Posts Tagged ‘Album Review’

Kev Hopper – XiX

Posted: 27 August 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Dimple Discs – 22nd August 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

Weird shit is welcome here at Aural Aggravation. It was a part of the ethos of my starting this site back in 2015. Yes, it’s been that long since I decided that I wanted to strike out alone with a view to creating a platform devoted essentially to stuff that appealed to me and exploring them with more long-form, discursive essay-type writing. This of course completely went against the grain of where most media, in particular music media, is at now, and this has only become more pronounced over the last decade, in which time attention spans have largely been reduced to circa 120 characters or simply .GIFs and memes. But – presumably because my focus is on rather niche music which doesn’t always receive a wealth of coverage, rather than because of my propensity for divergence into the personal or the political – Aural Aggravation now attracts a respectable readership. I don’t feel any desire to celebrate 10 years of doing this: to do so would really be to celebrate a decade in a lifetime of stubbornness, a compulsion to write, and a musical obsession which I choose to inflict upon the world, but I do suppose, on reflection, that the rarity of the format, occasionally touching on theory, but – hopefully –without too much hypotactic wankery.

And so we arrive at XiX by Kev Hopper, who despite fourteen solo albums, and despite co-founding electronic act Ticklish in the late ‘90s, and was composer/bassist with Prescott in the 2010s, and working as a visual artist by the medium of painting for a good number of years, is still probably best known for being the bassist in Stump between 1983 and 1988. Despite only releasing one album proper, their output of singles and EPs was solid, they were all over the music press at the time, and they were championed by John Peel. This potted history throws into sharp relief just how times – and the face of the music industry, particularly outside the mainstream – have changed.

Hopper’s second album on Dimple Discs is a collection of quirky, whimsical electronic experiments. Skittery, light, and lively, there’s a playfulness which defines the pieces, even when sliding into low-end notes and minor chords. ‘Vector Prodder’ plunks and plonks, twangs and reverberates, and slides into spooky but fun territory, and in some respects it’s got 1960s Addams Family vibes. ‘Gruntian Forbes’ twists and spins strangeness into a sunny calypso groove, and this, in many ways, encapsulates Hoppers’ approach to composition on the twelve tracks on offer here – namely taking a comfortable form, and rendering it uncomfortable by warping, twisting, and distorting it in some way or another, tossing in some ethereal haze and a bucketload of l’aissez-faire oddball elements. And why not?

XiX fully embraces the spirit of experimentalism – the idea of simply trying things out and seeing what happens, and not even being hugely concerned if it’s only half-successful. That isn’t to say there are any semi-successes or borderline failures on XiX: what I’m driving at is the spirit of creative freedom which pervades. When cut free of the constraints of commercial concerns, when liberated from self-censorship, and simply creating for the sake of creating, for the joy that experimentation and making sound can bring, a work takes on a level of buoyancy. XiX is the sound of creative freedom. ‘Devils’ may be dolorous, with hints of Tom Waits, but ‘Lance The Prawn’ is an exercise in gurling synth and ridiculously OTT vocal processing (half-burying absurd couplets like ‘lance the prawn / on the lawn’) amidst bleeps and wiffles and space-age throbs and pulsations.

It’s sci-fi in its influences, but it’s Douglas Adams on the serious scale. While I’m no fan of Adams myself – I find the humour simply too cheesy, but worse than that, I find the fans of his works, who insist on referencing him relentlessly beyond irritating, I would like to think that this scaling works in context. The album’s material is not irritating or nerdy, but it is, at times, overtly strange, and nowhere more so than on ‘Brand Street Psychodrama’. It may be but a brief interlude, but it’s all the disorientation. ‘Window Seat’ brings all the chimes and gentle brass, evoking that mythological bygone age crossed with intimations of ‘made in China’, in the brittle 80s plastic sense.

Having just written about Eamon the Destroyer’s new release, it seems that this belongs in the same field, but represents an altogether different face of the experimental dice.

And this is a good thing, in that we are able to wander through very different corridors while stroking our chins and pondering the work emerging from the field of ‘experimental music’. Towards the end, there’s an urgency that builds to XiX. Or perhaps it’s just my anxiety rising as midnight draws closer.

Either way, this is a supple work, which ventures across a range of styles and forms, with the chiming, tinkling nine-minute closer, ‘The Cucurella Problem’, with its whimsical , warping lead lines and tentative, wandering bass being truly exemplary. It bends the brain, but slowly, gently, softly, and it’s kinda nice.

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Eamon the Destroyer – The Maker’s Quit

Posted: 26 August 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Bearsuit Records – 5th September 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

The thing with Eamon the Destroyer is that you never know what you’re going to get. The Maker’s Quit is different again from We’ll Be Piranhas, which in turn was quite unlike Small Blue Car (which remains a personal favourite, even if it does make me feel impossibly heavy on the inside). If We’ll be Piranhas marked a step forward in terms of experimentalism and optimism, The Maker’s Quit sees a greater emphasis on songwriting and structure – but don’t for a second think it’s in any way straightforward, and that the experimentalism has taken a back seat – it’s still very much a copilot here, and with the accent on the mentalism.

Here, the title track commences what is an incredibly varied set with a song that has the theatricality of Alex Harvey crossed with 1990s Leonard Cohen, before ‘Silverback’ confounds all expectation by bringing some shuffling funk-infused jazziness. In contrast to the fairly minimal arrangements common to previous ETD releases, this is pretty busy, then is settles into a mellow groove that’s almost loungey – bar the mid-section, which is rent with a protracted burst of extraneous sound. It’s almost as if he purposefully weaves around the line between genius and self-sabotage simply to tests us as listeners. There are some nice, light, poppy moments on here, and – albeit fleetingly – some captivating grooves. But it wouldn’t be Eamon the Destroyer without a huge helping of straight-up weird shit mashups, and The Maker’s Quit brings the lot, from frenzied jazz and post-grunge, wonky vaudeville waltzes and whistling, via electropop and slices of pan-culturally inspired melody.

More often than not, the verses and choruses are so contrasting as to seem to have been spliced from different songs – that’s when there are verses and choruses. ‘Three Wheels’ is a veritable patchwork, which compresses segments of what sounds like half a dozen songs into five minutes as it spins from grandiose heavy country dirgery by way of an intro, which even hints vaguely at recent Swans, before swerving into Europop with a hint of Sparks, through a off-kilter but gentle soundscaping that slides into laid-back salsa before winding up with a segment of jaunty indie rock. But rather than feel like an identity crisis, the effect is more that of a multi-faceted artist showing all his facets simultaneously. It’s hard to keep up, but one can only imagine what it must be like to live in his head.

The lyrics are equally fragmented, between stream of conscious and cut-ups, producing a Burroughsian, dream-like quality. This snippet from ‘The Maker’s Quit’ exemplary: ‘Saturn kid – spins and reels – in a city / Little Feet – lost in a wave – out to sea / A grandmother – nods – to a space in the crowd / Cap gun assassin – emerges – from a conjurers cloud…’ Beyond oceans and waves, it’s impossible to pin down any notion of themes or meanings. The images float up and fade out instantaneously.

‘The Ocean’ begins dramatically, a swelling, surging drone that halts abruptly, yielding to one of the most typically Eamon the Destroyer passages – lo-fi folktronica with a low croon reminiscent of Mark Lanegan, which slowly tilts its face upwards from scuffed boot-tips towards the sun…. and then all mayhem happens in a brief but explosive interlude, and your head’s suddenly spinning because wherethehellhasthiscomefrom? It’s this wild unpredictability and unapologetic perversity which is – strange to say – a substantial part of the appeal of Eamon the Destroyer.

When Eamon the Destroyer goes downtempo, as on the mournful, string-soaked introductory segment of ‘Captive’, you can actually feel your heart growing heavier by the bar, but then it twists onto some semi-ambient avant-jazz, and the sensation transitions to bewilderment.

The final track, ‘The Buffalo Sings’, is a twelve-minute behemoth is s slow, surging lo-fi electronic exploration. Face the strange? It embraces it, hard, then absorbs it by ghostly osmosis. If ever a song was less country, less ‘Buffalo’… maybe some of the western themed electrogoth songs by James Ray and the Performance are on a par on that score, but this wanders into a sonic desert without even a hat for protection from the punishing sun, and slowly, everything melts in the heat. Circuits bend and warp, and the weirdness rises like a heat haze… and it’s wonderful to be immersed in a work which celebrates creative freedom with no sense of constraint or obligation.

On reflection, with Eamon the Destroyer, you know exactly what you’re going to get: visionary hybridity, moments of aching sadness and fractured beauty, shards of melancholic memory , unbridled inventiveness and fevered creativity, and music like nothing anyone else is making. In a world where meaning seems to have all but evaporated and it’s increasingly difficult to make sense of any of it, The Maker’s Quit feels like a fitting soundtrack. It exists purely in its own space, and it’s the perfect space to escape to in these most dismal of times.

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Slomo – The Creep

Posted: 21 August 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Ideologic Organ – 5th September 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

Umberto Eco is one of the many authors I feel I should have read, and hope that one day I will get around to reading. Social media has of late showered me with posts and reposts with a quite from Eco about owning more books than you will ever read – something I never much relate to. I only have so many hours in the day, and reading – since I insist on engaging with books rather than passively absorbing audio books while participating in other activities – is one of those pastimes which is time-intensive. I find music-listening to be comparable. As much as I enjoy listening to music while I’m cooking or participating in other activities, I like to give music full attention, especially new music. And it’s in this context that I often find I purchase music – like books, albeit to a lesser extent – at a faster rate than I can consume it. And this is why it’s taken me until the twentieth anniversary release of Slomo’s The Creep to catch up with this cult classic which brings together sludge / doom and vintage industrial influence.

The album’s context, too, is worth providing here, and so, I shall quote at length rather than paraphrase – not because I’m lazy in my writing, but because I fear making omissions, and feel that liner notes or press releases articulate in a way which better represent the artist.

Just one week after the passing of COIL’s Jhonn Balance in late 2004, the 61-minutes of "The Creep" manifested in a Sheffield suburb. Not yet a band and only captured due to happenstance, this first music of Slomo flowed forth without any consideration of it even being "a piece", let alone a release, though it didn’t take long for the participants (Chris "Holy" McGrail and Howard Marsden) to realise they’d captured something of distinct colour on account of how often they were listening to it.

Initially dubbed "The Ballad of Jhonn & Sleazy", the pair soon instead ascribed the music to Boleigh Fogou; a prehistoric underground chamber on the Land’s End peninsula that both had recently visited and been affected by. "The Creep" took its name from the peculiar side chamber assumed to be if ritual function, having no apparent practical use. This ponderous music chimed perfectly with the fogou; an apparently stolid place that teems with life once you become attuned to its frequency.

Fitting in perfectly alongside other massive single-track albums such as Sleep’s "Dopesmoker", COIL’s ‘Queens of the Circulating Library’, Cope’s "Odin", and Boris’ "Flood", "The Creep" secured a limited release on Cope’s Fuck Off & Di CD-R label in 2005 that quickly sold out via supportive outlets such as Southern Lord, Aquarius Records and Stephen O’Malley’s Ideologic Organ – then operating merely as a blog and micro-store.

And now, Ideologic Organ present a twentieth-anniversary vinyl edition. No doubt there will be plenty of people who are happy about this: after all, it’s never been released on vinyl, and I expect the tonal qualities of vinyl are ideal for a work where there is so much texture, so much richness of tone. The slow, resonant, reverberating bass during the quiet intro deserves deep grooves and decent speakers.

One downside of where the industry is now – and there are, as most of us are aware, many – is that the days of a promo copy of a slab of vinyl are essentially over (unless you’re writing for a major national or international publication), meaning I’m here with some decent enough speakers, but basing my opinion of the mastering and overall sonic experience based on an MP3 version. And as the low notes crawl, quivering, from those decent enough speakers, the rooms seems to darken and the atmosphere grows thicker, heavier.

Not a lot really happens during the first fifteen minutes, but the effect is profound, in that it resonates throughout the body. There is movement, but it occurs at a tectonic pace, and by stealth, rumbling around the far reaches of internal organs. For anyone who has read The Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton’s seventeenth-century analysis of depression which explores the effects of the various humours on both mind and body. And The Creep slowly pulls on the gut and the intestinal tract in the most shuddering, lugubrious ways. At times it’s barely there, but shudders and shivers uncomfortably low on the psychic register. Others… there are low peaks among the troughs, but this is an album that registers more on a subliminal level and certainly low in the guts.

Where I raised the point of the vinyl release likely being popular with many fans, the counterpoint to this is the disruption to the continuity that the format creates. Listening to the MP3 version, there’s a fractional pause at just over thirty-two and a half minutes. It feels like a minor stutter, given that there is a long, low, undulating bass boom that fans out like a ship’s horn or subaquatic signals – but imagine having to get up and flip the record at this critical point before things begin to build. I’m perhaps being picky, but this feels like an unwarranted disruption.

The second half is even lower and slower than the first: twenty-nine minutes of bleak, rumbling abstraction. It’s the perfect amalgamation of drone, experimental, and dark ambient. And The Creep is dark. Whisps of feedback trail around and waft over hovering bass tines which simply roll and reverberate. Time stalls. Everything hangs in suspension: even your mind, and your digestion, hang, suspended, paused. Your breath… your mind. You stop thinking and simply float in this, this sound. Immersive is an understatement. It’s all-consuming, and you can easily lose yourself – completely – in this slow, slow, heavy drone.

20 years on, it’s clear that this is a work which is timeless. Niche, but timeless, in the same way that Earth 2 and Sleep’s Dopesmoker are more than just heavy droning noise. It’s no means an easy listen, but I’d still point to it as an essential one.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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RFD Promo

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.

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