Tag: Xqui

Shots: Stichflamme Barnick / Nick Storring / Love Stereo / Alex Zethson & Johan Jutterström / Sean Armstrong / Xqui

On By 429harrowroadIn Album reviews, EP reviews, Single reviews1 Comment

STICHFLAMME BARNICK – STICHFLAMME BARNICK (Superpolar Taïps)

Bring on the distortion: the pairing of Stichflamme Dormagen and Robin Barnick was recorded between 2022 and 2024 and finds the pair producing intensive blocks of sound that are subjected to punishing processing. ‘Dolce al Cucchiao’ is among the heaviest tracks here, sounding not unlike an outtake from Pat Metheny’s Zero Tolerance For Silence. Elsewhere, the comparative levity of the pan pipe melody that dominates ‘Montabaur 8’ is subsumed by a ceaseless bass oscillator sweep that, halfway through, threatens to swallow up the poor piper and his innocent, gleeful playing. Released November 15 2024.

https://superpolar.bandcamp.com/album/stichflamme-barnick

NICK STORRING – MIRANTE (We Are Busy Bodies)

For his ninth album, multi-instrumentalist Nick Storring looked to Brazil for inspiration. That impulse gives the seven tracks here a greater rhythmic quotient than his previous works, with layers of vibrant percussion offsetting the orchestral-leaning textures that have become the hallmark of his musical work. At times, these pieces are quiet and contemplative; at others they are noisy, impactful and direct. ‘Roxa’, a three-part suite-within-a-suite, is a case in point. ‘Roxa I’ starts with ephemeral textures and interjections of percussion before opening out to include a stalking blues guitar riff and clusters of tones arranged into a delicate, tentative melody. “Roxa II’ unfolds as a sonic journey, building slowly toward a crescendo of angular, discordant clashes between layers of tuned percussion. The symphonic ‘Roxa III’, which closes the album, begins with rich swells of languid strings before evolving into a series of fast-paced, joyous rhythms for percussion and assembled clapping hands. Released March 21 2025.

https://nickstorring.bandcamp.com/album/mirante

LOVE STEREO – TU MUNDO

I saw Love Stereo perform at the Whisky A Go-Go in LA last year. Their set followed the release of their first single, ‘Fool’, which I wrote about here. A trio of Jonathan Burkes (vocals, bass, synths), Diane Hernandez (drums) and Steve Abagon (guitars / synths), Love Stereo make music that fuses sensitive electronics with a sharp and incisive rock sound. ‘Tu Mundo’, their second single, opens with a heavy, techno-inflected bass line and kick drum pattern before evolving into a softer, more introspective number as Burkes’ fragile vocal drifts into view. As the track progresses, crashing waves of guitar collide with increasingly emphatic vocals, haunting synth tones and pounded drums, a far cry from the minimalist pulse that opened the song. Released 1 April 2025.

https://lovestereo.bandcamp.com/track/tu-mundo

 

ALEX ZETHSON / JOHAN JUTTERSTRÖM – IT COULD / IF I (Astral Spirits / Thanatosis Produktion)

It Could / If I pairs Alex Zethson (piano) and Johan Jutterström (saxophone). Comprising new arrangements of standards, their own pieces and interpretations of pieces by Pet Shop Boys and Leonard Cohen, the album provides a beatific insight into two players who have a symbiotic relationship going back to their teenage years. On their version of ‘If I Had You’ – recorded by everyone from Frank Sinatra to Art Blakey – Jutterström offers a delicate, light accompaniment to Zethson’s minimal keyboard playing, while the version of Cohen’s ‘If I Didn’t Have You’, from You Want It Darker – his final album released during his lifetime – finds both of the players fluidly alternating their way through the song’s core melody, providing a poignant, heart-wrenchingly emotional close to an absorbing jazz suite. Released April 11 2025.

https://alexzethson.bandcamp.com/album/it-could-if-i

 

SEAN ARMSTRONG – VELVET EVER AFTER (Rehberge Records)

Dear Sean,

Many thanks for sending me your album, Velvet Ever After, on March 27 2025. It’s always nice to receive new music, and I’m always very grateful for this.

I also know how inordinately stressful it can be sending out something you’ve created into the aether and hoping for someone to give it a listen. I’ve been there. It takes a lot of self-confidence and resilience. I also know how it feels when someone you’ve sent it to doesn’t respond. I’ve also been there.

And so, with that in mind, I wanted to apologise. I saw your email come in, and I didn’t reply. That sucks. It’s common courtesy to at least acknowledge receipt of an email, from a DIY label like yours. Had I replied at the time, I would have said how much I liked the fact that Rehberge is named after your favourite park in Berlin (who does that?), and how much I loved the fact that it’s something you run with your partner, Rocky Lorelei. But I didn’t reply, and so I didn’t say any of that to you. I could come up with a plethora of excuses and reasons – too many emails, too many problems, too little time etc – but it still sucks that I never replied.

I didn’t just want to apologise for that. I also wanted to say how much I loved the album. I listened to Velvet Ever After after it had already been released, on what had been a really, really stressful day with my day job. It soothed me in a way that I really needed after the day I’d had. Your guitar playing has such a delicate, graceful quality, and I also love the songs like ‘The Whirlpool’ where Rocky adds pretty synth melodies alongside you. Your voice is also superb, and I found myself actually breathing – like actually breathing, with proper, deep breaths – while listening to songs like ‘My God’ and ‘The Library’, for the first time since I got to the office just after 0700.

I’m getting dreamy, sun-drenched West Coast tasting notes and a nice reminder of Real Estate, a band I realised I haven’t played for years, but now really want to listen to again. The instrumental pieces are also absolutely beautiful. ‘Valley Of Racing Shadows’ is stunning, as is ‘Concertina Sundae’.

So, like I said at the top: I’m so sorry for ignoring your email. However, I’m overjoyed that you sent it my way. Please add me to your mailing list with the email I’ve sent you separately, and I look forward to staying in touch.

All the best,

Mat

Released April 25 2025.

https://rehbergerecords.bandcamp.com/album/velvet-ever-after

 

XQUI – ALBION

I have discovered that I gravitate to anonymous characters. Perhaps it’s because I have such a ubiquitous, boring, pedestrian name that it feels like I am in good company with people who keep their identities hidden (while I hide in plain sight). This explains why I get on pretty well with Homer Flynn, the spokesperson for the ultimate anonymous act, The Residents. I’ve spoken with Xqui. We had a Zoom call. Like The Residents, he wore a mask, and it was fucking terrifying.

‘Terrifying’ isn’t a word you could levy at Xqui’s latest missive, the three-track Albion EP. The release continues a series of muses that began back in 2018 with the Britannia EP, and which continued the following year with the Revisited EP. Xqui began, er, revisiting his series of pieces all entitled ‘Britannia’ on 2023’s Nights That Went On Too Long, a release that I contributed spoken word to. His ‘Britannia’ variations lean into a fuzzy, hazy, ephemeral manipulation of what might well be a classic display of pomp and circumstance, snatched from a rowdy Proms performance at the Royal Albert Hall. Your ear latches on to familiar sounds – a swooning orchestral passage, a choir, a distinctive melody – before reverb and heavy processing obliterates that which you believe you recognise.

Is this a social comment on Britishness and our declining global relevance, or just another glorious example of Xqui’s idiosyncratic approach to sound art? Well, it’s actually derived from recordings made at a Lancashire ‘Coconutters’ event, a tradition that dates back some 150 years, and one which originated from the diaspora created through Cornish miners taking their skills – and their traditions – to far-flung places. You can read about that here.

The bit about Xqui’s unique sound art approach remains completely true, however.

Released April 26 2025.

https://xqui.bandcamp.com/album/albion-ep

Words: Mat Smith

(c) 2025 Further.

 

Shots: Luce Mawdsley / Leaving / Xqui

On By 429harrowroadIn Album reviewsLeave a comment

LUCE MAWDSLEY – NORTHWEST & NEBULOUS (Pure O)

Luce Mawdsley is a Liverpool-based composer and multi-instrumentalist. Their latest album was recorded in the city’s Scandinavian Church and found Mawdsley playing guitar, organ and percussion alongside Nicholas Branton (clarinets) and Rachel Nicholas (viola). Describing their music as part of a journey, the title of the album focuses in on the starting point of Mawdsley’s own journey in Formby, a town in the North-West of England; the nebulousness refers to where they find themselves arriving today, as a non-binary, neurodivergent artist.

There is a sense of grace and harmony here, infused with expansive atmospheres inspired by Western cinema soundtracks. Pieces like the title track bounce and sway with a melodic levity, the three musicians weaving in and out of another like converging tributaries of water. Elsewhere, ‘The Growing Rooms’ has a devastating, heart-wrenching quality, its reverberating slide guitar reminding this writer of a motif running through Francis Lai’s ‘Love Story’ or sections of Mark Knopfler’s music from ‘Local Hero’. On many of these pieces, including the plaintive opening piece ‘Latex Feather’, Mawdsley is content for Nicholas’ viola to act as the music’s focal point, offering questing, searching, swooning, lyrical reflections of Mawdsley’s ceaseless curiosity.

Released 29 March 2024. Bandcamp: here

XQUI – GITHERMENTS AND THE MRI (Human Geography)

Prompted by a harrowing trip to A&E amid a breakdown, Githerments And The MRI represents an astonishing release in the catalogue of prolific and consistently inventive sound artist Xqui, wherein the recorded sounds of an MRI scanner become central characters in his idiosyncratic sound world.

Noisy, complex and nuanced, this is Xqui at his most terrifying – and this comes from the perspective of a writer who has interviewed him, where the mask that he wears when he decides to come out of the shadows left me with endless nightmares. This is often so terrifying that if you’re about to go for an MRI scan, listening to this slab of caustic sound art may prompt you to cancel. There are, however, plenty of moments here that poke their way through the industrial atmospherics dominating these two twenty-minute pieces. Dub rhythms occasional emerge from the threatening whir of the scanner; a ticking clock fashions itself into a springy King Tubby mixing desk cast-off; a brief sample of Erik Satie offers a much-needed sense of respite; effusive backwards melodies offer a mournful moment of reflection. While these pieces might sit as complete polar opposites to more ethereal Xqui works like Hymns For Terry Francis, they add new and fascinating insights into the mind of this prolific creator.

Released 21 April 2024. Bandcamp: here

LEAVING – HIDDEN VIEW (Moon Glyph)

Leaving is the alias of Perth’s Rupert Thomas, who first came to my attention as one half of the duo Erasers, whose Constant Connection album was a personal highlight from 2022. For Hidden View, Thomas’s second solo album, he explores fragile, sparse arrangements that evoke a sense of emotional trepidation and the wild naturalistic environments surrounding his home.

Usually consisting of off-kilter rhythms, minimal effects and haunted, enquiring synth melodies, pieces like the standout ‘Mirrored Feeling’ offer a sense of restlessness and unease; at first glance, they are bathed in beatific, enveloping ambient texture and persuasive layers of undulating melodies, but listen closely and those emotive gestures are gently punctured by a pinprick of doubt and darkness. Elsewhere, on the subtle widescreen atmospherics of key track ‘Hidden Dreams’ he assiduously evokes those brief moments spent in the weird interzone between wakefulness and sleep. Thomas has a seemingly innate ability to produce synth passages that imprint themselves devastatingly into your consciousness, making for an instrumental album with a low-key expressive depth.

Released 26 April 2024. Bandcamp: here

Words: Mat Smith

(c) 2024 Further.

Shots: Pagan Red / Jay Wires / Andy Warhol / Xqui / Khodumodumo

On By 429harrowroadIn Album reviews1 Comment

PAGAN RED – MATERIA (Titrate)

I first came across Pagan Red at a Titrate label night at IKLECTIK in 2022, and the material played that night was signalled as being extracted from this album. My overriding impression of that set was one of physical bass intensity, overlaid with dense drones and other interventions of unknowable provenance that whirr and fizz unpredictably. On record, the 25-minute ‘A Waning Mind’s Eye’, and the shorter tracks ‘Purus Terrae’ and ‘Sands’ are much more subtle, coiling themselves around you with a combination of airy levity and brooding complexity. Materia exists in darkness, light, and everywhere in between. Released March 31 2023. With thanks to Henrique.

JAY WIRES – GHOST (Yes Trigger Music)

The latest single from New York electronic music producer Jay Wires continues the emotional themes of his earlier releases in 2022 and 2023. A haunting and epic synth pop journey, ‘Ghost’ details a sense of abandonment and disappointment. Beginning with sparse, fragile framing, by the end the track has soared to progressively new heights, even as Jay’s vocals become more intensely and savagely introspective. Jay calls this music “electro-pop therapy”, and his ongoing open, frank discourse with his listeners about his relationship struggles is universally relatable to us and, I hope, cathartic for him. Released October 20 2023.

VARIOUS ARTISTS – BEFORE BRILLO BOX OR BANANA: MUSIC WITHIN THE ALBUM COVER ART OF ANDY WARHOL (Él Records / Cherry Red Records)

Writes David Bourdon in his book Warhol, quoted in the copious liner notes of this four disc set: “Art directors showered Warhol with assignments because he worked fast, met deadlines, and displayed a properly submissive attitude when they demanded revisions.”

This compilation surveys the music that lies within sleeves designed by Andy Warhol after he moved to New York City in 1949. This was the era of Warhol’s commercial art, exemplified by drawings of shoes for Glamour magazine and advertisements for the I. Miller shoe store that appeared in the New York Times. His sleeve art for LPs of music by Gershwin, Tchaikovsky, Thelonius Monk, Count Basie and others, released by labels like Columbia and Blue Note, is less well known, but they highlight early ideas of reproduction and collective creation – via assistants and his mother’s calligraphy – that would go on to become staples of his later work. The four discs here compile a significant number of pieces of classical and jazz music featured on those LPs, while a fourth disc collates pieces by Cage, Feldman, Cecil Taylor, Albert and others in an effort to contextualise the musical currents that surrounded Warhol in 1950s Manhattan. Extensive sleeve notes, quotes and photos of Warhol’s sleeve designs round out an essential and original boxset from Él Records. Released November 24 2023. With thanks to Matt.

XQUI – MELTING ICE WITH ICE (Wormhole World)

The latest album from anonymous, Vince Clarke-tipped sound artist Xqui is easily one of his most atmospheric to date. The album’s centrepiece is the ten minute ‘Cherry Red Neon Blues’, where Xqui briefly emerges from behind his mask to deliver oblique verse over a set of long-form soundscapes. Here you find intriguing, impenetrable sentiments that feels, to me, like a vague outline of a strange night out, reminding me of Scorsese’s seminal After Hours. Elsewhere, ‘Zero Divided By Zero’ carries a sense of fragile tenderness, with deep, sedentary ambience offset by soaring, euphoric tones. The (almost) title track, ‘Melting Ice’ features squidgy synth tones that seem to echo and reverberate across a barren arctic landscape. Plaintive, and vaguely melancholic, Xqui‘s new collection feels like unanswered radio transmissions from an abandoned polar lab complex. Released December 1 2023.

KHODUMODUMO – WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING THIS SIDE?

An accompanying email with this album from South Africa’s Khodumodumo said, “We hope it unsettles you,” which is a great marketing tactic as far as I’m concerned. And unsettling this certainly is, if you’re generally freaked out by its cloying, discordant, wonky textures and brooding clouds of menacing ambience. ‘Trapped In Deluded And Helpless Loops’ stands out for its cycles of queasily unpredictable repeated samples, while the brief and atmospheric ‘Their Whistles Have Noticed You’ seems to carry a calm latency, presaging some extreme violence. This album is most unsettling with the title track, which uses samples of Appartheid-era news report to highlight South Africa’s racial tensions. Released December 8 2023.

Words: Mat Smith

(c) 2023 Further.

Mortality Tables: Goodparley – Two Meditations For Freya

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MORTALITY TABLES
GOODPARLEY – TWO MEDITATIONS FOR FREYA

digital EP released today | remixes by Alka & Xqui

mortalitytables.bandcamp.com

Two improvised pieces for guitar. Recorded by Oli Richards (Goodparley) on 10 February 2022 in response to a concept by Mat Smith.

1. Meditation Twenty-Four (i) (For Freya)
2. Meditation Twenty-Four (ii) (For Freya)
3. Meditation Twenty-Four (i) (For Freya) – Alka Remix
4. Meditation Twenty-Four (ii) (For Freya) – Xqui Remix

Response: Oli Richards
Concept: Mat Smith
Mastering: John@SEODAH
Design: Neil Coe

A Mortality Tables Product
MTP10

CONCEPT NOTES BY MAT SMITH

‘Two Meditations For Freya’ is a sound response to anxiety.

On 10 January 2022, my youngest daughter found herself too scared to sleep. She was never a great sleeper as a baby and toddler, and now, as a teenager, often struggles to relax enough for bed.

This night was different, however. She seemed to be gripped by an intense and unrelenting panic which she could not explain. In context, she had been receiving weekly cognitive behavioural therapy treatment for anxiety and depression through CHUMS, a Bedfordshire charity focused on helping young people cope with mental health issues. She’d had one of her weekly sessions earlier that day and it seemed to have triggered something inside her, but she could not – or perhaps would not – articulate it.

In an effort to help her, I offered to stay in her room so that she could feel safe and reassured enough to drift off. As she tossed and turned, I decided to practice some guided meditation in the midnight darkness of her room. She eventually fell asleep while listening to the rhythm of my breath. For the next week, we practiced short meditations together every night just before bed, and she slept better every night that week.

Around that time I was working with Oli Richards as he prepared his album Meditations Vol. 1 for release by Wormhole World. The album collected five improvised guitar ‘meditations’, each one recorded in the first few minutes after he woke up in the morning. Oli had begun releasing these pieces in November 2021, and I had been struck by their beauty and simplicity. I began seeing them as brief moments of acute stillness in which to detach from the world, and support my own meditation practice.

I approached Oli with the story of how Freya couldn’t sleep and asked if he’d consider recording an improvisation for her, to support the meditations she and I were doing together. His recordings were made on 10 February 2022 at his home in Cardiff. They were originally released through Oli’s Bandcamp page later the same day.

All proceeds from this release will go to CHUMS. CHUMS provides mental health and emotional wellbeing support for children, young people and their families.
chums.uk.com

ABOUT GOODPARLEY

Goodparley (Oli Richards) is a Cardiff-based musician and sound artist. His sounds are largely based around improvised ambient guitar loops and textures, manipulated in real-time using various modulating effects to create inherently experimental soundscapes.
goodparley.bandcamp.com

ABOUT MORTALITY TABLES

“In an effort to circumvent our unalterable mortality, we create. We make SOUNDS, ART, WORDS. These things are our INSURANCE against death.”
– Mortality Tables, On Mortality, Immortality & Charles Ives (2022)

E Peritia Ratio: reason from experience.

Nothing happens without context. Every event has a catalyst. There is no such thing as a blank page.

So it goes that each Mortality Tables Product must begin with an outline of an initial creative concept – a thought; a notion; a moment of serious whimsy; a considered reflection on life, memory, love, loss, trauma, death.

We document those ideas, then invite collaborators to respond freely to them.

They may ignore us. They may say no. They may say yes. Whoever we invite to participate shall be unencumbered by restriction, constraint, expectation, convention, limit or judgement.

There are never any right or wrong answers, because there are no questions. There is nothing more than the idea and the response.

Mortality Tables
Est. Bloomsbury, 2019
mortality-tables.com
Mortality Tables illustration by Savage Pencil

(c) 2022 Mortality Tables

Wonderful Beasts – The Art Of Whisper

On By 429harrowroadIn Album reviewsLeave a comment

Front cover

More than ever before, ambient music feels somehow necessary right now. It represents a vehicle through which to still one’s restless mind amid a tickertape feed of dystopian signals, harrowing statistics and only the briefest flourishes of hope. Whether as a tool for absorption or distraction, ambient music can centre you elsewhere, allowing you to regain focus and perspective.

Unfortunately, a lot of ambient music is also terminally boring, the equivalent of sonic wallpaper or a naff pastiche of inconsequential New Age reference points. That accusation thankfully cannot be levied at Wonderful Beasts, a pairing of electronic artists boycalledcrow and Xqui, whose first collaboration together is anything but music to drift off to sleep to.

For the most part, The Art Of Whisper is built from blocks of gauzy texture, etiolated clouds of sound that float past you and hover, mirage-like and just out to reach, before vanishing into nothingness. Sprinkles of delicate synth melodies are cast over pieces like ‘I Fell Into A Dream’, a languid pace and frosty atmosphere evoking crystalline structures and ghostly shimmer. ‘Love Her’ and ‘Quiet’ include what could be the heavily-processed sound of pealing church bells submerged under layers and layers of dense reverb so as to leave the merest trace outline of joyfulness.

Elsewhere, there are pieces that break free of these beatific soundworlds. ‘My Old Guitar’ has a firmness and drama, its delicate melodic gestures nudged forward with a murky bass undertow and a distant beat. The track opens with a distorted, over-amped synth passage, creating the sense of memory and nostalgia enshrined in the title. A similar effect can be found on ‘She Is The Melody Man’, wherein a pounded, tribal rhythm supports a framework of high-velocity sequences and plucked guitar-like sounds, simultaneously carrying a sense of threat but also a youthful vigour, like looking back on the adventure games you played as a child. ‘Into The Emerald Eye’ is perhaps the noisiest piece here, with squalling layers of angry noise that finally ebb away into the same stylistic terrain as the likes of ‘Love Her’.

What boycalledcrow and Xqui offer is a sense of narrative without once revealing the story, offering little more than glimpses of moments freighted with emotional, yet ephemeral significance. To do that within the context of ambient music is nothing short of remarkable.

The Art Of Whisper by Wonderful Beasts was released March 20 2020 by Wormhole World.

(c) 2020 Further.