. And yes, I know I’m biased.

https://rupertlally.bandcamp.com/album/tiny-universes

Tiny Universes by Rupert Lally was released December 5 2025. It is available for a limited period as a pay-what-you-like release.

* There are a small number of CD copies of Lunar Forms available here.

Words: Mat Smith

(c) 2025 Further.

Critical Objects – Fractured In Grey

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‘Fractured In Grey’ is the third single from Critical Objects, a pairing of anonymous sound artist Veryan and the not-anonymous Pinklogik (Jules Straw). The new track continues the duo’s exploration of electronic pop’s hinterlands established with the preceding singles, ‘Rewind’ and ‘Blossoming Ache’, thus time setting Straws’ introspective vocal to a crisp electro beat and a fat, melodic bassline that has overtones of wonky, pitch-bent acid house.

As ever with the Veryan-Pinklogikisches Freundschaft, it’s the details that matter. Beneath that fat bassline is a slowly-unfurling pointillistic melody which gently asserts itself as the track progresses. There are further textural details lurking in the dense reverb which occupies the background, giving Straws’ voice an uncertain, wavering depth. And once again, like ‘Rewind’ and ‘Blossoming Ache’, the dense news of the mix is an illusion. The layers are deceptively simple, leading to the wing lodging itself in your consciousness for hours after.

Like with their previous two singles, both Pinklogik and Veryan offer up their own individual mixes of the track. Pinklogik’s mix isolates the haunting, melodic fragility but hugely ratchets up the rhythm, giving ‘Fractured In Grey’ a sense of slick momentum. Elsewhere, Veryan deconstructs the track into a frozen, atmospheric wonderland of suppressed beats and fluttering, overlapping ambient melodies. That one track can yield two such different perspectives is the quiet power of this wonderful – and hopefully enduring – duo.

https://criticalobjects.bandcamp.com/album/fractured-in-grey

Fractured In Grey was released December 3 2025.

Words: Mat Smith

(c) 2025 Further.