On occasion, I write press releases for artists. I think of it as a side hustle to a side hustle, given that writing for this blog and Electronic Sound isn’t my main job. I find it a wonderful, liberating experience. A review needs to be relatively objective whereas a press release, given its stated purpose of trying to attract attention to a particular product, is much more free.

As a upstanding, responsible, and, I hope, relatively good music journalist, one of the key disciplines you learn is that you don’t simply rewrite the press release when you’re composing a review. It’s not the first rule of review writing, but it’s fairly close to the top. However, I do notice that quite often the press releases I’ve written get copied completely and passed off as a review, or get subtly edited to show some modicum of originality. And I’m not fully sure how I feel about this, if I’m honest. I don’t know if I’m offended by the laziness, or flattered by the wholesale appropriation of my words.

So, with all of that said, I’m now going to appear completely hypocritical by lifting the entire press release text for Billy Malm’s SPÄTLZLE and pasting it in below.

Self-taught Euro-dance instrumentalist Billy Malm is back with a new collection of studio cuts showcasing the artist’s flair for combining sounds in the same way you might, for example, mix together different kinds of Fanta, maybe Fanta Limón and Fanta Orange, or if you have access to some of the more niche Fantas, like Strawberry or Haunted Apple, you can use those as well, and share that with a friend, giving them some of the mixed together Fantas to drink out of their own glass, so they can experience something that you made for them, even though it’s all just really Fanta and the components of the mixture were produced by the company that makes Fanta, probably in a factory or possibly a workshop if they do it in smaller batches for new flavour prototyping, but the mixture kind of becomes more than Fanta and you can tell by looking at it because it’s not a normal Fanta color, like there’s normally no brown Fanta or dark yellow Fanta, so the friend who you share it with gets this multisensory moment of realizing something unique for the first time and they can swirl it around in the glass and smell it as if they’re at a fancy wine tasting event, and they could be doing this as a funny joke or even in earnest because they are genuinely immersed in this personal act of creation you have prepared for them and to be honest, everyone knows that smell plays a significant role in how things taste, so there’s actually nothing ridiculous about them smelling their drink in this situation, and they might even take things a bit further, holding their ear close to the glass to observe how this combination of Fantas sparkles, perhaps noticing some surprising properties relating to the carbonation, for example that while the bubbles occur more frequently than in normal Fanta, they might sound less explosive when they burst, more like the tiny air pockets in the Fanta are just opening gently like cactus flowers when they reach the surface because this mixture somehow contains less internal violence than other Fantas or mixtures of Fanta that they’ve tried and this evidence of a seemingly miraculous harmony within the beverage might place in them a kernel of optimism that, given the right conditions, could develop into something that at this point in time, they don’t even have the ability to comprehend, and they might go so far as to pour a small amount of the drink you made for them onto the palm of their hand, to feel this thing, to really explore what it is by using the middle finger, ring finger and little finger to rub the liquid into the soft center of their hand, working it like a wholemeal dough, so that the sugars and the previously invisible dirt or dead skin on the skin starts to form tiny sticky tubular strands, kneading the mass, the actually quite disgusting dark micro baguettes of filth, which your friend frowns at, pulling back, suddenly realizing that maybe they’ve taken things too far and that the norms within society aren’t all just completely arbitrary, though some of them absolutely are, but in this case the disapproval earned from pouring sweet beverages on oneself does seem reasonable given this viscid, unheimlich outcome, and the friend looks to you for reassurance that there is a way back for them, a line they can grab before being swept out by the now relentless tides of chaos, swirling all around, threatening to pull apart any notion of stability they once held and you reach out and take the glass of mixed Fantas away from them and they meekly let you have it, this seemingly cursed chalice, this gift infused with so much hope that they irresponsibly abused potentially precipitating any number of currently unknowable consequences and you look them in the eye as they sheepishly return your gaze and raising the glass high between you and your friend, you release a what could be a moment of smile from one corner of your lips, above which a faint twitch ripples across the eyebrow (a waggle? your perceptive friend cautiously wonders) and you slowly draw the glass of mixed together Fantas back in a gentle arc and pour the contents of the vessel, approximately 250ml of Fanta-based liquid, over your head, the soda instantly absorbed into your hair and running down the facial features and neck as you roll the empty glass onto the middle of the laminate-topped table and start vigorously massaging the Fantas into your scalp like some high-fructose 2-in-1 shampoo/conditioner, laughing, cackling, on the precipice of what people refer to as hysteria, but without any trace of malice, and your friend, after a few abbreviated false starts, now fully joins in your extreme merriment, howling, shrieking, whooping, convulsing, yelping, hiccupping, coughing, resonant swells ringing off nearby surfaces when the frequencies of the two vocalizations of pure joy align, these roaring tsunamis of euphoric sound sweeping over and blocking out the rest of the world, the humming and hissing of hidden HVAC systems, babies crying, the traffic noises, concerned exclamations from passersby, some kind of alarm, religious bellringing, all squashed into insignificance by the laughter, all but perhaps the rising telltale buzz of the inevitable gathering wasps.

Maybe you can see why I did that. I’m not sure that one sentence even is a press release. It certainly intended to be one by the way it started, but that’s most definitely not how it ends up. I would posit that this is less a bit of sales-y text designed to sell a product and a work of surrealist art.

A traditional press release it may not be, but it is more than adequate preparation for what SPÄTLZE sounds like. This is a collection of fizzy, effervescent tracks that flip ceaselessly between wonky electro and leftfield techno. These pieces are dominated by heavy bass, sprays of seemingly random pulses, unpredictable synths and beats that seem hellbent on freeing themselves from a DAW grid-prison.

That’s not to suggest that tracks like the title track or ‘Fragola’ are wayward, messy sprawls. Far from it. There’s discipline here, in abundance, but Malm actively skews any sense of linearity. With ‘Spätzle’, when a steady, glass-like staccato sequence emerges, that’s his cue to mess everything else up, rather than allowing the track to coalesce around that pretty focal point. I appreciate that this analogy might get lost on non-British readers, but what Malm does here reminds me a lot of the late and lamented comedian Les Dawson. Dawson was a talented, almost virtuoso-standard pianist, but he would do these skits where he completely ballsed-up the music he was playing. It was a talent that he could only do convincingly, and with hilarious results, because he was so talented a player in the first place. So there you have it: Billy Malm is experimental electronic music’s Les Dawson. Go figure.

SPÄTZLE concludes with ‘How Are You Doing?’ (I’m fine, thanks). It begins with a web of siren-like sounds that nod in the direction of Fad Gadget’s ‘Back To Nature’, before ushering in a solid 4/4 rhythm that’s probably one of the tightest and unaltered set of beats on the whole album. Stuttering, chugging synths that sound like electronic wah-wah funk guitar, a sprightly bass pattern, friendly drones and harshly-filtered tones are then thrown in over the beats, creating an alternately playful and resolute finale to this brilliantly inventive, wonderfully madcap and boldly other banger of an album.

SPÄTZLE by Billy Malm was released January 30 2025 by Strategic Tape Reserve

Words: Mat Smith

(c) 2025 Further.