Shots: Xuma / Asher Levitas & Margaret Fielder McGinnis / Brass Clouds, Fog Net & Volcanic Pinnacles / Hiro Ama / Pas Musique

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XUMA – FREE BETTY

‘Free Betty’ is a protest song by Xuma, the Brighton duo duo of Harriett and Chris Robbins Kennish, whose debut album Jasmine I wrote about two years ago. The focus of their ire here is on the jailing of one Ibtissame Betty Lachgar, imprisoned in squalid conditions in Morocco for wearing a slogan t-shirt – in London, where the last time I checked we still enjoyed freedom of speech and expression – that supported two women sentenced to death in Iran for being lesbians. ‘Free Betty’ contains four mixes of the track, fronted by Harriett Robbins Kennish’s angular, punky vocals, the mixes all pack their own political punch, ranging from crisp electro to fast-paced minimal techno. You can read more about the Free Betty campaign here. Released January 18 2026.

https://xuma.bandcamp.com/album/free-betty

Shameless Plug #1: Chris Robbins Kennish released ‘Wedding Piano’ under the name Ultrachill as part of Season 3 of my Mortality Tables LIFEFILES project. It can be found here.

ASHER LEVITAS & MARGARET FIELDER MCGINNIS – THROUGH THESE RED WINDOWS

This collaboration between sound artists Asher Levitas and Margaret Fielder McGinnis uses two discrete inputs as the jumping-off points for the four tracks presented here. The first is a series of sculptures by McGinnis which are named after Wallace Sabine (1868 – 1919), a physicist whose pioneering work on acoustics was integrated into the architectural design of the Boston Symphony Hall. The second input is a recurring childhood dream that Levitas experienced, which, when approached as sound sculptures, become textures that range from dreamy and resolved to tangled and impenetrable. These were then played through McGinnis’s sculptures, fringing them with a metallic crackle like a rattling air conditioning unit which gives even the most elegiac tone a sense of deep and complex uncertainty. A remarkable release from these two seasoned artists. Released February 13 2026.

https://asherlevitas.bandcamp.com/album/through-these-red-windows-2

Shameless Plug #2: Asher Levitas released ‘It’s Like Last Time But This Time You’ve Got A Gun’ as part of another Mortality Tables initiative, The Impermanence Project. It can be found here.

BRASS CLOUDS, FOG NET & VOLCANIC PINNACLES – DIVE 2: SONOLUMINESCENCE

It’s hard not to describe the second release from the Bathysphere imprint’s Dive series as immersive. Recorded in a single day by the mysterious Brass Clouds, Fog Net and Volcanic Pinnacles, Dive 2 is part-jazz, part-ambient, part-soundscape and all, well, immersive. We hear unobtrusive, atmospheric field recordings, singing bowl tones, evocative saxophone melodies, and big blocks of floating texture, often all at once. It is a highly emotional suite, sidestepping specific classification. The inquisitive piano melodies, fluid synth-brass notes and fluttering electronics of ‘Spectral Visions’ combine together to make one of the album’s emotive highlights, its discernible instrumentation briefly collapsing into a dense web of enveloping drones. ‘Phosphor Signals’ trawls through rich, bass-heavy low-end thanks to a combination of sonorous sax and heavy synths, though which poke a joyful melodic pairing of chiming percussion and piano. Immersive, like I already said (twice). Released February 26 2026 by Bathysphere.

https://bathysphererecords.bandcamp.com/album/dive-2-sonoluminescence

HIRO AMA – BOOSTER PACK

In 2024, I reviewed Japan-born, London-based Hiro Ama’s Music For Peace And Harmony for Electronic Sound. This seems to happen to me increasingly rarely these days, but it is an album that I returned to countless times after the review was written. Its gentle, mellifluous atmospherics left a real impression on me, and I found myself playing it during moments where things were getting on top of me or I felt anxious. Honesty, it’s a beautiful collection. Please do check it out. The Hiro Ama of Booster Pack is very different. This is music designed to move your feet, not soothe your troubled soul. In fact, the only trace of the Ama from Music For Peace And Harmony I can find is on ‘Cloud 9’, where a wonky melody briefly offers a glimpse of the lightness of spirit that coloured his 2024 album. The EP proves Ama to be a highly dexterous and unpredictable producer. The intense ‘Lava’ belongs in a Moby rave DJ set from 1992, with a savage, almost EBM bass line. Opener ‘Booster’ is the highlight, occupying a euphoric (but often skewed) deep house zone that, like the spiritual side he showed on Music For Peace And Harmony, Ama makes entirely his own. Released April 10 2026 by PRAH.

https://hiroama.bandcamp.com/album/booster-pack-ep

PAS MUSIQUE – 8 PHRASES

Hot on the heels of the solo Pas Musique performance by founding member Robert Pepper at the Pictor Gallery in New York last week, there’s a new album out this week. 8 Phrases is the soundtrack to a film comprising eight short segments, and finds the trio of Pepper, Michael Durek and Jon Worthley returning to the instant composition / filming approach they used between 2008 and 2011. The full film can be found here. ‘Whisper’ occupies the dead centre of this collection, finding them intoning a nursery rhyme I’d forgotten all about over a sound bed of swirling, slightly discordant electronics doused in phasing, fluctuating reverb. The words are delivered in a low, conspiratorial whisper which imbues them with a grim sense of discomfort and unease, not dissimilar to how The Residents often usher the familiar toward the nightmarish. Elsewhere, ‘Inside A Clock’ fuses a pulsating, restless low-end with murky, shrouded voices from which emerges a dense sequence of unpredictable sounds. ‘Garden Echo’ might have the most beatific title of all of these pieces but it is also one of the collection’s darkest moments, as a polite cloud of pretty textures gets hitched to a dirty, faltering rhythm, accompanied by urgent sirens, and grubby blocks of distorted noise. Released April 24 2026.

https://pasmusique.bandcamp.com/album/8-phrases

Words: Mat Smith

(c) 2026 Further.

Pas Musique / onewayness : Ambient Chaos (Pictor Gallery, New York April 17 2026)

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Pas Musique

Everything up to now is just a prologue.

A gallery just out of the shadow of the High Line. Pictures from Michael Zenreich’s LIFESTILL series line the walls. Initially unclear until studied correctly, each one seems to contain processed photographs of fruit overlaid with resolute grid lines.

Against a backdrop of old video footage of preserved childhood memories, onewayness (Adam Holquist) offers a dreamy suite of delicate piano motifs offset by occasional fleeting sonic interventions, each successive element quietly interfacing with the melodies. It is a subtle evocation of the passing of time, every isolated note feeling like a grain of sand being drawn inexorably to the bottom half of a glass timer.

Robert Pepper‘s solo Pas Musique set occupied a noisier, more abrasive ambient zone. We hear looped sounds that become inadvertent rhythms, interspersed with brief vocal sounds that blur rapidly into Pepper’s rich soundscape. There are moments where what sounds like a Tibetan singing bowl is subjected to heavy dub processing until it reaches a point of total unrecognisability. A video shows an inchoate image of either rapidly swirling water or a medical camera making a journey through a body, creating an unsettling, unswerving visual presence that mirrors Pepper’s continually oscillating, restless, discordant tapestries.

There is a palpable tension here. Rhythms try to assert themselves only to be suppressed. A TV announcers words are jumbled into nonsense. Sweet sounds rapidly become nightmarish.

That ongoing tension across Pepper’s thirty-minute set mirrors Zenreich’s pictures and their uncomfortable relationship between organic objects and the authoritarian, domineering power of the grid.

Pas Musique will release 8 Phases on April 24 2026. With thanks to John.

Words: Mat Smith

(c) 2026 Further.

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.