Posts Tagged ‘electronica’

The Pixel Rain – Glitching Sky

Posted: 2 October 2026 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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2nd October 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Is Bandcamp Friday the new Record Store Day? Hardly. For a start, it’s the artists who get paid on Bandcamp Fridays, with 100% of royalties from sales going to said artists, rather quite literally everyone other than the major labels which hijacked Record Store Day some years ago getting fleeced. And there’s no queuing round the block from 7am to have a hope of bagging an overpriced reissue, only to find some bugger’s got in there first and whacked it on eBay at double the price before you even make it home again. But Bandcamp Fridays have become a bit of an overwhelming event: with so much new music being released on Bandcamp Fridays now – and you really can’t blame artists for choosing to release their latest material to coincide with these days – but the risk is that releases can get lost in the blizzard of emails and hype on social media.

The release of The Pixel Rain’s ‘Glitching Sky’ is one that shouldn’t pass without mention or be one of those which gets buried by the noise. It’s the final single to be released from their forthcoming debut album, A Sense of Danger, due at the end of the month, and provides the title track for a four-track EP which features the previous three singles.

The musical vehicle of London-based Áron Siegler, The Pixel Rain, who’s ‘Last’ grabbed me in June, fuse industrial rock, post punk, synth-pop, and electro. And since TPR’s inception in 2023, he’s been keeping pretty busy, with a steady stream of single and EP releases.

As we learn from the accompanying notes, ‘At the centre of the song is a character retreating from an unfulfilling reality into a virtual world where they can construct a more powerful version of themselves. For Siegler, however, the idea extends beyond any particular technology or online space, reflecting more broadly on the increasingly commonplace ways people seek distraction and escape from anxiety, disappointment and everyday life.’

Seigler says, ‘The idea came from thinking about someone whose real life isn’t giving them very much, so they retreat into a virtual world where they can be whoever they want to be. There’s something quite sad about that, but also something a little ridiculous, so I wanted the story to have both sides to it.’

On the one hand, I agree: the fact we see new stories every day about people with AI girlfriends or boyfriends, or who say their AI companion is their best friend, or who use an AI therapist isn’t just ridiculous, but also plain weird, and speaks volumes about the world we live in right now. People crave human contact, but, unable to handle it, and / or unable make connections, retreat into virtual worlds. On the other hand, I was hanging out in chatrooms around the turn of the millennium when it truly felt like a new world. I – without any intent – met my future wife in a chatroom, before dating sites had even been conceived, and, later, MySpace would prove to be one of the most liberating and escapist alternative worlds, where you truly could be another you, and the connections I made there, through shared interests, led to some of the most incredible creative collaborations. But then the Internet got hijacked by capitalism and corporations and advertising and essentially turned to shit around 2010. Bastards.

Whereas ‘Last’ put the guitars up in the mix, ‘Glitching Sky’ sits in the bracket of upbeat electronica, and while the lyrics are ambivalent, framing as they do both sides of the story, the vibe is more euphoric dance. It’s somewhat unexpected, but is well done, and sits nicely in the context of the EP as a whole, with the downtempo ‘A Sense of Danger’ bringing a starker, more coldwave aspect, with some soaring guitar detail creating a gripping dynamic with the crisp electronic drum sound.

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‘Sacrifice’ sits between Depeche Mode and turn-of-the-millennium electrogoth, while the EP’s last track is, fittingly, ‘Last’. And it’s an anthem. Fact. One thing that’s clear from this EP is that The Pixel Rain appreciate the importance of the ordering of the songs on a release. Having the songs is priority number one, but the order in which they appear. I worry this is a dying art in the age of streaming and skipping after fifteen seconds, but it does matter for those of us who od still listen to EPs and albums properly. And Glitching Sky is an EP which deserves to be listened to properly.

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The Pixel Rain (Áron Siegler) by Evelina Klimova (Landscape 01) web

Photo by Evelina Klimova

Damage Control & OHMelectronic – Red Lines EP

Posted: 15 September 2026 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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Metropolis Records – 11th September 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Red Lines, the new EP from international electro-industrial group Damage Control – centred around a core quartet of Bill Barsby, Richard Thacker and Alex Wise (all based in Australia), plus Markus App from Germany – and finds them in collaboration with the Canadian duo OHMelectronic.

“‘Red Lines’ is about psychological warfare, the endless cycle of human conflict and the hunger for power that lies in the hearts of men,” says Huxtable of the EP title track. “While the lyrics were inspired by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the same themes haunt America and it’s global conflicts. As tyranny and the fog of war repeats itself through every age, so too does the hope that we learn from our mistakes.”

I only wish I had that same hope, could share that optimism: the trouble is, we never do seem to learn from our mistakes. One might have thought that we – as a species – would have learned from the outcomes of two worlds wars, the second of which involved genocide and nuclear annihilation. Yet somehow, we’re in a place where to suggest that there’s a genocide taking place in Gaza is controversial, and we have world leaders who are so unpredictable that in recent months, I’ve taken to checking news sites on my phone on waking at 5am to make sure the world hasn’t ended. But then, it’s not just world leaders who seem perilously close to the button – because despite myriad dystopian sci-fi works detailing how AI will destroy us, those who run the multi-billion dollar corporations developing it are more interested in next year’s profits than the future of humanity. I say humanity, but something has changed in recent years. A trigger has flipped. Where is the humanity?

Russia had seemingly been biding their time during the pandemic, and pounced on Ukraine the moment restrictions were lifted. But the whole world changed during the pandemic: people emerged from restrictions fired up and angry. The mask – and the gloves – were off. The evidence was plain to see: people were suddenly ok driving aggressively, yelling at random strangers in the street, and being openly racist. Politics turned a new shade of ugly, and while America leads the way there, the rest of the world isn’t far behind, and war is all around us and escalating by the week, to the point that much conflict around the globe goes unreported in Western media. Even the ongoing conflicts in Ukraine, Gaza, Iran, have seemingly faded into the background in much of the news media, giving the impression that it’s mundane and life goes on. What the actual fuck happened? Is this really where we are, who we are?

Before we arrive at ‘Red Lines’, the EP’s lead – and title- track, the percussion-driven ‘Manifesto’ pounds in, and thunders and pumps hard under a thick sonic haze. It’s a quintessential techno-electro / industrial cut, which reaches back to the late 80s and early 90s Wax Trax! catalogue for references.

The title track is tight and oppressive, quiet, queasy, dense, grinding bass with serrated edges, and thudding beats are welded together as the backdrop to minimal synths wavering cautiously. The vocal is understated, monotone, but breathy, while reeling off a list of horrors. By the end, the sensation is suffocation, and there is no room, and no air, to breathe. It’s not only Damage Control at their absolute best, but one of the most gripping tracks in the genre in a while. It’s the claustrophobic intensity that makes it.

‘Modernity’ is tense and dense, a pumping hard-edge disco groove, and a snarling response to the to the dark and difficult word in which we find ourselves. It marks a fitting close to a powerful document of these difficult and alienating times.

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Greg Bullock – 26EP

Posted: 11 September 2026 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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7th August 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

What do Depeche Mode, Pink Floyd and Roger Waters, and The Cure have in common? No? A bit stumped? Well they’re all listed as touchstones for the new solo EP from Greg Bullock, who’s perhaps better known as co-founder and one half of Cyborg Amok, purveyors of goth-infused synth-rock – although he his solo career has always coexisted alongside. The band’s name seems particularly salient in context of the recent news of AI’s exponential self-advancements: what was essentially science fiction just a couple of years ago is now the reality of the world in which we live. And it’s the reality of the world in which 26EP is firmly routed, exploring, as he puts it ‘ideas we may not always find comfort in: persecution, contamination, ignorance, and mortality’.

It’s true: few find comfort in any of those topics, and while the romanticism of death is a fairly popular and eternal trope in art through the centuries, few find much by way of warmth when confronted with issues of mortality in immediate proximity. In fact, it’s strange how even the most philosophical – or nihilistic, or tough-seeming – individuals who are brazen about death wilt at the loss of friend and relatives and are suddenly moved to proclaim that someone in their sixties or seventies was ‘of no age’ and ‘taken too young’. In short, death in the abstract is fine, but the actuality is something we can’t even bear to contemplate. Meanwhile, persecution, contamination, and ignorance provide the daily fuel for fiery exchanges on social media and inflammatory reports in the news media. It seems that in recent years, we’ve come to thrive on these very things which tear us apart, as individuals, and as a society. I suppose it comes down to the separation of the keyboard to the life experience, the chasm which yawns between concept and corporality.

‘In Other Words’ starts with a bassline reminiscent of The Cure circa Faith, before plunging into a dark gothy post-punk space, somewhere underground and airless. ‘The deeper the trench / The higher the climb’, he croons in a reverb-soaked baritone, dry, crunched, but ringing clear. It’s a lyric based in logic rather than one which provides a revelatory insight, and yet… and yet, we seem to have become so mired in distractions and misinformation and futile infighting, that simple, basic truths have been cast by the wayside, and in this context, this plain observation carries unexpected weight, particularly as we continue to dig ourselves ever deeper, not only increasingly entrenched in polarised views, but also in embracing AI and practices which accelerate climate change. We’re digging our own graves, here. The trench is approaching the depth of very depths of the oceans. And still we dig.

The folksy ‘Thirty Pieces’ is sparse and dark, despite some lilting instrumentation. Bullock’s rasping vocal lands between Leonard Cohen and recent releases by James Ray, while ‘I Ain’t Goin!’ presents a hybrid of early post-punk and electropop, with a primitive production aesthetic reminiscent of the era, a basic drum machine with a whip-crack snare dominating the mix.

The riff on ‘Blu-Green Beauty’ leans on ‘You Really Got me’ by The Kinks, but filtered through Dr Mix and the Remix as Bullock rails against climate change and paints a bleak yet somehow encouraging picture in which there is still choice: ‘You can close the curtains / You can close your eyes / You can kill everything / You can kill, blu-green beauty.’ Do we still have a choice? If so, for how long?

26EP is pretty bleak, but still contains glimmers of optimism. Where I’m sitting, the future is dark, so I hope he’s right.

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Isn’tses – Throwing A Shoe Into A Black Hole

Posted: 9 September 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Cruel Nature Records – 14th August 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Working under the Isn’tses moniker, London duo Lisa McKendrick and Tim Drage have spent more than a decade sculpting noise with their own unique slant, evolving not only their own methods and methodologies, but their own circuitry, perhaps most famously the ‘Chernobylizer’, a compact yet devastatingly powerful noise-generating device.

The notes which accompany this, their latest release in a prodigious and ever-expanding body of work, describe Throwing A Shoe Into A Black Hole as ‘raw and chaotic’, departing from noise alone to deliver a work where ‘a mix of complex beats, textures, unpredictable sounds and frenetic rhythms enter the music, at times with melody and screamy vocals as they push the boundaries of electronic music,’ and finally summarising it as ‘an intense mind-bending spacey journey of wild explosive emotion and sonic textures.’

It contains ten compositions – songs would be a hell of a stretch – the titles of which either seem purposefully incomplete and therefore impenetrable, or otherwise oblique, apart from those which include references to ‘rave’. There is certainly an abundance of heavy-duty pulsating electronic beats and whoops and cheers and yelps crop up with a certain frequency. But if this is to be considered in any way a ‘dance’ album, it’s in the context of late 70s and early 80s electronica – the warped groves and unsettling, detached vocals of Throbbing Gristle circa 20 Jazz Funk Greats, and Chris and Cosey’s Trance. The beats are industrial strength, but shudder and stutter, pulsing through fuzzed-out, distorted synth waves and an endless array of extraneous interjections. Demented shrieks and wailings rise though the thick atmosphere towards the end of the first track, ‘Sol Receiver’, and ‘I Spit on Your Rave’ only amplifies their commitment to melding propulsive beats and throbbing synths and melting them together with a sonic haze and disconcerting sense of psychopathy.

The majority of the pieces evoke a kind of derangement of the senses, repetition and disconcerting discord conjuring a trance-like evocation – but it’s dark and murky, and there’s a thick, squelchy analogue feel which contributes to a sound that feels more like the drug-induced hellish nightmare of a cult than spiritual transcendence. The thumping, clumping stomp or ‘Freekfall’ is nothing short of purgatorial, and you want to escape, but you find your limbs are leaden and limp, and you can’t move as you find yourself staring into a swirling vortex, even when you close your eyes. There is no escape.

‘Undo Fear Biases’ is an unadulterated seething miasma of heavy noise propelled by a palpating myocardial spasm of a beat, while ‘Free The Party’ is centred around an interview or some other monologue about the days of rave culture. In contrast, ‘I’m Not The’ is the soundtrack to the rave where the trip is bad, man. It’s like hearing The Prodigy and some shit shoegaze indie at the same time while your brain is exploding one lobe at a time and the fragments form small vortices as they cascade from your ears. Pleasant, it is not, and the same is true of ‘Do Or Die’, with its sonic allusions to ‘Discipline’ and ‘Whorl of Sound’, and which escalates to something akin to the detonation scenes in Threads. Total sonic annihilation, absolute obliteration. Sitting here with only a beer, my head is beginning to spin and my stomach is slowly starting to churn. This isn’t accidental: Isn’tses understand the impact of frequencies, and the way sounds interact.

Throwing A Shoe Into A Black Hole is by no means especially harsh as noise goes, but it is relentlessly, unyieldingly hellish in its conception and execution. It’s no criticism when I comment that this is hard work and a difficult album: it’s supposed to be. But why is the churning, shifting, reverberating discord of Throwing A Shoe Into A Black Hole more challenging than a screeding blast of continuous harsh noise? Everyone’s brain processes things differently, so I can only speak for myself when debating this, but it’s more often than not possible to allow waves of noise to wash over and flow across the mind, to go with the flow, as it were. Dance music is different in many ways, but by the same token, it’s easy to process a steady four-four beat, particularly when it’s the constant, consistent bass thump which defines the majority of dance music – it’s that beat, and that consistent tempo, which makes it music for dancing. You zone out the extranea, and focus on that core element. And that’s the common ground shared by dance and noise when it comes to how we process it – by zooming out and focusing on something within it. This isn’t possible with Throwing A Shoe Into A Black Hole. Everything about how each piece is assembled is built on continual disruption. There’s nothing to latch on to, there’s nothing consistent. Yes, there are rhythms, but they’re jarring, riven with irregularities, or what the brain will likely perceive as irregularities, and there’s so much else going on, disconnected and disjointed sounds flying in all directions, that any attempt to filter them out and focus is impossible.

Back in the late 70s, much of what Throbbing Gristle and Cabaret Voltaire were doing was inspired by the tape experiments of William S. Burroughs, and the proposed methods for psychic warfare using sonic weaponry as detailed in Electronic Revolution and The Revised Boy Scout Manual. There’s a palpable sense that with Throwing A Shoe Into A Black Hole, Isn’tses are returning to the origins of industrial music. And what’s remarkable is that even now, it’s absolutely devastating. Complete sensory overload. A derangement of the senses.

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Circuit3 – Metanoia: Music From Therapy

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

Christopher Nosnibor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Ran Slavin – Hyper Basic

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

Christopher Nosnibor

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

“I’m getting skibidi rizz.”

“Bruh’s hyper basic.”

“I can’t even.”

“Bruh.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Watch: ‘Do-List’ by Eilir Pierce

Posted: 31 July 2026 in Recommended Streams and Videos, Singles and EPs
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Most artists begin with a single. Eilir Pierce waited until his 40th album.

Released on July 10th, 2026, ‘Do-List’ is the first official standalone single from the Welsh artist  and filmmaker after more than 30 years of music-making, 39 self-released albums and over 500 songs.

Having spent much of his career operating outside conventional music-industry structures, Pierce recently moved from Wales to Glasgow to begin his most ambitious project yet.

His forthcoming 40th album, Half-Time, is a synth-pop musical about moving to a new city and attempting to become a pop star in middle age. Featuring guest appearances from Aidan Moffat of Arab Strap and Mercury Prize-nominated Welsh artist Gwenno, the project will also become a live stage show and film, with Pierce performing a full run at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in August.

‘Do-List’ captures the overloaded mind behind those plans.

The song races through tasks, ambitions and unfinished ideas as Pierce tries to impose order on everything he believes he needs to achieve. Each completed tick provides a smaller reward. Meanwhile, the jobs continue to multiply.

“I make lists because I’m overwhelmed,” says Pierce. “Then the list becomes another thing overwhelming me. I tick something off, feel satisfied for about three seconds and immediately notice the other 27 things I haven’t done.”

He adds: “I also refuse to call it a ‘to-do list’. The ‘to’ is completely unnecessary. That kind of inefficiency is exactly how lists get out of control.”

Built around tense piano and an increasingly agitated vocal, Do-List developed with Glasgow producer Gavin Thomson into a darker arrangement of drum machines, synth textures and strings.

Its clipped, spoken verses carry the blunt repetition of The Fall and the  deadpan detachment of Dry Cleaning. The chorus opens into something more exposed, with echoes of early Daniel Johnston and the eerie consolation of the Lady in the Radiator from David Lynch’s Eraserhead.

At the centre of the song is Pierce’s hope for an afterlife free from unfinished admin: “Heaven is a place with no list.” For a moment, the song escapes the pressure of constant productivity. Then another task arrives.

‘Do-List’ is Pierce’s attempt to write a direct pop song after three decades of working largely on his own terms. It is also the first item in an increasingly unreasonable plan involving an album, musical, film, Fringe run and bid for middle-aged pop stardom.

Perhaps Pierce was born in the wrong era.

Or perhaps releasing a debut single after 39 albums is exactly the point.

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Watch: ‘In Unity’ WIELORYB vs PSYCHOTRIBE Tribute Remix by DEATĦ B¥ LØVE

Posted: 22 July 2026 in Recommended Streams and Videos, Singles and EPs
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Trans-Atlantic dark-electronic duo DEATĦ B¥ LØVE presents their new single ‘n Unity (WIELORYB Remix and Tribute)’ which is dedicated to Wieloryb a.k.a. Paweł Kmiecik, a groundbreaking music and video artist, known forhis aggressive brand of industrial music and post-apocalyptic videos and who also, tragically, passed away just a month ago.

This two-track offering consists of "In Unity (WIELORYB Power Noise Remix)" and "In Unity (WIELORYB vs. PSYCHOTRIBE Tribute Remix)", for which the accompanying video was created by Wieloryb. This single arrives soon after the release of DEATĦ B¥ LØVE’s debut album 444, released via Distortion Productions.

A talented artist, Wieloryb was the dark pulse of Poland’s industrial music scene, emerging in Gdańsk in 1994 during an era of concrete, rust, and cold electronics. From his first recordings, Wieloryb struck without compromise. Electro industrial, EBM, and techno merged with noise, metallic rhythms, and haunting ambient soundscapes. The debut cassette "I" earned a Fryderyk Award nomination and opened a new chapter in Polish electronic music that was brutal, uncompromising, and devoid of light.

For decades, Wieloryb’s music has existed where aggression meets trance, and destruction gives way to contemplation. It is more than sound. It is a complete mechanical ritual, where raw electronics intertwine seamlessly with Paweł’s experimental visual art and video work, creating a singular aesthetic language of industrial melancholy.

“We dedicate this release to Wieloryb, Paweł Kmiecik, an extraordinary artist, producer, and video creator, whose vision left a lasting mark on the industrial scene. ‘n Unity’was the final remix he completed before his sudden and unexpected passing,” says Pete Guellard.

“His post-apocalyptic industrial landscapes sent chills down our spines, while his relentless rhythms and crushing soundscapes raised our pulse and demanded movement. His work was raw, uncompromising, and unforgettable. Thank you for everything Paweł. Your legacy lives on through the art you left behind. All profits from this release will go directly to support Paweł fmily.”

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Gintas K – Sugar Noizy

Posted: 13 July 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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zeromoon – 1st July 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Gintas K’s relentless release schedule (Discogs lists a whopping 70 albums credited to him since 1999) continues with his second album of 2026, recorded, again, live, with no overdubs, ‘using computer, midi keyboard & controller.’ And while this album contains a not insubstantial seventeen pieces, there are a fair few which are barely over a minute in duration, meaning that it clocks in at under an hour, making it significantly shorter than Merzmania, released in March, with its seventy-five minute run time.

The title implies either sweet but harsh, or the brain froth of a surfeit of sucrose. This being Gintas K, it’s actually both, simultaneously. Sugar Noizy is by no means a radical departure from the vast majority of his work over the last decade, and that’s all to the good. Arguably, he’s emerging as Lithuania’s bubbly, glitchy answer to Merzbow, in that his sound is by no means as harsh, but he very much has a distinctive sound and style.

If anything, Sugar Noizy is rather more sparse and minimal than many previous releases. ‘geras noise ss’ is constructed around subdued trills of feedback, and it has that low-key, subdued, even vaguely muffled feel of ‘Never Forget Death’ by Whitehouse’ – minus the shrill, mangled vocals – but claustrophobic, quietly intense.

As ever, Gintas K’s work sounds like circuitry collapsing into a foamy, frothy meltdown, and amidst the bubbles and bleeps, a chaotic cacophony of dripping, glooping squelches and squiggles, Sugar Noizy is a hyperactive work that’s essentially intended to overwhelm. And it does. Even when it slows to an infrequent drip, you find yourself on edge, wondering what’s next. And when it comes to ‘letas noiz zem’, the answer is a mangled morass of fractured, stuttering distortion that sounds like your speakers are breaking.

Some of the shorter ‘interlude’ tracks are truly wild: ‘minutinis’ may be a minute long, but it’s fried, a complete frenzy, and there are a lot of moments – often extremely brief – which sound watery, and slow digital darkness drips amidst the freakout of dark, digital violence as the segments and elements intersect.

Like the majority of Gintas K’s works, Sugar Noizy is a discombobulating barrage of wibbles, dribbles, whirs and buzzes, fragmented shards and dying drones, often all at the same time – making for a nice addition to his ever-expanding catalogue.

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The Pixel Rain – Last

Posted: 23 June 2026 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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18th June 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

‘Death is following us’, Áron Siegler warns at the start of, and throughout ‘Last’, the new single from Southeast London act The Pixel Rain. Hungarian-born songwriter and project founder Siegler has spent the last three years evolving a sound which draws on industrial rock, post punk, synth-pop and electronic music, and now, in the run-up to the release of the debut album, A Sense of Danger, set for a September release, they serve up a tune that pitches the guitar up in the mix.

Of the song, Siegler says, “‘Last’ was born from my scorn for modern-day authority figures as I was picturing a world that these kinds of people are gonna leave behind. The song has a specific meaning for me as a Hungarian person but I always try to write lyrics universally, encouraging the audience to find their own stories in my songs”.

The timing of the release couldn’t be better, landing just a few short days before the resignation of UK Prime Minister Sir Kier Starmer, after less than two years in the position. The media – online, in print, and on TV – is frothing with speculation, of course, while much is also being made of his legacy. It’s remarkable how a leader so insipid could be so divisive – but certainly, under his leadership, the government has done no favours to the trans community, migrants, or those with disabilities, or civil liberties in general, particularly when it comes to protesting the genocide in Gaza, which he still maintains is simply Israel defending itself. What kind of world is he leaving behind? What of his predecessors, and what – just what? – of Trump?

Death is indeed following us – and it’s stalking us digitally, through social media, through AI. One might be forgiven for feeling paranoid.

The production of ‘Last’ forges a sonic density which encapsulates that inescapable tension. The band cite The Jesus and Mary Chain and The Horrors as sonic inspirations in addition to their usual electronic touchstones, and it may allude vaguely to Automatic in form, but I’d say it lands more in the domain of Interpol intersecting with Depeche Mode – although that’s by no means a bad thing. The guitars are mixed quite smooth and soaring, and the song is imbued with an anthemic feel, while propelled by an insistent beat, and the chorus is prominent and dominant. If the rest of the album matches this standard of songwriting, it’s destined for success.

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The Pixel Rain (Áron Siegler) by Evelina Klimova (Landscape 02) web

Áron Siegler by Evelina Kloimova

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