Posts Tagged ‘EP Review’

GURT – Survival of the Shittest

Posted: 12 May 2026 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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5th June 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

I laugh, because the phrase ‘survival of the shittest’ was a phrase I used – a lot – in the late 90s, in my early years of being thrown into the corporate world after completing a degree in English literature. Back then, the belief still existed that a better education would lead to a better job, although in the three years between starting my degree and finishing it, a lot changed, and none of it for the good. ‘Graduate jobs’ stopped being a thing, meaning that it was a feat just to land a temp job doing data input work at an insurance company. It was fucking soul crushing, and Charles Bukowski’s Factotum became a book I came to relate to all too closely as I trudged my way through what felt like endless drudgery. And the managers, those who got promoted, those who did well? The common trait among them seemed to be that, when you boiled it down to the basics, they were all cunts. Backstabbers, self-promoters, overconfident wankers, twats with all the ambition but none of the skills… these bastards were killing it on the career ladder, while I sloughed away in a pit of despair. Scum floats, and all around me, it did. I wasn’t envious of their lives or their ‘careers’, but it was a gut-wrenching showcase of the shitshow that is capitalism and the greasy pole of corporate life: the survival of the shittest in sharp relief. This is now true of all aspects of life: as politics has become indistinguishable from business, and capitalism has taken over all aspects of existence, every bugger is using business-speak and striving to attain success not by means of hard work and talent, but by connivery and cuntishness. And it needs to be called out, and blocked wherever possible.

This new EP by GURT is nothing less than an absolute beast. With three tracks clocking in at ten and a half minutes, there’s no flab, no extravagant solos, no wanking about. They’re described as purveyors of ‘party doom’, but they’re a bit too uptempo to be doom and far too doomy to be party for most. Ultimately, their thing is a rabid racket, and at times, I’m reminded of the Leeds scene circa 2010 and shortly after, specifically around the emergence of crazed guitar noise acts like Pulled Apart by Horses and These Monsters. These were exciting times, particularly as it predated the need for professionalism to make it even onto a stage. Don’t get me wrong: these were great bands, but they were also wild, and things feel a lot more contained now.

GURT do not feel contained, GURT feel deranged, unhinged, rampant. ‘Live Nation, Dead Scene’ goes in all guns blazing, a rabid rager presumably targeted at the multinational ticket agency – operating what’s probably one of the biggest legal scams on the planet right now, with their exorbitant fees and dynamic pricing. The music industry has always sought to gouge every penny from fans while the artists themselves wallow at the bottom of the pile when it comes to benefiting from the proceeds, but Live Nation have hatched a whole new level of exploitatious robbery. They are literally – and yes, I do mean that – killing music for profit, and should be boycotted at all costs. I doubt this is a major issue for GURT.

The title track is a low-slung, sludgy, riff-driven roar, propelled by some ferocious drumming. The vocals are mangled to all hell, and it’s seriously gnarly.

Their cover of 2 Unlimited’s ‘No Limit’ simply shouldn’t work. It’s truly preposterous, audacious, and absurd. Metal covers of pop and dance tunes is old hat, predictable, corny… and yet they overcome all of this to conclude the EP with a ballsy, over-the-top take on a dance-pop song that’s as maligned as it was successful. This version’s not going to be making number one in a hundred countries around the world or filling dancefloors in perpetuity, but credit to GURT for the inspired choice. And now ‘party doom’ makes sense. Get on down, motherfuckers!

AA

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The Sunken Land – up close everything melts into air

Posted: 11 May 2026 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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17th April 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Since emerging as The Sunken Land not so long ago, David Martin has focused on his consistent push forward, and his systematic output. One gets the impression that this is much more driven by a desire to render new sonic art, than the capitalist compulsion, now being pushed by streaming sites, to continuously create ‘content’. And for that, I say ‘good’: content creation as a goal in itself is as anathematic to art as AI itself: creation for the pleasure of the act, however, is an entirely different matter.

This, the third release by The Sunken Land – and the third in four months – is perhaps the most ambitious yet, making deeper explorations into texture, tone, and contrast.

Admirably, there is no information about this release: it’s left for the listener to unravel. And why shouldn’t it be? While it can be interesting to learn where there’s a specific back-story, motivation, meaning, or method which is vital to a work, more often than not, the endless explication given by some artists gets to be a drain after a while. It can also make the writing of a review feel somewhat futile, as if half the job’s already been done.

As the title perhaps suggests, there’s a sense of ephemerality to the three compositions on up close everything melts into air. The first, ‘scoria bricks’ is an eight-minute piece which overlays a heavy, pulsating drone, dense with distortion, with soft, comparatively clean notes, which at times sounds like Earth attempting to cover Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Albatross’. The contrasting parts, while distinctly separate, form a full-spectrum sonic flow, which is both immersive and strangely soothing.

Some cursory research, meanwhile, reveals that a scoria brick is a type of blue-grey brick made from slag, originally manufactured from the waste of the steelworks of Teesside, common across the North-East of England, and that ‘the word Scoria originally comes from Greek, meaning “Excrement”, but came to be used by the Romans for a kind of volcanic rock’. It’s more than I can manage to avoid making some reference to ‘shit bricks’ here. However, I also discovered that these are precisely the bricks, manufactured in the late nineteenth century, used in the back alleys in the part of York where I live, which, on a personal level, brought an additional dimension to listening back to the track, a sense of connection with a part of the local history I had hitherto been unaware of.

Arriving with a tearing detonation of a chord, ‘into air’ is again simultaneously heavy yet delicate, even light. The experience is perhaps evocative of waves crashing against rocks, and observing rainbows amidst the spray – something rare and special, and so fleeting and impermanent – barely even tangible, and completely without substance – that it hardly seems to exist at all. In a blink, the phenomena has passed, as if evaporated, quite literally ‘into air’.

The third and final piece, ‘white sike’, is both the briefest and the gentlest of the suite, and given the voyage of discovery inspired by ‘scoria bricks’, it’s perhaps most likely in some way connected to White Sike Wood, a forest some way west and a shade north of Harrogate, rather than the White Sike in Dumfries And Galloway. Its picked notes and slow movement is the sonic equivalent of dappled sun – rather than Sunn O))) – through leaves, and over its duration, a tranquillity descends.

AA

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Mass Hallucination – Mass Hallucination (EP)

Posted: 2 May 2026 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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Makeshift Swahili – 11th March 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Leeds’ Mass Hallunication’s thing is short, fast, noisy hardcore noise. This eponymous three-track EP is their debut release proper, following a digital-only self-released demo, which clearly laid the groundwork and set the template for this (right down to the fact that the three songs, despite being different songs, have the same durations of 1:19, 0:56, and 1:12, which is a remarkable coincidence).

And so it is that Mass Hallucination clocks in with a total run time of three minutes and twenty-seven seconds, and while it would be misleading to say that it’s more polished than the demo, the sound quality and the mix is better. Beyond that, this is savage, brutal, raw, rage triple-distilled and bottled fresh, rough and unaged at 100% proof.

‘Lacerated’ raises the curtain in a wail of feedback and a bowel-bothering bass which strolls in tentatively, before everything goes off in a flurry of unbridled violence. Centred around a cyclical riff, it’s a dirty gnarly assault delivered with a skin-shredding ferocity. Each track starts and ends in screeds of feedback, and the whole EP runs as a continuous piece, segued by the scream, the songs themselves blasting out in frenetic fits.

The lyrics are chewed, gargled, and spat, the words themselves lost in translation but the sentiments as clear as anything, everything coalescing to conjure a purgatorial purging, everything louder than everything else, a relentless roar of the most primal anger. Ugly and uncompromising, Mass Hallucination is pure catharsis, and a definitive statement.

AA

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Ecce Shnak – Shadows Grow Fangs

Posted: 19 April 2026 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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Christopher Nosnibor

Few bands are less predictable than New York’s Ecce Shnak, and their catalogue is a veritable smorgasbord of flavours and textures. Their last release was the standalone single, ‘Katy’s Wart’, a two-and-a-half minute grungy punk rager presented in the middle of a sort of weirdy supernatural teen drama short film. Before that there as the live EP Backroom Sessions, a 4-song live set recorded at Backroom Studios in Rockaway, NJ released to coincide with a US West Coast tour with Spacehog and EMF.

Then, there was their being featured in the video for EMF’s ‘LGBTQ+ Lover’.

And now, a year on, they finally return to promote their last studio EP, Shadows Grow Fangs, on the East Coast, before hitting Europe and the UK (sadly no longer part of Europe for trade and touring, despite its continental geography), again with EMF – a band who’ve evolved significantly since they first broke in the early 90s. It seems like an appropriate time to catch up with this varied and inventive five-song set.

‘Prayer of Love’ brings together an almost trippy, psychedelic vibe and shades off prog, with a shuffling beat and an almost Cure-like bass. There’s some guitar noise kicking away low in the mix, too, and contrasts abound, although it’s nothing in comparison to ‘The Internet’. It’s 2026 (yes, the EP was released in 2025, but still) – and The Internet has become such a fact of life it’s largely overlooked as a thing. News articles quote comments made in response to posts on X or Instagram as if they have some value, and no-one considers this weird or devaluing. How is it any different from quoting some bloke down the pub or a street heckle as commentary? The track opens with layers of chatter and the scrattering of a reverby shoegaze guitar, then a shuffling beat slides in and in an instant it’s a rap / opera / math-rock hybrid. In some ways, it feels like a retro hybrid that evokes the days when sampling and scratching were innovate and it’s at least twenty years too late, but at the same time, it feel timely, in that never before has shit been stranger, more messed up, more bewildering, as the generation gap grows wider by the week and the different generations – A, Z, X, boomers – evolve their own languages which are incomprehensible to anyone other than their peers. Does anyone actually know what anyone else is saying, let alone what’s going on?

The title track is bombastic and theatrical, but also a bit post-rock and a bit chamber pop and a bit drum ‘n’ bass. The last time I heard anything quite this headspinning was when I discovered Birdeatsbaby, who veered between dark cabaret and metal, while incorporating elements of classical and prog.

The EP’s final song, ‘Stroll With Me’ marks a significant shift, as a sparse, acoustic folk song with gentle organ tones, which is disarming and genuinely pretty.

None of the songs on here sound like any of the others, and nothing on Shadows Grow Fangs sounds like ‘Katy’s Wart’ – or anything else for that, for that matter: Ecce Shnak tunes are like a box of chocolates – only better, because they’ll not rot your teeth and will give your brain something to chew on. What they’ll do next is anyone’s guess, and the live shows are certainly going to be interesting.

AA

TOUR DATES
MAY 07  Philadelphia, PA, USA – Nikki Lopez
MAY 08  Buffalo, NY, USA  – Town Ballroom
MAY 09  Toronto, ON, Canada – Dance Cave
MAY 10  Montreal, QC, Canada – Bar Le Ritz
MAY 11  Boston, MA, USA  – City Winery
MAY 13  New York, NY, USA  – Sony Hall
MAY 14  Millersville, PA, USA  – Phantom Power
MAY 15  Baltimore, MD, USA  – Metro Gallery
MAY 16  Hamden, CT, USA  – Space Ballroom
JUN 02  Manchester, UK – Gorilla
JUN 03  Worthing, UK – The Factory Live
JUN 04  Portsmouth, UK – Kola
JUN 05  Southend, UK – Chinnerys
JUN 06  London, UK – The Garage
JUN 07  Leeds, UK – Brudenell Social Club

AA

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The 113 – The Hedonist

Posted: 17 April 2026 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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17th April 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

The singles leading up to the release of The Hedonist, the second EP by The 113 have very much been cause for excitement and built a buzz about the band. Each of the four songs is tense, taut, edgy, quickfire vocals spitting lyrical depictions of the grim present in which we find ourselves with a splenetic urgency against a noisy backdrop where the combination of bass, drums, and guitar – in themselves, completely conventional – meld to forge a dense, unified aural assault.

As they put it, The Hedonist ‘revolves thematically around an anti-technology sentiment, raising questions about data, online worlds and how these can be weaponised against you.’ This – and various surveys and reports – is indicative of an increasingly anti-technology (and certainly an anti-AI) sentiment among younger generations. They have reason for concern, and it’s hard to decide what’s scarier, the prospect how personal data will be used, or how entire swathes of jobs will cease to exist in the imminent future. Anyone who blithely pisses about making caricatures and action figures in the name of fun is not only missing the point: they’ve already sold their soul and more. They’re part of the machine.

We’re living in every single dystopian fiction ever created all at once, right now. This isn’t hyperbole. And it feels as if we’re all trapped and helpless. It’s small wonder we’re experiencing a mental health crisis as we see an entire generation coming through paranoid and scared as we witness an existential threat in many ways worse than the cold war, inasmuch as it’s a war on all fronts.

The 113 recognise this, and The Hedonist is an articulation of this infinitely-faceted terror. Every single track is a standout, and in sustaining the high level of intensity across the whole EP, the potency of the material is amplified. Where The Hedonist succeeds is in the way it doesn’t depart from the blueprint of the debut, To Combat Regret, but instead builds on it.

It’s by no means music to chill out to: quite the opposite, in fact. It’ll likely raise your blood pressure and make you clench your jaw and fists. But if there’s a band that encapsulates the zeitgeist, it’s The 113.

AA

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Gout – Actual Bastard (EP)

Posted: 8 April 2026 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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17th April 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

I happen to know a fair few people who suffer from gout – which may be an indication of my age and the people I associate with – and they will all attest that it really is an ‘actual bastard’. But the title of this EP is also so, so Glaswegian. Living in Glasgow for four years, I came to appreciate that not only is Scotland culturally very different from England – something tourists probably don’t get to absorb in a week or two – but Glasgow has a culture, and a dialect, and countless turns of phrase which are unique to Glasgow. Following my time there, ‘Actual Bastard’ sounds like Glasgow, and the only way it could sound more Glasgae is if it was called Pure Bastard, Pure Wee Bastard¸ or maybe Fuckin Bawbag Cunt Bastard. Glasgow’s probably the only place on the planet where you can call a colleague a cunt in the office and not get into trouble because it’s a term of endearment as well as an insult.

Gout features members of Glasgow bands Lucia & the Best Boys and The Ninth Wave. As the bio notes, though, Gout is ‘a far cry from these projects, however’ (And having caught The Ninth Wave at Live at Leeds (I think) many moons ago, I can attest to this), Gout distils the intensity of hardcore with the low, driven crush of sludge forebears’.

No two ways about it: Actual Bastard is an absolute rager, with rabid, throat-ripping vocals raving and raw over filthy, low-slung churning riffs. The first track, ‘nmate’ lurches headlong into punishing, sludge-laden dirt, calling to mind The Jesus Lizard and the like, but scratcher, heavier, more overtly metal. ‘Too Bleak’ ratchets up the savagery, making for an eardrum-busting assault – but it’s tame in the face of ‘I Am A Beacon of Health and Wellbeing’ which sees the riffery go straight-up Godflesh and the tuning go way down to conjure the most ferocious hybrid of 90s noise rock and extreme metal.

AA

If ‘Junk Sick’ goes a bit easier, with clean chorus-tinged guitar and a slugging bass, it’s not without a brutal lurch into extremity, going early Pitch Shifter meets Fudge Tunnel around the midway point.

‘Tarmac’ brings peace at last with a spoken word narrative and clean guitar strum. ‘I’m the eldest of two / You’re the youngest of three / I’m just tarmac to you / you can walk all over me… just walk all over me’, Ally Scott mutters tensely. Here, it registers that this is not just a band doing it for a bit of a laugh: there’s real emotional depth buried amidst the tempest of noise. But of course this revealingly introspective moment is swiftly swallowed in a welter of noise. What does cut through is pure rage and anguish, a cathartic offloading of trauma, amidst a swirl of metal meets shoegaze. The impact level is high, and ‘Tarmac’ only elevates the power of Actual Bastard. I’m foraging for words here, in the face of overwhelming musical might.

Gout sure as hell don’t hold back, and Actual Bastard is a flailing, furious, rampant, relentless beast of an EP.

AA

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Teleost – Teleost

Posted: 25 March 2026 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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22nd March 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

After an eon evolving their sound with comparatively little to show in terms of releases, Teleost have really picked up the pace of late: Three Originals was released in January 2025, followed by ATAVISM in December of last year, and here we are barely three months on faced with a new eponymous EP. Clearly, they concentrate their mental energy into the music rather than the naming of their EPs – and rightly so. The title is inconsequential: the music is what this is all about. moreover, what this, and what Teleost are all about, is exploring those dark tones and the ways in which frequencies resonate against one another, particularly at volume.

Live shows – particularly of late – have more than attested to the necessity for volume for Teleost, in the same was as is true for Earth, and Sunn O))). The simple fact is that some sounds, some frequencies, some resonant interplays, simply cannot occur at low volumes. Anyone who suggests that these bands – and Swans and A Place to Bury Strangers, among others – exploit volume gratuitously simply doesn’t understand the way in which vibrations change things. Teleost, however, very much do. And with their ultra-slow doom-drone, this is a band who really go into microcosmic detail when it comes to tonal shifts and reverberations within their great wall of sound.

This – their second EP, and sixth release in all – features three tracks. And once again, epic is the word. The four-and-three-quarter-minute sludgefest that is ‘Palanquin’ feels like a brief bridging piece between the megalithic ten-minute ‘Navigator’ and the eight-minute ‘Standing Stone’. And holy shit, is this heavy.

With Telost, the guitar has always been heavy, thick, grinding, the sound more akin to two guitars – or more – grinding out a speaker-shredding tsunami. But this… this takes it up several notches. It’s not just the guitar sound itself, of course: the production achieves the rare feat of capturing not just the rib-rattling, lung-shredding sound of a duo that take Melvins’ reattenuation of Black Sabbath to a skull-crushing level of pain.

With Teleost, there’s a clear sense of structure, of linear progression, too. ‘Navigator’ starts out gently, a textured hum, a buzzing drone, clean strings strummed but resonating. Low tom beats enter the mix and the build is slow, deliberate. Leo Hancil’s vocals reverberate – detached, a pagan-like incantation low in the mix. The suspense builds. Dissonance chimes, but still we traverse through deep fog and mud-thick tracks. And then at five minutes, it hits. And it hits so hard but so sweetly. The impact is immense. THAT is a riff, and how to land it. It completely knocks the air from your lungs, then proceeds to tear your limbs off, one by one, while shredding your skin with blunt but brutal claws.

How two people can create this organ-bustingly megalithic noise is unfathomable. But they do, time and again, growing ever more immense with each show, and with each recording. Yes, I say it every time, but every time, it’s true: Teleost have transcended to another echelon with this release: denser, heavier, louder, more punishing – and at the same time more immersive and transportative.

AA

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Polevaulter – Descending

Posted: 19 March 2026 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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13th March 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Polevaulter are very much a band of the times. The cost of living and the fact bands make no money has driven a marked shift towards duos and power trios, and notably electronic music and drum machines have become popular again. The less kit you’ve got, the easier it is to rehearse at home or in a small space, there’s less to the logistics of getting a smaller number of people with minimal gear around (hell, the logistics of getting people in the same place at the same time around work and family and all that shit), and any fees and proceeds from merch are split fewer ways. Necessity and invention, and all that. And notably, there’s a lot of angry electro-led noise coming out of the north. Benefits are clearly up there in representing this thing, which isn’t anything like a movement, any more than the emerging goth scene in the 80s was a movement, but an artistic current, a zeitgeist. But we also have the likes of The Sick Man of Europe, Machine Mafia, and Polevaulter. These guys are something of the exception, in that they’re a shade dancier, but given the buzzing bass fury and relentless rage in the vocals, they’re never going to trouble any regular townie nightclubs, let alone any charts or Radio 1 Dance.

On the new EP, Polevaulter frontman Jon Franz said, “’Descending’ is our most cohesive and controlled EP, and also the most raw and direct. We wanted to reach people immediately, give them something to quickly digest and then say exactly what we wanted to say. The vocals start quick in each song. It progresses down through the EP into an anxious rave, the themes about being lied to all your lives and believing what you are told coming from power down to the working people. It’s our darkest and danciest EP I think.”

And so it is that with Descending, Polevaulter deliver four ultra-taut and super-succinct slabs of electro-led abrasion. ‘The Cursor is a Fly’ makes for a comparatively gentle introduction, before the grinding ‘Dogtrack’.the woozy, bulbous subsonic bass is pure dance, but the snarling, disaffected vocal is punk to the core, Franz wheezing ‘Just trying to buy a house, now let me have it… dogtrack… gamble… run down… dogtrack… going round and round and round…’ It’s bleak and hypnotic and bleak and hypnotic and… you get the picture.

‘Manifest’ mines a dark dance groove with a vocal that’s bordering on spoken word, and calls to mind the short-lived and criminally underrated York band Viewer, the technoindie collaboration between the late cult techo legend Tim Wright and vocalist AB Johnson. In other words, it’s a well-balanced hybrid, where thumping beats and techno synths collide with a vocal that draws influence from Jarvis Cocker and Mark E. Smith. ‘I’m going down with the ship’, Franz announced against a clattering backdrop of snashing metallic snare drum detonations and rapidly-shifting synth gyrations.

The final track, ‘Soothsayer’, is the EP’s longest, and a sparse, haunting intro paved the way for a dark, reverb-heavy electrogoth groove with hushed, hypnotic vocals over an almost subliminal bass groove cut through with a heartbeat kick drum and smashing snare and builds to a tense, suffocating climax.

These are dark times, and it is definitively grim up north. Polevaulter provide a soundtrack to this, while countering bleak nihilism with some almost euphoric dance synths. Descending offers escapism in the same space as the darkest pessimism. The conflicts and contradictions are navigated successfully, though. Polevaulter have taken a massive leap here, and really gone beyond their previous works.

AA

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The Sunken Land – worm moon sessions

Posted: 12 March 2026 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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6th March 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

My first encounter with The Sunken Land was at the York EMOM (that’s Electronic Music Open Mic) at the start of the month. There were looks and mumblings of surprise, confusion, and even consternation within my vicinity. These events attract makers of a broad spectrum of music, from those who dabble to the obsessives, from laptops to modular setups to self-made kit, and from pop to ambience to far more experimental stuff. Often, there’s much interest and conversation in the gear being used, particularly as a fair bit of the kit is rather novel. ‘What is that?’ began to be asked around as The Sunken Land’s set started. There was incredulity, amazement at the instrument being wielded on stage, something alien to these night. It was a guitar.

The man playing, it, one David Martin, was conjuring layered soundscapes, pleasant to the ear, but underpinned with a physical density. It was well executed, and powerful, and distinct.

worm moon sessions, released the following day, captures the sound of that live performance well.

While there’s apparently no scientific evidence, there is plenty of anecdotal indication that people feel different on and around full moon. Werewolf mythology is but one example of the way the power of the moon seems to affect us, and since this satellite planet drives the Earth’s tides, it’s hardly surprising we also feel that we sense its force. There’s also something compelling, mesmerising, hypnotic, about a large, bright moon, or a moon with an aura, or displaying an unusual hue. This year’s worm moon, on 3rd March, was particularly unusual, emerging a fiery red from a total lunar eclipse, and perhaps some of this rare power filtered into The Sunken Land’s recordings here. While worm moon sessions may not represent an immense leap from demos 2026, released in February, there’s most definitely evidence of a gradual honing of the ‘bedsit doomgaze’ form here.

AA

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‘worm moon’ brings the heavy drone of Sunn O))) but with elements of melody rising out of the dense sonic swamp. These melodic details, in context, evoke the form of later Earth. It’s the kind of slow, deliberate guitar work that compels the listener to really hone in on the textures and tonality, the way the notes of a struck chord – thick with distortion and expanded with reverb – interact with one another.

The shorter ‘almost true’ is altogether lighter, more graceful, emphasising the ‘gaze’ aspect of the self-made genre tag. It’s still dense and underpinned with slow, droning distortion, but there’s a soft, almost ethereal hue around it, and the experience is ultimately uplifting, like the first signs of spring.

AA

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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. 

AA

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