Autoreverse

On July 19, 2025July 20, 2025 By 429harrowroadIn Album reviewsLeave a comment

CROMWELL ATE A TWIX HERE – FRAGILE / YOL – GLASSED ASCENSION (Strategic Tape Reverse)

Cromwell Ate A Twix Here is a typically wry and obtuse new alias from More Realistic Goals polymath Justin Watson. ‘Fragile’ features purloined spoken word commentary from David Yates set to a sound bed of pleasant strings, high-pitched voices, birdsong, noises of unknown provenance, occasional disharmony and myriad other sonic accompaniments. Yates’ chat recounts the first flushes of a new relationship in frank detail, his delivery carrying a frank flatness that belies a sense of dry humour – especially when he describes how the nascent couple arrange their breakfast plates. And then, a moment of revelation when Yates reveals that he is a widower. The sentences are delivered in the same dispassionate voice, and yet the implication is of extreme and devastating sadness, even if none of this is necessarily evident. Finally, the story lurches into a sort of Welcome To Night Vale weirdness. I won’t spoil the surprise, but the title makes a lot more sense after what happens.

In contrast, the Yol side is noisy, expressive and agitated, the voice as a sound source rather than a method of reportage. Insectoid vocal sounds and flat blocks of distortion occupy the background here, punctured by machine-like, menacing sonic objects that sound like they were entirely crafted from recordings of vintage late-1990s modem tones, as well as a sound that could be a spun glass bottle attached to a faulty contact mic. Yol’s voice flutters between shouted statements and exasperated, desperate repetitions about cushions and body parts. It is insistent, forceful and pretty terrifying, if I’m honest, but its challenging aesthetic is also weirdly liberating for reasons that I can’t quite explain. Uneasy listening for the hard of hearing, to quote Fad Gadget and Non. Released March 21 2025.

https://strategictapereserve.bandcamp.com/album/fragile-glassed-ascension

SCHMITZ & NIEBUHR – PORZ 1975 (Tillerfisch / Superpolar Taïps)

Well, this is an interesting one. An email popped into my inbox from Superpolar Taïps head honcho Marco Trovatello, entitled ‘Prog…?’, which certainly caught my attention. It wasn’t what I’d expect to receive from him. Then again, with Marco and his cassette imprint, I’ve come to expect the unexpected. Schmitz & Niebuhr sounds like a duo, but is in fact a trio of Trovatello, Dierk Düchting and Bernd Wilberg – none of whom, you will observe, is called Schmitz or Niebuhr.

To execute PORZ 1975, the trio were joined by at least a dozen guest musicians and also a marching band. The concept (there’s always a concept in prog music!) was to make an album celebrating the 16 districts of the German town of Porz, which was, in 1975, absorbed into Cologne. Each track is named after one of the districts, and Trovatello / Düchting / Wilberg constrained themselves to only using instruments that were available in 1975. That gives standout tracks like ‘Urbach’, ‘Westhoven’ and ‘Wahnheide’ all sorts of Moog-y richness, with impossibly groovy hooks laid over writhing nests of jangly guitars and driving rhythms. Crucially, there’s no showy-offy, onanistic, fifteen-minute soloing to be found here – just a double-album window into the 1970s electronically-augmented rock music that time politely forgot. Released May 2 2025.

https://superpolar.bandcamp.com/album/porz-1975

AUDIO OBSCURA – AS LONG AS GRAVITY PERSISTS ON HOLDING ME TO THIS EARTH

It may not seem like it, for an artist as prolific as Audio Obscura (Neil Stringfellow), but As Long As Gravity Persists In Holding Me To This Earth arose from an extended period of doubt, resulting in a form of creative paralysis. In 2024, Stringfellow hadn’t made any new music for some time because of that overriding lack of belief in something that anyone who has spent any time with his music will know is a rare talent that he possesses, but such is the way with our personal fears and inhibitions: we rarely see in ourselves what others see in us. His focus shifted away from composition toward live performance, and the process for preparing for a show in Whitby in November 2024 yielded the improvised piece that opens this collection, ‘Pyramid Song’

‘Pyramid Song’ has a hauntingly beautiful quality, something that is shared by all ten pieces on the album. There is a lightness of touch here that has perhaps been missing from Stringfellow’s previous music – unadorned field recordings; delicate and emotive piano; fragile and muted, dubby electronics; effusive but not intrusive strings; disparate and dislocated samples. There is, however, an undeniable sadness to pieces like ‘The Weight Of The World’, which speaks to this overriding mental state that he found himself prior to its creation. Being honest and transparent about these things, as we know, can liberate you from these feelings, and this austere, emotional collection is evidently a cathartic listen. A number of Stringfellow’s works, particularly his series of albums focused on impending climate disaster, have been about the macro – those things that will impact all of us; As Long As Gravity Persists In Holding Me To This Earth instead trains its lens on no one other than Stringfellow himself, but in so doing, he has made a universally-relatable album. Sequentially, there is another project that came before this album which explains more about how he unlocked his creativity, which will be released in September. Released May 23 2025.

https://audioobscura.bandcamp.com/album/as-long-as-gravity-persists-on-holding-me-to-this-earth

AUTOREVERSE – AUTOTUNES (Éditions Gravats)

Autoreverse is a duo of Arnaud Rivière and Nina Garcia, and Autotunes is their first studio album. Collaborations like this don’t just happen, however. Garcia and Rivière are seasoned partners in sound, their symbiotic technique and sonic presentation forged through countless gigs, some of which have been documented as live cassettes. It goes like this: Garcia is a renowned, Thurston Moore-tipped noise guitarist (check out her recent solo album Bye Bye Bird, which I enthusiastically covered for Electronic Sound), and Rivière utilises a busted turntable.

‘HI-SPEED DUB switch’ is a joyously abstracted collision between these elements. You hear Garcia’s growling, purring, distorted guitar, and then it is overwhelmed by an initially impenetrable block of squalling feedback from Rivière’s stylus. Listen closer, and textures and details reveal themselves, only they are frazzled and fractured beyond recognition. I thought I could hear voices at the epicentre of the din at one point, but quite honestly it could have been my imagination. The ensuing section seems to be where Garcia and Rivière begin to co-exist, an enmeshed discourse between hissing feedback, textures with all the smoothness of course-grade sandpaper, nuanced pulses, buzzing drones and finally a sense of latent, angry energy expressed as an anti-ambient, amp-bothering soundscape. Thrillingly and wilfully unpredictable. Released June 6 2025.

https://editions-gravats.bandcamp.com/album/autotunes

Words: Mat Smith

Rental Yields

On April 13, 2023April 13, 2023 By 429harrowroadIn InterviewsLeave a comment

Spread across six volumes, Rental Yields is a typically broadminded concept from Justin Watson’s Front & Follow imprint. In what he describes as a ‘landlord / tenant’ model, the project found each participating artist borrowing sounds created by another, and using those sounds to create their track – creating a home in someone else’s house, if you will, without ever actually owning it. Squatter’s rights, perhaps.

A glance down the track lists of the three volumes released to date acts like a roll call of some of the most exciting artists operating today – Bone Music, Camp Of Wolves, Elizabeth Joan Kelly, Runningonair, The Incidental Crack, Dave Clarkson, Rupert Lally, Letters From Mouse, Graham Dunning, Kemper Norton, Audio Obscura, Robin The Fog and countless others.

As Watson busily readies the fourth eclectic volume in the series, Further. distracted him from his elaborate project planning spreadsheet to ask him a few questions.

Where did the idea for Rental Yields come from?

Rental Yields feels like a natural progression from our You Can Never Leave project, continuing the theme of inequity in Manchester, but also more broadly, and working with artists to explore (directly or indirectly) what this means.

The idea itself came from a desire to do another collaboration project, and a complete lack of acknowledgement (again) of the administration involved. As ever these things are a collaborative effort which emerge through real world and online chats, throwing ideas around (some more sensible than others) and seeking ways to using creativity and musical nonsense to have some fun, and hopefully contribute something positive at the same time

The specifics of the ‘landlord / tenant’ concept came from Stephen Buckley (aka Polypores), so we can all blame him. I think the initial idea was probably quite simple, but over time a series of PowerPoint slide decks and spreadsheets have turned it into what it is today.

Personally, I enjoy the convoluted nature of it (possibly more than the reviewer at The Wire…).

You seem to have a knack of collating these incredible collections – how did you choose the artists for this project? Did you set any rules for contributors?

All artists are self-selecting and it is as inclusive as possible – anyone can join in (as it should be), and we try and remove any barriers to being involved, or to people knowing about it and feeling they can be a part of it.

But yes, there are rules – I refer you to the previously-mentioned slide decks. They are really fun.

If we didn’t have rules where would we be Mat? And then where would we be without a series of annoying and pointless rules, created by someone who should have probably gone for a walk instead?

Were there any tracks that particularly surprised you?

It has been great to have so many submissions from people I didn’t know much about, or who are now doing amazing things. It feels weird to highlight anyone in particular, but Yol was my artist of 2022. Just incredible, and bringing something so refreshing and much needed at the moment.

This series is for charity. Can you tell us a bit more about the charity you’re working with here?

We’ve previously work with Coffee4Craig, another fantastic charity in Manchester, and before that The Brick in Wigan.

For this we chose SPIN. They were recommended to us by one of the artists involved in the project who also worked in the charity sector in Manchester. They are doing vital work, so it is great to be able to support them a little bit – with a bit of money (our target is now £2,000), but also with a bit of promo and maybe some more opportunities in the future. We keep thinking about doing some gigs…

Buy Rental Yields at fandf.bandcamp.com

Rental Yields Volume Four is released April 14 2023 by Front & Follow.

Interview: Mat Smith

The Incidental Crack – Municipal Music

On May 18, 2021May 17, 2021 By 429harrowroadIn Album reviewsLeave a comment

The Incidental Crack is a distance collaboration between Justin Watson (Front & Follow, Gated Canal Community), Rob Spencer (also Gated Canal Community) and Simon Proffitt (Cahn Ingold Prelog, The Master Musicians Of Dyffryn Moor). Avoiding the typical pitfalls of social electrics (a phrase coined by Bovine Life back in ye olde dial-up days of 2000), The Incidental Crack’s approach instead is to juxtapose heavily-disguised quotidian sounds with questioning electronics.

A case in point is ‘The Second Cup Of Tea Of The Day’, the first of the three lengthy tracks on Municipal Music, their second album together (or is that apart?). If that sounds like a strange and perhaps mundane name for a track – even in the context of the not-going-out-not-seeing-anyone-staring-at-these-four-walls tedium of lockdown – consider that I’m pretty sure that its source field recording is less a field recording and more a kitchen recording of the steps required to make the aforementioned second cup of the tea of the day. Those sounds are then harshly processed and skewed to create ominous textures and brooding drones that, were the British Tea Manufacturers Union (possibly made up) to hear this, they might well think that The Incidental Crack are in cahoots with the British Coffee Manufacturers Union (see above) to scare people off drinking tea. Fortunately, while the track brews its way through what I think is running water, a kettle reaching a climactic boiling point and a teaspoon clattering inside a tea cup, it makes a sharp evolution toward searching, entrancing electronics, ending up in a serene territory set to what feels like a twitchy waltz pulse.

Two of the three tracks here follow a similar technique of processing field recordings into obscurity and then layering in outlines of rhythm, sinewy synth sequences, siren-like drones and effects. The result is strangely discomfiting, while the familiarity – howsoever processed – is also weirdly soothing. Take the album’s final piece, ‘Ice-Cream At The Pavilion’. On first inspection, the captured material here – the typical beach-side sounds of waves, a carousel, children playing, fun being had, the sound of skin reddening to a crisp under British sun – should be pleasing to the ear; these are the sounds of childhood, of carefree living, of life before mortgages, anxiety, zoonotic illnesses, social fucking media, existential dread and lockdown. In the six hands of The Incidental Crack, those sounds are twisted, inverted, made nightmarish and sinister, reminding me instead of all the stuff I hated about days spent on the beach in Essex and Kent as a kid – getting dressed beneath a towel, sand, other people, being rubbish at skimming stones into the water – and leaving me precariously unsettled.

Fortunately, the second track – ‘Just Passing Through’ – is somewhat more positive. This is a track relying on volume and fluctuating restlessness to imply a sense of forward motion. Long tones build and fade; drones rise up, get phased and panned across the stereo field; harsh, rapidly-shifting sounds grab your attention and then dissipate; you feel yourself being either pushed or pulled along through some sort of winding, turbulent tunnel toward an unknowable destination (though, according to the sequencing of the tracks, that destination is our nausea-inducing warped beach scene; shudders). Occasionally a tiny little broken melody – a xylophone maybe – reveals itself, adopts a casual exotica breeziness and then just as quickly disappears. It’s a trip full of unbridled energy, like listening to electricity co-operating under duress; that it does this without ever relying on anything so pedestrian as a rhythm to create its suggestion of speed and rapid flight is a testament to this trio’s gleeful sonic adventuring.

Municipal Music by The Incidental Crack is released May 21 2021 by Herhalen.

Words: Mat Smith

In Conversation: Justin Watson on Isolation & Rejection

On November 5, 2020November 4, 2020 By 429harrowroadIn InterviewsLeave a comment

How did the Isolation & Rejection idea come to you, particularly as you’d shut F&F the year before?

F&F was officially in hibernation in November 2019, following the release of Ekoplekz’s last album. It was a great way to end things, at least for now I thought, and I had no intentions of doing anything with the label for a while at least (perhaps never) – running F&F was great fun and I got to work with some incredible artists, but I needed a break and wanted to forget about it for a while (I wrote a short piece for Electronic Sound which goes into some of the reasons).

Christmas that year was glorious – the kids even got presents instead of more vinyl in the basement.

Then just when I thought I was out… etc.

I&R started with a throwaway comment on Twitter (where all throwaway comments go to die), as lockdown and the challenges being faced (for individuals, families, charities, the NHS but also the creative sector) inspired a flurry of activity from artists and labels, which was wonderful to see – this included a whole bunch of projects and compilations all raising funds for great local and national causes*.

I wondered, in the aftermath of the first batch of new compilations out of lockdown, what happens to all those rejected tracks? The project grew from there, eventually turning into a place where tracks rejected or abandoned in any way could find a home.

The basic idea also touched on something I’ve always found weird about running a label, which is the bit about deciding if something is any good or not, or if it ‘fits’. It might just be me, but that always felt weird and even a little unhealthy (not doing it in isolation helped, like the collaboration with Joe Stannard for The Outer Church). People running record labels don’t know any better than anyone else, obviously – often they are just weird, evil narcissists using the record label business to expand their empires of misery, discarding artistic dreams with abandon and a belly laugh (joke).

Anyway…

Doing something open and inclusive seemed like a good idea, and timely. I then stupidly expanded on the idea online, chatted to Rob Spencer (from Gated Canal Community) about it and we then jointly stumbled into this huge (and joyous) project.

*As an aside, some of favourites were Bechdel Volume One, From Perpetuity, Touch: Isolation, Her Indoors, Help Musicians Compilation…

Were you surprised at the level of interest?

We have 105 artists involved, with more tracks being submitted after the deadline (which were, unfortunately, rejected – the compilation of those tracks will no doubt appear at some point).

Rob and I were pretty surprised by the response – I was thinking a nice little project, maybe 20-25 artists, would be lovely and help me cope with the insanity of lockdown (and shielding for me personally – 6 months in one room is not a good idea).

Nothing I’ve heard thus far sounds like it should have been rejected. Did you get any stories explaining why something had been overlooked?

We got loads of great stories – some weird, some funny, and some quite upsetting.

We’ve put together a few of the stories and shared them on the GCC website here and here – and will be putting up more soon.

There are some consistent themes – it seems rejection is a shared experience of many artists.

How did The Brick come into the equation? Were you aware of their work before?

Rob is from Wigan (go Cherry and Whites) and suggested they would be a good charity to raise money for.

We were keen to make sure that any money raised went locally, and went directly to a charity dealing with not only the impact of COVID-19 but many of the inequality and injustices that have unfortunately become a part of society right now.

The Brick felt like a good home for the project – they do amazing work, and are also lovely people.

Are you sure you can’t be convinced to do a Volume 6? Or a second lockdown series?

As mentioned above, we had some submissions after the closing date, and I really wanted to do a bonus 6th volume, but already it was feeling like a huge undertaking and I wanted to make sure it didn’t all fall apart.

Fingers crossed it hasn’t – I hope that the artists feel like we did it justice.

We have got another project in the works though – another one launched on twitter with very little consideration to any of the implications (and this one comes with some added trickiness…).

Isolation & Rejection Vol. 5 and all preceding volumes can be found at fandf.bandcamp.com

Interview: Mat Smith