Posts Tagged ‘Drone’

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.

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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.

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tejploopare – gråkråka

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

Christopher Nosnibor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Soma Crew / How Buildings Fail / Speed Readers – The Golden Ball, York, 17 July 2026

Posted: 18 July 2026 in Live, Reviews
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Christopher Nosnibor

It’s been a while since I went to ‘bands in the bar’ kind of thing. Although the Horsemusic nights are essentially bands in a bar, it’s a large space and they play on a raised area at the far end of a rectangular room, meaning there’s a sense of separation (in addition to the handrail which runs across it). For many years, there would be acoustic soloists and duos – nearly always playing variations on the blues – in the corner of every other bar, and it was kinda fun for a while, but got a bit samey rather fast. Still, the point is that there’s something less formal about the ‘bands in a bar’ setting. The Golden Ball, consistently in the Good Beer Guide, is a community owned and run pub with multiple rooms (some more like nooks or snugs), where they host quizzes, spoken word and open mic nights and the like, plus decent size beer garden.

It might be Soma Crew lite tonight, paired down to minimal gear, with no cymbals and fewer pedals, but it’s still a lot of pedals, and by the time you’ve got a PA, amps and pedals for two guitarists and a bass, plus drum kit and another amp and mountain of electronic equipment for How Buildings Fail, plus a massive – and truly essential – thermostatically-controlled fan, seating, and space in general is very much at a premium. More than twenty people and it’s pretty cosy, to put it mildly.

David Mudie playing a solo Speedreaders set is the closest to truly stripped-back as it gets, with just him and a clean-sounding guitar and a couple of pedals. Played this way, it accentuates the sad, emotional nuisance of the downtempo slowcore songs, and he seems unusually relaxed and even borderline chatty by his standards.

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Speedreaders

It sets the tone for the night: the intimacy of the space is a great unifier, and the warmth of the atmosphere isn’t just heatwave and humidity.

Simon – aka How Buildings Fail – seems genuinely quite overwhelmed by the positive response to his performance, each song received with enthusiastic applause. He soaked the small room with low end feedback as he drawled monologues reminiscent of The Fall – the first track in particular seems to lean on ‘Smile’, and the more uptempo (house) pieces rattle along, propelled by a primitive drum machine. Electronica with live guitar, it’s gloriously ramshackle and old-school in every way, from the scratchy guitar to the, we, scratchy electronics. And people are amazed. This is telling: he runs the York EMOM (Electronic Music Open Mic) night – it’s part of a now (inter)national network of events which gives a safe space for all the nerds and oddballs to perform (I say this in the most positive sense as a regular myself), and the York one in particular seems to cultivate a culture of experimentalism, left-field, ambient, noisy, and downright weird shit, and it’s brilliant. But it is a bubble, and maybe not all of the EMOM participants have the same potential beyond the bubble. But How Buildings Fail balances quirky post-punk with just enough catchiness to appeal to a broader audience, and to see how he’s received out in the wild is a joy for me, and clearly, a revelation for those unfamiliar, which is a fair few of those in tonight.

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How Buildings Fail

Soma Crew might well be the band I’ve seen and covered the most since I started out with Aural Aggravation a decade ago, and I’d seen them a fair few times before that, too. They are, definitively, mainstays of the scene, and have landed some high-profile support slots for visiting bands (notably The Fall at Fibbers in 2016) can be depended on for three things: 1) a different lineup nearly every time 2) drummer Nick wearing his Sin City Rockers T-shirt 3) they’ll always play counterintuitively and start with the most hesitant-sounding, ploddiest song on the setlist. It’s like a test, but also a warm-up as they feel their way towards the groove. It’s only after the drawling crawl that they strike their motorik stride, and once they do, they’re mining gold all the way to the finish. Chugging rhythm guitar, strolling bass, soaring lead and thudding minimal drums all settle in nicely. And then from nowhere, the sound erupts a few songs in. It’s not devastatingly loud, but in this confined space, the sound feels huge. On ‘Westworld’ they hold a single note – not even a chord – for about five minutes. Then the drums kick in and they hold it another eternity. It’s glorious. The band are looking relaxed and right in there, and I find myself completely immersed for a spell.

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Soma Crew

And the thing is, it’s simply nice. It’s also more than that. There is a palpable sense of community here tonight, people stick around and chat afterwards, taking their time over pints purchased at last orders instead of the usual emptying minutes after the music finishes. Soma Crew probably rehearse in a bigger room than this, but it’s not about the numbers, it’s about the music, the vibe, the connection. None of the performers is new or up-and-coming, and won’t be offended by this observation. But there’s a further point here: so many of the up-and-comers find that life – work, mortgages, families – put paid to creative activity post-thirty. That all of tonight’s acts have remained artistically active is testament to a certain commitment to creativity. It may simply be stubbornness, but for that  stubbornness kudos is due, not only for keeping on, but keeping on doing good stuff. Better than good, in fact. Grassroots music events don’t come much more essential than this.

Jana Irmert – Messengers (Original Soundtrack)

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

Christopher Nosnibor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Colin Webster / Balázs Pándi / Matt Cargill – Chewed Up And Spat Out

Posted: 13 July 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Raw Tonk Records – 15th May 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

I’m late to the party with this one. Can I pretend it’s fashionably late, rather than simply tardy? I’m going to say yes, since the event actually took place in 2019 and it’s taken till now to make its way into the world, but let’s focus on the fact that this is, indeed, one hell of a party.

Chewed Up And Spat Out was recorded in a one-off session in London. Hungarian master drummer Balázs Pándi (Merzbow, Thurston Moore, Mats Gustafsson etc.) was in town for a few days and contacted saxophonist Colin Webster (Sex Swing, Dead Neanderthals etc..) who suggested adding Matt Cargill (Sly & The Family Drone) to the session on electronics. And if that lineup isn’t enough, the whole thing was recorded and mixed by Tim Cedar of Part Chimp, who knows a thing or two about noise.

We’re deep in wild jazz experimentalism here, and this is apparent from the groans and honks of saxophone which warp and drone amidst a simmering cacophony of rolling drums – not so much a rhythm as a gathering storm. The electronic elements are subtle at first, a few bleeps and twitters of treble pass here and there while a low drone hums almost subliminally on the first track, ‘To Arise from Sleep’. But the drone mutates into a thick, throbbing pulsation which gargles like a digital didgeridoo on ‘Chewed Up’, while the percussion is more subtle, predominantly manifesting as clattering rim shots initially and the sax is similarly restrained, simmering under until it finally cuts loose. At over eight and a half minutes, counterpart ‘Spat Out’ is something of an endurance test, and works backwards, starting with a crescendo before lurching stop-start blasts of noise which almost approximate a riff give way to a prolonged freeform spasm.

Not only does it have the best title, but ‘Money Shitter’ is peak freak, one of those crazed cacophonous jazz monsters that starts like its ending and ends like its starting and never goes anywhere but at the same time flies in all directions simultaneously. It sounds like unplanned, unco-ordinated chaos – and perhaps it is – but the thing to remember is that it’s supposed to sound like that, and they manage to navigate a succession of explosive crescendos interspersed with subtler, more ponderous passages, and in combination, they interrogate the interplay between the instruments, the tones, the textures, the dynamics. The final piece, ‘Blot’, sees them inspect these sonic relationships in a more granular detail, ponderously pushing through a succession of peaks and troughs for almost twelve minutes. Here, the abrasive intensity is tempered in favour of atmosphere – although the mid-point finds Webster wringing some prolonged bleats over rolling, fluid beats, building to a frenzied extended crescendo and a slow collapse.

There’s a lot of movement on Chewed Up And Spat Out, an album which conveys not only great energy, but a physicality and kineticism – which does, ultimately, leave you feeling as the title tells it. This is the good shit, and by the conclusion, it’s fair to say that from a listening perspective, it does what it says on the proverbial tin.

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Sunn O))) / Black Mountain – Project House, Leeds, 1st July 2026

Posted: 2 July 2026 in Live, Reviews
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Christopher Nosnibor

I can still smell the smoke on my clothes and skin. I can still taste the smoke. Not tobacco smoke, as used to be the case way back (although more recently than seems possible), but smoke machine smoke. Back in the 90s – and no doubt prior – gigs would often leave this lingering residue embedded within the senses. But some time, around the turn of the millennium, perhaps, there seemed to be a change in the formula of smoke used at most live events, in favour of something less dense and noxious, and which didn’t make you sweat so much, with most fog formulas now being advertised as being white, without ‘unpleasant odour’ and ‘leaving no oily residue’. Sunn O))) seem to have managed to hijack an entire tanker’s worth of the old vegetable oil-based stuff and pump it out at a rate of gallons per second during the entirely of their set, which, despite featuring (apparently) five tracks, has a colossal duration in the region of an hour and three quarters.

So much of the Sunn O))) experience is steeped in ritual and ceremony. From the hooded robes, the power of incense drifting in amongst the smoke from the machines, the wielding of the guitars as eternal drones ring in sustain from the amplifiers. Those amplifiers, vintage valve amps, stacked almost to the ceiling my towering monoliths, arranged in such a way as to resemble the interior of a prehistoric monument, bathed, before the show begins, in a celestial blue hue, inviting worship simply by their looming presence, even when silent.

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Black Mountain make for an interesting choice of support, and an appropriate contrast. Initially, they present as a quiet acoustic folk duo. There’s some chat at the side towards the toilets and bar, but the swelling audience is largely quiet and respectful in front of the stage. Their second song introduces drum machine and distortion on the guitar, and while the harmonious form doesn’t change, the texture very much does, with squalling desert rock overtones and bluesy strains and a dash of 70s rock filtering their way into the songs throughout the set, which is pleasant – not in the vague, not much of anything sense, but mellow and melodic and low-key. It’s a most enjoyable half hour which contrasts nicely with the earth-shattering experience which follows.

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Black Mountain

By way of an intro, they play all of the talk from between the songs from an entire live set by Venom, the progenitors of black metal (something Melvins did with their ‘Cowboy’ single, which was equally frustrating). It made for a long and twitchy eight minutes of suspense that felt like an eternity. But this is Sunn O))) all over. Their entire ethos seems to be based on the question of ‘how far can we actually push this?’ – and when they find what must surely be the absolute limit, they nudge it a bit further, and then further still. And as it played on, and on, the stage began to flood with smoke… and more, and more smoke, until it became completely impenetrable. Vertical LED beams along the front of the stage illuminate the smoke in such a way as to create a curtain which renders the stage itself invisible when viewed from the other side.

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Sunn O)))

Anderson and O’Malley are guided onstage with torches, and moments later the first chord strikes. Immediately, everything shudders. The very air quakes as I feel my flesh quiver and my ribs, my lungs tremble. Time immediately stalls. And something strange happens. Perhaps I enter something approximating a trance-like state. Whatever it is, I find myself utterly spellbound, and borderline hypnotised by the combination of the spectacle and the sound. It’s not zoning out, but zoning in, fixated on the tones and textures, and the way the two interact and interweave, catching glimpses of the band in the brief moments when the smog thins.

Stripped down to a two-piece, the volume is typically obliterative, but it’s clear they’re fully immersed in exploring the spaces between the notes, more subtle dynamics of the way certain frequencies resonate. The sound is remarkably clear, and while there are howling walls of feedback, the sonic spectrum is predominantly low-end, meaning that there’s no tinnitus-inducing harsh treble (at least not with earplugs, and everyone I see is suitably equipped), and as a consequence, it’s easier to simply bask in the huge throb which envelops every inch of your being. The first two tracks are run together as one continuous piece, a full hour in duration, and at this point, the smoke reaches a new peak of density. It’s beyond suffocating, you can’t see your own hand let alone the stage, from which emanates the most brutal howl of feedback yet. But there’s no checking your watch to puff that only twenty minutes have elapsed, and they’ve barely played three notes. Some people move further back to escape the full force of the backline, but the majority simply stand, transfixed. This is peak Sunn O))). As much as there’s a sense that they’re testing us, they’re also testing themselves, and revelling in the theatre of it all. It’s high art.

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More smoke blasts across the stage like a tidal wave. Everything is vibrating, from my nostrils to my buttocks. I’m amused to see people nearby attempting to film clips of the show, only for their phones to be completely submerged in billows of smoke – which are an analogue of the billowing rumble radiating from the stacks of speakers, and with the backline alone capable of filling the 1,000 capacity with that organ-bothering low-frequency drone, the fact they’re all in turn mic’d up only adds layers to this oceanic swell of sound. Anderson and O’Malley don’t so much strike chords as mildly stroke a string to set off another devastating avalanche of sound.

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Towards the end of the set, O’Malley lodges his guitar on top of a stack, wedged against the ceiling, before subsequently hanging it by the neck from a power cable above, and letting it swing from the rafters.

And just like that, it stops. The smoke clears, and the two men step forward and receive – humbly, and with gratitude – the most rapturous applause. Because for all of the theatre involved in creating the separation between band and audience, the obstinate absence of engagement, for the pain-threshold volume, the appreciation flows both ways. It’s a joyously respectful experience: no chat (as if!), no heckling, but a symbiotic exchange based on pure immersion in pure art. And tonight, we’ve witnessed an ascendency to a new pinnacle. Pure transcendence.

Conflux Coldwell – Echolalia

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

Christopher Nosnibor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Conflux Coldwell 2026

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