Posts Tagged ‘electronica’

Gintas K – Merzmania

Posted: 12 April 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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gk. rec. – 30th March 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

There’s a clue in the album’s title as to what Gintas K’s latest musical venture is about, and while neither Merzmania nor anything else in Gintas K’s catalogue comes close to the harsh noise of Masami Akita, there are clear connections and parallels between the two artists, in particular the prodigious output, and their propensity for taking experimentation to its absolute limit. Oh, and the occasional pun. Merzmania very much seems to echo Merzbow’s revelling in self-referential ‘Merz’ prefixes with album titles like Merzbeat, Merzdub, Merzbear, and Merzbuddha. It’s by no means an homage or stylistic lift, but a simple and seemingly sincere acknowledgement of a thread of influence. But anyone familiar with the work of Gintas K will already be aware that he is a unique presence within the field of experimental electronic-based audio works.

As he explains regarding this release, ‘Merzmania is electroacoustic live electronics pieces made using my own instrument made from a computer, Plogue Bidule software & midi controller assigned to VST plugins. All software parameters controlled, altered live in real time during performance using knobs & sliders of midi controller attached to VST plugins parameters. Performance made from synthesized sounds. Merzmania is a piece connecting classical music skills with today’s noise music (slight allusion to noise icon – Merzbow). Merzmania’s main playing method is real time interaction with the computer which I am using on all my live compositions’.

The tech stuff goes over my head, if I’m honest – but I’m more interested in the output than the input, and Merzmania provides 75 minutes of sonic mayhem. From swarming, skittering microtones which crowd in a dizzy delirium, through warping drones and groans, fairground organ sounds, and the occasional subaquatic detonation, it’s all going on, and often simultaneously, as is very much the case with the first piece, the 9:41 ‘merzmania#1 main’. Five minutes in and my head is spinning and I’m experiencing a huge anxiety spike and a sense of being overwhelmed. ‘Mania’ is very much the word here.

‘merzmania#2’ is the sound of a thousand digital hornets clustering around a dial-up modem struggling to connect – for nearly eight minutes, while ‘merzmania#3 dreaming’ makes you wonder what kind of dreams this guy has. It’s by no means nightmarish, but the rush of discord very much instils the sensation of rising panic, the palpitations of an anxiety dream. There’s something that fleetingly resembles a break from some drum ‘n’ bass, and again, the fact that there’s so much going on, all at once is… headspinning. And I mean… holy shit. Just when you think it couldn’t get any wilder, any more frenzied, any more overloading or intense… Gintas K manages to take it up not just another notch, but another two or three.

‘merzmania#5 slow’ does offer some respite from the insanity, but its syncopated toots and scratches and hums and crunches are far from soothing, and the space becomes increasingly sonically crowded as it progresses. The stereo panning is nothing sort of brain-melting, and nowhere more so than on ‘merzmania#6’, tinkling chirps and motorised hums and drones, the sound of a piano being played by a dozen cats while an engine revs… the hum of the power lines…

While employing much of the same technology and largely the same performance techniques of previous releases, something about Merzmania feels like a step forward for Gintas K. It’s hard to pinpoint precisely what, but that’s likely because my head is swimming with a tonal assault. But also, it is different: many of the sounds are more piano-like, more overtly ‘keyboardy’, in place of the bubbling froth which dominated many of his past works.

There’s distortion and fizzing static and pure noise on ‘merzmania#8 spare’, and ‘merzmania#10 hum’ essentially speaks for itself. And even with all of the live demos posted on his YouTube channel, just how Gintas K conjures this wild mash-up is difficult to assimilate. Because, but really, how…? It’s a lot to process. Life, the world, everything, really. And this latest Gintas K album does not help. But if it wasn’t this, something else would assault the senses, in other ways. Gintas K’s work will never offer a diversion or escape, but it does provide a different kind of mental overload. The final track, the second ‘slow’ is very much more gentle in the main, a tinkling taking the lead, but some roars like the revving of a motorbike overtaking, and explosive noise obliterating the finale.

Merzmania finds Gintas K at his experimental best, and pushing beyond the parameters set out on previous works, which were in themselves boundary-pushing. This, then, is the outer limits… but there’s a sense that he’ll still go on from here, too.

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Abel Autopsy – uunder

Posted: 6 April 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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20th March 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

With his debut release, Abel Autopsy makes his ambition clear, announcing that uunder is envisioned as a journey within a three-part series, with the next two releases in the series being overr and outt, and promising ‘dark, melancholic, shapeshifting worlds that slide between light and shadow’. Although the inconsistency of the double letters on this first release from those projected to follow disturbs my sense of necessary balance, I can close my mind to it while opening my ears and concentrating on the music.

The nine tracks take the form of layered, atmospheric synth-dominated compositions, and Abel Autopsy sets out the context for these thereal works, which evoke haunting (super)natural landscapes by electronic means.

“This started in my youth – pulling apart various musical instruments (battery powered) while in the woods of Appalachia. There was an eerie, ethereal vibe almost like something ‘other’ in the wilderness with me. That permeates through all of the songs and is woven in the mental tapestry throughout. This album is an exercise in capturing that – the balance between light and shadow, feeling another ‘presence’ with you that is not entirely from here.”

The vocals on ‘ghostride’ are muffled, indistinct, the words – if there actually are any – indecipherable, serving more as another instrument than anything else. The pieces are bold, sweeping, cinematic, the ambient tendencies given form by solid mechanised beats which are up in the mix. ‘unfound’ and ‘gates’ land in the space between later Depeche Mode and Nine Inch Nails, the latter also spinning in dance tropes and the haunting monasterial sounds of Enigma music.

He is very partial to the big thunderclap blast when making a change in key or tempo, or simply stepping up the drama – perhaps excessively so, as there are moments when things do feel a bit formulaic – something compounded by the comparative uniformity of the track durations, which are all within the range of 3:01 and 3:37 (three of the nine have a run time of 3:37).

‘mycenae’ tweaks the template to accentuate the contrasts between light and dark and thanks to a super-full, extra-low bass, goes darker than anywhere else on the album, and the crackling static which fizzes through the introduction of the heavier, more distorted ‘nihill’, which concludes the set, brings a sense of decay and a doomy finality.

There are some neat ideas spread across uunder, and the execution is similarly neat, with a clear attention to detail. More variety, particularly in terms of tempo and dynamics would likely create greater impact, but it’s a promising start, and it will be interesting to see how Abel Autopsy evolves over the next instalments of the trilogy.

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Stine Janvin / Morten Joh – Or Gare: Funeral Procession Music from Ryfylke, Norway

Posted: 4 April 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Futura Resistenza  – 24th Match 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Well, it is Good Friday, so it seems an appropriate time to settle down with a large whisky and some candles to engage with an album of funeral procession music from Ryfylke, Norway. And as the title suggests, this is actually what this collaborative album contains:

Rooted in the bygone custom of ‘Liksong’ (literally ‘corpse song’) that was once sung by small groups of singers who guided rural funeral processions, Janvin and Joh tap into its uncanny, unbearably slow intervallic structures, reanimating the practice as a kind of ancient electronic microtonal devotional music. Voices and vocal effects, synths and melodic percussion seep into the cracks between major and minor, and the whole thing carries the creaking weight of ceremony, yet glows with an otherworldly modernity, as if a forgotten liturgy had been retuned for a dimly humming chapel of circuits.

The duo, with Janvin on vocals and electronics and Joh on synths, tape machines, and percussion, also enlisted Lucy Railton (cello) and Jules Reidy (electric guitar).

The nine tracks present a remarkably structured, linear funeral journey – and while the premise of the album is already most uncommonly literal, so is the linear structure, which begins with ‘Leaving Home’ and concludes with ‘Postlude’, which it arrives at via ‘Pasing neighbours’, ‘Before the burial site’, ‘By the grave’, ‘Lowering the coffing’, and ‘Processing grief’, among other almost instructional titles.

The pieces them selves are quite minimal in their arrangements: drones, hums and haunting, folk-inspired vocals, bathed in reverb and surrounded by echo come together to create soundscapes which are haunting, and, at times, other-wordly. ‘Pasing Neighbours’ is a slice of detached, rippling electronica, which on the surface couldn’t be further removed from ancient Nordic rituals… and yet Janvin and John succeed in subtly manipulating the sounds to conjure something which reaches deep into the psyche with its rippling dissonance.

There’s a gravity to this album which underlies the twisting, processed electronic experimentalism which is befitting of the subject and the context, and while ‘Passing neighbours’ does amalgamate shoegaze with robotix 80s electro, it doesn’t feel disrespectful to the source.

‘Rest – Bordvers’ which features Jules Reidy) is a sliver of ghostly folk which sounds like spirits ascending over an early Silver Jews outtake, and ‘Before the burial site – Jeg Raader Eder Alle’ is a heavily processed, almost space-age reindentation of a folk incantation – but it’s the haunting, eight-minute ‘By the grave – Akk, Mon Jeg Staar I Naade’ which really grips the attention with its ghostly wails and insistent pulsations and expansive, arcing drones. The dronerous ‘Lowering the coffin’ features vintage spacemuzak ripples and reverberating ululations contrasts sharply with ‘Processing grief’, which begins hymn-like, before swiftly transitioning to shuffling, fractal synthiness reminiscent of Tangerine Dream.

One suspects that in this modernisation, in this translation, something has been lost. But at the same time, this interpretation serves to keep an ancient heritage alive. And this is the sound of dark woodland, of glaciers, of spartan spaces – ice-dusted woodland. Often, it’;s trult beautiful, and this is nbowhere more clear on ‘Acceptance – Kom, Menneske, At Skue Mig!’, another piece which is more than seven minutes in duration.

The final track, ‘Postlude’ is gentle, and even alludes to a brighter future on the horizon. For mem it feels a little soon, although there s no use of timescale by which to orientate oneself available in the immediate entrance of the accommodation.

Having spent the last three years processing – and documenting – grief following the loss of my wife, Or Gare: Funeral Procession Music from Ryfylke, Norway is a difficult album to approach on a personal level. But there are times in this expansive, exploratory work, that death, in all its suffering, has been muted and spun into niceness – if not a palatable, packageable sound.

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Loaf of Beard – Privilege and Other Poisons

Posted: 18 March 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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skoghall rekordings – 18th March 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Patience is supposedly a virtue… but then apparently, there’s no time like the present. And you’re supposed to strike while the iron’s hot. Clearly, Trump and his negotiators and so-called ‘Minister of War’ figured there was no time like the present even while negotiations with Iran were progressing nicely, with Iran offering substantial concessions around their nuclear programme.

Loaf of Beard’s follow-up to 2023’s Dog had been scheduled for a couple of months’ time, but from nowhere, it’s been brought forward and landed yesterday. It’s not even a Friday, let alone a Bandcamp Friday! Still, after LoB material got an airing on a jaunt of the UK late last year, this might be considered an example of striking while the iron’s still a bit warm, and moreover, given the way things are going, there really is no time like the present inasmuch as we can’t guarantee there will even be a future. There is an urgency to making art right now, and putting it out there FAST isn’t so much about keeping it relevant – although that is a factor, since events are happening at such pace it’s nigh on impossible to keep up – but about processing all of this shit and conveying the intense and myriad mixed emotions these insane times engender.

As they write in the accompanying notes, ‘In these constantly changing and worrying times it is somewhat of a relief that certain artists go out of their way to document humanity’s descent into fucking stupidity and greed’.

Loaf of Beard – a duo consisting of Chisel and Rabies Beefburger tackle these serious matters with an element of humour, Chisel ranting and chanting in a distinctly north of England sprechgesang over uptempo lo-fi drum machines and scratchy electronica. There’s something uplifting about both the musical and lyrical simplicity. On ‘All Of This Lot Can Get Fucked’, Chisel reels off a list of politicians and other public figures, with a chanting refrain of ‘get fucked’. It’s simple but effective, and in a just world, they’d be playing to hundreds of people all singing the words back at them in a display of unity. But that’s not the world we live in, as they point out on ‘Shit Mic, No Fans’:

Some might say I’m the laziest rapper

I have to admit, that there’s none crapper

All the fucker MCs come along and diss me

I spit out rhymes, they just dismiss me

The irony is that this isn’t a million miles away from Sleaford Mods in many respects., and I suspect they’re aware of this fact. When you boil it down, it’s sweary sociopolitical rants with repetitive hooks delivered over minimal electronic backing. But while there is humour here, at times, Privilege and Other Poisons is unafraid to venture into dark territory, and this is nowhere more apparent than on ‘B.A.E’, where they call out the manufacturer of arms and ‘informational security’, whose share price has absolutely skyrocketed in recent years, since Russia invaded Ukraine and war has essentially spread around the globe, with the lugubrious refrain of ‘B.A.E and their profits of death’. And this is how the world works under capitalism. A small – very small – minority coin it in while everyone else’s lives crumble and tens of thousands of people – innocent civilians – are slaughtered because some cunts in suits who wield power beyond imagination are petulant pieces of shit who want global domination like in a stupid movie and think it’s a game.

Elsewhere, ‘Claptrap Fåntratt’ sounds like The Fall circa Light User Syndrome (which is severely underrated in the scheme of their oeuvre). ‘Freeze Peach’ goes full-throttle raging electro/punk thrashabout, with Chisel foaming at the mouth with the chorus of ‘take your fucking flags down dickhead’ before going all-out Beavis and Butthead. ‘I Feel Like a Twat’ serves up a slice of cheesy jazz-infused disco funk, and knowing its awfulness is conscious and intentional only raises the level of awkwardness. This is Loaf of Beard all over. They exist to make you feel uncomfortable – and they succeed. And I for one respect that.

Semi-ambient pastoral contemplations about wildlife and sightings of elk make for some welcome respite: it’s not healthy to be raging all the time, and however fucked the planet may be, nature is resilient. It’s us who need to become extinct.

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Listen: ‘Blood + Wine’ by SINE

Posted: 28 February 2026 in Recommended Streams and Videos, Singles and EPs
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Electronic artist SINE (aka Rona Rougeheart) has released a new single entitled ‘Blood + Wine’ on Metropolis Records. Modern and club-ready, and featuring a vocal that is playful, frenetic and seductive, it is an upbeat dance track with bold electronic basslines accented by sub-bass drops. “Creating this song was about capturing the tension of chasing something that always feels just out of reach; the feeling of an endless pursuit,” states Rougeheart.

Her first totally self-produced song, ‘Blood + Wine’ also marks a key moment in the evolution of the SINE sound. “There was little time to focus on making my new album in 2025, as I was often away on US tours with Clan of Xymox, PIG and Nitzer Ebb,” she explains. “However, being around them taught me a lot. Once home, I started applying the knowledge I had absorbed, which led to this new track. It became a first real test of self-producing, and I was genuinely happy with the result. I’m really proud of the progress I’ve made.”

Mastered by Mark Pistel (Meat Beat Manifesto, Consolidated), ‘Blood + Wine’ remains true to SINE’s self-described ‘electronic boom’ style.

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Originally from New York but based in Austin, Texas, Rona Rougeheart blends dance beats, sub-bass, rhythmic synths and industrial elements. Her live show as SINE blends high-fashion aesthetics with synths, drumming and vocals, led by a strong female-fronted presence and cinematic visuals that entertain and empower.

She has collaborated with Adrian Sherwood, Meat Beat Manifesto, Clan of Xymox, Chris Connelly (Pigface, Revolting Cocks), Mark Pistel (Consolidated), Andee Blacksugar (KMFDM, Blondie), Xiu Xiu and the late Mark Stewart (The Pop Group).

A multi-instrumentalist, Rougeheart has been endorsed by Gretsch Drums, Gibraltar hardware and Roland.

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SINE | Rona Rougeheart photo by Bobby Talamine

Listen: ‘Fading Away’ by Jah Wobble & Jon Klein

Posted: 6 February 2026 in Recommended Streams and Videos, Singles and EPs
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The iconic Jah Wobble has teamed up with guitarist Jon Klein on Automated Paradise, their third collaborative album and debut album as a duo with Dimple Discs. Out March 27th, this eight-track collection is previewed by the invigorating lead track ‘Fading Away’, a track that pulsates with motorik drive and the raw electrical tension of British post-punk and new wave, its shimmering progressive layers seemingly surging through the circuits of life itself.

The pairing of post-punk legends Jah Wobble (Public Image Ltd.) and Jon Klein (Specimen, Siouxsie & The Banshees) is no coincidence. Initially combining forces on the Metal Box – Rebuilt In Dub album, released in 2021, they continue to collaborate – both live and creating music in the studio.

“Jah Wobble and I share a mutual desire to keep a momentum going at the centre of the creative process. So we keeping it moving and trust our instinctive decisions and ideas. Automated Paradise is essentially a collection of jams and sketches, all made very spontaneously. We’d made several albums together previously, starting with 2021’s Metal Box – Rebuilt in Dub, so he had a wide range of experiences and strategies to draw from,” says Jon Klein.

“‘Fading Away’ is an end-of-civilisation story, echoing one of the earliest themes of human literature and reflecting a persistent human anxiety about the fragility of social order.”

Jah Wobble adds, “Making this record with Jon Klein was (as ever) an absolute buzz . Totally in the moment. Proper post punk. Angry and humorous. ‘Fading Away’ was the first track we finished from this album. We did this record in a handful of very intense, spontaneous sessions. Right place, right time sort of thing”.

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This album follows two 2025 albums for Wobble -  Dub Volume 1 (Dimple Discs) and the expanded reissue of the 2017 album The Usual Suspects, featuring 25 career highlights, re-recorded and including some of Wobble’s finest material, alongside tracks by Invaders Of The Heart and PiL.

This is Jah Wobble’s first post-punk album in recent years, following an array of travel and dub records. The brash guitar-driven tracks reflect his continuing preoccupation with the declining state of the nation. Driven by his experience working weekly at a music-based community project in Merton, along with Jon Klein, this record recalls the spirit of Mark Stewart – angry in an empathetic, constructive way. Like much of his recent work, the lyrical content was often inspired while traversing London’s transport system.

Jon Klein is a guitarist and producer best known as a member of Siouxsie and the Banshees from 1987 until 1994, which saw the release of the albums Peepshow, Superstition and The Rapture. Originally in the Bristol band Europeans, he then formed the glam-goth act Specimen and relocated to London, where he co-founded The Batcave nightclub. He has worked with Talvin Singh and Sinéad O’Connor, and co-produced a string of No. 1 albums for Warner-signed Spanish band Fangoria, fueling a decade-long streak of chart-topping success in Spain. His most recent work being as co-producer and guitarist with Jah Wobble.

Jah Wobble (born John Wardle) is a bass guitarist and vocalist from East London, whose career encapsulated genres from post-punk, dub and world music to experimental rock and electronic music. An original member of Public Image Ltd (PiL) from 1978-80, he made two groundbreaking albums with the band, which included the iconic Metal Box.

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Listen: ‘Lighthouse’ by Hunter As a Horse

Posted: 31 January 2026 in Recommended Streams and Videos, Singles and EPs
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Hunter As a Horse (HAAH) is the South African musician and vocalist Mia van Wyk. Based in the Western Cape, she has spent the last few years self-releasing a diverse series of singles and EPs that combine electronically-focused songs with intense, melancholic lyrics that are given a darkly cinematic production.

Having recently signed to Metropolis Records, the first HAAH single for the label is ’Lighthouse’, an extremely personal song that weaves together mythology and psychology. Inspired by Carl Jung and ‘shadow work’, it is about how only the broken can truly understand each other. “But, one who was broken and is now healed has greater power to lead the broken through the dark night of the soul because they know the territory,” explains van Wyk. “It’s like if someone who died came back to guide the lost back home. I’m ignoring every warning about how you can’t save someone and declaring that I can. It’s about fearlessly challenging somebody else’s demons.”

Seamlessly genre-hopping between alternative, indie, electronic and dream-pop, with diversions into alternative dance and even nu-goth, the songs of HAAH have been described as mysterious, apocalyptic soundtracks for the strange happenings of our time, with the UK newspaper The Guardian commenting: “Brings to mind the mesmerising atmospherics of Lamb and Zero 7. Dark and very lovely indeed.”

The song lyrics of van Wyk are a mystical ride through her strange and synchronicitous life. Deeply authentic, they are inspired by death, addiction, astral visions, CPTSD, melancholia, nostalgia and magical thinking.

Hear ‘Lighthouse’ here:

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HUNTER AS A HORSE | Mia van Wyk

Watch: ’Sellenno’ by DEATĦ B¥ LØVE

Posted: 20 January 2026 in Recommended Streams and Videos, Singles and EPs
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Transatlantic project, DEATH BY LOVE has just unveiled ‘Sellenno’ – the new single & video from the forthcoming album, 444 due out on February 20th.
’Sellenno’ is not merely a song. It is an act of confrontation.

Written during autumn, a season of decay and withdrawal, the song emerged as an attempt to give form to pain that had long remained unnamed. As the external world faded into rust and cold, the song became a vessel for what could no longer stay buried: the psychological residue of childhood trauma and the emotional numbness shaped by C-PTSD.

At its core, ‘Sellenno’ explores dissociation: the state in which feeling becomes dangerous, and pain paradoxically turns into the only proof of being alive.

‘Sellenno’ stands as a portrait of survival rather than catharsis. It does not offer healing as spectacle, but as possibility, Speaking openly about trauma becomes, in itself, an act of resistance against silence. For a long time, the past remained locked away. With ‘Sellenno’ , that silence is broken.

The music video for ‘Sellenno’ was filmed on location at the historic Heinz Ketchup Factory in Pittsburgh, USA. Its vast, abandoned interiors – cold, dark, and cavernous provide an ideal visual counterpoint to the song’s emotional core, amplifying themes of dissociation, withdrawal, and inner desolation.

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DEATH BY LOVE weaves gothic, industrial, and trip-hop sensibilities into a singular sonic language, enriched by evocative Middle Eastern vocal textures. The project brings together Peter Guellard—whose decades-long presence in the U.S. dark-electronic underground includes work with The Electric Hellfire Club, Closterkeller, and Blitzkrieg—and Inga Habiba, whose distinctive, spiritually charged voice has been shaped by a multicultural heritage and a long career fronting gothic and new-wave acts in Poland.

A genuinely transatlantic duo, DEATH BY LOVE creates across continents through digital collaboration and embraces a multimedia approach to performance—pushing the concept of live presentation to its limits, even incorporating holographic presence on stage.

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Watch: ‘Exile (Single Version)’ by Mesh

Posted: 8 January 2026 in Singles and EPs
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MESH unveil the stylish music video ‘Exile’ as the first new song from the UK alternative electronic duo since nine years! This single is an edit of the opening track of the English band’s forthcoming new album The Truth Doesn’t Matter, which has been scheduled for release on March 27, 2026.

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MESH comment on ‘Exile’: “I was trying to write some music that was uplifting but had a dark and moody undertone”, Richard explains. “I had the chord structure and the chorus, but felt something was missing. That’s when I added the arpeggio type line at the start. This changed the character of the song and gave it that hypnotic, driving feel. It is the glue that holds it all together. After we had finished mixing the album and almost a year after the music was written, Mark sent me the track with the vocals added. It was one of those moments when I knew immediately that this track had to be the single. It was as quick as that.”

“We were about to go to Germany to mix the album with Olaf!, Mark adds. "I still had a couple of instrumentals from Rich which had no lyrics or vocals. I loaded one into Cubasis on my phone and started working on it in dead time during the mixing. I needed inspiration, and Judit, the wife of our producer Olaf, gave me the only English books that she had: Chicken Soup for the Soul – Stories for a Better World by various authors, and ‘The Man Who Fell to Earth’, which is a Bowie biography. I was also reading Heinlein’s ‘Stranger in a Strange Land’ on my pad. The lyrics kind of just fell out of those influences. I recorded the vocals on the phone outside on Olaf’s balcony and recorded them properly when I got home. It was all very last minute, but worth that last push.”

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Gareth Jones – 53_StOlaves : Response

Posted: 5 January 2026 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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Mortality Tables – 5th January 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Mortality Tables’ Impermanence Project has grown legs over the course of the last year, and has offered some remarkable, striking, and intensely personal responses to the theme. And as the title of this latest addition to the expanding body of work emerging under the project’s auspices alludes, Gareth Jones’ 53_StOlaves : Response is a response to a response, so to speak, adding layers of interpretation but also a certain kind of dialogue to the project.

The original St Olaves (St Olaves : Catharsis) was recorded label owner and project curator Mat Smith and released in June, and stands as one of the most intense and deeply personal pieces, a churning whorl of noise distilled from a field recording made by Smith at St. Olave’s, Hart Street, London. Amidst it, there are footsteps, voices, all vague and barely audible in the overwhelming wall of sound. The accompanying notes relate, ‘For a brief moment, you settled into silence. I said that I loved you again. It seemed to sink in who I was and why I was calling. It would be the last time that I truly connected with you, and I am convinced that despite the blur of the drugs and your Alzheimer’s that you understood.

‘The moment lasted barely a couple of seconds during our nine-minute call, but it felt like an eternity. You began saying that you were about to be taken away for tests, but you didn’t know what the tests were. Except they weren’t tests: you were being taken to theatre.

‘Two hours and five minutes after our call, at 1405, you passed away during surgery.’

It hits hard.

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And so we arrive at 53_StOlaves : Response, a field recording made by Jones while on holiday in Greece. He writes, ‘I was moved to create a response to St. Olave’s in the spirit of impermanence understood as, viewed through the lens of, transformation.’

53_StOlaves : Response is a similar duration – meaning it contains just over nine minutes of buzzing, jarring waves of background noise. It glitches frequently, the volume suddenly surging unexpectedly after an ebb, tapering to an elongated organ-like drone before altogether more optimistic-sounding ripples emerge. It has a wistfulness, a certain air of melancholy, but over time, this too dissipates, leaving gentle, dappled ambient hues with understated beats fluttering to the fade.

If St Olaves : Catharsis is the soundtrack to raw anguish and the howl of loss, the staggering bewilderment at the fragility and brevity of life, 53_StOlaves : Response feels like the emergence of acceptance over the passage of time. And this is where Response really comes to add to the theme of impermanence, and it feels like a subtle reassurance that while we likely never necessarily ‘recover’ from those deepest losses, that the wounds will forever remain psychological scars, the pain does ease, eventually, through, as Jones puts it, ‘transformation’. Nothing lasts forever. We transition. We transform. 

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