Posts Tagged ‘collaboration’

Listen: ‘Bound’ by Pettybone x Shooting Daggers x Petrol Girls

Posted: 5 December 2025 in Recommended Streams and Videos, Singles and EPs
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There’s a very good reason not to compile ‘best of the year’ lists until after the year is finished. There are always late contenders, and this is a prime candidate by way of a late entry for one of the singles of 2025.

‘Bound’ is the new single and collaboration from the past and the present of the femme, gender queer, punk scene, featuring Pettybone, Shooting Daggers and Petrol Girls. 2 and 1/2 years in the making, this is the first new music from Pettybone since their split in 2012.

Pettybone formed in 2010 after being drawn together through the individual struggles they had encountered in their lives, with the desire to speak up about their experiences. Their debut album From Desperate Times Come Radical Minds followed in 2011 and by 2012 the band split, but their impact and influence is still felt to this day, with both Petrol Girls and Shooting Daggers being inspired by them.

The same year that Pettybone split up, raging feminist, post hardcore band Petrol Girls were formed. Most recently they released their 3rd album Baby in 2022 (Hassle Records). While queercore punk band Shooting Daggers formed in 2019, going on to release their debut album in 2024.

The punk scene is small, in the femme, gender queer scene it is even smaller. All 3 bands know each other – Zel (Pettybone) taught Raquel (Shooting Daggers) to play drums way back in the day, and Zel also filled in on drums for Petrol Girls a couple of times. Raquel from Shooting Daggers comments, “We’re all friends as well as having massive respect for each others bands. So, what better than do a collab that spans the Globe?!”

Pettybone guitarist Ivona first had a guitar riff and sent it to Zel in Aotearoa to get some drum ideas, then sent it onto Lianna (Pettybone) in London for the bass. They met up in London early late 2024 to lay down the instrumental track with Sam Thredder in London (who also recorded the Pettybone’s debut album). The instrumental was sent to in Petrol Girls vocalist Ren in Austria to come up with some lyric ideas. At the time she replied: “I have something brewing! Something against white liberal feminism and liberation for everyone. It’s about discomfort not being the same as unsafe.”

Shooting Daggers vocalist Sal worked on melody and there was some back and forth on the lyrics and vocal lines with Petrol Girls’ Ren and Pettybone’s Ivona.

Unfortunately, Pettybone singer Amy was unavailable to take part in the project, and Ren also couldn’t do it from Austria, so Sal from Shooting Daggers stepped in and smashed out the vocal at Holy Mountain studio. The track was then mixed and mastered by Casper Maxwell in Naarm/Melbourne.

Ren (Petrol Girls) comments on the lyrics for the new single,

“’Bound up in our liberation we are bound’ comes from the Lilla Watson quote in the context of the aboriginal liberation movement in Australia, but its so well known because it expresses such a vital idea. I was really touched to be invited to write lyrics for this feminist collaboration and wanted to express faith in liberation and collectivity, which are the core of any meaningful feminism. The lyrics are mostly a response to arguments I was having at the time with people around me where I live in Austria about the genocide in Palestine, but I think they can apply pretty widely. We need feminist solidarity across borders. We need anti-racist feminism, abolition feminism, anti-colonial feminism, anti-fascist feminism. And we need each other.”

‘Bound’ will be self-released by Petttybone via their Bandcamp on the 5th Dec 2025.

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Listen: ‘…(something) ruined’ by Foldhead vs Christopher Nosnibor

Posted: 6 July 2025 in Recommended Streams and Videos, Singles and EPs
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Foldhead had making noise for some time. Nosnibor had spent the last few months taking steps beyond the staid spoken word scene via a series of ‘versus’ collaborations with experimental artists in and around York. So when Foldhead put out a shout out on Facebook for a collaborator to provide vocals for a set he was booked for, Nosnibor’s name cropped up.

The pair met for the first time on the day. Consequently, no one knew what the fuck to expect, least of all the two guys plugging into the PA. In an instant, a ‘third mind’ moment occurred, yielding noise terror which was infinitely greater than the sum of the parts. In that moment, they knew that this had to be the start of something. And so it was that …(something) ruined was born.

This is a document of that first explosive coming together.

Recorded live at Chunk, Leeds, 1st March 2019.

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BLOOM – The Improvisation Sessions (Vol I)

Posted: 12 June 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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11th June 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

Some artists thrive on collaboration. Deborah Fialkiewicz is one of those. While she’s prolific as a solo artist, the volume of collaborative works in her discography is also noteworthy: when she’s not working as part of SPORE, she’s part of the ever-rotating lineup of BLOOM – and that’s before we touch on the frequent collaborations with (AN) EeL, the most recent of which was only released three weeks ago.

The Improvisation Sessions was recorded live May of this year, with a lineup of Dan Dolby, Deborah Fialkiewicz, and John Koser, marking an expansion from the duo which recorded the trilogy of Parallel Minor, Besides, and Hybrid in 2020. Fialkiewicz is without doubt an artist with range, but one who favours the dark end of the ambient spectrum more often than not, and this is very much the case here.

The Improvisation Sessions features two longform tracks which would quite nicely align with a vinyl release.

‘Chameleon Soul’, which spans a colossal continuous twenty minutes, begins with low, rumbling ominous drones, but soon escalates to a busy, buzzy criss-cross of sounds, interweaving and interlacing, leaving one’s head in a spin as if after trying to trace several flies flitting about the kitchen on a hot summer’s day for any period of time. It’s a morass of warping tones overlaying a ballast of churning noise, and any comparisons to Hull luminaries Throbbing Gristle or Merzbow are entirely justified.

The layers of distortion only grow denser and gnarlier as the track progresses, crashing waves of white noise blast in from one side and then the other as they really push to test the stamina. And then you realise we’re only six minutes in. This is a positive: plenty more left to enjoy… Enjoyment is of course subjective, and enjoyment of this requires being appreciative of a dizzying, disorientating assault simultaneous with a full-on white noise blizzard.

The momentary lulls, the spells where they pull back from the precipice of all-out aural obliteration, are far from mellow, as serrated spurs of hard-edged drones, wails of feedback and brain-melting extraneous noise conglomerate to seismic effect. There are some nasty high-end frequencies knocking about in the mix, moments were one has to check if the whistle is coming from the speakers of if it’s that troublesome tinnitus nagging again, and said frequencies rise from a battery of ugly distortion, bone-shattering blasts of which simple explode around the twelve-minute mark, and from hereon in, things only grow harsher, more corrupted, more intense, more difficult to withstand. We’d be inching into polythene bags on heads territory were it not for the variation, but the last three minutes or so are fractured, damaged, and agonizing – part power electronics, part circuit meltdown.

As the world becomes evermore and increasingly fucked up, I find words fail me more by the day. It’s harder to articulate, and this is where I’ve found that sound has come into its own. Sound as the capacity to convey something beyond words, something that lies in the most innermost parts, giving voice to the subconscious, even. On The Improvisation Sessions, BLOOM convey anxiety, gloom, pessimism.

‘The Dark Room’ is indeed dark, constructed primarily around a fixed but thick, distorted hum. Oscillators whine and whistle, and something about it calls to mind Whitehouse around the time of Never Forget Death, when they discovered low-end frequencies and restraint, the impact of a low undulating wave and subtle tweaks of reverb.

It rumbles and drones on, eddying and bouncing around in a shrilling mesh of dissonance. There isn’t a moment where this is an easy listen, and so often, it sounds as if the equipment is faulty, whether it’s a stuck loop or generating unexpected noise.

This set hangs on the edge of ambience, but be warned, it’s dark, and noisy at times, to the extend that it may shred your brain. For me personally, that’s my idea of fun, so it gets a two thumbs up, but for the more sensitive, this is a release to approach with caution.

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Deborah Fialkiewicz / (AN) EeL – Compelled by Nature

Posted: 24 May 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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19th May 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

Deborah Fialkiewicz’s neoclassical album Ad Vitam Decorus, has been in Bandcamp’s neoclassical ambient bestsellers chart for fully five years now, although she’s hardly been resting on her laurels and basking in the success since it’s release, having released a slew of works in a range of genre styles, with this, the latest, being a collaboration with (AN) Eel, who describes himself as ‘An Experimental Vocalist & Full Bodies Inhabitant of this Colorful universe’. His output is also remarkable, and his catalogue consists mostly of collaborative efforts, this being his second with Fialkiewicz (the first being Inkworks in April 2022)

Although the words are (AN) Eel’s work, those which are published on the release’s Bandcamp page could easily be about Fialkiewicz’s friendly foxy visitors, who she feeds and often photographs and writes of online:

Two Foxes, Out of Boxes,

In Your Garden

Seven Tales

Shape Shifter, Sun & Moon

Shadow Dancers, Rod & Womb

Silk and Cobwebs,

Perhaps this is simply an indication of how closely attuned this collaboration is.

Compelled by Nature contains two longform pieces, each hitting that magical twenty-three minute mark – meaning it would be ideally suited for a vinyl release, but in its digital form, has the feel of a ‘classic’ experimental electronic album, the likes of which you’d find on Editions Mego or Ici, d’ailleurs. The two compositions break down the title: ‘Compelled’ and ‘By Nature’, bringing an element of linguistic play into the frame.

‘Compelled’ offers up some fractured drones which crack and lurch in volume and frequency. As the piece progresses, looping, repetitive motifs emerge, atop of which gurgling, chattering, insect-like scratches emerge, chittering and bibbling, rising and falling, and when these incidentals fall to silence, the repetitive underlying sonic skeletal frame of the composition sits sparse and alone, becoming thoroughly hypnotic. The experience isn’t dissimilar from watching waves lap the shore on a calm day with a gentle tide. In time, 16-bit bleeps reminiscent of 80s arcade games ripple through an ever slower, evermore dolorous droning of a slow-strummed bass guitar. The vocalisations are eerie, ethereal, haunting – spiritual, but somehow detached from the world as we know it, a keening, crooning, mewling. It may or may not be wordless, but is in some ways similar to Michael Gira’s wordless articulations during the immense, immersive sonic expanses which have defined Swans output and performances in recent years – it’s not about song, or structure, but transcending sound and language. And in this context, the title, ‘Compelled’ takes on a clear and specific meaning: this is not music made for entertainment, or with an audience in mind, but music made because it needs to be made, the product of creativity as an outlet, a necessity as a means of getting through life in this insane world.

‘By Nature’ begins with distorted, distant babbling voices over a low, ominous drone, reminiscent to an extent of the start -and end – of ‘Pornography’ by The Cure. It’s dark and oppressive, not to mention somewhat disorientating. There are fragments of sampled narrative, but there are glitches, fractures, which disrupt it, and against this infernal, churning drone, chiming bells and similarly innocuous sounds take on a disturbing sense of portent, a certain horror-like suspense. Anyone familiar with the tropes of horror as a genre will be aware of how the most successful horror works because it transforms mundane situations to a source of fear by adding an undercurrent of the unknown, and / or a foreshadowing of nightmarish events ahead. This brings that quite specific sense of something bad about to happen. The digital bloops, computer game chimes and laser bleeps of ‘Compelled’ return, but this time against an altogether more sinister backdrop, a drone like a black hole opening up to swallow the entire solar system.

So many of the sounds are familiar, even if only vaguely so, but their collaging and recontextualization strips them of meaning by contextual connotation, and so what we find ourselves facing is something quite alien, and as such, uncomfortable, unsettling, even scary. What is this? What does it all mean? Only Deborah Fialkiewicz and (AN) EeL know – or perhaps even they don’t, really – perhaps – and it seems likely – Compelled by Nature is a work of instinct, something which happened because it simply came to be, and is as it is by happenstance. I can believe this is most likely, and that Compelled by Nature is more about process than product. It’s a compelling work. It is not, however, an album to be listened to in the dark.

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KLAMP – TOTAL TECHNITECH

Posted: 17 April 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Human Worth – 18th April 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

Given the event it supposedly commemorates, Good Friday has always seemed like a rather strange choice of name to give to the day – although I suppose for Christians it’s good because without it the religion probably wouldn’t exist. But this year, Good Friday actually lives up to its name, with the ever-dependable Human Worth dropping its second new release in a fortnight, this time in the form of TOTAAL TECHNIEK by KLAMP.

KLAMP first emerged in 2020, with the upfront Hate You, and since then, they’ve evolved considerably. Less a band and more of a fluid and ever-expanding collective, the original trio consisting of Jason Stoll (Sex Swing / Mugstar / JAAW), Lee Vincent (Pulled Apart by Horses) and Greg Wynne (Manatees) has now swelled to a lineup of seven performers, with Adam Devonshire (IDLES), Matthew Parker (Tall Ships), Rachael Morrison and Wayne Adams (Petbrick / Big Lad) having joined their ranks, along with a host of others who have contributed to this second album while passing through.

When approached in the right way – that is to say, with an open mind – collaboration can yield not only works which are greater than the sum of the parts, but unexpected results, as fresh input and different perspectives can throw wide open the doors to new ideas and possibilities. The converse of this is when a collaboration finds those involved arriving with egos fully inflated and preconceived ideas, and they simply stifle one another into playing to form. It’s abundantly clear that KLAAMP foster a spirit of experimentalism, a willingness to try things out, and see what transpires. The list of genres and influences, direct or implicit, noted in the liner notes is immense, and a reminder of why genres are not really the friend of artists who go with the flow of whatever happens creatively. But rather that dwell on that excessively, I’m simply going to replicate the ‘FFO’ list which accompanies the release, because it not only illustrates the stylistic range TOTAAL TECHNIEK offers, but also sets the scene in terms of expectation: ‘Swans / Sonic Youth / Black Sabbath / Godspeed You Black Emperor / Mark Lanegan / Einstürzende Neubauten / The Fall / Sunn O))) / Wire / Aphex Twin / Portishead / Godflesh / Earth / My Bloody Valentine / Gnod / Anna Von Hausswolf / The Bug and more… ‘ In other words, while there’s a lot of heavy and noisy stuff happening, there’s a whole lot more besides.

This means that the appropriately-titled ‘The First Song’ commences the set not with skull-crushing heavyweight riffery, but a subtle sense of ambience. Drones hover ominously, while chittering extranea evoke almost jungle-like sounds while distant beats flicker and echo like a collapsed synapse before they strickle into a drifting, psychedelic indie dream. There may be hints of later Earth about it, but ultimately it’s mellow and shoegazy, and while the pedals kick in just shy of the five minute mark, it’s steering hard in the vein of desert rock with an easy-going vibe, even with the raging vocals which are practically submerged in the mix. As it carries you along on its warm currents, there’s no frustration that this isn’t the heavy shit they’d promised. It’s simply good music, and has atmosphere and texture.

‘Zpine’ brings motorik drumming, a hint of Pavement crossed with Stereolab, with some noisy guitars slashing and splashing cross the solid, sequenced groove, while the vocals are harsh and ragged. The mid-section goes full Hawkwind, and the weirder and more wide-ranging it gets, the better it gets, too.

The album’s shortest song, ‘Wet Leather’ is a bass-led Krautrock-influenced psych-hued droner that bounces along nicely, and while it does kick off heavy a minute or so in, it mostly kinda comes on like The Fall circa Code: Selfish but with guitars from early Ride swirling all over.

‘Leprozenkapel’, the fourth track – which marks the end of side one – brings the rage and the noise and the throbbing noise, and it’s dark and heavy, and in some respects calls to mind late 80s Ministry as it pounds and snarls. Those drums, totally overloading with distortion and a metallic crunch… this is mean and brutal, while the eight-and-a-half-minute ‘The Crying Towel’ is different again, and altogether kinder. This is good: we need more kindness right now. And at some point a couple of minutes in, the ball-busting, super-weighty riff comes in, and there it is. But there are layers, texture, elements of shoegaze and more atop the lumbering rockout riffery. There is a lot happening here, and KLAAMP balance e it all perfectly.

Things shift towards menacing, doomy black metal on ‘Evil Pipe’, but the album ends – with another epic track in the form of the seven-and-a-half-minute title track, that comes on like a meshing of Joy Division or early New Order – particularly with the drumming – and Doves, before going full Melvins. And it somehow works. Of course, Human Worth would never release a crap album, but TOTAL TECHNITECH is truly outstanding. It’s not just the concept,  but in the delivery, and it’s all killer.

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Deadpop – Ohm

Posted: 16 April 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Human Worth – 11th April 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

Name three great but seemingly disparate acts for a collaboration, and the chances are that no-one, but no-one would pick Ghold, Bruxa Maria, and Test Dept. But here we are with the arrival of Ohm by Deadpop, which promises ‘Hard hitting & riff heavy sludge rock’ out of London.

It’s a pretty far-out work, it has to be said. Riding in on a siren-like wave of noise, ‘Saboteur’ announces the album’s arrival loudly and intensely, and it makes you sit up, alright, and your eyes pop when the guitars slam in after some forty seconds – which is a long time when it comes to listening to twitching, glitching feedback. The bass and drums meld together in a thick sludge of overdrive.

I’m not sure what the two parts of ‘Tomahawk’ are about – although it’s probably more likely to be a punk thing or the missile than expensive steak, and they bleed together for forge six minutes of thunderous racket which takes me back to circa 2009 when bands like Pulled Apart by Horses, Blacklisters, Chickenhawk (later rebranded as Hawk Eyes), and These Monsters were exploding on the Leeds scene. Sure, there’s been noisy shit in circulation forever, and grunge may have opened the doors to a wider, more mainstream, audience, but the indie charts and John Peel’s radio show was chock-solid with wayward guitar-driven racket. Human Worth have championed big noise from day one, but have perhaps leaned toward a different shade – or perhaps there hasn’t been anything quite of this nature released recently. And am I really feeling nostalgia for circa 2009? Well, actually, perhaps I am. It was sixteen years ago, after all. Kids doing their GCSE exams weren’t even born then.

I digress – as usual – but it’s relevant when positioning this release, an album that brings the kind of big sonic mayhem that feels less common now, and in context, feels quite different from anything else that’s been released recently. ‘Tomahawk II’ adds the percussive frenzy of Test Dept to the party, calling to mind early releases like the ‘Compulsion’ 12” and Beating the Retreat.

‘Third Metal Wheel’ is a lurching cacophony of lumbering guitars, layers of echoed vocals, and thunderous drumming, the outcome being something akin to Melvins current releases, and while the monster riffology of ‘Dirt Cheap Rage’ provides but an interlude at under two minutes, it’s well placed ahead of the experimental oddity of ‘Disgrace’, which straddles sludge rock, heavy psychedelia, and punk.

The six-and-a-half-minute ‘Yesterday’ summarises the album, really: a thick, full-heft riff slogalong that pounds away, relentlessly, it calls to mind Melvins, but also encapsulates the spirit of all that is stoner, sludge, and doom in a capsule.

The album’s final track, ‘Skygrave’ delivers a driving finish, a blistering blast of full-on, speaker-shredding distortion, with some brief warping samples and disturbances thrown in for good measure, and it’s a truly brain-melting occurrence. If on the surface, Ohm is just another sludgy / stoner noise, the actuality is so much more: this is an album that brings a certain experimental bent, on top of all the riffs. And yes, it does bring all the riffs. And that’s a fact. Ohm is a heavyweight riff-slugger – and that’s a fact, too. This album is a beast.

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CEL – Five minutes to self-destruct

Posted: 15 December 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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Gagarin Records – 6th December 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

You might be hard-pressed to call CEL a supergroup, but Felix Kubin has been creating sound here, there, and everywhere for a long time now, and Five minutes to self-destruct is definitely a coming together of established creative forces, containing as it does five recordings of live tracks performed by longstanding Kubin and longstanding collaborator Hubert Zemler, remixed by Warsaw sound engineer Jan Wroński.

And the thing about creative collaborations is that they often rely on spontaneity, immediacy, the frisson between the individuals in proximity, feeding off one another in the moment. And so it is here, as the accompanying notes set out: ‘The expressiveness of these recordings is evident not only in their unbridled live energy, which can hardly be reproduced in the studio, but also in a musical nervousness that sets itself apart from the current wellness folklore of the modular community. The pieces gather in their DNA the paranoid plasma of cultural unease, chaos and upheaval.’

To make a small sidestep, we hear endless decrees that employees need to return to the office in order to foster the spirit of collaboration and all the rest. We know that this is bollocks, and is simply about working the instruments of control. Collaboration and the coalescence of energy for creative ends is not something which cannot be forced, and it happens, regardless of distance, time, and space, given the right connection and chemistry. Hearing the performances on Five minutes to self-destruct, it’s immediately apparent that this is not something that could ever be created by desire or will alone.

As the accompanying bio notes, ‘The expressiveness of these recordings is evident not only in their unbridled live energy, which can hardly be reproduced in the studio, but also in a musical nervousness that sets itself apart from the current wellness folklore of the modular community. The pieces gather in their DNA the paranoid plasma of cultural unease, chaos and upheaval.’

The title track ‘Five minutes to self-destruct’ is a quote from Michael Crichton’s sci-fi classic The Andromeda Strain, which describes a research team’s fight for survival against an accidentally triggered self-destruct mechanism, underpinned by trigger impulses and increasing panic.

My own experience of the modular community may not be on quite the same scale or the same higher circles as theirs, but it does feel primarily the domain of the middle-class, middle-aged white male these days, and there’s a certain air of ease and the satisfaction of hobbyism about it. Needless to say, not so here. There’s a tension that runs throughout the entirety of the release. ‘Krakenwaltz’ cartwheels and loops in jittery circles, head-spinning rhythmic cycles with no small degree of attack, with some sharp, aggressive snare sounds and a frenetic, frantic undercurrent which grows increasingly disorientating over its near-six-minute duration.

‘Eskalacja’ is dominated by hectic percussion and a whirl of fairground bleeps and toots running in ever-tighter concentric circles. It some respects, it calls to mind the frenzied looping and wild, vaguely manic excesses of early Foetus 12” singles, seeing just how far they can push the concept, and themselves in the creation of hyperactive sound.

The seven-minute ‘Blauer Dunst’ which sits as the album’s centrepiece marks a distinct shift in tone and texture, a rumbling dark ambient piece that invites comparisons to some of the more abstract works of Throbbing Gristle. It predates the rest of the set by almost four years, having been recorded in October 2020.

It’s back to more upbeat, stomping percussion-led synth work on the DAF-like ‘Neustart Generation’ – but don’t mistake upbeat for uplifting: it clatters and bangs with a clipped, regimented, Germanic feel, and the grooves are taut and tense, and it’s simmering tension which crackles beneath the lumping, shuffling, organic rhythms which underpin the sparse, tetchy title track. A couple of minutes in, a loping percussive cycle breaks out and the repetition of this and the dominant synth motif, amidst a swell of extraneous sounds – samples, sirens – makes this one of those tracks where you can feel your blood pressure increasing as it progresses and the pace quickens to a blur. It ends before reaching the point of inducing an aneurysm, and the assurance to the applauding audience, “We’re still alive, it’s ok,” at the fae injects some unexpected humour to proceedings.

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Rupert Lally – Interzones

Posted: 30 November 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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Mortality Tables – 29th November 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

Because life experience creates linguistic associations, for me, it’s impossible to see or hear the word ‘interzone’ without immediately thinking of William S. Burroughs. The title of a collection of short stories and ‘routines’ penned in the mid-1950s, Interzone was the working title of the seminal breakthrough novel Naked Lunch (1959), and the collection, published in 1990 consists of segments which failed to make the final cut. The pieces were written while Burroughs was living in Tangier, something of a haven for expat writers, including, perhaps most notably, Paul Bowles, but also polyartist and true inventor of the cut-up method, Brion Gyson. Burroughs described the city as an ‘interzone’, and it was indeed both an ‘international zone’, as the portmanteau implies, and a space between zones, outside of any single culture or jurisdiction, its administration divided between the US, French, Spanish, and English sectors, where ‘nothing is true, everything is permitted’. Of course, there are numerous other connotations, but this is what I’m bringing in terms of prececeptional baggage to this.

The accompanying notes certainly indicate that the album’s content holds up to these parallel positions: ‘Like its name implies, these are place of transiency. Intermediate places. In-between locations. Melting pots of different people and different ideas, constantly evolving as one thing collides with another, and another, and another.’

The album was initially recorded in 2022 as a solo work, but subsequently scrapped and rerecorded with a different collaborator on each composition. Collaborations do tend to bring out different aspects of an artist, and it should therefore be of no surprise that this suite of nine pieces, recorded between 2022 and 2024 in Switzerland, England, Luxembourg, France and Zimbabwe, is eclectic in its take on electronica.

As the bookending pieces, ‘Entry Visa’ and ‘Exit Visa’ indicate, travel, movement, and transition, are the key themes here. But this is not some pan-cultural pick ‘n’ mix grab-bag, and instead creates an experience which replicates the disorientation of travel. It’s difficult to articulate just how this sonic patchwork works, or quite how the experience feels. It’s not as if it lurches from techno to grunge, to opera, to thrash, and in this respect Lally’s works represent his ‘two inches of ivory’, so to speak. But within the realm of electronica, Interzones covers substantial ground.

‘Play Position’, featuring Salford Electronics, is a sample-packed exploratory work with a prominent beat, which contrasts considerably with the near-ambience of ‘A Stealth Approach’, featuring Scanner; contrasting further, Simon Fisher Turner brings a sort of drawling space-age country aspect to ‘Calmer’, before things take a spin toward out-and-out trance on the title track, and Karen Vogt’s airy, soft vocals on ‘Running Circles’ pull the album gently into hypnotic shoegaze territory. The album continues on this trajectory, sliding deeper into dark, gothy electropop with ‘Ripples’.

The insistent beat and overtly dance style of ‘Exit Visa’ makes for an unexpected change in direction – despite the fact that, by this point, nothing should be truly unexpected. The effect, however, is disorientating, and you find yourself wondering how you came from A to B over the duration of the album. It’s testament to both Lally’s compositional skills and his selection of contributors – as well as the album’s sequencing – that somehow, it flows and the transitions themselves are seamless, which only heightens the sense of moving between spaces with no real sense of how it came to pass. Vitally, Interzones is a subtly detailed work, with hidden depths and moments of genuine beauty.

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Watch: ‘Let the Flowers Grow’ by Peter Murphy & Boy George

Posted: 8 November 2024 in Recommended Streams and Videos, Singles and EPs
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Legendary artists Peter Murphy and Boy George have combined forces for a gorgeously majestic new single entitled ‘Let The Flowers Grow’. Produced and co-written by Youth, their duet on what is a profoundly emotional orchestral masterpiece is available from today on Metropolis Records.
Murphy recalls: “I was recording my new album in Spain with Youth and, while listening to a playback of a song, I heard another piece of music coming from his mobile phone. It caught my ear for its melodic beauty as well as a Roy Orbison-like voice that was singing it.” Upon learning that it was an unfinished demo written by Boy George, he was intrigued and asked Youth if he could work on the partial song. “In a matter of twenty minutes, we had ‘Flowers…’ finished.”

“When I heard the mix, I was satiated in every way,” beams Boy George. “I have always loved Pete’s voice and his writing on this adds a beautiful darkness. The production feels very epic, like Scott Walker.”

Check it here:

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‘Let The Flowers Grow’ carries an air of elegance, the iconic voices of both singers delivering a message of hope and tolerance. Originally written by Boy George, its initial message was one of personal acceptance about being gay. As the song developed, it took on a more expansive and universal scope, its lyrics extending beyond sexuality and embracing race, gender, creed and religion. “With everything going on in the world about identity, it feels very powerful,” he explains.

The mutual adoration between the duo has spanned decades. “I first met Boy George when he asked to be allowed backstage to meet Howard Devoto when Bauhaus were supporting Magazine,” recalls Murphy. “He struck me as a super-original, self-styled 17th Century fop. The second time I met him was when we walked into the BBC to do ‘Ziggy Stardust’ on Top of the Pops where Culture Club were also making their debut on the show. George greeted me very warmly and I discovered he was a Bauhaus fan.”
With the single unveiled, Boy George adds:“It makes me dizzy and proud,” while Murphy concludes: “Boy George loves it and I’m so glad.”

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PETER MURPHY : photo by Jolene Siana  |  BOY GEORGE : photo by Dean Stockings

‘It’s going to be epic…’ The Foenale is near: JG Thirlwell interviewed by John Wisniewski

Posted: 2 November 2024 in Interviews
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Intro: Christopher Nosnibor

Interview: John Wisniewski

Images: individually credited, via Foetus.org

It’s been over forty-five years since Melbourne-born James George Thirlwell washed up on English shores, and having played some keyboards on the album No Cowboys by post-punk act PragVec in 1980, he embarked on what would become a truly remarkable and lifelong musical journey of his own.

Along the way, he’s released no fewer than eleven studio albums under an array of variants of the Foetus moniker, not to mention quite literally dozens of other musical vehicles from big band (Steroid Maximus) to more experimental instrumental work (Manorexia) and almost everything in between, not to mention powerful collaborations with Marc Almond (Flesh Volcano), Jim Coleman (Baby Zizane), Lydia Lunch (Stinkfist), and the late Roli Mosimann (Wiseblood), to name but three of many. And then there are the numerous scores… and yet whatever he turns his hand to, his work has a certain distinctive style, a sense of drama.

Foetus may have been on hiatus since 2013, but at the age of sixty-four, Thirlwell is showing no signs of slowing down. John Wisniewski managed to catch a window in the man’s relentless schedule to ask about his myriad projects past, present, and future…

JW: Did you formally study music, JG?

JGT: I briefly learned cello and percussion when I was a kid. But I was very slow with sight reading.

Later I just taught myself everything from instruments to recording, programming, scoring etc.

Tell us about your first music project, Foetus. What did you want to present?

The initial catalyst for Foetus was to create something totally by myself, where I played wrote and produced everything, as a reaction to the democracy of playing with other people. I wanted to make the music in my head and the music I wanted to hear. I also wanted to create artifacts, a work of art as a multiple where everyone owned an original. It took me a long time to be able to fully realize what was in my head. I’m still not always successful with that transfer process.

How did the Lydia Lunch collaboration come about?

I knew Lydia’s work and was introduced to her when she moved to London in about 1982 through the Birthday Party. At first she asked me to write her a press bio as I had been writing fanciful bios for the Birthday Party! First I played sax with one of her projects which we toured with in Sweden. Then we started writing songs for something called The Hard Diamond Drill, which was never realized. Then we created Stinkfist and went on to make Immaculate Consumptive. We became involved romantically and moved to NYC together. I was with her until about 1989 / 1990.

Any favorite music artists?

Many favorite artists, it changes daily. I become obsessed with someone for an afternoon. I like to hear new things all the time. I am a cultural sponge. I publish a monthly playlist on my Tumblr blog. https://jgthirlwell.tumblr.com/

What inspires you to create?

Everything. I have so many ideas, it is an infinite renewable resource. I also have a hungry legacy and I have to make sacrifices to its insatiable maw.

Another legendary early collaboration was with Nick Cave. How did that one come about?

The Birthday Party broke up. Nick was looking to work with other people and we were friends. We wrote the music for one song together, which was Wings Off Flies on the first Bad Seeds album. When he came to record that album I went to some sessions, but drifted away as I was in the midst of a big bout of recording of Foetus material, the sessions that became the Hole album. A bit later we had the Immaculate Consumptive project – Oct 1983.

Do you like collaborating with other artists?

I have gotten better at it.

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Photo by Marylene May

What was the experience like working with Marc Almond and Trent Reznor’s material?

Marc is very open minded and works very fast and is excited by music that challenges him and stretches the boundaries of what he has done. So that is stimulating. For Trent I remixed two of his songs, “Wish" and "Mr Self Destruct". I did my work on it, mutating the original material. he wasn’t involved. He liked what I did.

Do you like to work within different genres of music?

You may have noticed one of the hallmarks in my music, is that I combine multiple styles often within one song.

What are you working on now?

New Xordox album Terraform, Venture Bros Volume 3 and Foetus HALT should all be out in 2025.

Also under way are two albums of symphonies for chamber orchestra, and album of soundtracks I have written for Ken Jacobs. An EP with Laura Wolf, a triple box of music I created for sound and art installations. Hopefully another Archer soundtrack album. And much more.

Why do you have so many projects on the go (and how do you manage it)?
I like to work in a lot of styles and on a lot of projects in different forms – solo pieces, ensemble pieces, multi channel, electronic, acoustic, vocal, instrumental. Concert works, classic songs, scoring. I have a lot of ideas to get out of my system. There’s no one project that can harvest everything. There are things that I get out of my system with Foetus which are totally different to the place I am in when I create a sound installation, or a soundtrack,

My projects are usually staggered, which is to say a lot of projects in different states of completion. So I shunt them all along and they get completed in different paces. Then new ones sprout up. I couldn’t just work on one thing.

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Do you ever take time out and what do you do to unwind?
Yes I stop to watch movies, see art and travel. But my work is perpetual motion, I don’t need to unwind from it. I believe in being creative every day. That’s also manifested on ideas I have for visual art, photography etc
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I’ve read elsewhere that the upcoming Foetus album, as the title alludes, is slated to be your last. What can we expect from it?
Tying up forty five years of Foetus is no mean feat and I have been working on it for seven years. There are parts that make it seem like a continuum and other parts that have never been done in the Foetus context. It’s going to be epic.

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Catch up on JG Thirlwell’s output on his Bandcamp page.

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