Posts Tagged ‘Drone’

Deafkids / Kombi / Error Control – Boom, Leeds, 18th October 2026

Posted: 19 October 2026 in Live, Reviews
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Christopher Nosnibor

Doors opening at 7 suggests an early start and early finish, and sure enough Error Control is on at 7:30. It’s very quiet in terms of attendance – so quiet initially I’m wondering if I’ve got the wrong night, but the beer’s decent enough and there’s some pounding, beat-heavy industrial noise pumping from the PA.

There’s a pattern emerging here: bands on respected underground / independent labels landing in Leeds to play to small but enthusiastic audiences play some of the most outstanding gigs I’ve witnessed all year. This was true of Might and Noisepicker when they played the Duck and Drake, and the same is true of Deafkids, who have brought Kombi, also from Brazil, along as the main support. It’s the tenth night of a world tour which has already seen them play mainland Europe, UK, and Ireland, with a stack more UK dates before heading back across Europe and onto Japan before a final haul round South America. These guys work hard. I do wonder if Angine de Poitrine’s long-sold out (and probably oversold) show at the O2 may have pulled some people away, and likewise the Ambient Leeds night at The Fox and Newt, but it doesn’t seem all that probable. So where the hell is everyone? Still, those present make up for number in terms of enthusiasm, and get to witness something special.

Error Control, playing blindfolded, creates a punishing wall of noise worthy of Merzbow. He begins by tentatively locating the monitor and draping the mic on it to generate a sustained feedback, which then goes through a succession of pedals and bits, which he tweaks and bashes to evermore brutal effect. It’s the kind of noise that’s both exhilarating and immersive, the harsh blast rendered even more intense by the use of only red lighting, which strobes. As he climbs up onto his bench in front of the stage, a potential health and safety nightmare reveals itself, but he gradually returns to the ground, where he proceeds to hail his pedal board onto the floor, and the set ends abruptly while he’s standing on the pedalboard and everything cuts out.

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Error Control

It’s only after I get home that not only have I seen him perform in person once before, but that performing with …(something) ruined, we’ve also featured alongside one another at two virtual gigs during lockdown.

Kombi’s set is a fine example of exploratory, experimental music, which reveals different facets as the set progresses. Billowing dark ambient with guttural growls gives way to fractured guitar and crackling contact work, a convergence of avant-garde and industrial. On the third piece, he unleashes Sunn O))) -like power chord drone. The second half of his set is a continuous extended piece built around dank loops and drones and wailing feedback, whereby the low frequencies bother the bowels and the shrill squall of treble terrifies the eardrums.

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Deafkids are having some technical issues and start twenty minutes later than advertised. Oh, but they’re more than worth the wait. And if they’re disappointed by playing to around twenty-five people, they don’t let it show, and their set is an absolute blinder.

They’ve not only captured the sound and feel of new album, CICATRIZES DO FUTURO (SCARS OF THE FUTURE), but take it to a whole other level live. Not for the first time, I’m amazed that there are just two guys up there: with a combination of pre-recorded drum loops, prerecorded and live guitar and extraneous noise loops, infinite delay on everything, especially the vocals, and some truly remarkable drumming, they conjure a dense, powerful sound, dominated by a thunderous barrage of percussion.

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Marian Sarine’s drumming is something to behold, often playing the congas with one hands while working his way around snare, toms, and cymbals with a stick, effortlessly switching to two sticks, and occasionally two hands. He smiles a lot, too. The resulting battery lands like Test Dept meets Swans, but with some techno breaks and a Latin twist. Oh, and there’s some looped beatboxing, too. Because they need more beats. It all builds to a head-shredding wall of noise. This ultra-percussive explosion is paired with abstract guitar work and vocals swathed in cavernous reverb and endless echo. It’s totally hypnotic, propulsive.

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With so much percussion, it’s got groove. It’s techno, trance, dub, shoegaze, and noise rock all at once. And some flute. It all makes for an intense fifty minutes. And it’s all done by ten past ten, which is ideal on a Sunday night.

Matt Rösner – Lost Meridians

Posted: 16 October 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Room40 – 16th October 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Writing on Lost Meridians, Jonathan Wilson observes that ‘traditional instrumentation is manipulated, twisted, stretched and weaved into endless webs. Recorded with whatever was at hand, like a phone or single mic, these short and sharp moments have been pushed far beyond their original convention. Sparkling highs and low sub sonics seem to linger throughout asking more questions than offering answers,’ adding ‘this is music to pause to, this is music to slow down to, this is music to dream to… But mostly, this is music to remind us that sometimes the unexplained things around us are just as important as the things inside us’.

The unexplained has – at least for those of us who are a certain age – connotations of The X Files, but also, to an extent, Tales of the Unexpected, and The Twilight Zone, resurrected post-millennium.

Now, some of the things – at least where the titles are concerned – on Lost Meridians are quire easily explained, not least of all the first composition, ‘Mountains, standing steadfast’. It’s gentle, slow, contemplative, hazy, and in many ways reflects, in sonic form, the experience of gazing up at peaks, partly obscured by cloud, in a moment of calm.

Each autumn, I make a trip with my daughter to the Lake District. We stay in a cottage on the shore of Windermere. The cottage has a private jetty, and we scattered some of my wife’s ashes there the first year we went. Looking across the water towards the ridge on the far shore, and, behind that, Coniston Old Man, I have felt that sense of stillness that comes from being in nature, and also the sense of insignificance. The mountains, the lakes, were here millennia before us, and will remain for millennia after. We’re just passing through, and all we can really do is make the most of the time we have, however brief – and for some, it’s briefer than others. I find comfort and solace in the fact she knew and loved this magnificent landscape, and we shared time in it, as a family, and that consequently, our daughter feels a deep attachment to these surroundings, too.

‘At First Light’ features almost unfiltered folk elements, with a gently-strummed classical guitar standing in the foreground against a vague, eddying background, which at times tapers off to nearly nothing, while the immense, nebular drift of ‘A Vastness, unresolved’ mirrors the connotations evoked by the title perfectly. Indeed, we exist as dots within a vastness that’s beyond comprehension, and as such can never be resolved.

‘Across a line’ consists of two parts, the first of which chimes and rings but briefly before fading out to be replaced by a droning roar – heavy rain? a waterfall? wind? static? – which in turn fades beneath a soft watercolour wash of sound, and it’s remarkably soothing. The pairing of the final two pieces, ‘Fractures in Silence’ and the title track, are each six and a half minutes in length. The former takes the form of a long, slow undulation, which sounds in some respects like the dying wheeze of a broken church organ, culminating in what sounds something like an elongated cymbal crash and frozen-frame electronic glitch. The latter gradually fades in, a low, rumbling hum which hangs like a dense, churning sonic cloud.

Over the course of the album’s forty-one minutes, Rösner creates some richly atmospheric moments, the elements interwoven into a magnificently textured tapestry.

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Lustmord Lombardo – The Pulse Of Atoms

Posted: 7 October 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Ipecac Recordings – 2nd October 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Who had a collaboration between drumming legend Dave Lombardo with dark ambient / industrial demigod Lustmord on their bingo cards for 2026? No? Me neither, but then I didn’t have the US attacking Iran or an outbreak of the plague in Russia, either, so maybe my finger isn’t as much on the pulse as I thought.

This coming together has been simmering for a fair while, after all: they met backstage at a Fantômas show, introduced by mutual friend Buzz Osborne, around the time that Lustmord and Melvins released their collaborative album. That was released in 2004. It’s certainly been some time in the offing, then.

While Lombardo has enjoyed a 40-year career playing with Slayer, Misfits, Mr. Bungle, Suicidal Tendencies, and Testament among others, Lustmord’s modus operandi has largely been as a collaborator, with nearly as many albums produced with other artists as as a solo artist since he first appeared on the industrial scene with his eponymous debut in 1981.

It’s perhaps partly because of the sprawling – and lengthy – careers of the artists involved that The Pulse Of Atoms is a work that proves hard to place. It’s certainly a hell of a departure for Lombardo, given that this is, first and foremost, a dank, ominous ambient work, on which only one of the seven compositions runs short of the six-minute mark. The drums are very much a part of the texture and the atmosphere, rather than a driving or dominant force. It’s interesting to observe how a drummer whose field is metal and rock – however broadly applied – sits in a work which is explicitly neither rock nor metal, and moreover, is largely unstructured, formless, even.

“One thing about an album like this is that you can’t really point it out as being part of any specific genre or hopefully any specific period,” Lustmord explains. “Is it from last year? Is it from 10 years ago, is it from 20 years ago, is it from 5 years in the future? It’s trying to create something that has its own sound, not tapping into whatever musical language or history you’re familiar with. It goes way, way further back. This is the sound of planets dying or of stars being born. It’s about a bigger picture. It’s the sound of the birth of the universe and the death of the universe; it’s not rock and roll.” It most certainly is not, and this is very much the heart of the album’s power.

The first piece, ‘An Eternal Presence Part I: Unknown’ begins as a murky and unsettling rumble, and it’s fully two minutes before the percussion arrives. And when it does, it’s a rolling, tribal thrum. It is rhythmic, but the thunderous beats emerge from a deep, dark sonic swamp, amidst hints of Nordic forest paganism, and stop and start and feel as tentative as they do aggressive. Counterpart ‘An Eternal Presence Part II: Relentless’ lives up to its title with truly thunderous percussion, which rolls and rumbles with a rare intensity, before sliding into the grey gloop of ‘Paleomagnetic Resonance’, a dark ambient piece which drifts, formless, creepy, a slow-moving unsettling expanse of sound which drifts like fog and conjures a vision of a barren wasteland. It hums and drones and rumbles and suddenly, three minutes in, aggressive drumming crashes in and heavy drones glide down sonorously… the weight is palpable.

We crawl from the glacial desert that is ‘Beyond the Vast Cold Waste’ trepidatious, tremulous, into an apocalyptic world. Explosions ricochet in the distance. It feels like the world is ending. The experience is unsettling, but unshocking: we all knew the end was nigh. Didn’t we? This sounds and feels like the end of days. It’s suffocatingly dense. The weigh presses down on the shoulders and the back of the neck.

Like ‘An Eternal Presence’, ‘The Desolate Shore’ also spans two parts with a combined time of almost fifteen minutes. It’s here that we finally find a sense of true rhythm and groove, and Lombardo delivers driving dynamism against a swirling vortex of dark noise. The experience is like being sucked into a vacuum. It’s genuinely scary – like a warzone, like the collapse of civilisation, like the end of time. The final track, ‘The Abyssal Deep’ is ten minutes of the most desolate, disturbing ambience you’ll hear all year. It will suck the life out of you through its density alone.

This album feels less like a collaboration and more like a collision of musical colossi from very different spheres. And it’s immense, and intense.

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Listen: ‘My Eve My Dawn’ by Kali Malone

Posted: 1 October 2026 in Recommended Streams and Videos, Singles and EPs
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Kali Malone presents a second preview of her forthcoming album, Burning Song with the new song and album closer, ‘My Eve My Dawn.’

‘My Eve My Dawn,’ represents a clear vision of this process; foregrounding the cohesion between endings and beginnings, it moves through passages of sadness and joy, the linking tones offering a sense of continuity, and thus of acceptance.

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Burning Song arrives via Ideologic Organ digitally on October 30th with the LP & CD version arriving on November 13th.

Burning Song, Malone’s first new album of solo compositions since 2024’s All Life Long, marks a transformation in her compositional approach towards a process that is more intuitive and direct. Moving through endings and beginnings, reflection and foresight, the music of Burning Song hovers in the moment just before understanding, where revelation lives.

The album was recorded at the historic Thomaskirche in Leipzig, Germany, where J.S. Bach was cantor for the last 27 years of his life; his body rests beneath the sanctuary. Malone is the first musician to perform contemporary works on the church’s Bach Organ, an instrument completed in 2000 but with bespoke tuning and temperament systems based on historical norms of the baroque period.

Throughout Burning Song, Malone is joined by Lucy Railton on cello and Stephen O’Malley on bowed acoustic guitar, the same trio that honed a profound connection through the development of Malone’s 2023 work Does Spring Hide Its Joy. The trio moves as one through passages that are alternately ambiguous and radiant, at times triumphant as the tones rise towards the organ’s upper register. By discarding canon form, which has dominated much of Malone’s organ work, there is a clear sense of freedom that allows these pieces to unfold more gradually and speak more declaratively than ever before.

Live dates 2026

Fri. Oct. 9 – Venice, IT @ Chiesa di Santa Maria de Nazareth ^
Sun. Oct. 11 – Bern, CH @ Berner Münster [bee-flat] ^ tickets
Sun. Nov. 22 – Stockholm, SE @ Stockholm City Hall [City Hall of Stockholm] ^ tickets
Sun. Nov. 29 – Bratislava, SK @ Novy evanjelicky kostol [NEXT Festival] ^ tickets
Burning Song Live 2027

Mon. Jan. 25 – Berlin, DE @ Gedächtniskirche [CTM] # tickets
Tues. Jan. 26 – Berlin, DE @ Gedächtniskirche [CTM] # tickets
Thu. Jan. 28 – London, UK @ St. Martin [Baba Yaga’s Hut presents] # tickets
Fri. Jan. 29 – London, UK @ St. Martin [Baba Yaga’s Hut presents] # tickets
Sun. Jan. 31 – Geneva, CH @ Madeleine Chapel (Espace de la Madeleine) [Festival Antigel] # tickets
Sun. Feb. 28 – Basel, CH @ Pauluskirche [Festival Interfinity] # tickets
Thu. April 1 – Sun. April 4 – Knoxville, TN @ Big Ears # tickets
Thu. Apr. 8 – San Francisco, CA @ Grace Cathedral [The Lab Presents] #
Sat. Apr. 10 – Los Angeles, CA @ First Congregational Church [Upend Presents] # tickets
Mon. Apr. 12 – Brooklyn, NY @ First Unitarian Church [LPR Presents] #
Tues. Apr. 13 – Brooklyn, NY @ First Unitarian Church [LPR Presents] #
Fri. Jun. 4 – Helsinki, FI @ Temppeliaukio Church [We Jazz Presents] # tickets

* = Electronic set
^ = Solo organ set
# = Burning Song set

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Sly & The Family Drone – With Love

Posted: 25 September 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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28th August 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Time has a habit of evaporating, and life has a tendency to obstruct plans, and so it is that the latest offering from twisted jazz weirdos, with the slightly slushy, smushy loved-up Clintons Cards connotations of its title was intended to land on Valentine’s Day. Oh well, it’s perhaps for the best. I’m picturing a scene where a couple are enjoying a romantic evening in, a candlelit dinner with some nice food, a glass of wine, and after maybe a Rom-Com they’re getting in the mood, but instead of Barry White or something smooth and sultry, one of them says “I know just the thing. There’s this new album by Sly and the Family Drone…” Fuck knows how the scene ends, but it’s certainly not with the blissful soft-focus union of an 80s romance – more likely indescribably carnage, likely unspeakable gore, probably even at least one death.

As ever, most of the titles are random or otherwise inexplicable, although I’m sure they have their reasons, but unusually, the crazy puns and wordplay are largely absent, suggesting perhaps a newfound seriousness – although that seems unlikely. And what of ‘Cloth Control’, the album’s final piece? There’s probably something wrong with me that I’d leap to ‘touching cloth’, but from a band with songs with titles like ‘Handed Cack’ and ‘Sunken Disorderly’

‘Psychic Surgery’ begins innocuously enough, although, being Sly and the Family Drone, it’s more dark atmospheric sax and swampy drone with a reverb-soaked abb and flow, than it is smooth, seductive sax: there’s a noirish hint to the opening minutes, before supernatural skitters begin to creep in at a low level, and the percussion begins to clatter with unsettling irregularity – but increasing urgency – a couple of minutes in. It conveys the sense of a gathering storm, and noise begins to swell… but it passes without breaking. However, any sense of relief is but brief, as things get weirder and more tense with the more electronic ‘The Guts of Albion’. It starts with a murky, muffled-sounding pulsation, and a metallic clatter that calls to mind Neubauten or Test Dept. It’s against this tense backdrop, with heavy hints of another growing tempest, that the sax arrives – and this time, it is actually pretty smooth. I mean, it’s hardly 80s Tina Turner, or Dave Brubeck for that matter, but it’s by no means disagreeable. But as the beats build, and the sonorous drone sustains, so sax becomes more fragmented and the tension grows, and around halfway through the track’s seven and a half minutes, a plateau is attained, and you feel a shift as static and distortion creep in… and finally, it hits like a tidal wave. It’s the perfect release.

As a title, ‘Over the Rainbow’ instantly calls to mind the song from The Wizard of Oz. A ballad, but one flavoured with hope and optimism for another place, a brighter future. But while that motif is actually present, it’s distorted and stretched and played against a backdrop of three and a half minutes of crackling distortion: it’s more like hearing a lullaby or the tinkling of a child’s music box when it appears on the soundtrack to a horror movie. The context shifts, and something light and innocent becomes something dark and ominous. And here, we feel that disconnect, that discomforting disjointedness. Here, it’s quite subtle, but in some respects, that renders it all the more unsettling.

‘In The Oils’ goes for the low, heavy drone – and you feel it in our gut, a slow churn. There are some vocals swimming low in the mix, and there are moments where if feels like listening to Throbbing Gristle where the speaker’s submerged in a domestic aquarium. Plus, the final three minutes bring more drumwork than anyone would ever need in a lifetime. It’s not beats, it’s an explosion. But it feels good, because yes, finally, we get it: a climactic, pummelling blast of tribal drums and a rising drone that feels more like a jet engine warming up for take-off. It’s a climax which is a mind-bending crescendo that feels like the end of days.

The last track, ‘Cloth Control’ is built on a slow, rolling drone and reverberating, echo-swamped sax hum and grinding electronics which lead the listener into an otherworldly space of abstraction and strangeness. And what’s strangest of all is that feels like a different album with every play, and different layers, different aspects, reveal themselves.

Overall, the percussion is much less prominent on With Love than on many previous releases, but the abstract jazz meanderings and overall sense of musical exploration is significantly greater than ever. The only thing that’s really predictable about Sly and the Family Drone is their unpredictability, and With Love ventures into new realms of weirdness.

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Watch: ‘Heavy with Fruit’ by Kali Malone

Posted: 1 September 2026 in Recommended Streams and Videos, Singles and EPs
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Burning Song is the new release from Kali Malone and the first new album of solo compositions since early 2024’s All Life Long. The album arrives via Ideologic Organ on October 30th and is previewed with today’s single and video for the song ‘Heavy with Fruit.’

Music that hovers in the moment just before understanding, where revelation lives. Moving through endings and beginnings, reflection and foresight, Burning Song represents a transformation in Malone’s compositional strategy towards a process that is more intuitive and direct. The album was recorded at the historic Thomaskirche in Leipzig, Germany, where J.S. Bach was cantor for the last 27 years of his life; his body rests beneath the sanctuary. Malone is the first musician to perform contemporary works on the church’s Bach Organ, an instrument completed in 2000 but with bespoke tuning and temperament systems based on historical norms of the baroque period.

She is joined by Lucy Railton on cello and Stephen O’Malley on bowed acoustic guitar, the same trio that honed a profound connection based on deep listening through the development of Malone’s work Does Spring Hide Its Joy. Recording took place over the course of two late nights in August 2025, with the engineer Francesco Donadello placing over 20 microphones throughout the room and closely upon the instruments, allowing the listener to locate themselves within the music as it fills the historic sanctum.

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Across the album, chord follows chord, each in slow succession, emerging like stones of various shades and shapes on a winding path. The trio moves as one, stepwise, through passages that are alternately ambiguous and radiant, at times triumphant as the tones rise towards the organ’s upper register. By discarding canon form, which has dominated much of her organ work, there is a clear sense of freedom that allows these pieces to unfold more gradually and speak more declaratively than ever before. Even with the presence of one of the most canonized and dissected composers of all time just underfoot, Malone felt the pressure of tradition lifting, an ease of being dictating the flow of the music. She is careful to never extend the narratives of any individual piece beyond what feels conclusive, resulting in a relatively compact cycle of compositions.

The metaphor of burning holds two meanings. Fire moves in ways that appear intuitive, changing shape moment by moment, and relentlessly insistent. Here, Malone moves from harnessing the fractaline beauty of mathematics to reveling in the impact of feelings, of foresight, of something more undefined and from within. But burning is a process of change in which transformation spreads from a nexus point to rapidly consume whatever it encounters. The freedom found in the process of composing and realizing Burning Song is one that opens innumerable doors of possibility. In the fertility of ashes grows whatever comes next.

Live dates 2026/2027

Wed. Sept. 23 – Lisbon, PT @ Culgurest *
Sat. Sept. 26 – Cologne, DE @ St. Gertrud [Brutalism] *
Sun. Oct. 11 – Bern, CH @ Berner Münster [bee-flat] ^
Sun. Nov. 29 – Bratislava, SK @ Novy evanjelicky kostol [NEXT Festival] ^
Thu. Jan. 28 – London, UK @ St. Martin #
Fri. Jan. 29 – London, UK @ St. Martin #
Sun. Jan. 31 – Vernier, CH @ Madeleine Chapel – Espace de la Madeleine [Festival Antigel] #

* = Electronic set
^ = Solo organ set
# = Burning Song set
Plus more to follow

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Photo: Kingsley Ifil

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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Perverts In White Shirts – CULTurally appropriated songs and revisited memories

Posted: 18 August 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Misanthropic Agenda – 4th September 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

As titles go, this is one of those which is closer to an explanatory essay than a mere title. My last encounter with Perverts In White Shirts was four years ago, on the release of Meaning What Exactly? The tracks were lengthy, but the album was short¸ at least competitively. In contrast, CULTurally appropriated songs and revisited memories is an absolute monster: making a departure from the four longform pieces on Meaning What Exactly? presents twenty-eight individual pieces which find Nathalie Dreier and Dave Phillips plunge into some particularly heavy territory, and not without personal weight, either. I shall quote from the accompanying notes:

Rooted in Nathalie’s isolated upbringing in the controversial Children of God cult, the album draws on fragments of this group’s music, alongside songs and texts from other fanatic movements and gurus. Working with this source material, the anarchic, tongue-in-cheek

Perverts in White Shirts transmogrify, decontextualize, and reimagine melodies and words previously steeped in ideology, isolation, and indoctrination.

Before I start, I would like you to consider the time investment that reviewing an album that’s some two hours long demands, particularly when the final track runs for nearly half an hour. And from the outset, it’s a challenging work. ‘Truth’ warps and twists, and while ‘Come to Mommmy’ is, on the surface, a work of slow, psychedelic folk, it soon becomes apparent that this is the sound of dysfunction, and as we’re carried on through the album, the warped weirdness of the CULTurally appropriated songs and revisited memories reveals itself.

They describe the album as ‘a two-hour cringe-pop journey of disarming, catchy tunes’.

It’s not. It is two hours long, but it’s more a hybrid of dark ambience, samplism, and William Burroughs-style audio cut-ups. And it’s a headfuck. No, it’s more than that. In places, it’s not just disorientating, but nausea-inducing. It sounds, and feels, deeply wrong, and no more so than when it’s at its poppiest, its mellowest, its most accessible. Something at the heart of this album is deeply disturbing, in the horror movie sense.

Shouting and chanting and heavy reverb collide with ominous, tingling electronica, and dolorous low-end bass drones which border on dungeon synth. ‘Love is the Only Weapon’ is exemplary, and deeply uncomfortable. ‘dedication to the tackling of the beast’ pitches a processed, almost robotic vocal, the words abrim with religious connotations, against a low rumbling electronic bass.

‘Never Forever’ is stark and sparse, almost dubby, a work of minimal dance even, but there are horror movie hints to the vocals which reverberate dissonantly, hauntingly, around the rattling beats and slow, exploratory bass, which resonates… and then out of nowhere, the half-minute long ‘The Answer’ explodes in an industrial blast which is nothing short of explosive. In contrast, ‘A Change’ is a low-tempo crawler that’s rich in atmosphere, and positively eerie, its whispered vocal bordering on the subliminal. Against this is the euphoric ‘Love’. But that euphoria feels like the result of manipulation, and not because of the power of the suggestion from the notes. Listening to the warping, wefting, twisting otherness of CULTurally appropriated songs and revisited memories is an uncomfortable experience, which has nothing to do with spirituality and everything to do with the fact that humans are fucking weird. Apart from in Pet Sematary, how many scary hauntings can you list from other species? Where are all the demonic cats, the spirit dogs and rabbits? Brion Gysin said that ‘man is a bad animal’, and it’s hard to argue.

Similarly, CULTurally appropriated songs and revisited memories is a horrible album. It trawls through terrain that’s unplotted, and doesn’t stop at the waymarkers where there are, well, anything. The duration is a slog. You crawl your way to the end and just want to lie down. Sure, it’s psychedelic, but mostly it’s torture.

AA

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The Sunken Land – sunstead

Posted: 8 August 2026 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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19th July 2026

The Sunken Land – the musical vehicle for David Martin, York-based solo purveyor of ‘bedsit doomgaze’ – makes a fairly swift follow-up to The Woods at Dusk three-track EP, released in May, with a more expansive five tracker in the form of ‘sunstead’. There are no notes beyond the credits, meaning the music is left – or allowed – to speak for itself.

‘horizon fires’ makes for a strong start, and continues Martin’s assimilation of current and local geography events and events by way of inspiration. There have been countless wildfires around the UK in the last couple of months, many of which have failed to make national or even regional news. One can assume that this is largely on account that their number has made reporting impossible, meaning that only significant fires in national parks or those close to nuclear plants have warranted that level of coverage. But in and around York, there have been fires lit – intentionally – on an almost daily basis, in playparks and on local moorland, with one potentially endangering cattle and threatening to make its way toward a branch of Lidl to the south-west of the city. The entire country – and, indeed, most of mainland Europe, too – is a tinderbox, gripped by drought during one of – if not the –most prolonged hot / dry spells since records began. And people – mostly teens – are starting fires for fun. It’s a terrifying and bewildering state of affairs, and seeing smoke on the horizon is disconcerting. This first track layers soaring post-rock lead guitar lines over thick, distorted chords. At times – again – reminiscent of latter-day Earth, it’s a composition which explores tonal and textural contrasts, and builds tension as it does so.

‘tupla vs. egregore’ plunges straight into the heavy drone territory, the mesh of distortion and slow pace reminiscent to some extent of Sunn O))), but with strolling bass and some extended soloing that feel more as if it belongs in the domain of prog, it combines a host of disparate elements in quite unexpected ways – almost as unexpected as the abrupt ending. At just over fine minutes long, it’s by no means a short piece, but the impression is that it would have worked quite nicely extending over a full stretch of twenty minutes or so. The same is true of the six-minute title track, which swoops and soars and is all the while driven by a serrated drone of overdriven chords which hang for an eternity.

‘swedish death cleaning’ springs quite the surprise with a thudding riff that screams Mötörhead, which is in turn overlayed with the most flamboyant fretwork we’ve yet heard from The Sunken Land. It’s certainly the most raucous, and full-on rock piece in his catalogue, and unexpected as it is, it’s also well executed, and adheres to his principles of lo-fi recording and an absence of percussion, meaning it doesn’t feel entirely incongruous.

Across the EPs five cuts, sunstead demonstrates a marked expansion of The Sunken Land’s sound, and if the last of these, ‘noctilucence’ returns to more familiar territory, the overall feel of this set is one of greater confidence, and a determination to explore wider territory, and as such, marks the fulfilment of the promise of the works which preceded it. Given his rate of output – and evolution – the next six months could prove to be very interesting indeed.

AA

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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.

AA

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