Posts Tagged ‘Ambient’

Remote Viewing – State Violence

Posted: 22 August 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Human Worth – 18th September 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Remote Viewing’s second album, Modern Addictions (2023) was a hypercharged, uncompromising beast of an album. This came as no real surprise, given that, as their bio reminds us, ‘Remote Viewing are formed from the ashes of Palehorse, consisting of current members of Million Dead, Sly & The Family Drone, and Hands Up Who Wants To Die’. Sure, when most people hear the word ‘supergroup’ they think of Hollywood Vampires, or Audioslave, or, I dunno, The Travelling Wilburys. They’re ‘super’ by virtue of big names coming together, but their output has a tendency to be underwhelming, because there tend to be super egos cancelling one another out and stifling any spark. But a supergroup at this level – a coming together of musicians of quite different stripes, but all with something different to contribute – in my experience, brings a different kind of energy. Perhaps it comes from the sense that they need to prove themselves, but equally, from the thrill of collaboration. This is the thing with collaboration: sometimes it gels, others it doesn’t. Modern Addictions proved that Remote Viewing gelled, coalescing into a colossal guitar-driven powerhouse.

Imagine my frustration at only being able to be in one place at a time when I pitched up at The Brudenell to see Mogwai to discover Remote Viewing were supporting Humanfly in the other room.

State Violence is pitched as ‘Their most direct statement yet… an unapologetic reflection on the increasing levels of injustice, social division, extreme wealth and human atrocities we are seeing the world over’.

Direct statements – certainly credible ones – have been in short supply in recent years from the political classes, and worse still, criticism of their actions – and inactions – have been subject to increasingly harsh penalties. While one genocide has been televised in real-time around the globe, it’s been all too easy for people to fail to even appreciate the state of things in Sudan, and to shrug off the war in and around Iran as being a distant thing. Here in the UK in particular, there’s a sense of collective smugness that we’re ok because we’re not there, and we don’t have to contend with ICE either, and it’s from that state of bubble that we conveniently overlook that to criticise the state of Israel using the wrong terminology could see you lose your job or even imprisoned. A portion of the populace has been distracted with finger-pointing at immigrants as the reason their lives are shit. Meanwhile, peaceful protest in support of a direct action group has been outlawed.

This is the point at which State Violence arrives, and hits the spot, and does so by driving straight to the heart of a very British way of living.

‘#makemoneymakelovemakemoney’ kicks off – literally – in a rabid squall of dingy guitar accompanied by churning bass and a raving vocal performance, a raw-throated scream. A hybrid of sludge, black-hued metal, and noise rock, there are some blankly nihilist passages which call to mind Kowloon Walled City – but when they slam the pedals on, the overdrive is a speaker-ripping blast. Opening an album with a six-minute mid-pace trudge that makes the skin crawl is inspired: it’s a move that will grab those who are on the market for a challenge, and send the rest running after a minute or so – if that.

‘Retrain as a Swan’, the album’s lead single is one of the least single-like singles you’ll hear all year. It’s great, but it’s bereft of hooks or an obvious road in, and is, instead, a gut-churning sonic assault. The title, incidentally, was the lead line on a poster / flyer / meme which proffered a parodic take on training and recruitment advertisements, and highlights just how typically British State Violence is in its outlook and humour. Yes, humour. Remote Viewing remind that rage doesn’t have to be without humour, and that if anything – and again, this is a uniquely British trait – the more abstract or self-deprecating, or sarcastic, the humour, the better.

The sludgy squall of ‘Disrespect the Arts’ appears to be a raging attack on the way that not only funding for the arts has been stripped (something also in a state of advancement in the US) and the teaching of art and music cut from school syllabi and courses in the arts – including those in literature – dropped from university programmes, while creative jobs are being canned in favour of fucking AI, which is killing the planet but benefits billionaires. Go figure. ‘HUMAN RIGHTS’ is just straight-up, slowed-down and sludgy, trudging, pounding, relentless, Godflesh heavy. It’s like the heels of heavy boots pounding on your chest, knocking the air out repeatedly until you have no breath, and feel blacked out and lifeless.

The nine-minute ‘Accidental Holiday’ marks quite a contrast, exploring spacious, post-rock territory for the first three minutes, before the riff powers in, and then… POW! All the rage explodes here. If it’s not one of the sludgiest, most brutal, slugging doom riff blasts you’ve heard this year, you haven’t actually heard it. But at the same time, it alludes to post-metal and neoprog, and the guitar textures and the spaces are remarkably well calculated: it’s so clearly apparent that there’s a rare musical intuition between these performers that however dark and gnarly State Violence gets, it’s still exhilarating.

But it’s the two-and-a-half-minute closer ‘Birds of the Feather is on in 7 minutes’ which really encapsulates what State Violence is all about, in that is encapsulates the absurd disconnect between the backdrop to life, and actual life as lived in Britain. It manifests as a delicate, slightly warping, droning sliver of post-rock ambience, and its difference from the rest of the album is significant. That seven minutes is time to make a cuppa and fetch the digestives before settling down to some crap TV. “I don’t watch the news, me, it’s too depressing,” people say. I say, “know your enemy”. But who needs news channels to pump state-sponsored propaganda when they get fed rage bait shit while scrolling social media and watching Love Island? State Violence is more about them than for them, but for those who need a visceral soundtrack that screams back from the void, Remote Viewing have delivered it.

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Circuit3 – Metanoia: Music From Therapy

Posted: 19 August 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Mortality Tables – 14th August 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Ordinarily, I tend to pave the way to grappling with a release with some form of discursive preamble, but here, I feel it would detract from the work itself. Instead, I present the context for Metanoia: Music From Therapy directly from the accompanying notes, and without comment:

The first spark for Metanoia came from a simple plan to meet for a drink after a gig. Peter Fitzpatrick (Circuit3) and Mat Smith from the Mortality Tables imprint ended up talking about trauma, therapy, and the parts of ourselves we usually keep out of sight. That conversation led to a small, recorded experiment. From there the music began to take form, guided by fragments pulled from their notebooks.

Metanoia grew out of therapy and the slow process of letting difficult truths surface. Instead of singing those words, Fitzpatrick shaped them through analogue machines. The title refers to the deep shift that can follow self-reflection: a break, a reset, a way of living with more honesty.

A defining moment in the project was the opportunity to work with Vince Clarke, a long‑standing influence on Fitzpatrick’s music. They created an eleven-minute piece titled ‘The Hope’, named after the bar near Farringdon, London where that first conversation between Fitzpatrick and Smith happened. The collaboration feels like a dialogue across time: the artist Fitzpatrick once was, the one he is now, and the one emerging through this process.

Metanoia is not a linear or predictable account of trauma, breakdown, and recovery. Instead, it moves through a series of moments and memories that surfaced during therapy.

Vince Clarke crops up with remarkable frequency around Mortality Tables artists and releases, and his presence proves to be a positive one. There’s nothing here, or on other releases, which directly hints at Clarke’s celebrated electropop career

‘Cracked Eyes’ offers minimal, dulcimer-like tones, the notes fuzzy around the edges, as the backdrop to a skipping, fractured vocal loop which resembles to some extent one of William Burroughs’ tape experiments, the phrase, or phrases – muttered, mumbled – reverberates in fragments, overlapping, cutting in and out while played at different speeds, to quite unsettling effect.

A number of the pieces – in particular ‘Mood’, and ‘Where Are We Going?’ are comparatively brief interludes, and some of the instrumentals, such as ‘Imperfect’ are very much in the vein of Tangerine Dream or Mike Oldfield, built around sift, rippling notes and textured drones – flowing sounds of tranquillity, which don’t immediately evoke trauma or anguish. But of course, trauma and anguish aren’t necessarily endless stricken screaming, and therapy – the key to unlocking this album – can, for many, bring moments of peace and clarity amidst the painful psychological excavations.

‘Burnout’, on the other hand, it tense, the sound of a palpating heartbeat and panting breaths, albeit against an overtly uplifting electronic backdrop. This is something I personally find more relatable in some sense, and I suppose this is the leading point to observe when it comes to Metanoia: clearly, it comes from a deeply personal space, and some listeners will relate to some aspects more than others based on their own experiences. I know many people who have been through therapy, for a wide array of reasons, and with mixed experiences and outcomes. The trilling 70s synth sounds which course through the six-and-a-half minute ‘Shielding from the past’ seem to make sense, with their soft ambient cushioning, and despite their more sci-fi leanings that seem to tip a hat to Dr Who. Titles like ‘What If Everything Goes Right?’ take the listener through the difficult journey of self-doubt and catastrophising, before finally arriving at the eleven-minute finale, ‘The Hope’. And while there are undercurrents of doubt as articulated through darker shades, particularly at the start of the track, it does, ultimately, bloom into light.

Metanoia may be non-linear – and I understand this is often true of the journey through therapy, which can be riven with setbacks and periods of stasis – but it very much concludes with a piece which feels like the sun breaking on a new dawn, the curtains opening on a new chapter.

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tejploopare – gråkråka

Posted: 7 August 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Dret Skivor – 7th August 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

How do I know it’s Bandcamp Friday? Is it because I’ve received in the region of fifty emails by midday for new releases? Well, yes, there is that. But ultimately, it’s the fact that there’s a new release on Swedish microlabel dret skivor. This month’s is a radio-friendly unit shifter available to download and as a CD in a limited edition of two copies.

With uncharacteristically voluble notes accompanying it, we find the work described as ‘A chance meeting between winged and un-winged and captured hooded crow monologue.’ It would be impossible not to infer some element of reference to the 1979 debut album by Nurse With Wound, Chance Meeting on a Dissecting Table of a Sewing Machine and an Umbrella, which in turn was taken from Lautréamont’s The Songs of Maldoror, a work which sits within the broader oeuvre of Surrealism. All of this serves to present a comprehensible intertext given what dret skivor and its artists are all about – which, to boil it down to less academic terms, is ‘weird shit’.

Tejploopare add, ‘We thank our avian masters for the source material and Remo de Vico for his programming skills in creating the time-stretcher Loom that has been used in the creation of this piece’.

But if you’re expecting birdsong, or even something inspired by Hitchcock’s The Birds, think again. Gråkråka is just one fifteen-minute track which, regardless of its source material, manifests as one extended echo-heavy swirling drone, as much akin to the sound of a giant millstone grinding against another from the depths of a huge cavern, or the sound of a million bats taking flight from a cave with the audio slowed by maybe three hundred percent. Admittedly, I’ve never really listened to crows in conversation, and was unaware – or had forgotten – that they have the capacity to mimic the sounds of other birds, animals, and machinery’, according to learnbirdwatching.com. While the veracity of this is debatable, it is understood and accepted that crows are capable of advanced and highly sophisticated communication, using a range of techniques.

But let’s suspend disbelief for a moment and take on face value that gråkråka is simply the sound of crows, manipulated to a greater or lesser extent to forge a churning, whirring, multi-textural sonic experience. It’s not a drone per se, so much as a rumbling eddy, an endless whistle, and a slow grind, all at once, and these all shift around in tone and the level to which they sit to the fore over the track’s duration. At times, the upper buzzes and hums, the higher frequency fizz, makes my inner ears itchy, and make me feel a palpable relief that I don’t suffer tinnitus, but am coming to the opinion that perhaps a certain level of hearing loss may not be such a bad thing for the avoidance of sonic torture at certain frequencies. If only I hadn’t been so bloody sensible wearing earplugs to gigs this last twenty years, eh?

Gråkråka is not a work of harsh noise: it’s not even overtly noisy. But it is one of those aural explorations which is designed to inflict discomfort. And in that, it succeeds. By the mid-point, it’s attained a quire specific level of torturousness, and while it does pull back from this for a time, what replaces that scouring blast is a quivering ominous rumble, which again swells and replicates the sensation of some unseen fear growing closer: put another way, it’s the soundtrack to a nightmare, to a horror without words or boldly manifestation, simply a psychological attack which goes on, and on, twisting to a trebly roar akin to a demon rasping suicidal ideations into your ear during the final five minutes.

It’s not actually a criticism when I express the view that gråkråka feels like a long fifteen minutes. It’s not intended to be one of those soft ambient drifts where half an hour simply evaporates. Quite the opposite: this is an album that’s raison d’aitre is to seed discomfort and make you squirm from beginning to end. And it does.

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Ran Slavin – Hyper Basic

Posted: 2 August 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Nocturnal Rainbow Recordings – 31st July 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

The title of Ran Slavin’s latest does, for all the world, sound like some slangy diss.

“I’m getting skibidi rizz.”

“Bruh’s hyper basic.”

“I can’t even.”

“Bruh.”

It’s been a while since I’ve penned any dialogue in a creative context, and it also transpires that it isn’t actually some slangy diss, but precisely what it is remains unclear, and the accompanying notes do little to solidify where we’re at here, focusing on informing us what the album isn’t, and what it doesn’t do, instead of shedding light on its actual objective:

‘Neither functional nor ambient, the album occupies a shifting territory where abstraction and physicality remain in constant negotiation – a deconstructed club language suspended between pressure, atmosphere, and perceptual displacement… Rather than offering release, Hyper Basic inhabits a state of suspension, where signals dissolve into beats, reduction folds into excess, and movement unfolds as much in the mind as on the floor.’

And so, from what I can discern, it doesn’t occupy any particular space, but hovers and ambulates in some ‘between’ space.

The ‘hyper’ seems to relate more to the schizoid energy which ripples through the album’s eight ridiculously hectic compositions. The first of these, bearing the title ‘Ritual Decay’ would, superficially’ suggest some snarling back metal grind, but what we get is some sparse electro groove, and ‘Static Ritual’ is infinitely more Gilles Peterson than John Peel, if you catch my drift. Still, while it may not be entirely my bag, I’d take Gilles Peterson over Jordan Peterson, or, for that matter, Gilles de Rais any day. And we shall move on.

It’s all pretty chilled, but for some reason, I personally find this kind of stuff impossibly tense. When the beats hit, it’s not that I fear bring grooved away, as much I wonder what will happen next.

This is very much a work steeped in the tropes of 90s and early 00s dance music – or, perhaps, more accurately, the sound of more underground club culture. Despite the insistent beats and vocal samples which drift in and out, Hyper Basic doesn’t even for one moment deploy the formula of the monotonous mainstream nightclub thud-thud-thud-thud. So that’s another thing it isn’t – a work of mainstream dance. Rather than glowstick territory, this is chin-stroking territory, dance music you don’t actually dance to, but reflect on, dissect, muse on the dynamics, the tones, the details of the beats, and the vibrations. The arrangements are sparse, and there’s space and separation between the beats and the low-key bass tracks.

There are moments when the introverted shuffles break out into all-out groove euphoria, as on the rushing bomp ‘n’ stop of ‘No’, which builds over the course of almost eleven minutes, but many of the tracks just flick and flutter along while whispers reverberate in the background. On ‘Beta Phase’ the beats turn harder, a thwocking metallic bin lid of a snare cuts through a woozy, rolling bass that’s dizzyingly dense and it’s anything but comfortable – although I suspect many would love it. A looped vocal snippet bobs to the surface here and there, too. ‘Found Luxury’ fires up a snarling, serrated bass which owes more to rock than dance, and it drives through a drifting wash of synths and samples amidst a rather conflict-filled semi-ambient concoction.

As with much of Ran Slavin’s work, Hyper Basic is hard to place, and just as hard to critique, largely because it doesn’t stay in one place long enough to get a handle on what’s happening. There are elements I just can’t get on board with, while accepting it’s a matter of taste, but it’s impossible to deny that Ran Slavin has a knack for bringing a unique slant to the dancier end of electronic music, and that Hyper Basic is anything but.

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Lawrence English – The Rest Is My Ghost

Posted: 30 July 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Room40 – 7th August 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Lawrence English is an artist who invariably creates works imbued with insight and purpose, with concept and theoretical grounding in the contemplative, academic sense. I had the good fortune to interview him by email some years ago, which proved to be not only illuminating, but exhilarating on a personal level when he wrote insightfully and knowledgeably of William S. Burroughs and the cut-up technique. I very much get the impression he spends as much time considering his work as he does creating it, in the physical sense.

That interview, sadly, is long gone, along with the site which published it. This is true of many interviews, reviews, and indeed, works of fiction which I had published online through the years, and I’m not sure they exist on hard drives anymore either so far down the line. Back in the late 90s and early 00s, we were sold the dream that The Internet would be the archive of everything. The idea went that if it existed, however niche, you could find it online, and this was essentially the precis for Warren Ellis’ 2007 novel Crooked Little Vein. This was also the time of MySpace and what felt like a new world, full of potential. And then the corporations took over and it all turned to shit. I daresay others have a different perspective, but this is mine. And of course, Ellis turned out to be another sleazy male shitbag and overnight saw his outstanding career sunk by his own actions. But I miss those days when the Internet was exciting, anarchic, and not dominated by AI and bots or riven with social and political engineering and so on.

And this is where we arrive at The Rest Is My Ghost, and Lawrence’s notes on the album:

‘Nostalgia is not an ideology, though in this moment, we could be mistaken for thinking it might be just that. Over the past years, the idea of nostalgia has been filtered through various political and technological lenses and has become a tool used for forgetting, rather than remembering. Instead of embracing histories’ complexities and inconsistencies, this version of nostalgia seeks only singular recollection. This contemporary phenomenon of nostalgia has become a methodology at best, and a weapon at worst, used to erode the past and project forward a collapsed and unimaginably sanitised version of things, places, and ways of being from former times. It’s this projection that sees it playing a mounting role in a social pathology associated with reducing the imagined possibilities of future.

‘The Rest Is My Ghost is a record that interrogates the manifestations of this reductive futuring and celebrates those that have tried (and failed), and those who continue to push back against decayed and revisionist positions. It’s a record that considers the weaponisation of nostalgia for the purposes of cloaking possible futures.’

These observations are on point. The far-right parties in the UK – in particular Reform and its adherents are largely basing their campaigns on nostalgia. But not even real nostalgia. They hark back go a golden age that never was with dewy-eyed yearning for a completely glossed reimagining of the 1950s, whereby kids cycled to school down cobbled streets, and bidding the milkman, who is whistling cheerily, a good morning, and dad does off to work in his tweed tie while mum goes to the village store and buys freshly baked bread and eggs laid on the local farm. And NONE OF THIS HAPPENED. This is probably why the Facebook pages in support of Nigel Farage and espousing this worldview are bursting with bollocks AI mages of London busses and phone boxes and cardboard cutout people.

We still had rationing until 1954, some nine years after the second world war ended – although by this time, we were living in the grip of the Cold War and fear of nuclear annihilation. A golden age indeed.

On The Rest Is My Ghost, Lawrence English conjures many rich, immersive atmospheres, many of which evoke nostalgic echoes of myriad shades. ‘大’ opens the album with a crashing gong and eerie wraiths and swirling eddies of sound which slowly give way to tectonic crashes and earth-shattering bursts of sound which connote a collapse of civilisation, and, indeed, the planet. It’s heavy, and it’s hard to breathe while surrounded by this rib-crushing, oxygen-bereft swirl of sound.

As much as ‘Acid Nostalgia’ makes an obvious nod to a particular moment in time, there is both humour and serious comment to be unravelled here. It’s something I noticed in my thirties: peers would bemoan how there had been no decent music released since they were twenty-one or so. This was patently untrue: what they were actually saying is that they switched off after they left college or university and got jobs, started families, and disengaged. Their rave days, their festival days, were their life pinnacle. They associated these experiences of their youth with freedom and a lack of responsibility, and found themselves unable to separate their ageing and becoming entrenched in adulthood, the 9-5 and all that shit, with the times themselves.

There’s no escaping or denying that things have a unique buzz when they’re new, and in your teens the senses are heightened, and you can spend the rest of your life failing to recapture that initial rush. But some of these sad fucks… it’s like their lives ended at eighteen or so, and by the time they hit thirty they’re embittered.

Echoes and layers and dark ambient forced define The Rest Is My Ghost. ‘Sodium Vapour Halo’ (remember when street lights weren’t white LEDs? Remember the sodium haze?) presents a howling wall of sound, a sound that screams anxiety, that swirls all around and grips your very being and shakes it. Ah, ‘Aerial Cable’… it’s a subtler, but no less wry commentary which stands alongside South Park’s ‘Member Berries’ episode. Nostalgia is big business, but one which very much traps people into an idealised misremembrance of the past – and keep them buying anniversary reissues of the albums they had on tape or whatever when they were in school.

By the time we arrive at ‘Hack’, we find ourselves worn out and exhausted as we trudge through drifting sand dunes of sound.

The Rest Is My Ghost is not a representation of the all-pervasive nostalgia trip that keeps the people docile – or angry, as they rage about wanting their country back, idealising a time before immigrants took over (which would, of course, predate the Roman Empire). As English positions it, it’s an interrogation – and in intense one, which responds to the ugly side of the wave of nostalgia which is sweeping through contemporary culture. It also feels like a response, and one which doesn’t shy from confrontation. While so much of this nostalgia appears to stem not so much from a love of the part but a fear of the future, so The Rest Is My Ghost encapsulates a certain sense of anxiety over the prospect that we fail to make progress in a meaningful and constructive way. This is a dark album for dark times. Without words, The Rest Is My Ghost not only conveys so much, but provokes so much thought and speaks on so many levels, making it an essential work.

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Jana Irmert – Messengers (Original Soundtrack)

Posted: 15 July 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Superpang – 17th July 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Jana Irmert’s catalogue is a body of work defined by ever-shifting focus, and her capacity to do so makes her an ideal choice for soundtrack work. Her bio features credits for receiving the German Documentary Film Music Award in 2019, and in 2021 she was nominated for an Edda Award for her sound design on Jóhann Jóhannsson’s film Last and First Men. She also created the soundtrack to Henrike Meyer’s auto-fictional hybrid documentary To Be an Extra, and this work in turn was respun to make When I Dissolve.

Portals, released last year, was an entirely different kind of soundtrack: produced entirely from field recordings made in the Amazon rainforest, it soundtracked a lived experience and captured the artist in nature, in the purest sense.

Her score for Jeffrey Zablotny’s film Messengers is different again, although does very much draw on elements of the natural world – albeit far removed from the rainforest, with the film being ‘a poetic exploration of three subterranean observatories hidden deep beneath Canada, Japan, and Antarctica’.

Sometimes, I wonder if reviewing a score independent of the film it soundtracks, and without having seen said film, is a good idea. But I would contend that the measure of any score is its ability to stand up without the visuals. And the Messengers soundtrack very much does – so much so that I find myself questioning whether to picture could possibly convey the quiet intensity of Irmirt’s score, which is designed around a vintage Yamaha Electone organ.

There’s depth and detail to the compositions here, with slow-moving analogue drones providing an earthy, organic feel throughout. ‘Dream Cabin’ shifts between atmospheres and brings together elements of light and dark, serenity and tension, playing them against and across one another. ‘Subatomic Collisions’ brings ominous echoes, unseen movements in the dark. Yes: there is something powerfully visual and sensory about this work. In places it’s dank, claustrophobic. I find myself holding my breath in suspense. With nothing to look at to guide or illustrate, the mind fills the spaces in interpreting the sound. And the imagination is always capable of inspiring a deeper fear, a deeper dread, than anything in life. I’m not talking about monsters or skeletons, although the mind will inevitably prey on your own worst fears. And largely, this is why we’re so often scared of the dark. The probability of there being a predator of some sort, or falling into a bottomless chasm are slim compared to, say, stubbing your toe or banging your head. But fumbling in the dark, perhaps along a narrow tunnel with damp walls, no-one fears a bruised toe or scraped skull. Darkness, and isolation, play into our biggest, deepest, most primal fears, because alone, in the dark, we’re at our most vulnerable.

The way Irmirt weaves the details into these pieces is incredibly subtle. There are no horror-like fear chords, no overt sense of impending doom or danger exists within the fabric of these compositions. And yet, with pieces like ‘Something is Listening’ with its reverberating clicks and shuffles and sonar-like droning pulsations, the sounds set you on edge. Note that it’s not someone, but something that’s listening. What is listening? We don’t know, because we can’t see: all we can do is sense it, and feel our paranoia swell.

There’s something almost David Attenborourgh about ‘Ultrapure’, a piece which would feel quite natural as an accompaniment to footage of jellyfish and angler fish and deep aquatic creatures moving in slow suspension – although equally it could be the slow-motion backdrop to scenes from a deep-space telescope with its tranquil images of nebulae drifting millions of light years from here and now – a sensation only accentuated by the slow tones of ‘Sleeping, Listening to the Stars in Darkness.’ Note, listening. Because as much as we think of space as silent, everything has sound. The stars are not static, but in constant flux, until they fizzle and fade or otherwise implode or swallow everything. There is both stillness and movement here: that is to say, listen closely to the stillness, and the movement will reveal itself.

Messengers is evocative, and inspires contemplation, a reflection of the contrasts between confined space and infinite space – and the similarities, in that both are dark and you will find yourself alone in that darkness with nothing but your thoughts and fears. Weaving through infinite passageways of ponderance, Irmert finally brings us to ‘Monuments to Our Questions’, and it feels as if this should offer some form of solidification to all of the abstraction which has preceded it. But like a shadow, like mist, it leaves us feeling that answers are illusory, things we tell ourselves to still the anguish rather than because we have attained conclusive knowledge. Ultimately, we know nothing, and are, and will be, forever fumbling blindly in darkness.

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Listen: ‘I Believe’ by Huw Cadwaladr

Posted: 10 July 2026 in Recommended Streams and Videos, Singles and EPs
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Of this new release, Electronic Producer and DJ Huw Cadwaladr, says, ‘I Believe’, never originally intended for public release, offers the first glimpse into the world of Cambria Nocturna. The track marks a departure from the electronic work Gruff and I previously created as Carcharorion, moving toward a more songwriting-driven and lyrically expressive approach. While evolving creatively, the project continues to explore our shared love of cinematic electronic sound through experimental tape loops, field recordings, analogue instrumentation, and richly textured production. Originally conceived as a post-punk composition before transforming into a driving techno piece, ‘I Believe’ evolved over many months into its final form — a confessional and emotionally charged work. Recorded by Gruff and myself, and mixed by Alexander Green at The Zoo, the track became the first true catalyst and creative foundation for what would eventually become Cambria Nocturna.

Cambria Nocturna itself emerged from a period of profound personal trauma. During this time, I reconnected with Gruff after more than a decade apart, and together we began experimenting once again. What started as artistic collaboration quickly became something deeper: a source of healing, catharsis, and genuine therapy.

Through channeling these emotions creatively, Cambria Nocturna was born — a sonic tapestry of deeply atmospheric electronic music shaped by raw emotion, human connection, and resilience. By merging analogue electronics with acoustic instrumentation, we drew from a broad spectrum of influences, spanning 90s trip-hop, techno, electro, 80s Italo, and alternative electronica, alongside the work of artists such as John Cale and Nick Cave.

‘I Believe’ marks the beginning of a new chapter: emotionally resonant electronic music rooted in vulnerability, transformation and defiant survival— with further releases set to follow.

Hear ‘I Believe here:

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Emerging from a period of profound personal upheaval, Huw has created a sonic tapestry of deeply atmospheric electronic music shaped by raw emotion, resilience, and human connection.

During a time of recovery and reflection, music became both an escape and a lifeline. Around this time, he reconnected with Gruff, his longtime creative partner in Carcharorion. After more than a decade away from creating together, the pair began experimenting once again, discovering that the process offered not only artistic fulfilment, but genuine therapy.

The result is Cambria Nocturna: a deeply personal project born from vulnerability, reflection, and survival. Never originally intended for public release, the project became an honest exploration of emotional darkness, connection, and self-expression.

The debut single, ‘I Believe’, marks the beginning of this new chapter – emotionally charged electronic music rooted in atmosphere, honesty, and catharsis, with more releases set to follow.

Outside of his own music, Huw is also a presenter on Radio Sudd, where he hosts a show focused primarily on club-based electronic music.

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melondruie – Sound of Rain

Posted: 28 June 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Cruel Nature Records – 3rd July 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Despite our reputation, it’s not just us Brits who have a weather fixation, and the fact of the matter is, the weather has a baring on our daily lives, perhaps more than many of us even recognise – and that’s without considering the effects of weather events on the likes of transport and food production. On a primal, human level, weather conditions affect our moods, and even our health.

I myself recorded a longform piece, ‘January Can’t Last Forever’ from a bleak place in early 2023, when weeks of rain had caused widespread flooding locally, and a few particularly heavy downpours overwhelmed the guttering at the front of the house. Those weeks, in the darkest days of winter, felt like a lifetime, and it was all I could do to get through it by reminding myself that these things do pass, eventually. April and May of this year saw rain most days, too, although I’m writing this as sweat pours off me at the tail end of the second heatwave of 2026, during which a couple of brief thunderstorms have only contributed to ramping up the already suffocating levels of humidity.

As such, there’s a particular relatability, on a personal level, with the inspiration for melondruie’s Sound of Rain: the Seattleite’s latest work of minimalist ambient electronical was ‘made in the spring of 2025 during various rainy days’. As the liner notes explain, ‘The record frames rain as a calming, almost therapeutic force – masking the noise and tension of human life with a steady, immersive sonic wash’, with ‘a focus on texture, atmosphere, and subtle emotional resonance.’

There’s a certain playfulness about some of the compositions: ‘Washed Away’ bounces and ripples with something of a lightness, and the rhythmic nature of the notes interplay through patterns which shift gradually and with a liquid ease.

Despite the angry and negative connotations of titles like ‘Red Mist’ and ‘Destroyed Again’, the heavier, darker undercurrents of rumbling bass and wraith-like howls which resemble thin, chilling winds are counterbalanced by soft sounds which seem to connote the relief of shafts of light breaking through the cloud cover, or a vague hint of a rainbow. Consequently, and album which could have been rendered relentlessly bleak, gloomy, oppressive, is anything but.

On Sound of Rain, melondruie explores the interplay between gentle textures, with smooth, gliding drones interacting and interpolating with rippling, bubbling layers. ‘Falsehoods’, the final track, expands on this territory with the gush of a torrent to begin, gradually tapering from a current of sweeping tension towards something altogether calmer.

The rhythmic cadences of the pieces give them a sense of movement, of flow, even a kind of groove at times, which draws the listener in and holds the attention in a way which is rare – in my experience – for an ambient work. The conception and execution is inspired, and while the extent to which it evokes rainy days will vary according to one’s own experience and perception, Sound of Rain cannot fail to inspire reflection and contemplation.

AA

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Conflux Coldwell – Echolalia

Posted: 25 June 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Bulletdodge – 26th June 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Since first presenting work under the Conflux Coldwell moniker in 2013, Leeds-based sound architect and explorer Michael C Coldwell has used this particular vehicle to venture forth through different environments of an external nature, often with field recordings providing an integral element. As such, while maintaining a focus on aspects of hauntology, Echolalia marks something departure in terms of its inspirations and themes, primarily in just how personal it is, particularly in comparison to his previous offering, Shadows and Simulacra which dug deep into the dark domains of AI and the absence of any human soul therein. This time, the explorations are focused very much on interior environments.

As the accompanying notes explain, ‘Echolalia explores the notion of internal “ghosts” — the lingering traces that inhabit the mind. Sparked by his daughter’s autism diagnosis earlier this year, and his sister’s AuDHD diagnosis the year before, Coldwell was prompted to reflect on his own neurodivergence. The result is a deeply personal and introspective work that interrogates how these experiences have shaped his creative process, his unique perception of the world, and his enduring fascination with machines and hauntology’.

Something I’ve noticed, quite acutely, in the last few years, is just how many people I know – particularly on social media, where I’ve evolved a substantial network of creatives in all types of media – are receiving diagnoses of autism, ADHD, and various other neurodivergences in adulthood. Many are in the fifty-plus demographic. And so many of them relay that so much makes sense with this information. It isn’t, then, that there’s more autism, more neurodivergence, but simply that we have finally got better at diagnosing it. There remains, however, some way to go in terms of accommodating it. But this observation has set me thinking of late, that, given the way creatively-minded individuals gravitate toward one another – taking my virtual social circle as an example – perhaps neurodiversity is directly correspondent with creativity? I’m merely touching the edge of a discussion here, nudging an idea out into world… but artists are renowned for being misfits, a bit weird, prone to many of the traits associated with neurodivergence, and it may explain why some people – neurotypical ones – are content with working the nine to five, watching some TV and then going to bed at 10pm, while the creatives can’t settle and feel unfulfilled, and are instead compelled to stay up till the small hours doing stuff.

The ten pieces on Echolalia are tense, intense, and hit the listener from all angles simultaneously. And in doing so, Coldwell not only captures, but replicates that sense of overstimulation, of excessive input.

‘Complex Machines’ arrives in a fizz and crackle of distortion, wibbling synths and a sampled voiceover from what sounds like an educational or instructive film about the use of computers in school, before disembodied voices drift over some ominous drones. The number 23 emerges from the reverberating haze. It has the hallmarks of being from the soundtrack to a sci-fi technodystopia, but the fact of the matter is that this is where we are. Our education system is in crisis, and kids are increasingly suffering from an ever-diminishing attention span on account of the ubiquitous bombardment of myriad media. This is magnified significantly for those with ADHD and AuDHD, whose brains are already crammed and overcrowded, who find simply existing in the world an overwhelming experience.

‘Homeworld’ may or may not be a reference to Harry Harrisons’s 1980 novel, the first instalment of the To the Stars trilogy, but skittery synths and muttery vocal loops combine to create a tension that isn’t resolved by the end of the piece, which instead gives way to the crackling static and stammering electronic primitivism of ‘Pattern Glare’, with its aural allusions to Throbbing Gristle and Suicide, and also its near-infinite reverb. It’s eerie, unsettling, and it makes you feel nervous. Well, it makes me feel nervous, anyway.

It’s true that I feel nervous often, but something about Echolalia is truly nail-biting. ‘Dysthtythmia’ – a condition which covers a broad spectrum of irregular heartbeats – returns to lifted segments of speech to round off the first side of physical release, and as neat as this feels in terms of closing a loop, it equally feels like revisiting a trigger point.

The second half of the album is yet harder to process, a collage of synths and voices layering ever faster and ever deeper and ever more complex in their combination, the flickering shimmer of ‘Five Wing Four’ being exemplary. There is simply too much to take I in at once, and Coldwell knows this, because this is the soundtrack to assimilation and processing. ‘Left hand, right eye…’ My wife used to get so angry when driving: it was my job to navigate and I would forever confuse left and right. Having a PhD in English bears no relation to my suffering LRC (Left–right confusion) which apparently affects nearly 10% of the male population. But what it does go to show is that brains are strange and unpredictable. And ‘strange and unpredictable’ is ultimately a fair summary of Echolalia, too.

AA

Conflux Coldwell 2026

Puce Moment – O.R.G.II

Posted: 24 June 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Odd Doo – 12th June 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

There is something uniquely compelling about the sound of a pipe organ. I’m clearly not alone in this, as there have been many non-religious works which have explored the use of the instrument, ranging from ribcage-rattling drone to the tired groaning wheeze of dilapidated organs in dire need of restoration. Because organs tend to be installed – often designed and built specifically to work with the acoustics of the space – they can’t readily be transported elsewhere, and equally, they each have their own individual sounds, however nuanced the differences may be to the average ear.

After four subsequent albums, O.R.G.II finds Puce Moment – the musical and visual project of Nico Devos and Pénélope Michel, whose choice of name references a short film from 1949 – revisit the inspirations for their 2019 album O.R.G. It was recorded at Saint Joseph Church Armentières, France – a truly remarkable building, with, it would appear, a quite spectacular pipe organ.

They describe the album as ‘an immersive musical work that brings the traditional pipe organ into dialogue with electronic and drone compositions, unfolding within a liminal soundscape — a space of transition and encounter orchestrated by Puce Moment’.

And so it is that they present five compositions constructed around quivering, slow-moving drones which are tonally rich, warm and organic. And immersive they are, indeed. The album begins with the ten-and-a-half-minute ‘Simoon’, which was aired with an accompanying video last month. It’s incredibly textured and nuanced, but to extract those textures and nuances requires a degree of attention. In our overloading, hyperaccelerated, technologically-driven times, where the average attention span is barely three seconds, the idea of sitting down and paying attention to prolonged hums might sound untenable, but the fact is that spending time with the lights down, or off, and the phone in another room while simply feeling the textures, the subtle interplay between the layers and waves is nothing short of a revelation.

The individual pieces melt together – which seems appropriate, given that I’m writing this in the middle of a punishing heatwave, and I feel as if my entire body is slowly melting. ‘Pavna’ pulsates in a way which resonates with my own palpating internal organs… and as if in protest, my laptop crashes and I lose three hundred words of my review in progress. But I’m too sapped to panic, and perhaps more pertinently, I’m feeling too zen thanks to the soporific nature of the cinematic dronescape in which I find myself.

The nine-and-a-half-minute ‘Ruach’ rumbles almost subliminally at first, before transitioning into a rippling wave reminiscent of a combination of Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream, a trilling waltz with a distinctly retro feel, which bleeds into the fourteen-and-a-half-minute ‘Ilma’, a piece which truly encapsulates the layering and detail of the album.

AA

Puce Moment1_©Puce Moment(1)

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