Archive for the ‘Reviews’ Category

Erik Griswold – Next Level Avoidance

Posted: 19 August 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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ROOM40 – 9th August 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

It’s been some time since I’ve sat down to listen to a work created using prepared piano. It’s been even longer since I spent time with Erik Griswold’s work. Perhaps the two are related, as Griswold’s accompanying notes recount how it’s been a while for him, too:

Under the house again, just me and my very old piano. Have we got anything more to say to each other? Will some new toys spice things up a bit? The creative process seems to swing like a (Foucoult’s?) pendulum, always returning to the same spot again and again, eventually. When I last made short form prepared piano pieces in 2015 (Pain Avoidance Machine) I was “feeling stifled by the negativity of the Australian political discourse, the narcissistic excess of social media, and facing a long summer of migraine-inducing heat.” If only I had known how far we had to go.

To the sounds of my 1885 Lipp and Sohn, prepared with brass bolts, strips of paper and rubber, I’ve added an analogue synthesizer, extending the exploration into the electronic. The tactile quality of both instruments is central to my approach, with small inconsistencies of sound, attack, decay, filtering all foregrounded. It’s a very intimate setting with just two C414 microphones at close distance to capture the granular details of sonic materials. The addition of “frames,” “windows,” and “sonic mirrors” produce a ritualistic aura hovering above and around the music.

I take a moment to reflect on reading this, before I can even bring myself to listen, reflecting on the title. Putting things off is… well, it’s a way of dealing, but it’s not really coping, is it? Not that Griswold hasn’t been making music: he’s maintained a steady flow of releases over the last few years, even during the COVID years – but to return to the piano is a significant step.

The title track raises the curtain here, and at times the tinkling tones are achingly beautiful, graceful, delicate, the most magnificent invocations of neoclassical perfection – albeit alternating with plinking, plonkling randomness which flips between low-end thunder and what, to the untrained ear or anyone unfamiliar with the instrumentation, sounds like clumsy stumbling.

‘Wild West’ isn’t a twanging country tune, and says nothing of the wiki-wiki-wah-wah we know, but a rolling piano piece with the prepared element adding a taut, almost electronic-sounding aspect – like the plucking of an egg-slicer – but also abstract, and strangely evocative. Meanwhile, the gentle, somewhat vague, and perhaps rather progressive-leaning ‘Ghost in the Middle’ radiates a hypnotic beauty.

The album’s mid-section takes on a dreamy, drifting, hazy quality, floating from here to there, with scratches and scrapes, forward and backward providing texture to these ponderous sonic expanses.

‘Uncertainty’ again balances neoclassical magnificence with angular irregularities and some jarring alternative tuning which continues into the trickling ‘Poly cascade’, a stack that’s subtle and in some way grounding.

‘Colours of Summer’ lands as a surprise and completely rips out those roots in an instant, being a throbbing techno track which completely goes against the grain of the album. In complete contrast, ‘Ghost of Ravel’ returns to classical territories, and is nothing short of beautiful, although as the album inches towards its close – the atmospheric bubbler that is ‘X-Mode’ which calls to mind the Krautrock bubbling of Tangerine Dream, and, more contemporaneously perhaps Pye Corner Audio’, find ourselves floating, drifting, unsure of where we are. Next Level Avoidance is full of surprises, and is in essence representative of the prepared piano, in that it’s unpredictable, unstable. Dim the lights, breathe and feel the flow.

AA

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Solace – Further (2025 Remaster)

Posted: 17 August 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Magnetic Eye Records – 22nd August 2025

Everything gets an anniversary reissue now, doesn’t it? And however much you love a band or an album, the constant cycle of repackaged reissues with bonus this, that or the other, a new remastering starts to feel like a cynical drain. Not that such exploitation is anything new: the late 80s and early 90s with infinite formats of single releases whereby fans felt compelled to purchase multiple versions to obtain all the tracks and mixes in order to attain a higher chart position – when these things actually counted – were shocking for it. But back then, 7” and cassette singles cost 99p, a CD single wasn’t much more, and a 12” was maybe £3.50. But the point was that you got different stuff on different formats, and being a completist didn’t require a second job. Now, you’re looking at £30 for a splatter vinyl remaster with maybe one bonus track of an album you’ve already got five copies on, but you buy if for that track and for the sake of the collection… and being reminded that an album is now ten, twenty, twenty-five years old is like a body blow as you realise how quickly your life is passing by. On a personal note, I’m feeling this most acutely as I find myself on the cusp of fifty. How the hell have I been here half a century? And this means that anything that happened twenty-five years ago – at the turn of the millennium – was a quarter of a century ago. Remember how the entire civilised world was shitting itself over the so-called ‘Millennium bug’? It felt like the apocalypse was imminent at the time. How, it feels like a picnic.

But there are positives. Sometimes, a new edition can bring an album to the attention of a new generation of fans, and / or provide long-term fans with something special which serves to expand on the legacy of the release. This is likely the case with Further, an album which bypassed me, but won New Jersey stoner metal act Solace critical acclaim and fans, and there’s a poignancy about this re-release, too, as founder and vocalist Jason died in January of this year (the reissue was already in the pipeline before his departure), making for a fitting tribute and summation of his and the band’s legacy, remastered and expanded to include three previously unreleased tracks, and the original EP version of ‘Heavy Birth / 2 Fisted’.

Now, as this is my first exposure, if you’re already familiar with the album, this review will likely not be of much use to you: I’m in no position to comment on how the 2025 remaster compares to the original, or how the track sequencing – which follows that of the 2005 reissue, down to the 11-minute cut of ‘Heavy Birth / 2 Fisted’, with the additional material appended to the ten-track version.

For those unfamiliar, this is a solid slab of heavy metal that takes plenty of cues from Black Sabbath, straight from the off with the rifferola of ‘Man Dog’. The lead guitar work is busy, atop riffs which are thick and heavy, while the rhythm section is dense: the drums feel loud despite being fairly low in the mix, giving the impression of extreme volume on the part of the guitars while the bass slides like sludge at the bottom end of the sonic spectrum.

Jason’s vocals tend to manifest as bombastic and Ozzy-like, but there are moments, as on ‘Black Unholy Ground’ where he channels some palpable aggression, just before an epic solo breaks loose. There are no shortage of epic solos to be found here. The slower eight-and-a-half-minute ‘Followed’ exploits the classic quiet / loud dynamic and goes for the atmospheric slow-building intro, but when it gets going, by the mid-point it packs the filthy heft and rage of Fudge Tunnel. It’s a ball-busting blast of anguish which races to a pulverising conclusion with a blown-out cyclical riff. ‘Hungry Mother’ goes mellow – a brief acoustic interlude with some psychedelic hues – before the behemoth that is ‘Angels Dreaming’, a nine-minute monster that is peak stoner metal. Like ‘Followed’, ‘Heavy Birth’ draws as much on 90s underground noise as much as vintage heavy metal, and packs a massive punch.

The musical landscape of recent years is another world from that of 2000, and it’s important to bear this in mind, not because Further has aged badly, but because it sounds so contemporary. While stoner metal wasn’t a completely novel concept at the time of release – Melvins had been doing it since forever already, of course, and Queens of the Stone Age would unleash breakthrough major label debut Rated R in June 2000, it certainly isn’t the sound of the time, when nu-metal was the dominant style the world of guitar music, and after grunge fell to indie, big riffs were largely out in favour of guitars that sounded like slabs of concrete and vocals which switched between rap and emoting.

Further is heavy, gritty, unashamedly drawing on grunge (which with acts like Tad had taken cues from 70s metal in the first place), and hearing it now, it feels like an album that’s more at home in 2025 than it would have been in 2000. But this also demonstrates just how, while fashions come and go, quality music always holds up at any time – and this is quality. The bonus tracks – including the obligatory live cut in the form of ‘Funk #49 (Live in Tokyo ’98)’- are all worthy additions of a standard which is equal to the album itself.

AA

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Rún – Rún

Posted: 16 August 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Rocket Recordings – 22nd August 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

While you wouldn’t exactly call Rún a supergroup, they certainly represent a coming together of disparate artists of no insignificant pedigree, as their biography attests:

Rún comprise firstly Tara Baoth Mooney – sometime Jim Henson voice artist, with a longstanding background in everything from folk and choral music to experimental film-making. Diarmuid MacDiarmada – Nurse With Wound co-conspirator and brother of Lankum’s Cormac, brings with him the experience of avant-garde collaborations with a plethora of artists stretching back over thirty years. Drummer, sound designer and engineer Rian Trench, meanwhile, has worked on everything from the psychedelic IDM of Solar Bears to auto-generative experiments to orchestral arrangements, and owns the studio – The Meadow on Ireland’s East Coast – in which the album was made.

It’s a delicate folksome vocal which floats in on the first composition, ‘Paidir Poball (Pupil)’over what initially sounds like a mechanical wheeze of a bellows, or some form, of life support. The juxtaposition between something so earthy, so human, and something so very much not is compelling, and quite powerful, in a way which isn’t immediately easy to unravel. But a couple of minutes in, a thick, droning guitar – reminiscent of Earth 2, with that thick, sludgy distortion and trebly metal edge – winds its way int the mix and immediately, the mood and the direction changes. And then, on top, choral, almost monastic layers of vocal build and rise upwards to the heavens through the grit and grind and howls of feedback before eventually there is percussion. The drums – thick, thudding, low in the mix, feel as if they’re lagging, foundering in the tide or struggling against a head-facing current.

‘Your Death My Body’ strips things back primarily to percussion, but turns up the intensity with the vocals, which hit a wild intensity which borders on rabid. But with this, and some bleepy computer incursions and a grumbling but groovy bass which makes allusions to Jah Wobble, this album becomes increasingly difficult to place, or to pigeonhole. It’s a sad fact that nowadays, not only will they throw you in jail if you say you’re English, these days (I’m safe as I’m ashamed to pronounce my Englishness, even – or perhaps especially – in Scotland) – but aligning oneself to a genre can be a minefield, too.

The eight-minute ‘Terror Moon’ is a dark morass and a muti-layered, bass-heavy mindfuck that explodes into blistering, shredding electronic overload in the first minute before thumping percussion and the filthiest, fuzziest bass drive in and punch straight in the gut, propelling a psychotic, psychedelic weird-out with tripping space-rock synths and strains of feedback and infinite echo, which leaves you feeling dazed, dizzy. Terror? Yes, just a bit: it’s huge, it’s warped, and a tiny bit overwhelming in its weight and witchiness.

But this is nothing compared to the final track, the ultimate finale, the thirteen-and-a-half minute behemoth that is ‘Caoineadh’. Arriving as it does after a pair of punchy cuts – ‘Such is the Kingdom’ is murky, atmospheric, leaning toward experimental / spoken word, but a mere three an as half minutes on duration, and ‘Strike It’, which is perhaps the album’s most direct composition, evoking Swans circa ’86 but on speed, the grind coming with pace –it takes the album in a whole new trajectory. Gentle, even tentative at first, with nothing but a wandering bassline, it has a slow-burning drone-rock vibe to it as first. But then, the vocals – oh, the vocals! Tara Baoth Mooney brings a lilting folk feel against a slow, droning backdrop, which eventually gives way to a slow, expensive prog-pop mellowness, opening new horizons in every way. And every direction. It ends in a rippling wave of distortion.

This is essentially Rún in a nutshell: they have no confines, no limits, and to touch them is to embark on a journey. And what a journey this is.

AA

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Re:O – Crimson Desire

Posted: 15 August 2025 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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13th August 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

Re:O’s ninth single is a song of frustration, of dissatisfaction, about giving everything and receiving underwhelming returns. It’s a song about life’s struggles. And it takes the form of musical hybridity taken to another level. And when it comes to taking things far out, Japan has a long history of it. Only Japan could have given us Merzbow and Masonna, Mono and Melt-Banana, Shonen Knife and Baby Metal – acts which couldn’t be more different, or more wildly inventive. J-Pop may not be my bag, but on reading that Re:O take ‘the best of Japanese alternative music and combin[e] western metal and rock… Re:O has been described by fans as “Japancore” a mix of Metalcore, industrial metal, J-Pop, Darkpop, cyberpunk inspired symphonic layers with high energy and heavy guitar.” It’s a tantalising combination on which I’m immediately sold.

Hybridity in the arts emerged from the avant-garde, before becoming one of the defining features of postmodernity: the second half of the twentieth century can be seen as a veritable melting-pot, as creatives grappled with the notion that everything truly original had already been done, and so the only way to create something new was to plunder that which had gone before and twist it, smash it, reformulate it, alchemise new permutations. If the zeal – not to mention any sense of irony or knowingness – of such an approach to creativity seems to have been largely drained in the first quarter of the twenty-first century, Re:O prove that there’s life in art still after all.

With ‘Crimson Desire’ they pack more ideas into three and a half minutes than seems humanly feasible, starting out with snarling synths, meaty beats, and churning bass – a combination of technoiundustrial and nu-metal – before brain-shredding, overloaded industrial guitar chords blast in over Rio Suyama’s blistering vocal. And it blossoms into an epic chorus that’s an instant hook but still powered by a weighty instrumental backing. The mid-section is simply eye-popping, with hints of progressive metal in the mix.

The only other act doing anything remotely comparable right now is Eville, who have totally mastered the art of ball-busting nu-metal riffery paired with powerfully melodic choruses rendered all the more potent for strong female vocals, but Re:O bring something different again, ad quite unique to the party. It’s all in the delivery, of course, but they have succeeded in creating a sound that is theirs, and theirs alone. No two ways about it, they’re prime for Academy size venues, and given a fair wind, they could – and deserve to be – there this time next year.

AA

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Xqui – 17 Minutes (Menace Men RIP)

Posted: 14 August 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Mortality Tables – 1st August 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

The latest instalment of the ambitious and wide-ranging Impermanence Project curated by Mortality Tables is a document, as the artist explains, simply and succinctly: ‘This is the sound of my footsteps. I walk through some woods every lunchtime when I’m at work. I try to take a different route every day. The recording starts and ends at the office door. There are two gates which separate a lake – one of several – from the woods.’

This simple premise of recording a walk – a few seconds short of seventeen minutes in duration speaks on a number of levels: the first, in context of the project’s premise, is also the context of the walk itself – the lunch break at work. A brief window in which to seek separation from the work and the workplace. Too few workers really use this time as their own, with many scoffing a sandwich as their desk, or nipping to a canteen or a supermarket for a prepackaged meal deal, instead of something more beneficial to both physical and mental health. I must stress that I’m not judging, and it’s not easy, but as a walker myself, when I was office-based, I would make a point of getting out on a lunch-break, and now home-based, divide my day with a walk. This time out from work is but brief, but affords an opportunity to decompress, to recalibrate.

The fact the artist reports trying to take a different route every day is interesting. Treading new ground, or even walking a known route in the opposite direction, or otherwise questing for variety keeps things fresh, and opens one’s eyes to new sights. These things are often in the detail, but also change with the seasons, noting the changes in the colour of the leaves, a toadstool, hearing birdsong. The world is ever changing, and while work can all too often manifest as a groundhog day of ‘same shit, different day’ which often feels like ‘same shit, same day again – and what day even is it?’ the outdoors paints a different picture. Even when the realisation hits that it only seemed as though Spring was beginning to break mere weeks ago and now summer has past and the air smells of Autumn, and that nagging sense of another year having evaporated and life slipping past settled awkwardly in the gut – a soft but palpable blow which serves as a reminder of how short life is, the outward signs of the passage of time are evidence of being alive.

Listening to 17 Minutes, we get to accompany Xqui on their walk in real-time. They keep a decent pace, too, and as one tunes the attention, changes in echo, background sounds, the metallic scrape of a gate hinges, the different terrains underfoot, all become significant. There is traffic. There are few people, at least speaking along the way. I abhor having to listen to people’s conversations as I walk. And yet I find I’ve been unable to listen to music while walking since lockdown, and simply have to hear everything.

Although documenting a walk through woods, the backdrop to 17 Minutes sounds somewhat urban, or at least overtly inhabited, a setting where human presence dominates nature. A couple of minutes from the end, a gate swings and clangs shut. Although we’re not yet back at the office door, it feels significant. I even feel myself slump a little inside, feeling that passing through this gate – which in the opposite direction represents the opening up of a path to freedom – signifies the end of this escape. And with this, comes the hard appreciation of the fact that nothing last forever, especially not a lunch break.

AA

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Zabus – Whores of Holyrood

Posted: 13 August 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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12th August 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

Zabus have been on fire lately, as their recent EP, Shadow Genesis, released in June. It’s not only the prolific output which is noteworthy – some acts spunk out new material every other week, but the quality simply isn’t there – but we’re looking at a creative purple patch of innovation and ideas flowing in full spate. Whores of Holyrood is their fifth full-length album in less than two years, and while Zabus is ordinarily a collective centred around project founder Jeremy Moore, Whores of Holyrood is the first ostensibly solo release by Moore under the moniker, and it’s also pitched as ‘one of the most overtly political statements from Zabus to date.’

This matters. Anyone with an outlet, or a platform, right now, has, a duty to state their position. Silence is complicity. We know this from history. Individually, there is next to nothing we can do to stop Trump’s fascistic march, or halt the genocide in Gaza, or stop the wat in Sudan. But fucking hell, we are witnessing hell on earth right now. To take a line from William Burroughs’ Exterminator, ‘There are no innocent bystanders … what are they doing there in the first place?’ I don’t necessarily entirely agree with the stance, but it’s worth unpacking a bit, particularly in the context of 2025, when people are more likely to film the most horrific events on their phones and post them on social media than to intervene. I know, people are scared and all the rest, but… something is deeply wrong.

The title, Whores of Holyrood, immediately made me think of the Scottish parliament, but it would appear that there is no connection or implication intended. Instead, the album ‘explores the positive feedback loop between fascist authoritarian rule and societal inaction, apathy and resignation. Holyrood is a metaphor for the established classist hierarchy which derives its strength and influence from our subjugation.’

As an aside, ‘rood’ is a middle English term with its origins in Saxon for the cross, and a rood screen was a feature of medieval churches, a carved wooden partition depicting the crucifixion. Whores of Holyrood may not have any direct or specific connection to these historical roots, but they still seem somewhat relevant, albeit tangentially.

It’s ‘Shadow Genesis’, the lead track from the recent EP that launches the album with its reverb-heavy blues guitar and gothic stylings, and it’s dark, brooding, but it’s nothing to the snarling lo-fo post-punk goth epic that is ‘Burn to Your Own Destruction’: six and a half minutes of echo-soaked guitar swirling beneath bombastic baritone vocals, while the tile track is commanding, archly gothic, but with murky black metal production values. The same is true of ‘A-YA Bullet V’, which brings the driving funk groove of Bauhaus at their best, while also pushing the experimentalism to the fore.

‘Cremation Psalm’ is a murky swagger, equal parts Nick Cave and The Volcanoes, and every track on this album is pure gold. The muffled, echo-heavy production is not a detriment, but an asset, accentuating the old-school vibe which is s integral to the experience.

‘Sod Martyr’ is dark, dark, dark, and sparse, and something about it calls to mind The Honolulu Mountain Daffodils, while ‘Strangers of Non-Being’ brings together goth and heavy psychedelia with the addition of low, slow drone

If the Shadow Genesis EP showcased a keen experimentalism, and a broad range of stylistic touchstones, then Whores of Holyrood takes it all to the next level. Zabus keep pushing forward, outward, onward. Right now, it seems there is no stopping them.

AA

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Relay for Death – Mutual Consuming

Posted: 12 August 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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The Helen Scarsdale Agency – 8th August 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

When the accompanying notes and press release which replicates them describes a release as ‘dire’, you know you’re in for an uncomfortable ride. In the world of noise, such a choice of adjective doesn’t carry quite the same negative connotations as is the majority of musical spheres. When it comes to noise, and certain strains of metal, the objective is to make it as unpleasant as possible. It will alienate most people, and that’s precisely the objective: those who can withstand the torture are the right people.

And so it is that Mutual Consuming is described as ‘a dire piece of isolationist thrum, spectral caterwaul, and heavy gloom through an oblique and abstracted coupling of electronics, noise, and ominous field recordings.’

To quote further from the accompanying notes, Roxann and Rachal Spikula, the twins who make up Relay for Death’, offered the consideration that “Mutual Consuming comes from a concept in the philosophies that underpin traditional Chinese medicine theory, where the two opposing states (yin and yang) are 2 states on a continuum and their interactions produce an infinite possible number of states of aggregation. Within this interplay, there is a dynamic balance that is maintained by a constant adjustment of their relative levels. So an excess of yin consumes yang and vice versa.” We asked if this has anything to do with the concept of the Ouroboros, to which they responded, “We hadn’t thought about Ouroboros, but the eternal cycle of things makes sense too. The gorge fest of existence.” Does this relate to previous works? The twins concisely respond to that question in a rare interview in Untitled, “No.”

The album features but two pieces, each clocking in around the seventeen minute mark. An awkward length, but plenty of time to make for an uncomfortable, unsettling, and even torturous experience. And it is.

‘intone the morph orb’ is a darkly unsettling expanse of dark ambient, the sounds of thunder and cavernous growls from the pits of hell are collaged with scrawling metallic drones. Distant detonations reverberate, like volcanic eruptions beyond the horizon, as wispy ominousness lingers in the air. Very little tangible takes place, but the tension grows. There is a dark thriller / horror aspect to this: the hairs on the back of your neck prickle and you fear whatever may lie around the corner. The second half of the track is less precipitous, given to a protracted mid-to-high-end drones that swirls and eddies, cut through with occasional whistles of feedback.

There’s something vaguely Ballardian about the title ‘terminal ice wind’, and it is, indeed, a cold atmosphere which runs forth from the speakers, churning an ever denser sonic murk as the first few minute pass. It’s a seeping morass of dark discordance which takes cues from Throbbing Gristle. Three minutes in, thunderous explosions register, and all is noise, albeit for a brief time. In time, dissonant drones, thrumming reverberations and low rumbles emerge and come to dominate the mix in what is an ever-shifting soundscape, where light is in limited supply. This is, indeed, dark, and oppressive.

Everything about Mutual Consuming is as it should be. A collage of challenging sound on sound, any underlying concept fades to insignificance as the sounds assail the ears without apology. Mutual Consuming is not harsh, and on the noise spectrum, it’s fairly gentle, but it’s by no means accessible or easy on the ear.

AA

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Rotersand – Don’t Become the Thing You Hated

Posted: 11 August 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Metropolis Records – 8th August 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

The singles released ahead of the album did their job, at least for me, in the way it used to happen in the pre-Internet days, when you’d hear a single or two on the radio, and you’d get hyped for the album.

Half the time, the singles were the only tracks that were any good, but the other half of the time, the singles would actually prove to be representative and stand in a solid set of songs.

In this instance, the title resonated early. Perhaps it’s an age thing. In my 30s, I witnessed many of my peers somehow pass into middle-age overnight, bemoaning that there’s no good music anymore, how things aren’t how they were when they were between the ages of 16 to 21, how everything’s shit now and the nostalgia-wallowing would grow deeper with every beer consumed. As I approach fifty, it’s only got worse: many of us have teenage kids, and many of them go on about how the music their kids listen to is shit, it’s just noise, how their kids stay in bed till lunchtime at weekends and on school holidays, and so on. It’s as if the grind of the day-job and family life has erased their memories of what it was actually like being a teenager. It’s broadly true that people become more conservative as they grow older, and, despite the vehement intentions stated in youth, they become their parents, one way or another, perpetuating the same mistakes, while blaming their parents for the fact. This is but one example of the way people do have a tendency to become the thing they hated, but one which is close to my heart.

Right now, the world is almost unrecognisable from the one I grew up in, but instead of fighting the system and pushing for positive change and a more just society, greed, division, and hate have become evermore ingrained.

They open in grand style, with a smouldering six-minute epic in the form of piano-led ‘All Tomorrows’, which builds slowly and creates an air of wistfulness, of reflection, before hitting a solid upbeat dance groove. But as it ends, tomorrow is marked by departure, ending, alone. Across the course of fourteen songs, Rotersand explore the human condition in all its complexity, all the while dusting solid dancefloor-friendly tunes with a deep melancholy, their dark electropop leaning towards more industrial dance at times, as on ‘Father Ocean’, and ‘Watch Me’ particularly mines that late 80s / early 90s Wax Trax! vibe – while the use of autotune and the overall production firmly roots it in Europop territory. Elsewhere, ‘I Will Find You’ rolls up the entirety of electropop circa 1983-85 into a magnificently crisp four and a half minutes.

Unusually, the singles are both to be found in the second half of the album, but this is perhaps an indication of the consistency and depth of the material: while many albums suffer from a second-half slump, Don’t Become the Thing You Hated gets harder and more intense in the final third. ‘Private Firmament’ is a clear standout when it comes to dark intensity.

And so it is that Don’t Become the Thing You Hated is something of a caution, a reminder, a note to self, and it’s heavy with simmering anger – anger and twisted emotions directed in all directions, far and wide outward, and inwards, too. ‘Click Scroll tap Believe ‘ is a particularly taut listening experience and succinctly summarises life in the contemporary climate: ‘Technology the new religion / The lines between us are wearing thin’ may not be the pinnacle of poeticism, but it hits home. And that, really is the strength of Don’t Become the Thing You Hated: Rotersand zone in and hit their targets with a rare accuracy, again, and again.

AA

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Yorkshire Modular Society + Peter Digby Lee – Beneath the Hanging Sky

Posted: 10 August 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Dragon’s Eye Recordings  – 22nd August 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

A year on from my review of Yorkshire Modular Society’s Fiery Angels Fell, I find myself presented with another release of theirs on LA label Dragon’s Eye Recordings, and I can’t help but contemplate the circuitous routes by which music travels, since the release landed in my inbox courtesy of a PR based in Berlin – while no-one in my sphere of acquaintance, which includes a broad swathe of electronic artists around York and, indeed Yorkshire as it spreads in all directions – appears to have even the first inkling of the existence of YMS, despite their connection to Todmorden. But then, I often observe that what holds a lot of acts back is confinement to being ‘local’, and it’s a lack of vision, or ambition – or, occasionally, practical matters – which prevent them from reaching the national, or international, audience they deserve.

Yorkshire Modular Society clearly have an audience, and it’s not going to be found at pub gigs in their native county. This is true of most experimental artists: there’s no shortage of interest in niche work globally, but it’s thinly spread. There are places, predominantly across mainland Europe, and like Café Oto, which cater to such tastes, but they’re few and far between, which explains why most such projects tend to be more orientated towards the recording and release of their output, their audience growing nebulously, more often than not by association and word of mouth.

This release – which is the first collaborative album from Yorkshire Modular Society with Peter Digby Lee – could only ever really be a download. With ‘a suite of four ambient compositions shaped by intuition, ritual, and shared resonance’, it’s over two hours in duration, giving recent Swans a run in terms of epic.

The story goers that ‘The artists first crossed paths not through conversation, but through shared vibration — at the resonance Drone Bath in Todmorden. A quiet alignment. Some time later, Peter sent over a treasure trove of sound: samples he had recorded and collected over many years — textures, fragments, and moments suspended in time. From this archive, Dominick Schofield (Yorkshire Modular Society) began to listen, to loop, to stretch, to shape… What followed was a process of intuitive composition—letting the materials speak, revealing what had been buried in the dust and hum. This album is the result: four pieces, each unfolding from the source material with care and curiosity, a shared language spoken in tone, breath, and resonance.’

The title track is soft, gentle, sweeping, lilting, serene, floating in on picked strings, trilling woodwind and it all floats on a breeze of mellifluousness, cloud-like, its forms ever-shifting, impossible to solidify. With hints of Japanese influence and slow-swelling post-rock, it’s ambient, but also busy, layered, textured, thick, even, the musical equivalent of high humidity. It moves, endlessly, but the breezy feel is countered by a density which leaves the listener panting for air. The sound warps and wefts in such a way as to be a little uncomfortable around the region of the lower stomach after a time, like being on a boat which rocks slowly from side to side. ‘Beneath the Hanging Sky’ lays for almost thirty-six minutes, and it’s far from soothing, and as a consequence, I find myself feeling quite keyed up by the arrival of ‘Glass Lung’, another soundscape which stretches out for a full half-hour. This is more conventionally ambient, softer, more abstract, but follows a similar pattern of a slow rise and fall, an ebb and flow. Here, the application is emollient, sedative. I find myself yawning, not out of boredom, but from relaxation, something I don’t do often enough. And so it is that this slow-drifting sonic expanse takes things down a couple of notches. You may find yourself zoning out, your eyes drooping… and it’s to the good. Stimulation is very clearly not the objective here.

Third track, ‘Echo for the Unseen’, is the album’s shortest by some way, at a mere twenty-two minutes in length. It’s also darker, dense, more intense than anything which has preceded it, and as ambient as it ss, the eternal drones are reminiscent of recent both latter day Swans, and Sunn O)). The epic drone swells and surges, but mostly simmers, the droning growing more sonorous as it rolls and yawns wider as the track progress. There are harsher top-end tones drilling away in the mix as the track progresses. It makes for a long and weighty twenty-two minutes, and we feel as if we’re crawling our way to the closer, ‘Spiral of Breath’, which arrives on a heavy swirling drone that’s darkly atmospheric and big on the low-end. Instead of offering levity, ‘Spiral of Breath’ is the densest, darkest piece of the four, as well as the longest. With no lulls, no calm spells, no respite, it’s the most challenging track of the release. It’s suffocating. There is no respite. There is, however, endless depth, and eternal, purgatorial anguish.

AA

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Dragged Up / Juku / Pea Sea / Chaffinch – Fulfordgate WMC, York, 8th August 2025

Posted: 9 August 2025 in Live, Reviews
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Christopher Nosnibor

The third Utterly Fuzzled event boasts another strong lineup, with a mix of out of town talent, the cream of the crop from York, plus new and emerging acts. It seems wholly fitting that they’ve found Fulfordgate WMC as a home for these events. One might describe it as quaint, but it has everything you’d want for a DIY musical microscene – stage, PA, cheap beer, a little way off the beaten track but still accessible from the city centre – and some things which are harder to define. A sense of community, and quintessentially northern, unpretentious.

I recently finished reading Sleevenotes by Joe Thompson of Hey Colossus and Henry Blacker – which is, hands-down, the best book about being in a DIY / small band, and I cannot recommend it enough. So many of the observations on the DIY scene resonated with me as an attendee – and occasional performer – at venues which are rehearsal rooms, rooms upstairs or at the back of pubs, gigs where there are fifteen people in attendance, and eleven of those are the other bands. He writes of playing these spaces, some with capacities of fifty, and being grateful that anyone turns up at all, about how they all have day jobs and make music because… because, and not with any hope of making money – covering costs to pay for the petrol back is winning.

On my way out, JUKU’s Dan Gott asked if I would be doing a review, and expressed disappointment when I said I would be. He said he wanted me to just enjoy a gig. But just as for makers of music, making music is a compulsion, so is writing for me. As much as I assess and analyse, this project, or whatever it is, is ultimately a document – an ever-evolving document, a diary of sorts. Just as Hey Colossus have been ploughing their furrow for an eternity – or since 2003 – so I’ve been a heavy gig-goer for many years. I can’t remember everything. But I can document it.

Dragged Up are one of those acts who clearly aren’t in it for the money. I’ve covered a few of their releases, and on seeing that they were making the trip from Glasgow to play this humble venue was immediately buzzed. I suppose something about straddling being press and a music fan, and having a Facebook network largely made up of people in the same circles, it’s not always easy to maintain perspective when it comes to a band’s status. There’s an element of ‘wow, are they really playing this little place?’ – and then you’re faced with the fact that any band that’s big in your world isn’t necessarily big in the wider world. It goes both ways, of course: there are bands I’ve never heard of selling out O2 venues and bigger.

The first act on the bill is so new and emerging that they didn’t even have a name until about a week before the event, and so suffice to say that Chaffinch were an entirely unknown quantity. It transpires that they’re a new permutation of Knitting Circle, a band centred around Jo and Pete Dale, who also happen to be the movers behind Utterly Fuzzled events. Tjeir set is clearly a work in progress – Jo confessed that the lyrics to one of the songs, on a sheet of paper in front of her, had only been completed that morning. But they show great potential. As my cursory notes attest, there’s ‘jangle, post-punk, angular, Band of Susans riffiness, elsewhere more 80s indie, a bit Wedding Present. Mathy dynamics. Interesting and a very promising first outing.’ It’s a fair summary that requires little expansion.

Pea Sea is a singer/songwriter whose set is a mixed bag of rearranged traditional folk songs, and quirky narrative led indie tunes, even incorporating bossa nova rhythms, and some quite nice blues, too. It’s kinda ramshackle, and inherently Scottish, and it’s entertaining enough, although I’m not sure if it’s because of or in spite of the bad puns and awkward chat and spaces between songs.

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Pea Sea

I was already down for this the second I saw Dragged Up were coming to York, but the addition of JUKU to the bill absolutely made it. I’ve been banging on about them since their debut gig. And still, some of my mates who’d come down tonight seemed perplexed as to why they hadn’t seen them, as their brand of punk rock played hard and fast and at blistering volume absolutely blew them away. My mates should pay more attention to my reviews, I say. Suffice it to say, JUKU were fucking blistering. Naomi is kinda nonchalant but also goes hard, and there’s the constant worry as to whether the mic stand will fall over or her glasses will slip off her face (in the end, by some miracle, neither) and Dan wrings noise from his guitar with clenched tattooed fists, hunched over so low his forehead is practically scraping his strings. It’s primitive, four-chord punk cranked up to eleven, and they play so, so hard. This is a band that destroys every stage it sets foot on. They need to be on a label. They need to go national, international. Live acts don’t come better than this.

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Consequently, Dragged Up perhaps suffer from having to follow JUKU. They’re decent, though, and no mistake. But venturing out with their new bassist, things feel a bit tentative at times I’m too into the set to make many notes. I’ve hashed together some observations on how they’re masters of post-Fall post-Pavement ramshackle indie, and how their songs chime and crash with strolling bass and shuffling drums.

New single ‘Clachan Dubh’ lands around mid-set with its chunky, chuggy driving groove driven by thick bass and energetic drums, and they swing between succinct killer blasts and sprawling beasts led by thumping grooved and manifold swerves and detours.

It’s hard to tell if they’re not quite firing on all cylinders or if this is simply the way pf Dragged Up, and it’s likely a bit of both. But there’s no question that they simply do their thing and don’t really give a crap, and the attitude is worth all the applause and plaudits alone.

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Dragged Up are one of those bands who don’t even have a game to raise most of the time. They play their songs. They have some good songs, and people take notice.

It’s a tidy/messy end to a night of solid quality.

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