I’ll admit that Rupert Lally freaked me out a little with this one. And I don’t just mean about the music – I’ll get to that in due course. He messaged me to say he had a new album coming out and asked if I might be able to write some words about it. ‘Sure,’ I said. I’m a fan of his work, I’ve written about it easily more than any other artist, and I generally know what to expect (more on that later also).
What freaked me out was his next message, the preview of which flashed up on my phone screen as the words ‘Your Flesh Is Mine’. I felt like I was being stalked, like Drew Barrymore at the start of Scream, maybe. It was somewhat disconcerting, but it set the mood neatly for listening to the album.
This is a soundtrack. Lally is no stranger to these. He composes music for dance and theatre in Switzerland and knows intuitively how to convey mood and texture. This isn’t accompaniment for a particularly grim theatre production, though. It’s a score for a book. This also isn’t new territory for Lally. His soundtracks to Frank Herbert’s Dune, J.G. Ballard’s High Rise, William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (released as Notes From the Island), John Wyndham’s Day of the Triffids, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles, and Alan Garner’s The Owl Service were evocative and imaginative and distilled in such a way that perfectly brought to life the words on a page.
What’s different here is that this book hasn’t actually been published yet, and won’t be until 2027. It is the soundtrack to a noir book of the same name by Portuguese film-maker Victor Santos. Consequently, unlike Dune or High Rise, we don’t have the familiarity of the story with which to understand the cues.
However, based on pieces like the standout ‘Face To Face’, with its brooding piano and sudden gear-shift into spiralling synth tones, clouds of noxious drones and grim oscillator sweeps, I think you can get the gist. ‘Don’t Tell Anyone About This’ is dark, in a mysterious way, like we are becoming privy to a terrifying secret. ‘Something Deeply Wrong’ is a discordant, cloying affair that screeches to a despairing conclusion. ‘Manhunt’ uses string sounds to evoke a sense of panic and urgency. ‘Vera In The Park’ relies on a circling piano sequence very much in the style of Philip Glass or Michael Nyman, conveying a feeling of uncertainty and growing distress.
I mentioned that I generally know what to expect from Lally’s music. This one caught me off guard. I’ve become accustomed to his Eurorack modular synth work, but this one feels totally different – more textured, more detailed, more, well, soundtrack-y. It sounds like Lally has taken all the film music he’s written endlessly about and used those studies as inputs to create a rich, deep, emotionally resonant score that suggests he should ditch rural Switzerland for the studios of Hollywood.
I’ll admit that Rupert Lally freaked me out a little with this one. And I don’t just mean about the music – I’ll get to that in due course. He messaged me to say he had a new album coming out and asked if I might be able to write some words about it. ‘Sure,’ I said. I’m a fan of his work, I’ve written about it easily more than any other artist, and I generally know what to expect (more on that later also).
What freaked me out was his next message, the preview of which flashed up on my phone screen as the words ‘Your Flesh Is Mine’. I felt like I was being stalked, like Drew Barrymore at the start of Scream, maybe. It was somewhat disconcerting, but it set the mood neatly for listening to the album.
This is a soundtrack. Lally is no stranger to these. He composes music for dance and theatre in Switzerland and knows intuitively how to convey mood and texture. This isn’t accompaniment for a particularly grim theatre production, though. It’s a score for a book. This also isn’t new territory for Lally. His soundtracks to Frank Herbert’s Dune, J.G. Ballard’s High Rise, William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (released as Notes From the Island), John Wyndham’s Day of the Triffids, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles, and Alan Garner’s The Owl Service were evocative and imaginative and distilled in such a way that perfectly brought to life the words on a page.
What’s different here is that this book hasn’t actually been published yet, and won’t be until 2027. It is the soundtrack to a noir book of the same name by Portuguese film-maker Victor Santos. Consequently, unlike Dune or High Rise, we don’t have the familiarity of the story with which to understand the cues.
However, based on pieces like the standout ‘Face To Face’, with its brooding piano and sudden gear-shift into spiralling synth tones, clouds of noxious drones and grim oscillator sweeps, I think you can get the gist. ‘Don’t Tell Anyone About This’ is dark, in a mysterious way, like we are becoming privy to a terrifying secret. ‘Something Deeply Wrong’ is a discordant, cloying affair that screeches to a despairing conclusion. ‘Manhunt’ uses string sounds to evoke a sense of panic and urgency. ‘Vera In The Park’ relies on a circling piano sequence very much in the style of Philip Glass or Michael Nyman, conveying a feeling of uncertainty and growing distress.
I mentioned that I generally know what to expect from Lally’s music. This one caught me off guard. I’ve become accustomed to his Eurorack modular synth work, but this one feels totally different – more textured, more detailed, more, well, soundtrack-y. It sounds like Lally has taken all the film music he’s written endlessly about and used those studies as inputs to create a rich, deep, emotionally resonant score that suggests he should ditch rural Switzerland for the studios of Hollywood.
There are countless examples of artists having their work turned down, only to then assert themselves in a way that they probably wouldn’t have if it wasn’t for that rejection. My favourite example of this is The Residents, the anonymous Shreveport, LA group that decamped to San Francisco over half a century ago. Their first (anonymous) demo tape was sent to Warner Bros. Records and returned in the mail. The label A&R folks just addressed it to ‘The Residents’. Thus we have the foundation of one of the most enduring and expressive groups of artists you’ll ever interact with. Rejection can be a powerful force, like I said.
I was thinking about that while listening to the latest album from Neil Stringfellow’s Audio Obscura. I mean, I think about The Residents pretty much every day, but I’m talking here about rejection. Then again, I also think about that a lot.
Neil first told me about this album a while ago. It was a release he sent to Quiet Details, a label who I have the utmost admiration for. Alex Gold, who runs the label, is an absolute genius. His own music is exceptional, the creative concept behind Quiet Details is exceptional, and his mastering skills are also exceptional. Plus he’s great to go to a System7 gig with in Milton Keynes. That was a fun night.
For whatever reason, Quiet Details didn’t decide to release the album and so it languished, like a spurned lover dumped unceremoniously at a high school disco, on one of Neil’s many hard drives. Someone (possibly me, maybe some other likeminded fan of his work) encouraged him to just get it out there.
I’m glad he did. It is an absolutely beautiful body of work. It forms part of a continuum in Neil’s work of engaging with nature sounds, here using field recordings from five different countries. It also continues his shift towards classical structures and instrumentation. And so this is, undeniably, ambient music, but its phrasing and timbres are resolutely minimal. We are presented with strings, gentle, bell-like melodies, quiet tones and subtle rhythms across the entire breadth of these eight pieces.
My personal favourites come as a pair, right at the end of the album. ‘Zinc Creep aka The Old Room’ exists in a place of wonder and mystery, an organ-like suite of layered melodies giving it an austere, reverential feel. It develops slowly, eventually adding in white noise tones and a sense of disquiet to offset the clarity of the main instrument. The final track, ‘Lost Details aka Losing The Quiet War’ is the fragile embodiment of Neil’s disappointment at not getting picked to be a part of the Quiet Details series. We hear fragments of introspective piano, a well of restless, discordant sonic turbulence and rhythms that recall memories of his trippy AcidField Recordings In Dub gem for SubExotic.
Chin up Neil – it’s another great album, and better that it’s out here in our ears and Bandcamp collections rather than sulking in a folder.
Rejected Ambient Works Vol. 1. by Audio Obscura is released November 6 2026.
Two releases from the wonderful superpolar Taïps label, both from much earlier this year which I never got around to writing about. Each comes from the brilliant brain of anonymous Cologne-residing bassist / electronic artist bleed Air, whose work I’ve written about here before.
Temporary Second Residences comes from bleed Air’s side project five Bubble criteria, a pseudonym that shares little in common with the main alias apart from a curious use of capitalisation. It offers a suite of 15 (mostly) instrumental, post-rock pieces each built from unswerving drums delivered at a meditative pace over which are draped highly melodic guitar lines and occasional vintage analogue synth tones. The one time the tracks veer away from the fully-instrumental template is on ‘How Was Your Day Today?’, when Michael Cramm from Cologne’s Van Zoyd pops up to offer some spoken word musings.
The ethos behind the album was to collate pieces recorded while on the road, each one from a different place (not disclosed) during the last decade. The introspective phrasing and somewhat melancholy outlook feels very familiar to the sense of displacement and disconnectedness that I often feel when I travel with my day job. I imagine it will become an album I revisit time after time on planes and trains. Appropriately, this review was written on another plane, on another trip across the Atlantic.
My personal favourite piece is ‘Violin Spider’, one of several to feature warm and fuzzy analogue synth textures alongside guitar, while ‘Sabaudia’ features a nice detour into a jazz-guitar passage which is then replaced by a sweet wandering melodica melody. I hear nods to a whole bunch of artists here, but for some indefinable reason I’m chiefly reminded of Appliance and Tortoise.
Sticking with bleed Air, their eponymous debut album is the other release I never wrote about – either when it was first released in 2020 or when it received a nice lathe cut vinyl and cassette repressing earlier this year (the vinyl is sold out; a few copies of the cassette reissue are available). It features a female duck on the front cover. I like ducks.
Marco, superpolar Taïps’ creative mastermind tells me it’s the label’s biggest seller to date. It’s not hard to see why. It is a collection of vaguely Kosmische electronic tracks with a neatly inquisitive tonality, something that the guitar work in the five Bubble criteria album also shares. It’s a suite stacked to the rafters with filter sweeps, contemplative arpeggios, wonky beats and fat Moogy bass notes, which very occasionally leans into lo-fi territory.
‘I TEL’ is one of my favourite tracks here. Featuring beats straight out of an organ rhythm generator, rich long held synth tones and a twinkling melody that sparkles like the ice in the drink I was just served by a BA cabin crew member, the glue that holds ‘I TEL’ together is a low-slung bass guitar passage from bleed Air. To me, it sounds like something I heard on a compilation of soundtracks by Can’s Irmin Schmidt from years ago, only dear Irmin would never have allowed anything he composed to wander off quite so freely. Elsewhere, the resolute ‘Mars Yard’ feels like a track recovered from a box of unreleased Warp tracks, artist unknown, all mid-1990s post-electro beats and post-techno wiggly arps.
To bleed Air’s credit, this purported mixtape is neatly diverse in its reach. Each track has its own distinct personality but a common instinct that stops this feeling like a sprawling endeavour. I’m just sorry I missed it the first (and second) time around. As a robotic voice intones on ‘Mindfuck’, this is embarrassing.
The sold-out vinyl and cassette reissues of bleed Air by bleed Air were released April 6 2026. The original album was released September 4 2020. Temporary Second Residences by five Bubble criteria was released May 1. Both releases were via superpolar Taïps.
Pissed off and let down: that’s the sentiment of A Life On Hold, the new album from Tears|Ov (L.E. Allen, Terces Wale and Lottie Lou Poulet), which I recall hearing extracts from at a Tapeworm celebration event at Café Oto in 2025.
Consisting (generally) of short pieces, A Life On Hold is infused with a political narrative pouring scorn on an anti-capitalist patriarchal new normal that no one feels like they are truly a part of (unless you’re over-privileged and detached from the realities of day-to-day existence, of course).
It’s a necessarily unsettling listen, and one that deserves your fullest attention. ‘We’re Sorry’ begins with an insincere recorded apology before settling into prowling oscillator sweeps and militaristic drums that instil a sense of urgency, only for the frustrating robotic to re-emerge as the track’s focal point.
The curt ‘Happy Meal’ is presented as a playful suite of burbling arpeggios (I’m loving it?) while ‘Setting Sail’ – the longest track on the collection – fuses deep bass pulse synth tones, resigned spoken word verse, an uncoiling sound and a sample of someone baffled by misinformation. It’s a savage reflection of what it’s like to be alive today.
He sent me a promo download of Signals, his most recent album, and I never quite managed to get around to writing about it. In my defence, there’s been a lot of Life Stuff, Work Stuff and Other Stuff going on at my end and it consequently didn’t make it to the top of the to do list. Then I put the list in our recycling bin without realising. It was only when Dean sent me this companion EP that I twigged that I’d forgotten to review Signals. I can only apologise. I’ll try harder. Hopefully this piece makes up for it.
The sad fact is that I’m a huge fan of BUNKR’s work, and have been since I was introduced to it by my pal David Best from Fujiya & Miyagi (actually, I think I’ve overlooked writing about their brilliant new album also! I really need to get more organised).
What I missed with Signals was a collection inspired by the Surrey Hills. Its EP sequel is about the city laid out just beyond that geographical boundary. Signs, then, is a sort of romantic ode to the sprawling majesty of London and its unique personality. What did Samuel Johnson say? “When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.” This one’s for you, Sammy.
These four tracks have a journeying quality that is unique to BUNKR and one of the things I like most about Dean’s music. It is an implied vibrancy laced with total wonder at the sights unfolding in front of him. ‘Cruisen’ feels like a photograph taken with a slow shutter speed where the capital’s buses and black cabs become a blur of headlights. It carries a suggestion of energy suffused with nice little Kraftwerk-y flourishes and resolute, searching rhythms.
‘Eternal Cities’ reaches deeper into a kind of latency that eventually yields to post-hardcore beats and sweet melodic repetitions, neatly stacked like that Escher-esque illustration of all the Tube lines clustered below Piccadilly Circus. ‘The Distance Ate Itself’ is majestic and poignant, a tender instrumental electronic love song that has a stately, church organ grandeur to its framing.
Signs is an EP so sharply executed and decisive in its vision that they should play it as trains arrive into Waterloo, just to remind its weary commuters of why they drag themselves into London every day.
Washington Formica is the alias of French collagist Musta Fior. Bureau 31 arrived a week after ‘Essentials Oils’, which formed part of The Impermanence Project through my own Mortality Tables imprint. The two releases are markedly different. Whereas ‘Essentials Oils’ was built around dense clusters of drones, Bureau 31 focuses its attention on rhythms. The parallel between them comes in the most subtle of variations, with the carefully constructed beats continually shifting despite seeming fixed. In this way, it evokes Autechre’s ‘Repetitive Beats’, though the pace is much more languid. I listened to the chill ‘Porte C’ while driving to breakfast in Los Angeles along a palm tree-lined boulevard under a vivid blue Californian morning sky. It felt like the perfect accompaniment to a paradisiacal moment, the sinewy acid phrasing creating a sense of latent optimism. Elsewhere, the ten-minute title track begins slowly, before building up layer after layer of drums, over which sounds that swing with an implied jazziness are added. A brilliant addition to the Washington Formica catalogue. Released August 14 2026 by Wormhole World.
Almost Starlight pairs two musicians who might be better described as conceptualists. Jem Finer might be known as a guitarist and founding member of The Pogues, but his solo multidisciplinary activities have included thought-provoking pieces like Longplayer, an installation in a Docklands lighthouse using singing bowl samples that will run until 2999. John Matthias is nominally a violinist and arranger who has worked with Radiohead and others, but his backstory involves studying theoretical physics, which informs his approach to composition. Almost Starlight finds Finer playing hardy gurdy as a complement to Matthias’s swooping violin observations, recorded at Ashton Church of St. John the Baptist in Devon in July 2025. They are joined on key pieces by Jay Auborn (cello / percussion), the result being an atmospheric collection where classical forms are re-framed with electronic music sensibilities. ‘Queen Of Winds’ stands out as a highlight, wherein strange percussion sounds provide a metronomic pulse that is offset by howling winds of discordancy. Meanwhile, ‘As Low As Possible’ centres its attention on drones continually being pitched downwards, giving rise to a somewhat disconcerting feeling of time and existence coming to a dead stop. Released September 4 2026 by Touch.
“I have to go away and leave again,” is a central lyric on ‘Double Vision’, the sparse and fragile opening track on Cloud Canyons’ new album, Body Wisdom. Those lyrics precipitate a record that travels far from this initial moment of subtlety. Then again, the Italian quartet of Stella Baraldi, Michelle Christofori, Laura Storchi and Nicola Caleffi are rarely known for standing still. I initially came upon their music with last year’s Ecstasy / Discipline, which contained two tracks as different as they were alike. Body Wisdom takes that duality even further, presented as a collection of nine long pieces that journey toward vital electronic body music, a final state that is barely hinted at when the album starts. Along the way they offer sinewy synth sequences that evoke Giorgio Moroder, the wild blunt force of Factory Floor and trippy, psychedelic imagery. ‘Dream Hunter’ is my personal favourite here, its repeated synth sequence giving me joyful memories of the first time I listened to Suicide. An exciting stage in Cloud Canyons’ ongoing metamorphosis. Released September 4 2026.
A wise person said to me recently that “noise is in the ear of the beholder”. I had those words rattling around in my head when I started playing Live At Ohm by Forster (Mitchell Keaney and Davide Luciani); by the end of this recording of their show in Berlin in January 2026, my ears were ringing. In a good way, I should stress. In the same way that my ears were ringing for days after attending the final Throbbing Gristle concert in 2010. I knew what to expect. I visited the head of The Tapeworm at his London HQ a few months back and he gushed, “You must listen to this!” and played me the third track from this collection – loud, at foundation-troubling volume – where the bass intensity was physically impactful. Keaney and Luciani handle dangerous levels of distortion, probably without feeling the need for hazmat suits, and inputs are subjected to such savage processing that any hope of tracing their original provenance is pointless. In the case of that third track, a form of industrial techno emerges, but it is utterly, joyously, fractured. There are moments where what sounds like an ethereal voice floats gently above the din, but it is sucked down into the maelstrom of angry bass and clipped rhythms leaving barely a trace of itself. A joy to behold. Released October 2 2026 by The Tapeworm / The Wormhole.
I’m sat outside Café Oto, taking to Simon Fisher Turner, who has just completed a soundcheck ahead of his performance with John Lee Bird. Bird is also with us, on an adjacent bench, spontaneously writing the words that he will thread through Fisher Turner’s evolving soundscapes. We are also joined by writer and musician Sukie Smith, who, despite only having known me for less than five minutes, offers me suggestions of London galleries where I might consider hosting a Mortality Tables event later in the year.
Fisher Turner mentions that he found a recording he’d made of Chuck Berry at Wembley, and, for reasons I now cannot remember, we wind up talking about an all-female Slade covers band. The last thing I remember is a conversation about Gary Glitter. Bird considers adding Glitter lyrics to his performance later, but we collectively conclude this would more than likely be ill-advised.
New connections were formed, new ideas were shared.
I became acquainted with albums by both Smith and Bird in the days that followed. Smith’s wonderful The Glass Dress And A Ringing Bell was released in September 2024 and covers a lot of ground, steering a course between leftfield rock and experimental electronics. We find Smith helming the rapturous motorik blues rock of ‘Into The Light’, reflecting mournfully on love and loss on the fragile ‘Pull And Twist’ and offering a plaintive R&B-inflected electronica on ‘Fixed Star’. These dexterous stylistic shifts are possible thanks to her adaptable vocal style, pitched in the style of PJ Harvey, Patti Smith and Stevie Nicks, but one that is always Smith’s own.
On ‘A Ringing Bell’, Smith fuses a melancholy, delicate vocal with restless electronics and gentle acoustic instruments, while the closing track ‘Move Towards The Storm’ finds her voice occupying an ethereal, angelic tone on a track that is poised somewhere between hope, despair and acceptance, a bleeping electronic melody sounding not unlike a Morse code transmission from the edge of uncertainty.
One of the most evocative tracks here is ‘We Try Not To Think About It Now’, charting a wistful, dream-like trip through a vivid and restlessly-shifting Los Angeles over jangly guitars and a rhythm track that barely ever pauses for breath. We move fluidly between the Sunset Strip, Culver City, the Pacific Coast, Silver Lake and Echo Park, our motion framed by countless interactions and tiny character portraits, the whole thing punctured by an undercurrent of emerging and unresolvable sadness.
When I arrived at Oto, Fisher Turner greeted me with a very formal, “Good evening Matthew.” From behind the piano, Bird popped up like a jack-in-a-box and blurted, “Matthew Broderick?” The name stuck. I became Matthew Broderick that evening. He thrust a Bandcamp yum code and a pink badge proclaiming the legend Think Pink. The code unlocked his album with fellow sound artist Fabrizio Modonese Palumbo. The badge was its front cover.
The centrepiece of this album is the 21-minute title, featuring Bird recounting a list of observations, all delivered over Palumbo’s squealing electric viola and a rich and undulating series of drones, field recordings and processed sounds. Example non-sequiturs:
Pink is:
A cucumber in its happiest state
Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, previously ‘Blue’ Derek Jarman
A panda on a pedestal
The reference to Jarman and his monumental Blue – soundtracked, lest we forget, by Fisher Turner – is instructive. There is more than a hint of Blue here. It may not be as diaristic and political as Jarman’s observations, recorded painstakingly and painfully toward the end of his life, as his eyesight was fading to nothingness, but there is something just as curiously poignant present in Think Pink. Only it’s pink, not blue.
Yes, there is a tendency toward absurdism and wry humour, at least in the first few minutes of the title piece. However, once you surrender to Bird’s mesmerising, hypnotic voice, an implied disenchantment begins to appear. This happens at precisely the point the sounds become more inchoate and brittle, a hissing noise and tiny bells finally overwhelming the track and suppressing the last residues of Bird’s presence.
The release is rounded out by a reminiscence-filled interlude, a piano version containing very little discernible piano (until the final three minutes) and remixes from Paul Beauchamp, Xiu Xiu, Julia Kent and, in a somewhat – and perhaps inevitable – full-circle moment, Simon Fisher Turner.
The Glass Dress And A Ringing Bell by Sukie Smith was released September 1 2024. Think Pink by John Lee Bird and Fabrizio Modonese Palumbo was released April 17 2026.
Catch John Lee Bird and Sukie Smith in conversation and performance at The Crypt, 30 Prescot Street on August 21 2026, accompanying Bird’s Dollhouse Exhibition of his elaborate dolls. Tickets available at vout-o-reenees.com
“1300, Lewisham Way. I wonder if Asda sells kettles?”
– Leon Clowes, ‘Empirical Evidence Of The Existence Of Angels’
As a writer, it goes without saying that you have to be careful with how you use words. You don’t want to throw certain words around too often otherwise your writing starts to look sensationalist and hyperbolic.
For example, I’m acutely aware of how often I’ve described a piece of music that I’m writing about as ‘profound’. These are generally pieces of music that leave a deep, indelible mark on me in some way, that stir my emotions and move me in a specific but often unexpected way.
Multi-disciplinary artist Leon Clowes’ debut album, Empirical Evidence On The Existence Of Angels, is, however, a collection that fully deserves the word I am conscious I overuse.
It is unabashedly profound. Its centrepiece is the title track, wherein Clowes recounts the thoughts in his head every time he sees a feather during a specific period in 2021. Each entry is tagged, like a museum archive object or some fragment of bone unearthed in an archeological dig, with the date, time and location, followed by whatever thought was sluicing around his mind at that precise moment. On one level it is just a list of oblique diaristic entries – occasionally funny, often abstractly disconnected from their context, and yet overwhelmingly moving despite being positioned in a vacuum of quotidian nothingness.
Clowes’ goal was to prove, irrefutably, that angels existed. Not that London, where he lives, has a whole lot of pigeons that leave a lot of unwanted feathers on the pavement. It finds him attaching hope and significance during a period of personal turbulence, specifically his joining Alcoholics Anonymous. The pursuit of angels, and the self-reinforcing notion that a feather could have been discarded from an archangel’s wings, becomes something to focus on, something to distract himself from addiction; a salve, something hopeful, something concrete in an otherwise uncertain and unstable time.
I totally get it. Immediately after my father passed away in 2024, while in Los Angeles, I attached huge significance to any sighting of a humming bird or dragonfly, convinced that these creatures were messages from my absent father. It wasn’t without logic: a Google search told me what these were purported to mean, and thus I’ve believed it ever since, even after the oscillations of grief have slowly ebbed away. Others might see this as ridiculous, to which I’d say that the coping mechanisms we chose to adopt are intentionally personal, and therefore beyond logic.
‘Empirical Evidence Of The Existence Of Angels’ is surrounded by often short instrumental pieces, either for strings and piano or, in the case of the likes of ‘The Appliance Of Science’ and ‘Music Itself Listens To’, finely-wrought, wandering and fragmented electronics. Perhaps it’s the overhang of the title piece, but each of these vignettes carries that same sense of emotional uncertainty and the confrontation of demons. They are framed by the same muted, fragile and highly delicate sentiment, just without Clowes’ spoken-word focal point.
I could write more, but I won’t. I simply won’t do this body of work sufficient justice. I will instead return to where I started: this is profound.
Empirical Evidence Of The Existence Of Angels was released July 23 2026 via Naviar Records.
Shameless plug: Leon recently processed a recording I made of me talking about my father, and how his absence contributed to the genesis of the Mortality Tables Impermanence Project. You can listen to ‘Absent Fathers’, which was first broadcast on ResonanceFM on July 14 2026, at Mixcloud here.
Puzzles Of The Psyche is a 20-track compilation by Trevlad, whose mixes show the same curatorial intricacy that dominates this collection. Informed by the title, and a sleeve which gives me Escher-meets-AI vibes, this is a deep-thinking exploration filled with deep ambient cuts that often lean toward the mysterious. That style is best exemplified by Hy Vyb and Asha Patera, both of whom blend New Age-y reference points with almost noir-ish mystique. Elsewhere, tracks from Arcane Trickster, Oceanographer and Bit Cloudy go for bubbling, immersive ambience, while The Gaye Device breaks ranks and hitches that ambience to a low-slung house style reminiscent of UFOrb-era Orb. The two standouts, for this writer, both come in upper-case: HDRF’s long, elaborate and dramatic ‘Chronofracture 4’ and BUNKR’s supremely melancholic futurism on ‘Circling The Monolith’. Released March 26 2026.
The new album from Lines Of Silence (David Little, Dave Clarkson and Andrea Parra) is perhaps one of the most arresting and attention-grabbing albums I’ve heard this year. Opener ‘Wolf’ sets the pace, Featuring blisteringly hot guitar layers, ebbing / flowing synth sweep and a solid motorik beat, coming to rest somewhere in the liminal space between Neu! and The Modern Lovers, via the space rock of Hawkwind and Appliance. I’m not usually one for making comparisons with other artists, as I always find that kinda lazy, but I’ve just dropped four bands into a comment about one single track, so I might as well carry on. I’m pretty sure those comparisons are way, way off here, but ‘Come With Us (If You Want To…)’ sounds like System 7 covering incidental music from Miami Vice, with a squelchy bassline intertwining itself around sinewy, entrancing arpeggios. The second half of the album consists of more intentionally psychedelic pieces, generally without beats. The transcendent, euphoric effect is the same, just at a more languid pace. And yet there is implied momentum here, a sense of latency and expectation, of flying through wormholes in your consciousness and falling through the bottom of the universe. Released May 8 2026.
Cliff Workshop was composed by Edinburgh electronic musician Euan Dalgarno following an accident. Its creation became an integral part of his healing, both physically and also mentally. In his notes for the album, he talks openly about these pieces having a consciously reassuring tone. That tone is most evident on ‘The Bealach’, where a spiralling central melody encircles you with a powerfully emotive resonance, its intense grip only heightened by wavering voices and euphoric textures. Elsewhere, ‘Rockethaus’ emerges uncertainly from quiet, ruminative ambience, before coalescing into a devastating string crescendo, while ‘Jackson Pollock’ simulates the chaos and drama of the painter’s canvasses, with broad synth sweeps and discordant violins providing an analogue to Dalgarno’s unsettled mind amid his recovery. Released May 15 2026 by Bytes.
ISOLATED COMMUNITY – NORTHUMBERLAND PILLBOX ODYSSEY
In 2020, while temporarily living in Cornwall, I spent some time on the beach at Sennen. I’d been there countless times but for some reason had never spied the small, abandoned concrete military structure halfway up the hill behind the wide expanse of sand. Feeling inquisitive, I took myself up there to have a look. It was eerie and strange. Its roof had collapsed and it was filled with rubbish, needles and the remnants of a small fire. Where once it might have been part of an earnest effort to keep our shores safe from enemy invasion, it was now nothing more than a concrete waste basket. I made some field recordings, some of which may have ended up in Audio Obscura’s The Lost Weekend.
The latest release from Newcastle’s Isolated Community is concerned with the many such vestigial military structures that can be found across Northumberland. The duo of Richard and Rachael have an unerring knack for creating impressionistic sonic pieces from architectural inputs, and their focus here on these ‘pillboxes’ gives the collection an often dark and sinister vibe.
Some of the best moments appear in a sequence of tracks occupying the centre of the album, ‘Budle Bay: Gun Battery’, ‘Acklington: ‘Type22’ Pillbox’ and ‘Hemscott Hill: ‘Cottage’ Pillbox’. ‘Budle Bay’ floats on ghostly wraiths of spooky textures, offset by a wavering, mysterious melody, barely audible off in the distance, and a churning, spinning sound that sounds mechanical and dangerous. On ‘Acklington…’ we hear a wonky melody that shimmers over turbulent white noise and static; the melody sounds like it should belong at an afternoon tea dance for war veterans, only it is skewed and messy, like time and space have been cataclysmically disrupted by some catastrophic event. Finally, on ‘Hemscott Hill’ we hear a skeletal beat, a synth that whines like a siren, and a low vocal texture that sounds like ominous chanting. An imaginative, haunted exploration of our wartime past. Released May 22 2026 by Northumberland Audio Capture.
The concept behind the latest album from Neil Stringfellow arose while watching an interview with Duke Ellington. He was asked by the interviewer about playing piano, to which the Duke retorts that it isn’t playing, “this is dreaming”. In what feels like a rejected card from the Oblique Strategies deck, Stringfellow found himself pondering what a dreaming piano might sound like. This album is the response to that enquiry.
It is a collection somewhat removed from some of the earlier Audio Obscura albums, largely because of the emphasis on weaving beatific piano around complex rhythms and electronic impulses. It has a sinewy connection to the series of albums that commented on environmental change, given that Stringfellow composed the pieces at night during the extreme UK heatwaves of 2025, but for the most part this feels like he is breaking new musical ground.
I always find it hard to isolate highlights on Audio Obscura albums. Stringfellow’s approach to composition always creates an even musical flow state where individual pieces only ever feel like part of a complete whole. Nevertheless, ‘Is It True That We Only Ever Dream In Black And White’ stands out, beginning with the voice of his son, Arlo (“for extra pocket money”), where Stringfellow attaches contemplative piano to a resonant bass pulse; when the piano drops out, you hear a track filled with low-level turbulence and clusters of restless noise. The sonic framework of ‘People Say I’m A Dreamer’ consists of delicate piano, heat-haze textures, scratchy electronic patches and a beat that shuffles along like it belongs on an ambient trip-hop cut from 1994.
I remember the heatwaves of 2025. They sucked. I couldn’t sleep a wink, and, according to his notes, neither could Stringfellow. Whereas I just lay in bed desperately seeking some sleep, trying not to agitatedly toss and turn to find a comfortable position, he used the time to make art. The result is a uniquely atmospheric album, dreamily composed in the unsettling quiet of sleeplessness. Released June 12 2026.
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