Posts Tagged ‘Dance’

Watch ‘Pressing Against the Glass’ by Max Rael

Posted: 16 August 2025 in Recommended Streams and Videos, Singles and EPs
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British electronic artist Max Rael presents ‘Pressing Against The Glass’, a danceable elegy for the unbelonging. Capturing the deep-seated ache of being on the outside, this is a soundtrack for those who feel eternally separated from the warmth and safety they can only observe.

Based in Hertfordshire, Max Rael is a key creative force in the UK underground through 1990s-2000s electro-goth trailblazers History Of Guns, frontrunners of the Wasp Factory / FuturePunk scene, and Decommissioned Forests. Here, he showcases his singular talents on this record, featuring unique twists on sound design and his acclaimed outsider lyrical perspectives. Musician, writer, actor, engineer and producer, Max Rael has collaborated with Fish (Marillion), Last July, Kommand + Kontrol, Freudstein and Bienheldenschafgegenstand.

“I’ve always been taken by the image of someone being outside alone in the cold looking in through a window to warmth, comfort and safety that’s not for them. I was thinking of Heathcliff looking through the windows of Thrushcross Grange in Wuthering Heights or Frank Abagnale Jr in the film "Catch Me If You Can", outside in the snow at Christmas, unseen looking in through the window at his mother with her new family, happy and warm indoors and realising there is nowhere he belongs, and no one he belongs to,”  says Max Rael.

This is the latest audio-visual offering from his debut solo album The Enemy Is Us, released via London imprint Liquid Len Media. Offering up a dark bouquet of minimalist synth, darkwave and spoken-word electronic pop, this album introduces Rael’s compelling ‘futuretroist’ sound: an alternative sonic universe built on a unique sound design that feels at once familiar and alien.

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Rael’s powerful and thought-provoking spoken-word lyrics confronts a world in freefall—its corruption, alienation, and misery. The result seemingly effortlessly conflates a painfully personal portrait of an interior world, with an achingly universal depiction of society and the world outside. He still unearths a resilient core of hope and gallows humour that burns brightly through the darkness, offering a complex and compelling take on the human condition.

Earlier, Max Rael released the poignant shadow-streaked ‘Slightly Less Than Human’, a nervy electronic track with a great hooky synth melody and spoken word vocals. Partly inspired by Japanese author Osamu Dazai. Lyrically, Max Rael relays his feeling of being somehow different from the rest of the human race, while the non-album B-side ‘When the Only Winning Move Is Not to Play’ relates to the 1983 film War Games and the book The Games People Play by Eric Berne.

In April, Max Rael shared his spoken-word electronic pop song ‘Brighter Future’, where he questions avoidant strategies of coping with life in a seemingly increasingly chaotic and unsafe world and queries how can we reverse course from an anticipated dystopian future. The B-side ‘The People We Love Have Won (Persistence Is All)’ is a darker beast, named after Coil’s 2000 London performance at The Royal Festival Hall, which also happens to be tattooed on the inside of Rael’s left wrist.

Spoken word, electronic music and loud drums feature strongly on the 12-track album, produced and mixed by Max Rael with additional mixing by Caden Clarkson and mastered by Pete Maher (U2, Nick Cave, Depeche Mode, Pixies. Nine Inch Nails). Fusing a range of electronic music styles with other genres, Max Rael is a master journeyman of existential exploration into humanity, self, society, reality, psychology, philosophy and the future.

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Listen: ‘PUSHING UP DAISIES’ by HONESTY

Posted: 11 August 2025 in Recommended Streams and Videos, Singles and EPs
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Leeds collective HONESTY have shared a brand new track titled ‘PUSHING UP DAISIES’. George Mitchell takes lead vocal duties, delivering a gentle, intimate performance that contrasts the song’s morbid subject matter. The result is a subtly exhilarating take on club music that’s become HONESTY’s signature and the reason they’re one of the most essential dance acts coming out of the UK. The track was released today in tandem with ‘MEASURE ME (ALT MIX),’ which injects even more rave-fueled vitality into the lead single from their debut album which came out this Feb, this time led by an ethereal performance from vocalist Imi Marston. Listen here:

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HONESTY (Credit Dan Commons)

Will Long – Long Trax 4

Posted: 3 February 2025 in Albums, Recommended Streams and Videos
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Long Trax Productions – 31st January 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

The brief liner notes are almost as perplexing as the cover art and the rest of Will Long’s Bandcamp page. I mean, you might think that the title is the key here. While clocking in around the eleven-minute mark, these compositions, as much as they’re far from short, well, I’ve certainly heard many longer trax, with many albums featuring a single twenty-minute piece on each side. But of course, it’s a pun. Sort of. Regardless, spreading these four tracks across four sides of vinyl feels somewhat indulgent, although I won’t go quite as far as to say exploitative, despite the temptation.

Will Long has to date created an extensive catalogue of work, both with Celer, since 2004, and as a solo artist – and when I say ‘extensive’, I mean extensive, with Celer having released around a hundred albums (if you include collaborations and compilations), and his solo output is equally overwhelming in volume. The Long Trax releases have arrived sporadically between other releases, and are broadly connected, in stylistic terms. As Long puts it, ‘round 4 of the Long Trax series [is] the pivotal moment of truth. Four new deep cuts spread across 4 sides of vinyl in dual sleeves, and spun onto disc. An all-analog, hardware machine affair, full of glacial pads and icy stabs, rhythm composure (composer) sequences, round booming basslines, and narrators from beyond. It’s the real thing, still chugging along.’

Less than a minute into ‘One in the Future’, I’m feeling late 90s chilled techno vibes, and I’m dragged back to a handful of club experiences where I fucking hated the music and I hated the posers.

I’ll admit, I’ve always had something of a fraught relationship with dance music and its culture. I suppose I’ve generally leaned towards rock, but have found spaces in my head and heart for some dance and adjacent, loving the KLF from the start, and so much of the electronic music from the late 70s and early 80s. Chris and Cosey’s Trance is a straight-up dance album, and I dig it not just because it’s a Throbbing Gristle-related release. But, as I discovered when visiting a club in Brighton on visiting friends in the late 90s, some stuff, I just struggle to connect with. And this is it. To add to my story, I attended an Optimo night in Glasgow in 2004 to see Whitehouse. It was a strange event, in that most were there for the downtempo dance, which was halted for three quarters of an hour while William Bennet and Philip Best cranked out the most punishing, ear-shredding set to the sheer horror of the majority, before smooth beats returned, to their relief. My experience was inverse to the majority. Whitehouse did not go down well: the end of their set did. As the relentless bouncing beats returned, I was happy to leave, as were my whistling, devastated ears.

‘One in the Future’ is the longest eleven minutes of nondescript sonic wallpaper I have had the pain to endure in over a decade. It’s the monotony that hurts. It’s soulless, tedious, and nothing happens. And this is a fair summary of the album as a whole. To my ear, to my mind, to my insides, it feels so devoid of… anything that I can connect to. The samples blare, the squelchy synths blip and bloop and pulsate over tedious beats and maybe I need different drugs or a different brain, but this is relentlessly tedious, monotonous and crushingly dull. Get me out of here!

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Bloom – The Season – Xmas mouse mix

Posted: 26 November 2024 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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26th November 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

Deborah Fialkiewicz has been keeping busy – as usual. Composer of contemporary classical, ambient, and dark noise works both as a solo artist and in various collaborative permutations and guises, she’s back with a new BLOOM release in collaboration with Daniel James Dolby. And it’s a Christmas single.

I’ve never been rabid about Christmas, and the last three years have seen a succession of difficult Christmases for me personally. In December 2021, my wife was diagnosed with stage 4 breast cancer. We weren’t even sure if she would be home for Christmas. She was, but was incredibly weak after three weeks in hospital, and that she was able to sit at the table for Christmas dinner felt like a miracle. We were in shock, and she was clearly unwell. Having made substantial improvements in rebuilding her strength through 2022, she deteriorated with the onset of winter, and again was weak and struggling over Christmas. It still doesn’t seem real that she only had another three weeks. And so Christmas 2023 was the first with just me and my daughter, aged twelve. We made the best of it, but it wasn’t the same. I detail this not for sympathy, but purely for context. It means that while around this time of year it becomes nigh on impossible to avoid festive fervour, with adverts depicting happy couples and radiant nuclear families, all the usual Christmas tunes and an inbox busting with new ones clamouring for coverage, and Facebook friends and work colleagues are dizzy with excitement over getting their decorations up, sorting secret Santa and planning social activities, I’m not feeling much enthusiasm, concerned primarily with getting through it and hoping distant relatives don’t think I’m rude or twatty for not sending cards out for the second year in succession.

When writing about music, I am often – and perhaps increasingly – aware that how we engage with it, how it affects us, is intensely personal and involves multitudinous factors. Sometimes, it’s something as arbitrary as the mood we’re in when we hear a song that will determine our response. And the chances are – and I’m no doubt not alone in this – hearing chirpy tunes when I’m down isn’t going to cheer me up, it’s going to really piss me off, or set me off. It’s impossible to predict. To be safe, I tend to try to avoid Christmas songs, which involves avoiding TV and radio – which is surprisingly easy if you spend large chunks of your time in a small room reviewing obscure music – avoiding shops – manageable – tacky pubs – easy – and ignore review requests for Christmas singles.

But there is always space for an exception, and Bloom’s ‘The Season’ is it. Deborah may have been posting pics on Facebook of the ‘festive mouse’ in the studio to mark this release, but said mouse is looking over a piece of kit called ‘Psychosis Lab’ made by Resonance Circuits. The cuddly cartoon cover art for this release is misleading, and for that, I am grateful.

It’s five minutes of deep, hefty beats melded to a throbbing industrial synth bass. Atop this thumping dance-orientated rhythm section, there are synths which bring a dark 80s synthpop vibe. In combination, the feel is in the vein of a dance remix of Depeche Mode circa ‘85 or ’86, around the point they began making the transition from bouncy pop toward altogether darker territories. It’s repetitive, hypnotic, pulsating, big on energy. But there are eerie whispers which drift through it all, distant wails like spirits rising from their graves. These haunting echoes are more evocative of Halloween than Christmas – and this is a significant part of the appeal. It’s a curious combination of ethereal mists and hefty, driving dance groove, which is simultaneously uplifting, tense, and enigmatic. It is not schmaltzy, cheesy, twee, or saccharine. It’s the season, alright. The season to be weird, to be unconventional, to accept those darker moods and remember that they will pass. It’s a Christmas anthem for those who aren’t feeling festive. And I will most certainly drink to that.

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Andrew Brenza / alka – pod

Posted: 3 November 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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Mortality Tables – 1st November 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

Spoken word is hard. I know. I’ve done it. I’ve been terrible at it. I’ve witnessed countless others be terrible at it, too. Spoken word is even harder as a prose writer. It’s just so difficult to hold an audience’s attention. This is why spoken word events seem to favour poetry: whether they rhyme or not, poems tend to focus on rhythm and to be brief, rarely longer than aa couple of minutes. And a lot of poets manage to memorise their pieces for performance, and poets who ‘read’ tend to be looked down upon in certain circles. It’s rather harder to memorise and recite a three-page slab of prose, and face buries in pages makes performing and engaging altogether harder. But worst of all, people simply don’t seem to possess the attention span.

Reading prose is hard. A segment of a story may not really work outside if its intended context, and a short story that only takes three minutes to read isn’t going to have much substance.

There’s a huge disconnect here: people listen to audiobooks but struggle with spoken word or anything that isn’t a renowned author or a celebrity voicing an accessible, pot-driven narrative.

William Burroughs told Philippe Mikriammos in an interview in 1984 that ‘many poets are simply lazy prose writers.’ He qualified this by explaining, ‘I can take a page of descriptive prose and break it into lines, as I’ve done in Exterminator!, and then you’ve got a poem.’

It’s true.

Chop your sentences down to phrases.

Cut your phrases down,

Down to their component parts,

Capitalise each line

– unless you’re e e cummings –

And lo,

You have a poem.

Burroughs had the advantage of recording his spoken word pieces and performing segments from his books in the 60s, 70s, 80s, when the medium was still comparatively fresh, and people had attention spans greater than goldfish, and had the additional benefits of a remarkable flair for reading and a truly unique voice. Here in the 2020s, it can be hard to attract – and maintain – any kind of attention with an audience. As I say, I know: I’ve done it, and I’ve been terrible at it. I’ve also been alright at it. I’ve driven people from the room, and considered it an achievement, because it’s infinitely better to have an impact of that nature than for audience members to fall asleep, or worse, forget the performance. The challenge for any spoken-word performer, be it in a live setting or in a studio, is how to grab, and maintain, the attention of any audience.

Here, Andrew Brenza reads from his book pod (ghosTTruth, 2023) with accompaniment from sound artist and electronic instrument restorer alka (Vince Clarke’s VeryRecords). Instrumental augmentation is the most obvious and immediate way of grabbing the attention. It transforms a spoken word work into a multimedia project, for a start, and moreover, the moment ‘music’ is involved, a whole new audience – which likely has no interest in spoken word – opens up.

His voice processed with a metallic flanged edge and epic reverb, and against an ominous organ droning ambient hum, Brenza becomes commanding, not to mention eerie in his delivery. This is the fine line all spoken word performers must tread, of course, but here it is felt acutely: The delivery can often overrun the work; style overtakes concept and content.

I find myself drawn into the delivery of pod – the sounds, the delivery. But engrossed in these, the content slips to become secondary, in a way. But perhaps that’s ok. ‘Intermission Meander’ provides a bleapsome interlude, and the narrative segments are vignettes, segmented scenes which are centred around image and concept rather than linear narrative, events, or characters. In this context, this release works. It is not an audiobook, but an audio accompaniment to a book. It’s difficult to absorb, but a successful project.

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Watch: ‘Land of the Tyrants’ by Benefits feat. Zera Tønin

Posted: 17 September 2024 in Recommended Streams and Videos, Singles and EPs
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Benefits blast in ahead of another substantial UK / EU tour with the release of the first new material since their debut album, Nails.

‘Land of the Tyrants’ features additional vocals by Zera Tønin of Arch Femmesis.

It may be more overtly dancey than previous outings, hitting an almost trance groove, perhaps even a bit KLF, and the rage is more simmering than roaring in in terms of delivery, but lyrically… as explosive as ever, ‘Land of the Tyrants’ tells it like it is. The video is more overtly produced, but it’s dark and stark. It’s grim up north, right?

Tour dates:

05/10 HUDDERSFIELD Parish

06/10 LANCASTER Kanteena

07/10 GLASGOW The Hug and Pint

08/10 EDINBURGH Wee Red Bar

09/10 ABERDEEN Tunnels

10/10 STIRLING Tolbooth

11/10 MIDDLESBROUGH Play Brew

12/10 LIVERPOOL The Shipping Forecast

13/10 PRESTON The Ferret

17/10 ROTTERDAM Left of the Dial Festival

18/10 UTRECHT ACU

19/10 ROTTERDAM Left of the Dial Festival

20/10 OSTEND Cafe de Zwerver

22/10 SOUTHAMPTON The Joiners 23/10 BRIGHTON Hope and Ruin

24/10 MARGATE Where Else

25/10 LONDON The George Tavern

26/10 NEWPORT Le Pub

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Pic: Tom White

Polevaulter – Hang Wave

Posted: 24 January 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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26th January 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

Polevaulter haven’t come from nowhere but have, it seems, evolved – or devolved – from a regular band with guitars and a regular drummer, to a brutal drum-machine driven duo, a model which has landed them some high-profile support slots and attention in their own right. Debuting – at least in this incarnation – with ‘HILTSCTW’ (That’s ‘How I Learnt To Stop Chewing The Wasp And Face The Bulldog’) in February 2020, they’ve put out a couple of EPs on tape and CD, both of which have sold out, as well as a couple of digital singles, ahead of this, their debut album, which they performed live for eight hours straight and streamed it on YouTube as a fundraiser for Palestine the other week. It might not have had the intensity of one of their half-hour support sets, but it set out their position politically and as people, suggesting that as much as they’re about impact, they’re also about endurance.

With the exception of the last couple of singles, none of the songs on Hang Wave have been previously released. Hang Wave, then, is no sweeping up of their catalogue to date, but an album proper, and a work which is focused on where they’re at now, not where they were.

It’s a thudding pulsing bass drum bear that drives ‘Mia Goth Made Me Do It’, the first of the album’s ten tracks. It’s tense, and it’s dark: the bass is low-slung and bulbous, but the vocals are subject to really high-treble EQ and some crisp, dry reverb which gives them a harsh edge. This is no gentle introduction: they’re straight in and at the jugular. A mangled, confrontational industrial / goth assault, it makes for a challenging, confrontational opening to an album that’s stark and uncompromising.

Single ‘Trend’ packs snappy (and in places somewhat bizarre) lyrics, with lines like ‘Don’t tell me to put my vase away’ and ‘I do a line off a horses dick’, and stuttering beats, a monstrous bastard of a bass noise and some woozy discordant notes that bend and melt in the incendiary heat of the fire of the vocal ferocity. ‘Pissed in the Baths’, just unveiled as a final taster of the album is another murky morass of dingy post-punk, and as likely to deter more prospective listeners than it will attract. You get the impression that Polevaulter couldn’t care less, and that they’re not doing this to garner popularity, to get played on the radio, for accolades or to get rich or famous – which is a good job: in articulating alienation and also simply venturing, without restraint, down the deepest, darkest, and most obscure tunnels against a backdrop of the most unrefined, angular noise, Polevaulter have pretty much guaranteed they will achieve none of these things. Of course, in repelling the majority, they’re appealing to an extremely devoted minority of people who actively enjoy music that hurts, physically and mentally.

It’s hard to make out what the fuck they’re ranting and raving about most of the time, but the delivery – half spoken word, half hollering – is strong and is a message in itself. Because anger is an energy, and shouting into the abyss is the most exultant catharsis. Polevaulter deliver that catharsis in the bluntest, starkest of manners, and the production accentuates it all.

‘Industry Plant Based’ seems to be a swipe at more than one contemporary issue, and it’s fair to say it’s hard to imagine an act further from The Last Dinner Party.

There are no tunes to speak of on Hang Wave, and choruses are in short supply, too. Perhaps the most obvious and valid points of comparison are Benefits and Sleaford Mods – but whereas the latter bring hooks and groove, Polevaulter present nothing but bleak trudging, and while the former are focused on the channelling of rage with passion and a politically-charged message of unity, Polevaulter bring us blank nihilism delivered with a twist of crushing desolation. There are dance elements in the mix, but the mix is a cement mixer churning away a blend of grit and napalm, and this is nowhere more strongly evidenced than on single cut ‘Violently Ill’, a song so wrecked as to twist your intestines, while the air-raid siren howl of ‘GabWorld’ is chilling and unsettling.

The album winds up in a twitching, glitching, explosive mess in the form of the snarking, sparking, meltdown that is ‘any%WR’.

Hang Wave is harsh. There are no mellow moments, or softer interludes. There is nothing remotely pretty or pleasant about it, either. Outside, a storm rages – the second in as many days, and the tenth since October. The river just a few hundred yards away has burst its banks again. The sound of other people’s recycling rattles past my front door as it bowls down the street, and it’s a potent reminder of the reality and the palpable effects of climate change. It looks very much like we’re on the brink of WW3 s the UK and US dig deeper into their commitment to fire missiles into Yemen; Gaza is all but decimated; Trump looks like he’ll running for president once again, and no-one seems particularly concerned because they’re fretting about how they’ll pay the rent and the next energy bill. It’s a sick, sick world. All of it mounts up and compounds and you feel ill. With Hang Wave, Polevaulter do absolutely nothing to lift the mood or make you feel better, but Hang Wave is the perfectly bleak, nihilistic to these utterly fucked-up times.

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ALTR∞ – Infinite

Posted: 1 January 2024 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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12th December 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

German electro duo ALTR∞ seem like a pretty chipper pair, pronouncing the arrival of their second EP with the theatrical, Shakespeare-referencing proclamation ‘The world is not a stage, it’s a dancefloor: welcome to the Cosmic dancefloor of Eternity!’

They go on to explain how the ‘INFINITE’ EP is a celebration of the complexity and the beauty of life and the connection that binds us all! The broad spectrum of music influences, woven into the EP’s music tapestry, symbolises the infinite flow of ideas and references that shape and drive the Collective Consciousness. We hope that these songs will make you feel free: dancing and releasing all worries and troubles! We wanted to try new things, while exploring a more dancefloor-oriented sound, while still sticking to our own style. The energy was there and the rest just happened as usual – immersing in the magic of the studio and channelling our feelings!’

The EP’s four tracks span just over eighteen minutes, and while they are certainly very rhythmically-orientated, in terms of commercial dance, they’re not what anyone would call bangin’ dance choonz – not even your dad or your grandad. Sonically, Infinite sits somewhere in the middle ground between the minimal techno favoured by Gilles Peterson on his 6 Music show, and the kind of stuff I find modular synth fanatics noodling out at the Electronic Music Open Mic nights we have around the country.

‘I Saw the Future’ is, ironically, a squelchy analogue workout that’s decidedly retro, and the sparse vocals are more 90s dance track dub remix than avant-garde futurism. The vocal snippets add layers or mystique and esotericism, ‘Hurricane’ brings more urgent beats, clattering hand drums rattling over a thudding bass drum and pulsating groove, with weaving synths conjuring an expansive and trace-like atmosphere. The last track, ‘Infinite Mind’ pulses away in an inwardly-focused way.

This isn’t music that will send you wild or dance yourself into a frenzy, but will instead likely catapult you into inner space, and inspect your own psychological circuitry – in a most pleasant way. It kinda sounds like the cover looks.

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Binary Order – Thrown Away EP

Posted: 2 August 2023 in Singles and EPs
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26th June 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

‘Industrial’ is a definition that’s shifted significantly over the years. The shift seems to have come some time in the late eighties or early nineties, when the likes of Ministry and Pitch Shifter were breaking into a much more mass-market audience: the former smashed MTV with the singles from Psalm 69, with even Beavis and Butthead getting down to ‘NWO’ and proclaiming ‘even the old dude is cool’ in reference to William Burroughs’ appearance in the video to ‘Just One Fix’. It seems hard to reconcile the enormity of that album with the face of music in the media now, but the early 90s really were something. You’ll read endlessly about how Nirvana smashed open the doors and so on, and perhaps to an extent that’s true, but they were simply a part of the zeitgeist in an era when MTV focused on ‘M’, and you would find bands like Soundgarden and Butthole Surfers and Rage Against the Machine being played alongside ‘Sabotage’ by The Beastie Boys, and it didn’t seem incongruous with all the mediocre pap because, well, that was what people were listening to. I even picked up a Therapy? live bootleg CD in a record shop while on holiday in Venice in the summer of ’94. I was excited, but it didn’t seem particularly strange at the time. Pitchshifter, meanwhile, had named their debut album Industrial, and it was fucking heavy, but it wasn’t until they changed their sound and rode the wave of sports metal around the turn of the millennium that they got popular, doubtless aided by their intersection with The Prodigy.

But because of the bracketing of these bands as ‘industrial’ in the 90s, the original characteristics of what had previously been deemed ‘industrial’ became buried, and forgotten. It’s hard to really find a connection between Ministry and the likes of Throbbing Gristle and Cabaret Voltaire (at least musically: they all loved Burroughs, but Jourgensen’s fascination was more about the junkie guru legend, whereas TG and The Cabs were into exploring ways of applying the cut-ups and Burroughs’ tape experiments of the late 50s and early 60s to music.

Binary Order sit firmly in the bracket of contemporary industrial, or what many refer to as Industrial Metal, and with this release they really show their influences and wear them with pride.

Now, I do get somewhat twitchy when the running order of a review stream or download differs from the Bandcamp stream or whatever, because the flow of a release is important – at least to me, and I tend to consider the overall flow of a release in my appraisal of its success.

So we’re going with the Bandcamp sequence here, which kicks off with lead single and title track, ‘Thrown Away’, a cover of the song by the oft-maligned nineties nu-metal act Papa Roach, who, remarkably, are still going and releasing albums at a steady rate. Are people really still buying this shit? Rap Metal was surely one of the worst things to have happened to music… but here it is. They blast off the four-track EP with a chunky riff-dense rendition of ‘Thrown Away’, and with that out the way, be can finally turn to the rest of the EP.

The remaining three tracks are remixes of songs from their debut album, Songs from the Deep, released in November of last year. The ‘Bleeding Mix’ of ‘Parasite’ is a gut-churning gurgle of stuttering electronica, that starts with a pumping, shuddering beat and a quivering synth groove which provides a stark backdrop to the raw vocals… but then it gets a bit ravey and autotune and straddles the uncomfortable intersection between dancefloor and sonic assault.

The Arcadmix Remix of ‘A Good Death’ is altogether more atmospheric and moody, and works well, largely because it’s neither overtly dancey nor Industrial / Nu-Metal. The six-and-a-half-minute ‘Irreversible Mix’ of ‘Hands of Time’ manifests as a long, oppressive, darkly ambient drone that’s a real departure from the rest of the EP.

The diversity is the key strength of this release, paired with the fact that it shows a band wanting to push their limits and aren’t especially precious about how their material is reshaped or adhering rigidly too their chosen genre.

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Celestial North – Otherworld

Posted: 18 June 2023 in Albums
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7th July 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

A year after unveiling ‘The Nature of Light’ with the promise of a debut album in September 2022, Celestial North’s Otherworld is finally with us. With the title track and ‘Yarrow’ having also built a level of anticipation, it’s left like an album that’s been a long time coming.

Some things simply cannot be rushed, and Otherworld is appropriately-titled, as Celestial North creates songs which sound as if transported from another world, and another time. A she says of the album’s evolution, “I imagined that I was time-traveling through different and exciting worlds. Wandering through the ancient, sacred stone circles at Machrie Moor and then jumping straight into an underground rave in the forest.” And on Otherworld, she transports the listener on these journeys alongside her.

The album opens with the sweeping dreampop of ‘Are You Free’, which begins as a spoken word piece with misty synths, her Scottish accent strong and honest, before piano ripples in and she slides with grace and elegance into her lilting singing voice. It’s a question phrased as a statement, and I suppose it serves to remind us that whatever society’s constraints, we can, to an extent, choose our freedoms.

And yet, for all this ethereality and otherness, Otherworld has a deep-seated earthiness or sense of nature flowing through it. I don’t mean it feels like Celestial North is connected to nature: she is nature, and channels it through her ever molecule.

Raised in Scotland and now residing in Cumbria, Celestial North channels her natural surroundings and their rich, ancient history and heritage. Many artists have promotional photos shot by standing stones and in stone circles, but she describes her music as ‘pagan euphoria’, and listening to Otherworld, you feel that this isn’t image or posturing: these are the spaces where she belongs, and draws the energy from these places. Some – many – will likely dismiss the notion, but many of these locations do possess a unique and indescribable power that goes beyond mere awe. Castlerigg, near Keswick, is one which surprises me every time I visit; yet I have also felt something, like a crackle of electricity, on stumbling upon a minor circle, only half-intact, while in Scotland; the landscape was barren, and gorse had grown beside it, but the full circle was marked by a ring of nettles and a chill ran over me. These are the sensations which emanate from Otherworld.

Her piano-led rendition of REM’s ‘Nightswimming’ is a magnificently-realised slice of quintessentially dreamy indie. Ordinarily, I’d question placing a cover as the third track on an album, but context counts: this featured on a lauded and band-backed charity compilation released by God is in the TV – but moreover, it just works. ‘Olympic Skies’ is breezy, wistful, easy, airy, with a lilting melody that brings folk and dreamy indie into perfect alignment.

The aforementioned title track packs pitter-batter rhythms and sweeping synths and soaring backing vocals which wrap themselves around a fragile, yet confident-sounding lead vocal as it floats on air, before the more overtly 80s electro-sounding ‘Restless Spirit’, another paean to freedom, this time driven by a thumping dance beat. Her voice is unique and complex: it’s quiet, reserved, breathy, with hints of Suzanne Vega and The Corrs, but also Cranes’ Allison Shaw but also Maggie Riley on ‘Moonlight Shadow’. It makes for compelling listening, especially on songs like ‘The Stitch’, which convey powerful, wild-outdoors Celtic pagan vibes – but again, in an understated fashion. ‘Yarrow’ plays the album out with a rolling piano-based post-rock piece that’s sedate and soothing. Otherworld avoids the bombastic clichés which tend to mar much so-called pagan folk or electronic folk: many acts overdo the gothic leanings, and go for bold (melo)drama, which feels contrived and emotionally empty, simply because it’s trying too hard.

For Celestial North, it all comes naturally, and the dancier elements feel comfortable because one doesn’t get a sense of the artist trying to be simultaneously ‘hip’ and ‘deep’; this is simply her music, her style. Otherworld demonstrates that ‘powerful’ doesn’t have to be heavy or hard, and that ‘light’ doesn’t have to mean lightweight or flimsy. It’s accessible, but complex, deep but not dark or difficult. Sit back and let it carry you.

AA

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