Moray Newlands – Further.

A.M. BOYS – PRESENT PHASE

The second album from the NYC duo of John Blonde and Chris Moore is an enigma. As an example of leftfield electronic pop it’s up there with the best. Not only that, but Blonde and Moore’s conscious decision to evenly split the album between vocal tracks and instrumental pieces is unlike anything else on the market today. That largely from the way these pieces were written through intuition – if Blonde didn’t feel lyrics flowing when they were working on a track, he wouldn’t force them, and it would stay a pure instrumental piece. That gives each of these pieces an intentionality and purpose, not a sense of incompleteness. ‘Yesterday Yes’ is a good example of a track that exudes a bold, epically-building firmness – exceptionally lyrical in its melodic motif, only without lyrics. Elsewhere, the sublime ‘Ocean Ocean’ documents Blonde’s feelings as he sat watching the waves and surfers on Surfrider Beach, bringing some California warmth to their East Coast starkness. ‘Wounded Wrestler’ might be a note of romantic longing to an injured college sportsman, but its noisy, rough-edged delivery gives off an edge of a lost Throbbing Gristle track recorded live in a dark and murky Manhattan club. I interviewed Blonde and Moore for Electronic Sound. You can find that interview here. Released May 16 2005.

https://amboys.bandcamp.com/album/present-phase

CLOUD CANYONS – ECSTASY / DISCIPLINE

Cloud Canyons are an Italian quartet of Stella Baraldi, Michelle Cristofori, Laura Storchi and Nicola Caleffi. This single follows their 2023 debut album Dreaming Of Horses Running In Circles, and contains two long tracks that showcase a singular approach to electronic music. ‘Ecstasy’ is a dreamy affair, all pulsing arpeggios drenched in soft reverb to create hazy, gauzy, etiolated textures. There is a hint of white noise at the music’s fringes, like the lonely sound of rain on an apartment window. Over these sounds we hear mantra-like vocals that alternate between euphoric and uncertain, like the clipped voices of a half-heard conversation. ‘Discipline’ isn’t, alas, a Throbbing Gristle cover, but it does bear some similarity to Billie Ray Martin’s version of ‘Persuasion’. Over a grid of ceaseless beats, Cloud Canyons deploy a menacing bass pattern, minimalist, pointillistic high-pitched sounds and a fragile melody, while repeated vocals are processed into echoing beds of sound. It is at once energetic and insistent, carrying a sense of urgency and vital dark energy. The two tracks couldn’t be more different, but, really. who needs conformity anyway? Released July 25 2025.

https://cloudcanyonsband.bandcamp.com/album/ecstasy-discipline

MORAY NEWLANDS – THE RED RED EARTH (Wormhole World)

I’ve been meaning to write about this album for a while, ever since I read the opening line of Moray Newlands’ email that accompanied this album: “I’ve been ruminating on the inevitability of death and how it will come to us all at some point.” I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking the same thoughts, and my Mortality Tables project (which Newlands has contributed to) is almost entirely occupied with our essential impermanence. With a title inspired by the soil to be found near his home on the east coast of Scotland, the 16 pieces presented here represent his unfolding thoughts d reflections. Taking in soft and introspective piano, field recordings, wobbly vocal sounds, church bells, discordant strings, delicate electronics, inquisitive textures and quotes from Sylvia Plath, these pieces are far from maudlin, miserable reflections of Newlands’ thoughts. Instead, they carry a sort of openness and acceptance. The exception is ‘An Incident Has Occurred’ and its counterpart, ‘Another Incident Has Occurred’, which underline a brief sense of panicked uncertainty. The plaintive ‘(Put Me In) The Red Red Earth’, which closes the first half, and a version of Philip Glass’ ‘Closing’, which concludes the album, will just about finish you off and usher you to your own burial spot under the title’s red, red earth. Released August 15 2025.

https://wormholeworld.bandcamp.com/album/the-red-red-earth

MARCO AVITABILE – A FEW MEANINGFUL THINGS (Colectivo Casa Amarela)

Marco Avitabile is an Italian guitarist. There’s also a house DJ with the same name, but I’m guessing these aren’t the same person. Avitabile’s technique came out of heavier rock, but he has now established himself as a improviser, usually adding effects and processing to lift his music into a more structured style. His latest album for the Lisbon Colectivo Casa Amarela label is one freighted with tension, specifically the different directions we are all pulled in during our lives between family, work and our myriad passions. That essence manifests itself here in playing that is never angry or fractious, but which gently oscillates, as if Avitabile is using his instrument to ask questions in an attempt to make sense of his world. Key track ‘Copenhagen’ is an eight-minute guitar symphony, framed by an initial cluster of heavy guitar crashes and reverb that evolve into a poignant, heart-wrenching melody accompanied by subtle, unobtrusive electronics. The piece has a journeying, evolving quality, moving from the troubled, anguished darkness of its opening moments toward something much more euphoric. Released August 31 2025.

https://casaamarela.bandcamp.com/album/a-few-meaningful-things

CRITICAL OBJECTS – BLOSSOMING ACHE

In the last of these round-ups, I covered ‘Rewind’, the debut single from Critical Objects – the duo of Pinklogik and Veryan – and politely asked for more electronic pop from these two wonderful artists. Well, I’m pleased to say that’s happened. ‘Blossoming Ache’ is the duo’s second track, built from a powerful bass hook and determined beats, set in place beneath a series of spiralling melodies that have a fleeting, ephemeral delicateness. Pinklogik’s vocals are haunting and plaintive, alternating between innocence and world-weary disappointment, like a mournful choir heard through the haze of memory. As with ‘Rewind’, both Veryan and Pinklogik provide their own individual remixes to round out the release, offering up polar opposite explorations of the track’s layers – with Pinklogik ratcheting up the rhythmic element and Veryan turning the piece into a sparkling blend of vocals and textures that will have the hairs on the back of your neck standing to attention. I won’t repeat the earlier plea for more music from this duo; Veryan has already tipped me off that more is on the way. Released October 31 2025.

https://criticalobjects.bandcamp.com/album/blossoming-ache

Words: Mat Smith

SLOW CLINIC – ACCEPT (Florina Cassettes)

Slow Clinic is a project of mastering engineer James Edward Armstrong. On the three pieces presented here, it’s self-evident that Armstrong has an exceptional ear for detail and nuance. ‘Accept’, ‘Hold’ and ‘Wander’ are all constructed from field recordings made in Farnham, Surrey using an old dictaphone, upon which Armstrong layers gentle, undulating guitar drones. These drones were built from a chain of effects pedals but were otherwise fully unprocessed after they’d been recorded. At times resonant, at others contemplative, there is an appreciable openness to these pieces, and, perhaps, a vulnerability: they are imperfect, in the sense that the base layer dictaphone recordings are bathed in a hissy white noise where you can almost hear the tape mechanism. Moments of clarity find their way through, but that lo-fi bed of static is a constant. And, in that sense, this is Armstrong at his most accepting. For someone so well-versed in addressing deficiencies and errors in other artists’ material, with this EP he doesn’t seek to address those that present themselves in his own work. One can only imagine that process was strangely freeing and cathartic for an artist usually drawn to the most macroscopic of details. Released 27 March 2024.

MORAY NEWLANDS – BUZZ BUZZ (Wormhole World)

The latest album from Dundee’s Moray Newlands acts as a tribute to The Wasp Factory, Iain Banks’ debut novel. Forty years on from the publication of The Wasp Factory, it remains a book that is fraught with controversy and whose unswerving violence and vivid, twisted narrative launched Banks as his generation’s Anthony Burgess. When I first read the book, sometime in the early 1990s, the violence wasn’t what gripped me; instead it was a sort of compassion for Frank, the 16-year-old protagonist. Not, I stress, because I felt some sort of nihilistic familiarity with his character, but because of how deeply troubled and disturbed he was. I don’t think I had read a book, up to that point, where I felt as much sorrow for the main character as I did disgust. It proved to be good practice for when I read American Psycho.

Newlands’ album is, then, appropriately balanced – empathetic in places but just as unflinchingly brutal as Banks’ narrative. The two opening pieces, ‘The Sacrifice Poles’ and ‘Snake Park’ are mournful, symphonic and curiously moving. So moving in fact that you don’t notice the creeping undertow of sibilant buzzing sounds and dark shadows, all of which are fully realised on ‘The Bunker’, where the sound of birds and softly squalling sounds act as metaphors for Frank’s torturous ways. Buzz Buzz is like the Bibliotapes cassette that somehow never got released, moving episodically through the book’s pivotal scenes and figures. Here we meet Saul, a dog that is purported to have inflicted a grievous injury on young Frank (‘Old Saul’s Skull’). We encounter his brother, Eric, forever changed by his grim experiences as a medical volunteer, one of the book’s most harrowing moments (‘What Happened To Eric’). In a moment of grim, fairground whimsy, we alight upon Frank’s cousin, ‘Esmerelda’, killed after he attached her to a large kite which takes her far out to sea. The motive? Because he’d killed too many boys and needed to create a semblance of evenhandedness.

Elsewhere, we hear the sonic embodiment of Frank’s wasp-destroying mechanism on the title track, a stew of clocks, wound-up cogs, struck matches, dubby pulses and angry – nay fearful – buzzing. Even now, when confronted with the idea of Frank’s Heath Robinson torture device, I find myself instead thinking about an episode of Bagpuss where his mice companions use a similarly ramshackle machine to make digestive biscuits. I think it is a device my teenage brain used to prevent me from being too impacted by Frank’s callous traits. Finally, we arrive at the album’s closing moment, ‘What Happened To Me’, the sonic portrayal of a pivotal confrontation between Frank and his father, wherein we learn a lot about Frank – or maybe, just maybe, nothing at all. Newlands depicts this in a searching, inquisitive, but ultimately unresolved electro-symphonic tearjerker, a droning, undulating voice sound reminding us of Frank’s hymenopteran prey.

This album is not for the faint-hearted. There are moments here that are exceptionally terrifying, much like The Wasp Factory itself. My overriding impression, however, like my first reading of the book, is one of compassion toward poor Frank, in no small part thanks to Newlands’ clever sound design and masterful use of emotional texture. A powerful work of arresting, complex detail. Digital edition released 24 May 2024. CD edition released 28 June 2024.

WHETTMAN CHELMETS – A NEW PLACE (Quiet Details)

A New Place began life as a song by Whettman Chelmets’ young daughter. You can hear that song in the first two minutes of ‘Prelude To A New Place’, the first of the three tracks which constitute this release. That voice, imperfect, untrained and innocent, lends these pieces a sense of nostalgic optimism, which I can only liken to the feelings that wash over me whenever I look at old photographs of my children. There is a thick blanket of gauzy texture draped over these three pieces through which fragmentary details and ideas appear – a guitar, resonant brass, strings, a half-melody, children’s voices, discordant buzzing, the click of a computer mouse. At different points, these interventions can appear almost impenetrable, often threateningly dissonant, but those moments, like all the segments here, evolve away rapidly. In the final judgment, A New Place is a wonderfully evocative album full of ceaseless motion, and one of the most beatific albums I’ve had the pleasure of listening to. A resounding, emotional achievement for Chelmets, and another fine release from the consistently-brilliant Quiet Details imprint. Released 29 May 2024.

ASHER LEVITAS – Above The Pale Green (Waxing Crescent)

This four-track EP from Asher Levitas is bordered by two tracks that occupy similar stylistic ground. Opener ‘Fence – Stream – River’ begins with the the sound of gently flowing water and a metal fence being stroked by a stick, out of which rises a soft and delicate tapestry of ambient pads that sit on the frontiers between wistful, nostalgic and hopeful. A brief swirl of gurgling analogue synth evokes the notion of a meandering stream. A similar combination of field recordings and elegiac textures occurs on the closing track, which gives this EP its name. Except that where the first piece offers sense of optimism, ‘Above The Pale Green’ feels restless and uncertain.

If you only listened to those two tracks, you’d wind up with a completely unrepresentative impression of this EP. ‘Nowhere To Be’ is a woozy, slowly-evolving minimal synth pop cut overlaid with a haunting, wordless vocal and simple, pinprick melodies. It’s a lot like finding an early 1980s electronic demo tape in the loft of the house you’ve moved into, suitably draped in years of nostalgic fuzziness. If that wasn’t surprising enough, ‘You Don’t Have To’ is a further departure in the form of a plaintive, open and tender piano ballad. The keyboard sounds wonky and slightly imperfect and is augmented by subtle interventions off in the background. A grubby, dissonant melody, soaring textures and fragile rhythm in the middle eight usher in a more nuanced and layered conclusion. Having the bravery to fit three highly distinct and, on paper, incompatible styles together is a rare moment of daring, but Levitas executes it impeccably. Released 14 June 2024.

LOULA YORKE – Speak, Thou Vast And Venerable Head (Quiet Details)

The second Quiet Details review in this round-up comes from Oram Award winner Loula Yorke, and arrives hot on the heels of her recent masterpiece Volta. Heard in the context of that album, which relied less on the rave-inspired modular improvisations of her earlier work in favour of conscious composition, Speak, Thou Vast And Venerable Head feels unhurried and unburdened by expectation. It’s as if Volta reset those expectations and allows a sense of levity and freedom to enter Yorke’s electronic structures. The central piece here is the 13-minute ‘Monolithic Undertow’, which shares its title with Harry Sword’s landmark book about drones. Again, Yorke upsets expectation with this piece. Rather than being a dense block of intensely wavering drones, ‘Monolithic Undertow’ extends out on a intricate web of dubby, restless bass arpeggios, over which Yorke layers gently modulating clouds of intangible electronic texture. These are pieces filled with vast, open landscapes of sound and a sense of constant, fluid motion. Released 19 June 2024.

Words: Mat Smith

Further.

Tag: Moray Newlands

Shots: Slow Clinic / Moray Newlands / Whettman Chelmets / Asher Levitas / Loula Yorke