Music journalist for Electronic Sound and occasional press release writer for VeryRecords. Father, husband, vegan. Co-founder of Mortality Tables - mortality-tables.com
Atom Brigade started out as a collaboration between Martin Jensen and Rupert Lally, initially taking the form of an instrumental distance collaboration, its stylistic template being squarely focused on the 1980s. The pieces they created fell neatly a mix of low-slung, guitar-inflected melodic post-punk and chunky, almost Madchester-style funk grooves.
At some point in proceedings, the pair felt that the tracks they were honing would be well-suited to vocalists. They enlisted Star Madman (Amanda Jay) and Oliver Cherer and the Atom Brigade collective was born. Instrumental tracks like ‘Safe Travels’ and ‘Breathe Breakdown’ are the moments where Jensen and Lally get to show off their sound design and production chops, where their expansive knowledge of the rudiments of electronic composition truly comes to the fore.
However, as the pair themselves acknowledged, these pieces really benefit from the addition of vocals. This is an album that effortlessly flicker between dark and light, with Star Madman’s heartfelt, warm singing gracing the searching, thwarted ‘(We Never) Made It To Forever’ and the gently uplifting yet emotionally devastating closing track ‘New Illusion’.
The tracks with Oliver Cherer take the Atom Brigade sound in a manifestly different direction. ‘Little Town’ has a vaguely Thomas Newman dimension to its shimmering elusive sound, one that is caught between the poles of wonder and numb, emotional detachment. His vocal here is earnest, determined but quiet, interfacing with the fragile, fluttering soundworld created by Jensen and Lally to leave you feeling tentative, unresolved and uncertain. In contrast, ‘Oh Bader Meinhof’ is infectious and irrepressible, with Lally’s cool, chiming guitar licks and Jensen’s breakbeat locking together wondrously.
There is an understated dimension to Atom Brigade. None of these songs grab forcefully for your attention yet they deliver a resolute and memorable self-assuredness. That strange and unplaceable synergy is what makes this such an inspired collaboration. More – much more – please.
Atom Brigade by Atom Brigade was released August 11 2023 by Subexotic.
Today we hand over the keys to Further. to Nicholas Langley, founder of Brighton’s Third Kind Records. The label celebrated their 10th birthday on 3rd September. Congratulations to Nick and all the artists who have released incredibly diverse electronic music through TK over the past decade – and here’s looking forward to the next ten years.
“Even for the purposes of one of these anniversary type articles it’s impossible for me to chose some key releases from the eighty plus we’ve made over the past ten years. Every single release came about because I loved it for one reason or another and wanted to bring it to the ears of a few more people. Sometimes it was just a handful of people and other times it was quite a fair few – there never seems to be any real rhyme or reason to that. One thing is apparent to me now, that play stats and sales figures are no indicator of the real impact on human listeners out there. So anyway, instead of making an arbitrary selection myself, I asked some regular artists on the label which were their favourites.”
“Mind Control is a captivating release from Third Kind’s catalogue. The album is boundary-pushing, emotive, and intelligently crafted. I will never be indifferent to ‘You’d Better Wake Up Girlfriend’s melody and weird straight groove. More than that, Mind Control holds a special place in my heart as it was while listening to it that I decided to send my Notebook demos to the label.”
“In a personality-defining trip to Canterbury in the early ‘90s I visited my mates in a student house they shared with Nick Langley, now the label boss of Third Kind. One afternoon in the beige-carpeted living room, cushioned in a heady mix of ganja smoke, daytime TV, tea and buttered toast and half-heard conversations about alien abduction, Nick and his friend Dave Dilliway (fellow band member of Pharagonesia) played an impromptu ‘gig’ on a Yamaha SY85, mini-Korg and effects-laden electric guitar. The incredible music, which features on the 2021 release Geocentrics, opened my mind to the idea that music wasn’t just made by people with loads of cash and expensive studio set ups – I could try to make this kind of awesome electronic music in my own bedroom! Particular highlights are ‘Metropolis’, with its rapid distorted bass stabs, and the sublime ‘Geocentrics Theme’, with its perfect bass loops and melodic chimes. During the same visit Nick played me Aphex Twin’s seminal Selected Ambient Works 1985 – 1992 album. I moved to Canterbury soon after and the rest is history.”
“I love this album, but it’s hard to explain why. I love it enough that I named all the tracks of one of my own albums after the track names of this album. I don’t really understand how it was made. It has mystery, which is what I love. It says something in the notes about ‘fractal’ and ‘computer assisted’ but obviously with a human ear for beauty.”
“I fell in love with this album exactly 17 seconds in, as soon as I heard Hattie sing ‘Seriously…’ over those watery synth chords on the opening track ‘Shut Your Mouth’. Having only become aware of Hattie’s work through The Sleepers I was completely unprepared for the intimate, confessional nature of her songwriting and her fantastic voice which reminded me of Tracey Thorn’s. The stripped-back nature of the production only serves to enhance the feeling of a friend whispering secrets into your ear whilst strumming a guitar or playing a keyboard. Masterpiece, pure and simple.”
“I was really drawn to Ffion’s Unfurling because of the artwork. Something about it promised a melancholy and otherworldly experience. And that’s exactly what you get. Arpeggios that rise and fall like waves lapping the shore, this album is a whole seascape of hope and then fear, calm and then intensity, contentedness and then longing. It’s beautiful work.”
FFION (THOMAS RAGSDALE): Andy Fosberry – When Comfort Is Stranger (2020)
“I’d definitely have to pick Andy Fosberry’s When Comfort Is Stranger album because of its incredibly wide palette of sound ranging from tender strings and piano to clicky drum tracks. I’ve loved Andy’s stuff for years, but for me this one opened a bigger door into his world and musical vision. It’s got a great uniform sound to it and clearly comes from the same sessions, but nothing ever outstays its welcome.”
ANDY FOSBERRY: Sussex Telecom – Creator Warehouse (2022)
“Sussex Telecom is a used future of organic machine music from Skynet’s time displacement portal. Layers of drum machines, late stage first wave analog synthesisers, misbehaving 16-bit samples and often non-linear arrangements weave paths that your ears just have to follow. A beautiful, essential postcard from the present past of textural electronica. Favourite track: ‘Night’.”
PORTLAND VOWS (BOB PLANT): Bary Center – Guide Me Through The Hills Of Your Home (2020)
“I’ll be honest: the first thing that drew me to Bary Center’s 2020 Guide Me Through The Hills Of Your Home was the wonderful cover art, but it was the music that kept me there. These pieces have an almost tangible weight, something dark and warm you can almost hold. ‘Aforementioned Weaknesses’ and ‘Roots Of The System’ are especially evocative for me, especially now that Autumn is approaching. But all of these tracks offer something special.”
BARY CENTER (MARK WILLIAMS): Nicholas Langley – Final Wave (2019)
“For me, Nicholas Langley’s Final Wave encapsulates the entire Third Kind vibe in one record. Probably because Nick is the founder and curator of Third Kind, haha. Everything from giddy chiptune to dark ambient synth to intricate IDM, all born of artistic independence and sonic exploration. Like the entire Third Kind catalogue, Final Wave is playful, moody, weird, and warrants a lifetime of listening.”
GRAHAM DUNNING: H.L. Collins – Creating Friction (2015)
“Henry Collins’ Creating Friction is one of my favourite objects – I have the lovely big yellow box displayed on my bookshelves, and have had since I acquired a copy. Henry’s work has long been an inspiration and the tapes of the Creating Friction installations especially so. Chaotic scraping, drones and an otherworldly reverberation from various large junk metal sculptures.”
“Without meaning to sound sycophantic, Hz’s Sci-Fi Rains & Heartaches is an all-time favourite. It has that Blade Runner thing about it that’s hard to resist. And the minimal cassette sleeve has a personal feel, like receiving a handwritten letter in the post.”
TRIUM CIRCULORUM: Erm & Nickname – Erm & Nickname (2017)
“I got in touch with Third Kind Records for the first time a good few years ago. Nick did a giveaway for TK’s 333rd Twitter follower which was me. I received a massive pack of tapes soon after. The sound and physical media aesthetics resonated with me in a very deep way. From then on I bought a tape or two whenever I liked a release. The one I still love most is the Erm & Nickname album, an appealing set of cassette and CD with blissful psy-folk. The entire album has a sort of mushroom mood with songs coming over as detail rich collages. I love this release because it’s completely different from what I create.”
PETER HOGGARTH: Erm & Nickname – Erm & Nickname (2017)
“Dark psychedelic clouds gather at the fringes of a sepia tinged 70s English summer that never existed. Fave tracks ‘Wash Away’ and ‘If You Listen Very Carefully’. This record crops up on my iPod in shuffle mode quite often. I can’t quite place it, but it sounds familiar and is always a welcome pastoral delight.”
Brighton’s Third Kind are celebrating their tenth birthday in September 2023. To celebrate the occasion, the label released three new typically diverse gems, with further exciting projects expected to surface later in the year.
Portland Vows – Plastic Alice
Plastic Alice is the first of two new releases from Aberdeen-based modular electronic musician Bob Plant. Its seven delicate, ruminative tracks ponder the existential (post-existential?) philosophical question that bothers us all from time to time: what if I’m already dead and nothing is actually real? Plant describes this as “a soundtrack to that imagined disappearance”, and this collection has a very corporeal presence even if it can’t offer definitive reassurance that this isn’t all a freaky dream. Wafts of gentle, half-heard melodies and gauzy wisps of electronic texture cling to pieces like ‘A Friend Or Relative’, while a powerfully resonant searching quality emerges through the haunted strings of the dense (yet minimalistic) ‘Neurology’. The album concludes with the firm and resolute synth melodies and squalling strings of ‘Tangled Again’, carrying a weightiness, certainty and acceptance. Plant’s other Third Kind release is the similarly bewitching ‘Witches Of Hopsas Woods’, which will be released in September.
Plastic Alice by Portland Vows was released July 14.
Trium Circulorum – Uranium EP
Probably already long sold-out, Uranium is a follow-up to German drum ‘n’ bass producer Martin Hansel’s recent Third Kind release Boodoo Khan. Released as a lathe-cut three track single, Hensel offers up vibrant new mixes of two album tracks – ‘Uranium’ and ‘Enter Boodoo Khan’ – which both isolate the mysterious, ritualistic rhythmic energy of the original pieces but transform them into urgent, powerful and thrilling new shapes. Hansel got so immersed in the idea of reinterpreting his own work that he went on and remixed the whole of Boodoo Khan for a digital version of the physical release. The lathe-cut release is rounded out by a mix of ‘Uranium’ by labelmate Fisty Kendal, who reduces the sub bass and hopscotch beats of the original to a twitchy, nervous cut full of deep, shimmering synth work.
Uranium EP by Trium Circulorum was released July 21.
Fisty Kendal – Price Match!
Price Match! is a follow-up to one of the earliest Third Kind releases, and catches the wonderfully obtuse electronic producer Fisty Kendal (Stephen Cousins) in fine form. Unplaceable and restless, this precision-sharp collection switches seamlessly between the liquified electro shapes of ‘Coolin’ With The Renegades’, the semi-acoustic lo-fi techno of ‘Dead Crow Blues’ (a collaboration with Croydon’s Superman Revenge Squad) and the semi-cynical askance look at the ramifications of AI on the rapidfire pulsework of ‘Softmax ‘98’. The highlight here is the dreamy ‘You Know, For The Kids’, which skews its own sublimeness with humorously juxtaposed samples of interviews presented in such a way as to highlight the lonely love life of an electronic music-making nerd.
Price Match! by Fisty Kendal was released August 4 2023.
If a tape loops infinitely, where does it start and end?
A new split cassette from anonymous electronic artist and bassist bleed Air and Shenzhen legends Hualun ruminates quietly on that enquiry. The beginnings and conclusions are not clear. There is an A-side and a B-side, one by bleed Air and one by Hualun, but the labels glued to each side of the cassette shell might as well be interchangeable.
But there is a starting point to the story of this collaboration. Because it is a true collaboration. It is not simply two artists each throwing together music to fill a side of a tape, with little that obviously connects either side of the ferric oxide frontier. This began with an idea and a response: Hualun would make some new music, and bleed Air would respond to it. Idea and response. Two distinct creations. One unique source.
And yet it was agreed that bleed Air’s response would occupy the A-side, meaning that you hear the response before the idea. The net effect is one of reversal: even though you know it not to be the case, the relative positioning makes you feel like Hualun are in fact responding to bleed Air. If a tape loops infinitely, where does it start and end?
These two sides are, then, inextricably and umbilically linked. They both occupy a contemporary vantage point overlooking some of 1970s German electronic music’s finest moments, completely in tune with the sonic adventuring that the likes of Conrad Schnitzler and a select pioneering few bravely undertook.
There are three pieces that open Hualun’s side that form a beautiful and engaging triptych. ‘Snow Bath’ carries a fragile outline of a melody that evolves slowly over the course of the track, giving rise to a sense of gentle, fluttering motion and a languid, purposeful but relaxed poise. ‘Strand Man’ floats forth on horn-like textures, being funereal yet joyful simultaneously. Your attention is directed to those thick, resonant notes, but just behind them is a constantly shifting backdrop full of the minutest details. A sense of euphoric resolution arrives at the very end, just before it collapses into white noise. A surprise comes in the form of ‘Folks’, which is constructed from gentle cascades of guitar and electronic melodies. The piece is almost Beverly Glenn-Copeland-esque in its mesmeric, warm and loving presentation.
bleed Air’s side – the response to all of the above, remember – begins with ‘GhostEP’, built from wraith-like electronic transmissions and background static from a broken radio. These (im)pulses are then replaced by placid synth melodies that are sweetly moving, arranged either like classical motifs or fairground organ music, even as they are threatened by grinding machine sounds. One of my favourite pieces follows. ‘Travelogue’ features deep, spacey atmospheres uncoiling at a sedate and graceful pace. Resonant, swelling melodies give this a widescreen, sci-fi soundtrack quality; stirring, despite its minimal presentation. Elsewhere, the plaintive, echoing piano of the evocative ‘Ajar’ creates the image of sitting silently in a cafe, looking sadly through the window at the world going by and feeling completely detached from everything.
Both sides end in similar territory. bleed Air’s ‘Gap Map’ and Hualun’s ‘Before The Storm’ are stylistically inseparable. A white noise gale blows through these tracks, punctuated by a haunting (haunted?) melody. We are left with many questions. Who is who? What is what? Are they the same artist performing the same track? Or two artists standing in front of a mirror, so alike and yet so divided by the original idea and the reflected response?
If a tape loops infinitely, where does it start and end?
GhostEP by bleed Air / Dead Man by Hualun is released September 1 2023 by superpolar Taïps.
“Don’t overdose on this stuff,” The Dark Jazz Project’s Andrew Spackman told me when he sent me his new album, 3. “It’s pretty potent!”
I reckon I can handle it. I’ve been consuming Spackman’s music for years, first when he was know as SAD MAN and more recently as The Dark Jazz Project. Wonky jazz bangers were always Spackman’s medicine of choice, but with his most recent reinvention, it’s like he’s taken his music into a whole new dimension. I don’t mean into some sort of spiralling, ‘groovy, baby’ timewarp. I mean darker. Jazzier. Projectier.
3 is intense, though, even by Spackman’s standards. The risk advisory is to be noted. Twenty tracks. Two hours. An accompanying play called Dead King (A Play In Three Acts). This sort of stuff would take most artists years to come up with, but Spackman is able to deliver this kind of wonderful sprawl with a spontaneity and fluidity – at high speed – that’s resolutely fresh and refreshingly imaginative.
Never one to repeat himself, 3 flips and flops like around like manic three-legged frog, delving deep into dance music’s murkiest corners to drag out skewed rhythms, off-kilter half-melodies, headcleaning glitchy noise and a seemingly limitless collection of cool jazz samples. And that’s just the first track, the decisively-named ‘Jazz’. The effect here is like watching an especially dexterous DJ seeking out the most floor-clearing tracks in his collection and yet managing to get the stoic crowd to wiggle along with manic glee.
Picking out standout tracks from 3’s vast number of cuts is a tough, nay impossible task. They’re all belters. If highlights you must have, check out ‘The Great Ones’, a track which lurches from graceful, contemplative piano to a segment that sounds like Moby’s ‘Thousand’ remixed by a Dutch hardcore artist while juggling cans of ball bearings. Meanwhile, ‘Carloza’ twitches forth on a breakbeat reimagined by Gene Krupa, over which Spackman sprinkles tinkly synths and buzzing, vital hooks.
‘Babonza’ sounds like a shoot-out between Star Wars laser pistols and a drinking straw noisily chasing the final drops in a plastic beaker containing Ken Kesey’s Kool-Aid. ‘The Stranger Again’ is a tight, 4/4 monster that rapidly switches direction into a noisy mess, just as you’ve started showing off your best moves. It rather reminds me of when I was dancing to the Paul Oakenfold remix of U2’s ‘Even Better Than The Real Thing’ at Stratford-upon-Avon’s Wildmoor nightclub and the DJ switched tracks just as I had started playing air guitar along with The Edge.
3 is effectively the informal soundtrack to Dead King, involving a medieval monarch, a timewarp (okay, so I was wrong about the timewarp: groovy, baby) and a magical, energy-providing creature. The play is beautifully presented, with fantastic photography and a totally bonkers narrative. Spoiler alert: it doesn’t end well for the King, though the title may have already yielded that clue.
Mr. Spackman, you have outdone yourself this time.
Footnote: this review was completed while flying over Canada. As ever, I had eschewed the onboard entertainment in favour of the moving map. Two places were beneath us as I concluded the final sentence – Flin Flon and Pukatawagan – while Medicine Hat was off in distance. I fear that my mind had reached such befuddlement by Spackman’s latest collection that place names and track titles had become indistinguishable. Sheesh, he wasn’t wrong about the potency.
Shameless plug: Spackman contributed to my Mortality TablesLIFEFILES series with a track that was literally made with nothing but clothes hangers. Check it out here. All proceeds to the Deaf Children’s Society and Birmingham Children’s Hospital.
3 and Dead King were released / published by Irregular Patterns on July 7 2023.
Embrace The Point Of No Return by Daniel Parson’s Amongst The Pigeons project couldn’t be more different from his 2021 album Silence Will Be Assumed As Acceptance. For a start, this is a solo flight for Parsons, whereas Silence Will Be Assumed… was very much a collaborative release. It’s also instrumental, eschewing the vocal contributions that have characterised his last few releases. And yet, in spite of these differences, Embrace The Point Of No Return feels like a strangely logical follow-up.
Celebratory and upbeat, tracks like ‘Swipe For Latex’, ‘Trespass’, ‘Proximity Alert’ and ‘Who Do You Have To Go Home For’ have a compelling urgency and intensity – solid beats, dominant synth hooks and a propulsive, irresistible forward motion. That sense of intensity was also evident on Silence Will Be Assumed… with its focus on environmental disaster, social inequality and racism, but here it’s as if Parsons has accepted that the world is totally fucked, so we might as well just give up and dance. With that in mind, these pieces all shimmer and twitch with a euphoric, hedonistic carefreeness, devoid of any existential worries or troubles.
‘Nightshade’ is this writer’s personal favourite, a delicate, low-key banger that transports me back to early 1990s dance music. That track seems to encapsulate a sense of levity and optimism. I may be conflating this with my own now-distant youthfulness at the start of that decade, but it really felt like you could lose yourself completely in dance music’s rhythms and melodies and ignore what was going on in the world and the rest of your life.
This is the joyous, positive, life-affirming DJ set that plays while we watch our final sunset. We are dancing on the terminal beach, our eyes fixed on the diminishing horizon, outside the last nightclub on Earth.
Embrace The Point Of No Return by Amongst The Pigeons is released August 4 2023 by Peace & Feathers.
Debut album released digitally worldwide 31 July 2023
Special Measures is the debut album from guitarist JONO WRIGHT.
Wright might hail from the Midlands in the UK, but the heart and soul of Special Measures lies some 4000 miles away in Nashville, Tennessee. Named after Wright’s experiences in the education sector, the album was inspired by the fingerstyle playing of Chet Atkins. Special Measures features ten instrumental tracks of dexterous playing and beatific melodies, all surrounded by moments of contemplative introspection and joyous levity.
Recorded with George Shilling (Bernard Butler, Billy Bragg, Steve Winwood, Primal Scream), ‘Special Measures’ follows Wright’s debut EP, 6 (2018). Between 6 and beginning to write the pieces that form Special Measures, Wright began an intense process of learning the complex and dexterous fingerstyle technique with guidance and encouragement from fellow guitarist Gareth Pearson.
“Growing up, my dad was always obsessed with this type of music,” says Wright. “I didn’t think I’d ever be able to learn to do how what those guitarists were doing. The idea of playing more than one thing on the guitar at once made no sense to me. So I’d always been into it, but just couldn’t figure out how to do it, or where to start.”
The album opens with ‘Rubecula’ and ‘Shiver’, two becalming, meditative pieces that started from the same experience. “Rubecula’ is the Latin name for the robin,” explains Wright. “I’d had a conversation with somebody from work whose dad had recently died. She said that if a robin is near you, it represents a person who has passed away. When we were in Canada one Summer, we went to stay with one of my aunties. Her father, my great uncle, had passed away a few years before, and this was the first time I’d visited since he’d died. He was like a grandad to me. We were talking in her kitchen, and behind her on the shelf was a jug with a robin on it. It just hit me. The feeling that I got after seeing that robin was like a shiver, like a chill. That’s why those two tracks fit into one another.”
Elsewhere, the gentle, wistful ‘146’ was prompted by TV footage of Captain Sir Tom Moore’s lockdown walks for charity, something that made him a magnet for anyone looking for reasons to be cheerful during the challenging, bleak days of the 2020 pandemic. “146 was the last regiment he was in,” explains Wright. “I could have made a big thing of naming it after him, but I thought this was a little nod of the cap instead.”
One of the album’s highlights is ‘Ziggy’s Bounce’, a carefree, lighthearted track named after Wright’s golden retriever. “I take him for walks every day, and he hears all of my problems – my deepest, darkest thoughts and secrets,” he confesses. “This piece is him all over. He’s playful and stupid and everything in between.” A similarly jubilant freespiritedness occupies the brief ‘Jenny Wren’, a tender piece written about Wright’s mother.
Although the album is primarily Wright solo, there are moments where his captivating guitar is joined by other instruments. These interventions are always sensitively employed, and never intrusive. George Shilling’s stirring, emotional cello can be heard on pieces like ‘End Of The Road’ and ‘Last Train’, while Wright and Gareth Pearson together offer a dizzying display of fingerstyle technique on the lyrical, carefree ‘Gone Fishing’.
The album concludes with ‘Sweet Dreams’, which Wright describes as the lullaby to his children that he wrote far too late. Sweet, loving, hopeful and full of life, it acts as the perfect emotive counterweight to the themes of mortality and acceptance that cling to the opening moments of this very special and moving album.
Special Measures track listing
Rubecula Shiver Ziggy’s Bounce 146 Jenny Wren Last Train Special Measures Gone Fishing End Of The Road Sweet Dreams
All tracks written and performed by Jono Wright. Produced by Jono Wright and George Shilling.
Cello on ‘Rubecula’, ‘Shiver’, ‘Last Train’ and ‘End Of The Road’ by George Shilling. Additional guitar on ‘Gone Fishing’ by Gareth Pearson.
Recorded at Manor Gardens Studio, Newton Abbot.
Artwork by Andi Chamberlain.
Special Measures is released digitally worldwide on 31 July 2023.
BIOGRAPHY
Jono Wright is a guitarist and songwriter from Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, United Kingdom. He released his debut EP, 6, in 2018.
In addition to being a guitarist with an encyclopaedic knowledge of styles and artists, Wright is also a massive Star Wars fan, an obsession which lead him to name his band Mos Eisley Bros.
Wright’s debut solo album, Special Measures, is released 31 July 2023.
In a break with tradition, Jon and I decided to accompany our vinyl listening evening with a takeaway curry instead of our usual pan-cultural snack assortment. Fine Indian cuisine was provided by The Woburn Fort in Woburn Sands and we ducked in to The Gapevine for a drink while they prepared the food.
We left The Grapevine as a crooner picked up a microphone and began, er, serenading the customers. Any temptation to hang around and listen to him presumably belting out big band hits by Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett (may he rest in peace) over a tinny karaoke backing track was swiftly overridden – after all, there was serious LP listening business to attend to.
The evening’s listening began with The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars (RCA, 1972) by Davie Bowie. Little else needs saying about this album, so instead of analysing its myriad highlights, I told Jon the story of how my former boss Antony once had a private dinner with Bowie at Montreux.
Next up was Tubular Bells by Mike Oldfield (Virgin, 1973). This LP used to belong to my mum, who bought this when she moved from Scotland to Stratford-upon-Avon, not long before she met my dad in the pub she worked at. I only have affection for Tubular Bells, and I was absolutely obsessed with this LP as a small child. I used to pull all my parents’ albums out of the rack where they stored and pore over them for ages. This was one I studied intently, hoping that one day the mystery of what exactly a ‘nasal choir’ was would solve itself.
The evening being somewhat curtailed by me needing to go and pick up my eldest daughter from work, we managed one more LP before I left – The Shadows’ 20 Golden Greats (EMI, 1977). This LP used to belong to my dad, and was another sleeve I absolutely loved. Playing the album was accompanied by Jon attempting to copy The Shadows’ dance moves, and concluded with us deciding that while they had some pretty brilliant tunes (‘Foot Tapper’ was called out specifically), twenty of them played back-to-back was a little much. A bit like overeating Indian takeaway, maybe…
Our conversation included a brief discussion of Taylor Swift and the Speak Now snafu involving an album including tracks by Cabaret Voltaire and Matthew Herbert finding their way into certain sleeves of Ms Swift’s latest re-recorded release. The night before, coincidentally, I’d spoken to Mal from the Cabs. This may be apocryphal, but Mal had heard that this was a deliberate act of sabotage by disgruntled pressing plant staff annoyed at a statistic that four out of five vinyl albums are bought by people without record players. I find this specific statistic amusing, because four out of five references to music in a typical conversation are about Taylor Swift*.
We also spoke of the sad death of postal orders, Jon’s appearance on Pebble Mill, pre-Amazon mail order shopping, fishing, Milton Keynes’ new four bin household waste solution, and domestic chores.
The highlight of the evening was a duet between Jon playing a harmonica and his faithful canine sidekick Chester howling along in time like a tortured blues singer. Recorded evidence will follow after our sixth JaM Session.
* This statistic may not be accurate, but it certainly appears to be correct based on my own recent monocultural household experiences.
drøne is a duo of Mark Van Hoen and Touch’s Mike Harding, accompanied by ‘invited guests’. Presented as a single piece divided into discrete sonic movements, The Long Song captures the pair exploring a soundworld characterised by tiny, almost imperceptible changes in currents.
On ‘Escapement’, snatches of overheard conversation and baritone prayer calls join hissing noises that sound like gas escaping from a damaged canister, what could be a faltering shortwave data broadcast and tiny clusters of electronic melody. The interplay between these disparate elements is sudden and fleeting. Nothing stays in place for long. Everything – literally everything you hear – is ephemeral and inconsequential.
The approach taken on ‘Escapement’ runs through the entire duration of The Long Song. On ‘Altamura’, sounds arrange themselves into an inchoate, distant rhythm, but just as you start to lock into its abstract groove, it drops away and is replaced by a grainy – possibly VHS – recording of a weather broadcast from a location that isn’t specific. The effect is like listening at twin speeds: a sense of things unfolding both slowly and also rapidly. This isn’t some intense trading of ideas designed to appeal to the hyperactivity of the modern age, as the pace is rarely ever frantic; yet somehow ideas are allowed to evolve here at a surprising velocity, just one that is delivered with the extremest subtlety.
‘Inanna’ is one of the most gripping and arresting pieces on the album. Here, a collection of haunting, overlapping choral vocals (from Bana Haffar, Jana Winderen, Anna von Hausswolff and others) floats delicately and elegiacally into view. The presentation is at once uplifting, joyous and vital, yet they float above a foundation layer of gravelly, impenetrable sub-bass and clusters of wild static. As soon as your attention locks onto that, any sense of joy immediately evaporates, leaving you suddenly doubtful and uncertain. Something similar happens on ‘He Frightened The Bird Away’ which follows, only here it is a vaguely sinister, alien tapping sound and restless non-rhythm that punctures its way through clouds of becalming, descending harmonies.
There are countless moments like this across ‘The Long Song’, moments that trip you up and force you to reconsider what it is that you thought you might have heard, that decontextualise and recontextualise themselves endlessly. It shows two artists in complete control of their sound palettes, fully aware of the powerfully disorienting impact their assemblages can have on a listener.
The JaM Sessions find my friend Jon and I listening to vinyl, eating snacks, drinking wine / beer, reminiscing about life growing up in the Midlands and contemplating the major issues du jour.
At our May meeting, we found ourselves talking about Jim Reeves’ Distant Drums (RCA Victor, 1966). While flicking through LPs to take to Jon’s, I came upon a copy of this on my desk and couldn’t fathom where it had come from. Finally, I realised that it had been one of two old LPs that had been used to pad out a copy of a Disney themes album that my eldest daughter had bought. That became the first album we listened to this time around. The album was produced by Chet Atkins, and the shiny LP sleeve smelled of charity shops. ‘Distant Drums’ is a brilliant song, incidentally.
Next up was The Real Glenn Miller Orchestra’s Play The Original Music Of The Film ‘The Glenn Miller Story’ (RCA International reissue, 1971). I watched The Glenn Miller Story recently and have had some of Miller’s big band melodies swirling around my head ever since, so it was a useful way of scratching that itch. Both of us wondered whereabouts in America Kalamazoo is, but neither of us were ‘In The Mood’ to Google it.
Jon and I became mindful at this point that we should probably bring things up to date a little more before we ended up succumbing to an entire of easy listening. For both of us, ‘up to date’ is shorthand for the 1980s. Jon suggested The Beat’s I Just Can’t Stop It (Go-Feet, 1980). This found its way onto Jon’s turntable after a conversation about my youngest daughter going to see The Beat and Bow Wow Wow at The Roadmender in Northampton earlier in the week. Neither Jon nor I have seen either band; my 15 year old daughter has.
Staying resolutely in the 1980s, we concluded the evening with a spin of a very crackly copy of Thompson Twins’ Quick Step & Side Kick (Arista, 1983), which I’d bought from the Oxfam in Aylesbury recently. We spent most of the time pondering precisely what it was that recording at Compass Point – as the Twins did for this album – brought to the sessions.
In a departure from our previous focus on snacks that can be dipped into various flavours of houmous, Jon rustled up two very fine vegan salads. Major topics of discussion included his son’s diary entry about eating sushi for the first time, coups, the breakdown of Keynesian economic theory and Les Patterson’s fabled appearance on Parkinson sat next to a cringing Martine McCutcheon.
Further. 
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