Music journalist for Electronic Sound and occasional press release writer for VeryRecords. Father, husband, vegan. Co-founder of Mortality Tables - mortality-tables.com
My monthly musical meetings with my friend Jon continued in September with albums from OMD, Van Morrison, The Mamas And The Papas and Huey Lewis & The News. The vintage RCA Victor centre labels on my mum’s copy of Deliver by The Mamas And The Papas were regarded as classic, whereas the sleeve for Fore! by Huey Lewis was definitely not.
Conversation topics included RAAC, our respective Californian driving experiences and a return to the topic of the ineffectiveness of Keynesian economics in 2023.
The wine was Waitrose’s cheapest red, which we concluded was not as good as Tesco’s cheapest red, despite being double the price.
Olives, breadsticks and houmous were September’s snack selections.
Two recent releases from the Strategic Tape Reserve label both continue the label’s fascinating voyage into the heart of adventurous electronic sounds.
Whettman Chelmets’ Koppen finds the US sound artist foraging for sounds at The Gathering Place, a park in Tulsa, Oklahoma. It can be thought of sonic reconnaissance trip before Chelmetts upped sticks and moved to the area. These found sounds and field recordings were then augmented with elements such as snatches of radio broadcasts, the wind chimes outside his house and electronic melodies. Its title – Koppen – refers to a system of dividing the world into different climate zones, and the names of these pieces here refer to a specific zone in the Koppen classification system.
One could easily suggest that Chelmets’ deployment of serenity and turbulence in each track is a reflection of the volatility present across the world. These pieces are all restless, never still, always moving. Even in moments of tranquility, something edgy is just around the metaphorical corner. ‘ET’ and ‘Dfd’, for example, present vibrant soundworlds of many layers – metallic, ringing, bell-like tones, slowed-down rain sounds, whistling half-melodies, and something earthy and naturalistic, maybe the sound of walking through a damp wood in Fall. They are simultaneously enveloping but also threatening and brooding, poised with a sort of calm and resolute danger.
Something similar happens on ‘Cfa’. Here we are presented with a cluster of pretty, almost classical melodies. At some indefinable point these sounds become buried and lost as a harsh, sawing, back-and-forth sound and crushing white noise blanket drapes itself over the track. On ‘Dfc’ and ‘BWh’ the inverse happens, with a cloying, impenetrable web of sound dropping out into randomised bursts of dislocated radio recordings – ghostly voices and snatches of broadcast music. They are respite, perhaps, from what comes before, but somehow more ghostly and unsettling because of the starkness of contrast.
Koppen is presented as a single long piece, its constant shifts creating a dizzying, relentless unpredictability: in the quieter moments you are filled with anticipation of noise overtaking any sense of calm, and in the noisier moments you are waiting for the sudden drop into beatific, pastoral sweetness. None of this is remotely accidental, of course, and Chelmets proves himself to be an absolute master of sculpted, dramatic, enlivening sound art.
Owl And Monkey Haven by Ergo Phizmiz and Depresstival brings to an end their fabled Leisure Pop Trilogy. The third instalment of their series for Strategic Tape Reserve, following Plaza Centraal (2001) and Elmyr (2020), this is an utterly madcap leftfield pop sprawl.
The tone for this is largely set by opening track ‘Foyer’, an effervescent, skittish, lo-fi banger with wiry guitars, a decidedly awkward funkiness, birdsong, recorders, bleeping Casio synths, oompah bass, dull documentary samples and a vocal about paradise that sounds suspiciously like the late Mark E. Smith. All in one song!
Ergo Phizmiz has made a career of operating fluidly around copyright, and that’s no different here. Meanwhile, multimedia artist Depresstival set an ambition – this is deadly serious, so please approach it that way – to “become the ultimate post-structuralist Geri Haliwell tribute act.” This heartfelt reverence to the onetime Ginger Spice would certainly the interjection of a sample of the Spice Girls’ ‘Wannabe’ on the standout ‘Heartslashwallet’, a track that sounds like a Numanoid replicant thoroughly pissed off at having to constantly pay for romance. Meanwhile, ‘Stalker’, which includes lyrics about voyeuristically watching someone taking out their bins, has more than a stench of The Residents about it, and ‘Four Things I Would Have Done If It Wasn’t For Fucking Brexit’ is a protest song dressed as an erudite expression of love for motorik German music.
Quite honestly, nothing I write here could do justice to how completely bonkers this collection is. What I will say is that the final track, ‘John Lewis Christmas Advert’ envisions an alternative reality where a female torch singer covers the Sex Pistols over a tear-jerking stop-motion short film to support a department store’s flagging seasonal sales. Seriously ridiculous and ridiculously serious by turns, and a high watermark in the Ergo Phizmiz prankster portfolio.
Koppen by Whetmann Chelmets was released July 7 2023. Owl And Monkey Haven by Ergo Phizmiz ft. Depresstival was released September 8 2023. Both releases are on the Strategic Tape Reserve label.
This album of synth pop genius was released in December but only hit my inbox recently. A London duo of vocalist Steve Olander and synth whizz Alex Hall, Any Second Now take their name from one of the most subtle Vince Clarke-penned moments on Depeche Mode’s 1981 debut, and Any Second Now is resolutely faithful to electronic pop’s best vintages. Containing songs written over the last four decades but which were never recorded, these thirteen songs are filled to bursting point with crystalline, haunting one-note synth melodies and skeletal drum machine rhythms. With the opening and closing instrumental tracks (‘Peking Sunrise’ and ‘Peking Sunset’), Any Second Now isolate the early 1980s’ fascination with travel and far-off, exotic places, while the semi-detached, almost spoken emotional vocal of key tracks ‘Plastic World’ and ‘No Face’ serve as useful reminders of how easily early synth pop evolved out of punk. These songs are all poised perfectly between darkness and lightness, with ‘Who Killed Kennedy?’ tackling one of the most-asked questions of all time with a cheerful, if unresolvable, levity, while the title track is easily one of the most infectiously joyous pop tracks you’ll ever hear. Simply brilliant.
Any Second Now by Any Second Now was released December 17 2022.
intimaa’, the latest album from Montreal-based sound artist and modular electronics pioneer Bana Haffar, can be thought of as a sensitive and delicate collision of styles. On the one hand, key pieces like ‘Elemental’ and ‘Lifter’ highlight the vibrant and often unpredictable pathways that can be established by patching a bunch of magical sound-making boxes together; on the other, they are infused with structures, shapes, rhythms, atmospheres, field recordings and melodic detail that nod to traditional Middle Eastern music. As a listener, you can listen intently for these moments, or just appreciate intimaa’ as a richly textured ambient masterpiece.
intimaa’ by Bana Haffar was released May 19 2023 by Touch.
Miasms brings together Lori Goldston (cello), Greg Kelley (trumpet), Al Jones (electronics) and Austin Larkin (violin) for four improvised pieces, recorded in 2019. The occasion was an exhibition focused on the remains of a piano which had been dropped from a helicopter onto musician Larry Van Over’s farm in Duvall, Washington in 1968, an extreme artistic gesture that carried more than a whiff of Fluxus about it. The four musicians here are, in part, responding to the visual stimulus of the piano’s shattered remnants, but the main jumping-off point came through Jones attaching various electronic devices to the piano itself. Each piece contains an intense and intricate soundworld that fluctuates between the quiet and the dissonant. On ‘Two’, thick drones emerge from a turbulent, volatile squall of strings, while the comparatively calm ‘Three’ concerns itself with smaller gestures before a disruptive trumpet blast from Kelley forces the adaptable players into a more strident formation.
Miasms by Goldston / Jones / Kelley / Larkin was released August 4 2023 by Full Spectrum Records.
AWAKENED SOULS – unlikely places (Past Inside The Present)
awakened souls are a duo of Cynthia Bernard (voice, guitar) and James Bernard (bass, synths, guitar). Inspired by the idea that we can all find creative impulses in the least likely of places if only we took the time to stay present, this collection of ten pieces is perhaps one of the most delicate, contemplative albums I’ve heard. Reassuring and comforting, pieces like ‘waiting’ are nevertheless poised and purposeful, not exercises in empty ambient drifting. An oscillating synth tone on ‘fall asleep, dream’ floats determinedly over soft, undulating sounds and Cynthia’s ethereal vocals, collectively guiding your awareness and providing clarity to the disorganised clutter of your mind. Beyond beatific, and a joy to be in the company of.
unlikely places by awakened souls was released August 16 2023 by Past Inside The Present.
For Mizuniwa, sound artist Yui Onodera recorded sounds while visiting the Tochigi Prefecture, a landlocked area lying 80km to the north of his Tokyo home. A beautiful, tranquil location encompassing mountains, national parks, water falls and, on the basis of this album, ample sources of inspiration for Onodera. The six pieces here have a life-affirming warmth, full of rich, constantly-moving yet subtle synth layers and naturalistic water sounds. For me, key pieces like ‘Mizuniwa 2’ and ‘Mizuniwa 6’ are sonic embodiments of the concept of shakkei, whereby a background landscape is incorporated into the design of a garden. In this way, Onodera’s pieces encompass distant horizons and close-up details, making for a truly transcendent listening experience.
Mizuniwa by Yui Onodera was released August 4 2023 by Decaying Spheres.
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.
Further. 
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