Posts Tagged ‘Ambient’

Falling You – Metanoia

Posted: 17 December 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Projekt Records – 1st December 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

Having recently written on the retro qualities of Lowsunday’s latest release, the latest hot landing in my inbox is from another act which is preoccupied with a previous time – and who can blame them? I am painfully aware that old bastards like me constantly bemoan the shitness of the now while reminiscing about the golden era of our youth, and it’s no different from boomers still banging on about The Beatles and the music of the 60s and 70s as if time stopped when they hit thirty or whatever. There is a lot – a LOT – of exciting new music coming out right now, and much of it is pushing boundaries in unexpected directions. I for one will never cease to excited by this. But there is a significant amount of music emerging that draws its primary influences from the eighties and nineties, created by artists who simply cannot be drawn by nostalgia. Falling You are a perfect example.

Metanoia is pitched as being for ‘fans of 1980s 4AD dreampop (This Mortal Coil, Dead Can Dance), ‘90s shoegaze (Slowdive, Lush), or the darkwave / ethereal / ambient-electronic releases of the Projekt label (Love Spirals Downwards, Android Lust). It’s quite a span, but the fact is that this is a release with its inspirational roots well in the past. It pains me to be reminded that 1995 is thirty years ago when it feels like maybe a decade. The cover art of previous releases very much state shoegaze / dreampop, and while this album accompanied by altogether moodier artwork, which may in part serve to reflect the album’s title, it’s nevertheless hazy and evocative at the same time. ‘Hazy and evocative’ would be a fair summary of the album itself, too, and the dreamy / shoegaze elements are countered by some really quite unsettling spells of rather murkier ambience.

It starts strong with the bold swell of steel-stung acoustic guitar and a strong vocal – I’m not talking about a Florene Welch lung-busting bellow, but a controlled and balanced performance that really carries some resonance, and it’s mastered clear and loud… and then things swerve into a more electronic, almost dancy territory. Immediately it’s clear that this is going to be less an album and more a journey, and ‘Demiurge (Momento Eorum)’ immediately affirms this with its spiritual incantations and sonorous, droning rumblings.

‘Alcyone’ is the first of the album’s ten-minute epics, and it uses the time well: that is to say, with shuffling drums, spacious synths and layers of lilting vocals, it’s very much distilled from the essence of The Cocteau Twins, and slowly unfurls with an ethereal grace. A delicately-spun pop song at heart, the extended end section tapers down to a softly droning organ.

While the atmosphere is very much downbeat, downtempo, understated, one thing which is notable is the album’s range: ‘Ari’s Song’ is built around a soft-edged cyclical bass motif, around which piano and synths swirl, mist-like, the drums way in the distance, and even as a disturbance grows toward the end, it’s so far-away sounding, and the song itself, beyond that ever-present bass, barely there, and the same is true of the dank, dark ambient echoes of ‘Inside the Whale’. If ‘Ariadne’ is another shimmering indie tune hazed with fractal electronic ripples, the second ten-minute epic, ‘They Give Me Flowers’ provides a suitable companion piece to ‘Alcyone’, swerving from a brooding country and folk-tinged song with hints of All About Eve, and the album’s final track, ‘Philomena’ effectively completes the triptych, pulsing along gently and dreamily before slowly tapering away to nothingness. It’s a fitting conclusion to an album which at times is so vaporous and vague, it’s barely there – which is precisely the design. But in between the hazy drifts and particle-like waftings, there are some beautifully atmospheric and utterly captivating songs with strong leanings towards the dreamy pop side of indie. In terms of achieving an artistic objective, Falling You have absolutely nailed it with Metanoia.

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Klôvhôvve – öljud

Posted: 6 December 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Dret Skivor – 5th December 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

This last week or so has been good for noisy, weird, abstract, experimental stuff. It’s pure coincidence, but these things to very much arrive in waves. There’s no thyme nor reason to it: Some weeks I’ll find my inbox abrim with guttural metal – and I’m by no means complaining – but sometimes I will crave noise, and there is none. Not proper noise, anyway. That said, this isn’t abrasive, full-on noise, but a work of abstract ambience dominated by field recordings, mostly of birds and billowing winds.

The last klôvhôvve release, which came out in the spring of 2024, was recorded live in Nottingham just a few weeks previous, and similarly this one was recorded live in November of this year. That’s about all you’re likely to learn with a dret release, although the accompanying notes are generous in their praise to the album’s contributors: ‘Thanks go to the wonderful animals and nature of Hammarö whose sounds you can hear being manipulated by klôvhôvve’. This is laudable: we don’t thank or celebrate nature nearly enough. There are gulls aplenty here, among other creatures less obvious by their calls (at lest to me).

It begins with the rumble of thunder, and it grows closer and more menacing. And then comes the rain. I assume it’s the rain. I’ve heard enough of it in the last couple of months. It feels like it will never stop raining. Again. Öljud rumbles and creaks and billows: a lot of this sounds like heavy rain and high winds, conditions which simply make me want to hibernate rather than reconnect with nature. There are quack and quarks, and all kinds of trilling sounds. Nothing much happens – if anything, really. It doesn’t need to.

Is it ok to drift off to an ambient work? I would have to argue that when listening to a studio work that’s particularly tranquil, it’s a compliment rather than an insult. Öljud is subtle, rumbling. Not a lot happens, and what does happen takes place slowly. Very slowly.

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Ov Pain – Free Time

Posted: 22 November 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Room40 / A Guide To Saints – 7th November 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

Free time? What’s that? Who actually has free time anymore? Something seems to have gone awry. Every technological advance promises more leisure time: from the industrial revolution to the advent of AI, the promise has always been that increased productivity through automation would give us more free time. So where the fuck is it? I don’t know anyone who isn’t constantly chasing their tail, running just to stand still, who doesn’t feel like they’re losing the plot or on the brink of burnout simply because the demands of working and running a household is close to unmanageable, and making ends meet is a major challenge… and the stress suffered as a consequence. N

Ov Pain – the experimental duo consisting of Renee Barrance and Tim Player seemingly scraped and made time to record this album, a set of live improvisations (saving the time required to write and rehearse compositions), whereby, as Tim explains, ‘We recorded four different synthesizers – two apiece – straight into a computer pulled from a skip.’ This is how you do it when there’s no free time and no spare money. Although not explicitly detailed in Tim’s commentary, these factors are quite apparently central to the album’s creation, and by no means unique to Ov Pain. There’s a reason many acts peter out when the members reach a certain point in life: jobs and families mean that creative pursuits require some serious drive to maintain.

Tim adds, ‘One thing that is important to us is the immediacy and economy with which it was made and how that immediacy and economy becomes the thing itself.’

For all of its expansive soundscapes and layered, textural sensations, there is very much a sense of immediacy to Free Time. But, by the same token, for an album recorded quickly, it certain makes the most of time, in terms of space. There are long periods of time where little happens, where drones simply… drone on. The sounds slip and slide in and out, interweaving, meshing, separating, and transitioning organically, but not without phases of discord and dissonance.

The first track, ‘Fascia’ – with a monolithic running time of nearly eleven minutes – is a tormenting, tremoring, elongated organ drone, soon embellished with quavering layers of synth which warps and wavers, .it; s like watching a light which initially stands still but suddenly begins to zip around all over. It sits somewhere between ambient and extreme prog, with some intricate motifs cascading over that monotonous, eternal hum. Towards the end, the density and distortion begin to build, making for a climactic finale.

‘Slouching Toward Erewhon’ tosses in a neat literary allusion while bringing a sense of bewilderment and abstraction to proceedings, before ‘Comparative Advantage’ slowly pulses and trills, then crackles and buzzes, a thick surging swell of noise which is uneasy on the ear. And yet, the seconds of silence in the middle of the track are more uncomfortable… at least until the throbbing distortion bursts in atop stains of feedback and whirring static.

It may have been building for some time, but this is one of those evolving sets which after a time, you suddenly come to appreciate has expanded, and gone from a fairly easy drift to a heavy-duty drone assault.

Over the course of the album’s seven pieces, Ov Pain really do push the limits of their comparatively limited instrumentation. ‘Slander’ is a squalling, eardrum-damaging blast of gnarly treble that borders on extreme electronica, a straight-up assault on the ears and the mind. It hits all the harder because there is no let-up, and the frequencies are harsh and the sounds serrated. Around the mid-point, it goes darker, gritter, more abrasive, making for a punishing six minutes. Further layer of distortion and screaming noise enter the fray. It’s not quite Merzbow, but it’s by no means accessible. The final track, ‘Pusillanimous’ presents seven minutes of slow-pulsating ambience, and is altogether more tranquil to begin with, but before long, there are thick bursts of distortion and overdrive, and low rumbles heave and grind in ways which tug at the intestines. I feel my skin crawl at the tension.

Free Time is an album of surprises, and, more often than not of discomfort. It’s the sound of our times.

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The Azimuth Tilt – Alignment

Posted: 21 November 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Sinners Music – 1st October 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

Sinners Music – the label established by electronic music maestro and one-time music shop owner, Ian J Cole, continues to offer up new music that’s interesting and unusual. There are some context where ‘interesting’ is somewhat dismissive, diminishing, and people of a certain age will remember snooker legend Steve Davis being given the nickname of Steve ‘Interesting’ Davis ironically… although the double irony emerged that he was genuinely interesting, as his work with The Utopia Strong abundantly attests. Here, my use of ‘interesting’ is neither ironic nor dismissive: it’s meant sincerely, as there is no specific ‘house’ style or overt genre specificity evident. This is one of the reasons why boutique microlabels can be worth following – you never know quite what you’re going to get from them, but you can guarantee if won’t be ordinary. And this release by no means ordinary.

As for The Azimuth Tilt, their bio informs us that this is the work of ‘a solo ambient electronic project exploring the liminal spaces between sound, memory, and landscape. With a name drawn from the alignment of a real to reel tape head, the project orients itself toward the unseen—subtle shifts in perception, emotional resonance, and the hidden geometries of the natural world… Blending atmospheric textures, glacial rhythms, and immersive sound design.’ There are no clues as to who this is the project of, but it matters not, and in fact, the less we know, the better. This is the joy of abstract ambient works: all you need is the sound, and all you need from the sound is to let it drift, to carry you away. And this is what Alignment does.

On a certain level, it does very little. On another, it is a quintessential deep ambient album. Alignment features just six compositions, but has a running time of some fifty-seven minutes. The soundscapes which define it are sonically rich, with soft, drifting, cloudlike contrails merging with lower drones and contrails. In combination, filling the entire sonic spectrum, Alignment does a lot.

From nowhere, halfway through ‘An Unqualified Person’, a raucous sax breaks out.

And the layers build. Against scrawling spacious drift, it’s quite a contrast. And then there’s some subtle piano intervention, and from hereon in, the piano and sax alternate in leading. It’s nice… and not in a turtle-neck top kind of way. It’s nice but… a little strange. But ‘The Exquisite Space’ crackles and swirls abstractedly, with some supple motifs rippling and intertwining with a mellow mood exploration which arrives at more sax. Always more sax.

This seems to be a dictum The Azimuth Tilt are happy to follow, although it’s melted into the echo-soaked atmospherics of the final track, ‘And the Band Played On’. Alignment is not a dark album, but it’s one which feels unsettled, uncomfortable, unsure of its destination – and whatever it may be, the journey is worth the exploration.

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Songe – Daughters

Posted: 16 November 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Cruel Nature Records – 28th November 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

November always feels like plunging into an abyss. It’s the month when , after the clocks change on the last weekend of October, the darkness encroaches at an exponential pace, while, simultaneously, the weather deteriorates and temperatures suddenly drop. I struggle with November, and I’m by no means alone in this – but the darkness and muffling cold brings with it a blanket of isolation, too.

Listening to the debut album proper by Songe in this context makes for a heavy experience. And it’s the context that counts here, because in reality, Daughters is largely calm and spacious rather than dark and oppressive.

The Anglo-French duo consisting of Gaëlle Croguennec and Phoebe Bentham formed in 2023 ‘upon stumbling on a lonely church piano’, and, we learn that ‘Songe explores what it means to live in a postmodern world that feels rooted in destruction’.

This resonates. Right now, it feels as if the world is on a collision course. The so-called ‘great pause’ of the pandemic seems more, in hindsight, as if it was a time during which tensions built and nations pent up rage ready to unleash the moment the opportunity arose. Some of this a matter of perception and distortion, but the bare fact is that the last COVID restrictions were lifted here in the UK on 21 February 2022, and Russia invaded Ukraine three days later. The pandemic, for many, felt apocalyptic. It wasn’t simply the deaths, the fear, but the impact of the restrictions, which didn’t suddenly dissipate the moment those restrictions lifted. The end of restrictions felt like a deep-sea diver coming up for air, the aftereffects akin to the case of the bends. While we were recovering our breath and dealing with the cramps, Russia invaded Ukraine, and from thereon in it’s felt like an endless succession of disasters, storms, and then – then – the annihilation of Gaza.

Musically, Daughters – on which the duo deliver a set of ‘vibrant and experimental soundscapes using a variety of e-pianos, pedals and theremin, pairing a traditional playing style with bit-crushed granular delays to create a soaring top line met with ethereal vocals’ – is by no means dark, bleak, or depressing. In fact, quite the opposite is true. It’s a delightful set of compositions.

But sometimes, the more graceful, delicate, uplifting the music, the harder it hits. And on Daughters, Songe reach some dark and hard-to-reach places. From the most innocuous beginnings, the epic, nine-minute ‘Warmer, Hotter’ swells to a surge of discordant churn beneath soaring, ethereal vocals. The piano-led ‘Ashes’ borders on neoclassical in its delivery, and is rich in brooding atmosphere. ‘Heol’ begins with distorted, discordant harmonics, with frequencies which torment the inner ear. Gradually, through a foment of frothing frequences and fizzing tones, bubbling undercurrents rise. Haunting vocals rise through the mist, the haze, the dense and indefinable drift. It’s ethereal, spiritual, bewildering in terms of meaning.

Waves crash and splash before soft, rippling piano takes the lead on penultimate track, ‘Eveil’. It’s graceful, majestic, emotive – but not in a way which directly or obviously speaks of the album’s subject or context. The vocals are magnificent, but the words impenetrable. It works because of this, rather than in spite of it. It’s slow, subtle, powerful.

It’s not until the final composition, ‘Wraith’, that we feel the emotive power of a droning organ, paired with saddest of strings, that we really feel the depth and emotion al resonance of Daughters. As it fades in a brief reverberation, I find myself feeling sad. No, not sad: bereft. This is an album that takes time to take effect, to soak in. It deserves time to reflect.that time.

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Recur – A Strange Loop

Posted: 7 November 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Aumeta Records – 7th November 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

The ever-accelerating pace of life, and the endless noise of not just the Internet, but absolutely everything, seems to have given rise to an increasing popularity in the sphere of ambient works. It can’t simply be my perception: post-pandemic, everything has got louder, busier, there’s more traffic, the driving is worse and more aggressive, there are people everywhere at all times of day, and even country paths and lanes are chocca with cyclists, runners, and dog walkers even at 2pm on a Wednesday afternoon. Never mind the fact that the entire world is at war, is flooded, is burning, rioting… fuck! Just make it all stop!

A Strange Loop may be Recur’s debut album, but the project’s lead, Tim Harrison, is by no means new to this, being a BIFA-winning composer, and for this excursion into analogue explorations, he’s joined by Richard Jones, the Ligeti Quartet, Jack Wyllie and the album was created using unique instruments crafted by Chase Coley. It’s not really ambient, not by a long way, and at times it’s quite dramatic, but it is immersive, in a way which leads the listener away from the turbulence of the everyday and into calmer waters, a sheltered cove where the tides are diminished, and there is respite, time and space to simply breathe slowly and regroup at distance from the noise, the constant disruption, the endless agitation and consternation. We simply don’t get anywhere hear enough time to breathe. When was the last time you properly relaxed your shoulders, filled your lungs to full inflation, and exhaled, slowly? When was the last time you truly felt ok?

The eight here pieces are slow, hazy-edged, abstract, immersive. Calming. ‘Oscillate’ delivers on its title, the volume surging and sliding unpredictably, creating a trick of the ear at times, with smooth, silken saxophone drifting in and out through delicate piano and washes of sound without any definite sound source. ‘Id Etude’ veers toward a chamber orchestra feel with picked strings and gliding notes.

It’s simultaneously focused and free: you very swiftly appreciate that this is a work where each composition is complex, detailed, the instrumentation varied, and the interplay between the instruments is both integral and remarkable. There are no fewer than thirteen players credited here, including four marimbas, two violins, two vibraphones, viola, cello, piano, and a host of more obscure instruments.

‘Nocturne’ brings the percussion to the fore to forge a hypnotic, beat-driven sway, before ‘Hieroglyph’ brings slow chimes, clumping trudging beats, and unsettling scrapes which evoke a mysterious, ominous sensation. This is Recur at their best: for all of the people playing here, they manage to create sparse, minimal, ominous, sombre works, pieces which are delicate, elegant, soft, supple, pieces which evolve, which shift gradually between places and moods, which make you feel… That’s it, really: they make you feel. From tension to emotion, from ease to unease, the scraping strings and swelling … ‘Iridescent’ is exemplary. It’s gentle. It surges and swells, there are moments of near-silence… and these moments are uplifting in a strange way, perhaps because moments of near-silence are so rare in all the babble.

Recur are unafraid of the silence, and, indeed, embrace it. We all need to embrace the silence.

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Bite the Boxer – Venom Test

Posted: 3 November 2025 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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Christopher Nosnibor

Bite the Boxer is unquestionably an unusual and intriguing name for a musical project: my mind immediately leaps to the infamous ‘bite fight’ between Mike Tyson and Evander Holyfield in 1997, where Tyson lost through disqualification after biting off a chunk of Holyfield’s ear in one of sport’s most shocking moments.

In combining an eclectic range of elements spanning industrial, alt-pop, trip-hop, and ambient lo-fi, there’s nothing about Matt Park’s music which indicates any connection to this moment in sporting history. The same is true of his objective to create music imbued with ‘he feeling of impending doom but with just a glimmer of hope’, which is inspired by ‘horror video games and dystopian, post-apocalyptic films’.

‘Venom Test’ is haunting – at first ambient, before bursting with an expansive, cinematic feel, then plunging into darker territory. Even without the aid of a beautifully-shot and remarkably stylish video, the rack leads the listener through an evocative sequence of sonic transitions. Although never harsh, the distant drums are weighty, powerful, and the overall experience feels like a juxtaposition of must and decay with rays of shining hope breaking through cloud. The listener feels as if they’re being pulled in opposite directions, the suspenseful end offering no conclusion, but instead, leaving a sense of emotional quandary, an uncertainty. ‘Venom Test’ creates a tension, and provides no closure or conclusion, only a sense of a door being left ajar. It’s a deftly woven piece, and one which feels very much like it belongs to a much larger project – which it does, being a taster (which doesn’t remotely have the flavour of bloodied ear, to the best of my knowledge) for the forthcoming album, Haunted Remains Pt.2. As a choice of single, it’s a good one, leaving us in suspense to hear it in the context it was intended.

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William Covert – Dream Vessel

Posted: 9 October 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Coup Sur Coup – 17th October 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

Few drummers receive much recognition, unless they’re the backbone of bands who are household names (people know Ringo Starr, Keith Moon, Dave Grohl, Mike Joyce, Lars Ulrich), or have otherwise featured prominently in a specific musical milieu (Martin Atkins and Paul Ferguson come to mind). Their contributions are overlooked and underappreciated, and in the main, there’s a tendency to only notice exceptional drummers, or poor ones. It’s not the job of a drummer to grab attention, but to hold everything together at the back. Consequently, you might be forgiven for being unfamiliar with William Covert, whose career is defined more than 15 years of drumming in math rock, post-rock, and post-hardcore bands (Space Blood, Droughts, and Rust Ring).

As the narrative goes, ‘Covert began experimenting with live-looped synths alongside acoustic and electronic drums. This experimentation birthed two full-length solo albums characterized by post-rock and krautrock-inspired synth loops and melodies, all performed solo with loop pedals and sequencers.’ Dream Vessel was born out of a desire to pursue a different approach and a different direction, and indeed, the first part of this latest offering was a collaborative, group effort, with Nate Schenck on bass and Jack McKevitt on guitar, while we learn that ‘the other half was performed entirely solo, diving deep into cinematic ambient soundscapes, dreamy Frippertronic-influenced guitars, modular synth, and free-jazz drumming filtered through a post-industrial lens.’ Nothing if not varied, then.

The album’s five tracks span thirty-eight minutes, and it’s very much an exploratory experience. ‘Brotherhood of Sleep’ eases the listener in gently, with a slow, strolling bass and reverby guitars. It’s an expansive and spacious instrumental work, rich in texture and atmosphere – a shade proggy, a little bit jazzy, unfurling at a sedate pace. ‘Trancers’ fades in, and offers similar vibes, but it’s both more spacious, and more groove-led. The guitars bend and echo that bit further, and as the track progresses, so the pace and urgency build, along with the density of the guitars, which warp and stretch more with every bar. It may not hit the extremity of My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless, but the guitars do sound as if they’re melting by the midpoint, before the track locks into a muscular, driving groove that’s a world away from where it began. There’s an appeal that’s not easy to pin down when it comes to compositions which begin in one place and end up entirely in another, while it’s not entirely clear how they’ve transported the listener from A to B. The experience isn’t completely unlike making an absent-minded walk somewhere, when you haven’t been paying attention, and arrive with minimal recollection of the journey- although the difference is that the walk is usually via a familiar route that requires little to no concentration or engagement, whereas a song that swerves and switches involves an element of brain-scrambling along the way.

‘Dream Void’ is a centrepiece in every way: The third track, right in the middle, it’s over nine minutes in duration and a towering monolith of abstract drone. It’s immense, cinematic, widescreen, gentle. Around the mid-point, the drums arrive, and they’re busy, but backed off in the mix, and we’re led down a path to a place where frenetic percussion contrasts with chords which hover and hum for an eternity. Slow-picked guitar brings further texture to the mellow but brooding post-rock soundscape of ‘C-Beams’, which pushes toward nine minutes, as the album ventures into evermore experimental territory. As present as the drums are, they don’t provide rhythm, but bursts of percussion, swells of cymbal and wild batteries of rolling, roiling whomps.

The more concise, feedback-strewn ‘Throttle’ marks a change in aspect, a roar of noise, a wail of feedback, and positively wild, before ‘Come True’ closes the set with some Kraftwerkian bubbling synth and undulating bass, paired with a rolling beat. It’s all nicely done. And this is true of the album as a whole.

Dream Vessel is gentle, overall, but not without edge, or variety, and certainly not without dynamic. Here, ‘interesting’ and ‘unusual’ are not dismissive shrugs with a hint of condescension: Dream Vessel brings together a host of ideas and traverses a succession of soundscapes , never staying still for a second.

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Deadman’s Ghost – A Votive Offering

Posted: 29 September 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Cruel Nature Records – 22nd September 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

Love a few drones, me. Aural ones, not the buzzy buggers that tossers fly about for fun, or the nasty ones that undertake military operations and shoot the shit out of people and places. But places… places are important, the way they are so closely connected to memory, the way they evoke recollections of experiences… memory fades over time, but placers can so often provide triggers. The blurb for A Votive Offering register a deeper meaningfulness on account of the way the significance of place bears weight. I find myself; yearning for places I half-remember from childhood. My memory is a databank of random shots, from standing stone circles in Scotland and in the south, to a metal sign with a bullet hole in it, somewhere isolated on Dartmoor.

And so we arrive as A Votive Offering, and I shall quote in full from the Cruel Nature site here:

4 years since 2021’s Tethered Tales, the latest album by Deadman’s Ghost for Cruel Nature, uses drones, dark folk sounds, old samples and electronic beats to coalesce around a central theme. Each track in this collection evokes an obscure place in the Irish countryside with connections to folklore. Tucked away amidst today’s regimented rural landscape, small pockets of wilderness survive; vestiges of another era hidden behind roadside hedges and across farmer’s fields. These include the ruined cottage of a clairvoyant healer; a pair of standing stones believed to be oracles; a well which cures madness; and a cave where offerings were once left for ancient spirits. The songs presented here are paeans to these liminal spaces, and are infused with recordings taken there.

The first of the album’s seven compositions, ‘Chtonic Currents’ combines hovering hums, sonorous drones, gongs, bells, chimes, and special abstraction which occasionally builds to immense levels. ‘The Speaking Stones’ is ominous, heavy, and brings ominous waves of noise which wash over resonant, droning vocals.

There are samples on ‘The Man Who Felled the Fairythorn’, and one can’t help but contemplate the sad situation of Sycamore Gap. Or perhaps that is just me. The surprise here is that things suddenly take a turn for the heavy with throbbing industrial grooves cutting in.

A Votive Offering is dark. While twitters and chimes abound, dark surging, sonorous drones dominate, and weigh heavy over the sci-fi intimations tracks like ‘Biddy Early’s Potion’, where hints of Westworld twang, and hang ominously.

Gulls craw and waves splash on ‘Lunnaigh Dunes’, and a certain sadness pervades, inexplicably, dragging at the guts and lying heavy. Life was simpler once, and no so long ago. Nostalgia now is not what it was. And suddenly a drone grinds dark. The dynamic of A Votive Offering is one of continued motion, which keeps it interesting, but it’s also haunting.

A Votive Offering as a whole is haunting, but also strange, abstract, otherworldly. Ultimately, it’s… different, and an album get lost in.

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alka – the magnitude weighs heavy

Posted: 26 September 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Mortality Tables – 25th September 2025

Bryan Alka’s brief post on Facebook sharing the news of his new release, is revelatory: ‘Today we release my 5th full length on Mortality Tables. After a series of breakdowns… The Magnitude Weighs Heavy.’

The Magnitude Weighs Heavy is the third and final instalment of a of dark and brooding albums, the first two parts of which – The Colour Of Terrible Crystal and Regarding The Auguries – were released by Vince Clarke’s VeryRecords. Alka, and particularly Bryan Michael, has no small back story: ‘a Philadelphia-area artist who has collaborated with Vince Clarke (Depeche Mode / Erasure / Yazoo), Roger O’Donnell (The Cure), Christian Savill (Slowdive / Monster Movie) and Michael Textbeak (Cleopatra Records). alka was formed around 2000 as a return to his bedroom producing days, and as a cleansing of his disappointing experience within the Philadelphia indie rock scene.’

This thirteen-track album is epic, grand, expansive. It’s also an exercise is taut electropop with a decidedly early 80s bent. Because what goes around comes around, the whipcrack snare and noodly electronic drift which defines many of the tracks, despite being pure 1989, have a contemporary feel, too.

‘Soliloquiy’ drifts into dreamy electro shoegaze, mellow and atmospheric, rippling, and soaked with a certain sadness, however sturdy the beats remain. Elsewhere, as on ‘Creeps; its clearly an attempt to lock things down with pinging robotic beats

This feels like quite departure for Mortality Tables, given their learning toward abstraction an ambience, but they’ve always leaned toward the different, and this is a work which is unashamedly different. ‘Unravel’ is exemplary here: it’s got groove, and is ostensibly a bopping dance cut, and a far cry from the implications of the album title. But everyone deals with trauma, grief, and distress differently, and we all articulate our internal strifes by different means. ‘enchanté’ locks into a hypnotic groove, the likes of which I haven’t been so immersed in since I discovered The Dancing Wu Li Masters by 25 Men back in 2008.

For all that, there are large, ambient expanses, passages of stuttering electro which draw together elements of industrial alongside the layered dance beats. The ten-minute ‘an attempt to conjure quiet’ feels like it’s quite willing to delve deeper into noise, the very opposite of the quiet it claims to seek, and the duration of this album feels like a teetering on edge. I’m reminded of how my late wife would hassle an and harangue over details, over chores, and the tense, jittery tone which leads n this album at times tales me there. But if the dark mutter of ‘thee individual visions ov jhonn’ is dark with resonating melancholia, The Magnitude Weighs Heavy brings things back to the light. ‘Whatever Will Become’ is a hybrid of pop and bubbling electronica, busy but mesmerising in its concentric circles of sound, its abrupt ending jolting the listener back to the moment.

The magnitude may weigh heavy, but this album has a remarkable lightness, delivered with a deftness of touch.

AA

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