Posts Tagged ‘Experimental’

Soma Crew / Deathlounge / The Expression – The Black Horse, York, 2nd October 2025

Posted: 4 October 2025 in Live, Reviews
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It’s that time of year again, when the nights draw in, it rains nearly every day, and people start coming down with bugs and viruses. Consequently, JUKU have been forced to pull out of tonight’s double header, which is disappointing in extremis. A powerhouse live act wo we don’t get to see often enough, they promised to provide the perfect contrast to Soma Crew’s psychedelic drone. But alas, it was not to be on this occasion. This did, however, provide an opportunity for The Expression to step up and open the evening.

If ever one was looking for proof of just how healthy the York scene is right now, this is it. There are new bands of outstanding quality copping up all the time, none of whom are run-of-the-mill indie acts. It’s also worth noting how many of the bands in York aren’t all just blokes, either. And at the risk of repeating myself to the point of tedium, this is why it’s worth going to the free gig in pubs, the five-quid gigs in local venues, and turning up for all the acts. JUKU’s absence afforded the absolute revelation of The Expression.

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The Expression

They showcased a set of well-realised, tight compositions which brought together elements of dreamy shoegaze, and blistering post punk, propelled by rolling drums. The final song started gently but swelled into something altogether more solid, more riffy, calling to mind The God Machine. Despite battling issues with mic feedback, and nerves jangling just below the surface, they came across well and kept it together to relay some magical moments of chiming, mesmerising picked guitar, with vocals which at times were reminiscent of All About Eve’s Julianne Reagan. Definitely a band to keep on the radar.

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The Expression

I really so wanted to like Deathlounge. They have a great name and a great premise. Previous outings had shown real promise, too, not least of all their EP launch, despite what felt like an overly ambitious and overlong set. But tonight, they sparked, but simply failed to ignite. They sound rough, and it’s nothing to do with the PA. First and foremost, it’s the singer who’s the weakest link, but their lack of coherence is the real issue. They do melodic hardcore without the melody. Or the hard. The guitarist thinks he’s in Fugazi, while the bassist wants to be in Jamiroquai. The whole thing is a bit of a mess.

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Deathlounge

Soma Crew always seem to start with a slow, sparse number, and sound a bit trepidatious, awkward, uncertain. And tonight is no exception. I find myself thinking ‘ooh, is this even in key?’ With a substitute drummer, and Soma Crew being Soma Crew, the set is off to a slow, hesitant-sounding start, but building to a surging swell, a monolithic throbbing drone. I’ve drawn the comparison to Black Angels before, and the parallels are never more apparent tonight. With three guitars plus bass, and with everything but the vocals coming straight from the backline, they’re loud, and the sound fills the small space and then some. When they hit their stride, they’re phenomenal. Toward the end of their set they drop ‘Roadside Picnic’ and the sound is simply huge, and this, this is why we’re here.

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Soma Crew

Foldhead – Paris Braille

Posted: 3 October 2025 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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3rd October 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

Foldhead has been quiet on the output front of late, after something of a purple patch around lockdown, there was a lull, broken by Mirfield Pads in 2022, with only the ‘Single’ release with …(something) ruined since, and a live outing or two. This is the only kind of quiet you’ll get from Foldhead, mind you: the Yorkshire maker of mangled noise likes to turn it up and blast the frequencies – and tones.

If Mirfield Pads ventured towards mellower, more Tangerine Dream-like electronica, Paris Braille sees a return to the harsher territories more frequently wandered by Foldhead.

Paris Braille – the title likely a reference to two cut-up novels by the late Carl Weissner (who not only appeared in some collaborative / split works with Burroughs, including the seminal pamphlet So Who Owns Death TV?, but translated many of his novels for the German market), namely The Braille Film and Death in Paris – is a typically abrasive affair, with the title track being a nine-minute loop of noise which captures of the essence of the ‘derangement of the senses’ Brion Gysin strove to achieve with his multi-sensory performance pieces which extended the concept of the cut-ups to its logical extreme. The thunderous beat, when surrounded by and endless loop, becomes almost trance-like and strangely euphoric. It’s difficult to discern precisely what’s in the mix here: there may be voices, or it may simply be a tricky of the human ear – my human ear – in its quest to seek recognisable forms amidst the formless sonic churn, in the same way one finds the shapes of animals and faces in clouds. In the right context, say, as a remix on a Cabaret Voltaire EP (where it would be right at home, and the William Burroughs / cut-up connection is again relevant here), this would be hailed as an industrial dancefloor stomper – largely because that’s what it is. Intense, hypnotic, relentless, it’s a pulsating, shifting noise beast that slowly spins off its axis and out of control in a swelling surge of sound.

‘CW Loop’ unashamedly harks back to the tape experiments of Burroughs and Gysin from the late 50s and early 60s, which in turn were a huge influence in Throbbing Gristle, and in particular Genesis P-Orridge, who released a selection of archival recordings on the Nothing Here Now But the Recordings LP on Industrial Records in 1980. It is, quite simply, short vocal sample, heavily bathed in echo, looped, and overlayed with a churn of undulating noise.

The third and final track, ‘Film Death’ – the title echoing and mirroring that of the first – round the set off with a return to the thunderous, beat-driven sound of ‘Paris Braille’, this time with a squall of shrill feedback and full-spectrum static. The result is akin to Throbbing Gristle covering Matal Machine Music. In the world of Foldhead, this is absolutely mission accomplished.

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Content – Geezer Reimagined

Posted: 1 October 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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House of Halifax – 3rd October 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

Content’s career to date – such as it is – has certainly not followed a conventional trajectory, or even one designed to gain a following. It’s not the shifting lineups (that’s hardly unusual) but the fact the direction of their output is completely unpredictable. Their debut EP, We Keep Improving, released five years ago, was a riotous DIY racket, which I described as ‘a gnarly mess of electronics, popping beats and a disorientating sonic swirl’. Released in an edition of seventeen physical copies, it has all the ingredients required to become a near-mythical underground work.

So of course, with a different lineup, they followed this with an album which recreated the entirety of Yes Please! by Happy Mondays – an album which was roundly pilloried, and saw one of the weekly music papers review lead with the headline ‘No Thanks!’. It was the Mondays’ Shark Sandwich moment.

Amazingly, their second album is another cover of an album in its entirely, this time the 2018 Geezer by Leeds grindcore legends Ona Snop, who recently called it a day. I can’t think of anything further removed from, the slack, bloated funk of Yes Please! But this is Content, the vehicle of Benbow and – currently – Richard Knight. And this is absolutely guaranteed not to bring them world domination, or even more than a handful of fans. I don’t think they’re fussed about that, though.

Given that Ona Snop’s approach to powerviolence / grind was never entirely straightforward, or serious, Content’s irreverent approach to ‘reimagining’ the album, which blends industrial, techno, ambient, electropop, ‘retains some of the humour included in Ona Snop’s original work’, they say. Indeed it does. It certainly doesn’t contain much else, although that shouldn’t be construed as a criticism. The ‘reimagined’ tag gives them licence to pretty much do whatever the hell they please, and that’s precisely what they do.

And so it is that the first track, ‘In Pieces’, is transformed from forty-nine seconds of thrashing, splashing aural vomit, into a three-and-a-half-minute technoindustrial workout with a funk groove, coming on with the strut and snarl of Revolting Cocks circa Linger Fickin’ Good. It’s grimy and sleazy and fuck – and it’s as ace as it is audacious. It sets the tone for a wild ride: ‘Total Both’ brings bump and grind and flamboyance in spades, like Rammstein covering The Rocky Horror Show – or perhaps the other way around. Either way, it’s camp and crazy.

It’s all going on here: ‘More Important Than Christ’ starts out with wibbly 80s wizardry before going hyper electropop, landing somewhere between The Associates and The Teardrop Explodes in the process. There’s wonky electronica, spoken word, bleeps and horns… ‘Mustard Farm’ seemingly draws from Depeche Mode, Devo, and Man 2 Man in equal measure, while ‘Respect’ goes lounge, and there’s a hint of early Foetus in the warped disco blast of ‘Rotisserie Geezer’, before ‘Cement Head’ goes a bit Tom Waits.

How all this actually works, it’s hard to pinpoint. That each track is well executed – in that it’s apparent what they’re aiming for, and they achieve – helps, but the hectic, drum machine-propelled arrangements are dizzying, and so far removed from the source material at times it feels beyond tenuous. While the original ‘CD / DVD’ opens with a sample, Content rework it as a cut-up collage of glitched-up, mangled samples, harking back to the old-school Industrial roots demonstrated on the EP, with a debt to Throbbing Gristle and Cabaret Voltaire, and in turn, William Burrroughs. ‘Ona Snop F.C.’ is a super-slick autotuned workout that’s equal parts Prince, Har Mar Superstar, and overprocessed R’n’B. Horrible as it is, the knowing levels of cringiness are something to respect. Then, seemingly from nowhere, ‘Hot Soup’ goes all Mike Oldfield and ambient.

While the original album has a running time of less than twenty-five minutes, pulling the songs out and stretching things apart in every direction means that this reimagining runs for closer to an hour, and it never ceases to confound with its weirdness, or its willingness to embrace the cheesy. It’s almost impossible to judge Geezer Reimagined by conventional benchmarks or assess its merits by the standards one would ordinarily apply, because it simply doesn’t conform, and exists in its own sphere of strangeness. And whether or not you dig it – and I do – it’s impossible to deny that it’s imaginative in its interpretations.

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Content - Geezer Reimagined (House Of Halifax, 2025) (Front Cover)

Ashley Reaks – At Night The World Belongs To Me

Posted: 24 September 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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2nd October 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

The context for Ashley Reaks’ sixteenth solo album – and his third in three years (not counting the compilation of demos released earlier this year) – is weighty. He has written openly and extensively of his health issues, while sharing images and commentary nocturnal wanderings, and these both inform At Night The World Belongs To Me, of which he writes:

The looming spectre of death and loss haunt the album: Reaks survived two major health scares and a misdiagnosed terminal illness over the last 18 months, experiences that inform the reflective, poetically gloomy lyrics, and the 4 am downtempo grooves. Adding to the sense of loss, guitarist and long-term collaborator Nick Dunne died suddenly at home just one week after completing his guitar parts for the record.

Through all of this, he has continued to collage and write prodigiously, but At Night The World Belongs To Me marks a distinct change of tone from its immediate predecessors, The Body Blow of Grief (2024) and Winter Crawls (2023). The usual elements are all present and correct – the sense of experimentalism, the collaging of genres, melding post-punk, jazz, and dub – but this feels darker, more introspective. The cover art, too, reflects this. While it has the same rather disturbing, grotesque strangeness of his usual work, the grim-looking figure in repose has connotations of ailment, frailty, even the deathbed.

The first track, ‘Playing Skittles With The Skulls and Bones’ has a bass groove that calls to mind The Cure’s early sound, melded to a rattling rhythm reminiscent of ‘Bela Lugiosi’s Dead’. The smooth sax that wanders in around the mid-point provides something of a stylistic contrast, but at the same time, it’s minor-key vibes keep the song as a whole contained within a bubble of reflection, evoking the stillness of night. I know, I’m sort of dancing about architecture here, but something about Reaks’ work prompts a multi-sensory response.

‘Rimmed With Yellow Haloes’ brings soaring post-rock guitars atop of an urgent ricochet of drumming and solid bass. On the fact of it, it’s almost poppy, but it soon shifts to take on a folksy aspect, while Reaks sings of death and funeral pyres, and the refrain, delivered with lilting, proggy overtones, ‘The Lord gave the day to the living, the night to the dead’. In context of the album’s title and theme, there is a tangibly haunting foreshadowing here, a suggestion that Reaks has not only accepted his mortality, but has assumed his place. It’s powerful, and deeply moving. Of course, Reaks can’t help but introduce incongruous elements, with some horns which are pure ska and some super whizzy 80s pop synths providing a pretty wild counterpoint to it all. It’s hard not to smile, because there’s an audacity to this approach to composition and arrangement – a lot of it simply shouldn’t work, but it does, and it’s uniquely Reaks.

The album’s shortest song, ‘Things Unseen’ is snappy, poppy, Bowie-esque, an amalgamation of post-punk and electropop, a standout which is succinct and tight, and consequently, the dark connotations of the bleak shuffle of ‘Life Forever Underground’ – a rippling synth-led tune – are rendered more profound. The sequencing of this album is such that the shifts between songs accentuate their individual impact.

‘Mask the face, unmask the soul…’ he sings softly on ‘Mask The Face’, which has a somewhat spacey Krautrock feel to it – before a guitar solo that worthy of Mark Knopfler emerges most unexpectedly. And as dark as things get here, Reaks never ceases to bring surprises. At Night The World Belongs To Me perfectly encapsulates the reason he’s so respected and critically acclaimed, but orbits light years outside the mainstream. In a world defined by an exponentially reducing capacity for sustained attention, Ashley Reaks makes music that requires real engagement, the musical equivalent of complex carbs and high fibre foods in a processed, white bread culture. But also, contemporary mainstream radio music favours short songs which cut straight to the chorus, where the hook has to land in the first twenty seconds. Here, we have eight songs, all but one of which are over five minutes long. They take their time, they’re expansive and exploratory, there’s atmosphere, there’s depth. And as ‘Eyeing Up The Sky’ tapers away on a buzzing drone, we’re left with much to chew on, much to consider.

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The Dwarfs Of East Agouza – Sasquatch Landslide

Posted: 20 September 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Constellation – 3rd October 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

The third album by The Dwarfs Of East Agouza (Maurice Louca (Lehkfa), Alan Bishop (Sun City Girls, Sublime Frequencies), and Sam Shalabi (Land Of Kush) promises ‘a focussed set of rhythmic psych-trance free/improv’.

As their moniker and the album’s title suggests, they demonstrate a collective interest in urban myths, the strange, the embroidered and embellished tale, perhaps spun with a twist of esoteric mysticism, but at the same time, aren’t entirely serious about it all. That is by no means to imply they’re not serious about the music they make, even when the pieces have titles like ‘Goldfish Molasses’, ‘Saber Tooth Millipede’, and ‘Swollen Thankles’. Because it is possible to be intense and serious and at the same time retain a capacity for humour, a sense of the absurd.

Sasquatch Landslide is an album that’s knowingly ‘out there’, but at the same time, it’s clearly the work of a collective who are completely immersed in the world they’re creating through a conglomeration of sounds which border on the transcendental. Elongated, quavering drones and an array of percussion merge in a haze to forge loose, yet curiously intense grooves. The aforementioned ‘Sabre Tooth Millipede’ is a full-on wig-out jazz frenzy played with the psychedelic loopiness of Gong as their most far-out, and at the same time, amidst the twanging and clattering, there’s something of the spirit of The Master Musicians of Joujouka about it. For an added addling bonus, there are tempo changes galore, and some parts where there are multiple tempos crossing one another simultaneously as the players seemingly detach from this physical realm into different plains of consciousness, separate from one another yet still connected by some kind of telepathy. Because however weird and disjointed it gets, somehow it works.

‘Double Mothers’ goes spaced-out, haunting, and atmospheric. On the one hand, it’s one of the most overtly jazz pieces on the album, but the wandering, reverb-soaked saxophone weaves its way through a nagging twang of a distinctly Eastern influence, while a pulsing heartbeat rhythm creates an underlying tension.

Single cut ‘Titular’ is busy and adds an easy listening, lunge-like organ trill which is completely at odds with the hectic hand drums and frenzied fretwork. They really cut loose on the ten-minute ‘A Body to Match’, stretching things out in all directions – tempo, texture, detail, serving up a pan-cultural smorgasbord of noodlesome improvisation. There, they slowly pick apart the component elements, a slow-motion explosion or deconstruction of the composition, each part slowly moving further from the rest. ‘Goldfish Molasses’ slowly melts, a plodding beat reminiscent of ‘What A Day’ by Throbbing Gristle provides the spine for this slow, pulsating Industrial thudder, where a woozy bassline undulates in the background, and incidental noises and chattering yelps fill the space behind some indecipherable vocal.

Sasquatch Landslide is big on warped, looping drones and layers of intricacy upon layers of intricacy, which weave a shimmering sonic cloth that ripples and shifts before the eyes – and ears. Time itself bends and stretches, taking on an almost elastic quality as the threads unravel to reveal new layers and dimensions. One can feel the instrumentation expanding outwards into infinity – and infinite reverb – in the same way that the universe is continually expanding, only in an accelerated timeframe. For all of its abstraction, Sasquatch Landslide provokes quite visual interpretations of the sounds emanating from the speakers. I expect to have very strange dreams tonight after this.

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Listen: ‘Titular’ by The Dwarfs Of East Agouza

Posted: 17 September 2025 in Recommended Streams and Videos, Singles and EPs
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Maurice Louca, Alan Bishop, and Sam Shalabi expand on their telekinetic fusion of North African rhythm, heat-haze improvisation, shaabi rawness, free jazz, and psychedelic groove, following acclaimed albums on Sub Rosa, Akuphone, and Nawa Recordings.

Sasquatch Landslide overspills with the Cairo-based trio’s signature trance-inducing explorative  energies, anchored by Louca’s hypnotic beats and electronics, with  Shalabi and Bishop deploying guitar and alto saxophone in a variety of  signal-mashing modes. Comprising seven febrile jams across 42 minutes,  this is the most focused and twitchiest album in the DOEA  discography to date. Recorded by Emanuele Baratto (King Khan, Elder) and  mixed by Jace Lasek (Elephant Stone, Sunset Rubdown, The Besnard  Lakes), Sasquatch Landslide will be issued on 180gram vinyl and CD featuring artwork by Mark Sullo.

About ‘Titular’ Shalabi says; “This piece reminds me of the ‘after hours’ music I heard one night in a dark bunker-like jazz nightclub in Dakar many years ago… I’ve never heard that kind of music before or since.”

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L to R: Alan Bishop, Maurice Louca, Sam Shalabi

The Dwarfs Of East Agouza by Hans Van Der Linden

Johnny Richards & Dave King – The New Awkward

Posted: 31 August 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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False Door Records – 5th September 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

More than five years on from the onset of the pandemic, and still pandemic projects are emerging. The arrival of this release provides a timely reminder of a time which already many seem to have moved on from, forgotten. More than likely, there was a collective keenness to return to normal as quickly as possible, to bury the trauma and make like it never happened. There are many, of course, who will never forget, for a host of reasons. Many lost loved ones, but still many more suffered mentally, from isolation, from being trapped in abusive situations, or simply – I say ‘simply’ as if it’s something minor – the fear of the virus and the way the entire situation was managed and messaged by governments and media – not to mention the bewildering effusions of misinformation on social media.

In between home schooling, struggling to work as key workers, or struggling financially due to reduced furlough incomes, the idea that we were all in it together was essentially a myth – but people found ways of coping, and for those of a creative bent, new ways of creating became the focus.

For Johnny Richards and Dave King, this new way of creating involved emailing digital files across the world to one another: as the bio explains, ‘Richards recorded piano parts, some prepared, some using the piano as an explicitly percussive instrument, then sent King the files to the US for him to record his drum parts. Richards would then record further piano parts and overlay them, in response to King’s parts.’

At the time, there was much talk, many virtual column inches, devoted to the discussion of ‘the new normal’. Fleetingly, there was optimism, a hope for a kinder world, a world where we consumed less fossil fuels, where work / life balance was more evenly distributed… but since the end of the pandemic, it’s been hell, as if people pent up all their hatred and fury and have been unleashing it in war and antagonism and making up for lost time.

And so it is that The New Awkward reminds us of that fleeting spell of optimism, and as they reflect, ‘It could have happened at no other time. With its multiple layers percussion and piano, treated and untreated, it would be impossible to recreate live.’

Awkward is an appropriate choice of word for the title of this album. There is something almost feverish about the compositions, which are bursting with complex – and often irregular, contrasting, even conflicting – time signatures. At times, drums and piano happen upon coincidental timing, but for the most part, they seem to be duelling one another – not in an aggressive or antagonistic way, but playfully. On ‘The Chance Would be a Fine Ting’, there are moments where the parts intersect to forge a groove that almost has a swing, a swagger, albeit a slightly off-kilter, drunken one that staggers a little, the tempo changing as if the crank handle of an organ is slowing, then picking up pace again.

It’s a little disorientating, but ultimately fun, as titles like ‘Sleepless in Settle’ suggest – a title which only really makes sense in the context of Johnny’s being based in Leeds, or, more broadly, the north of England. The best jokes are always puns, especially when they’re super niche.

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The seven-and-a-half-minute ‘Memory Man’ has something of a vintage film feel to it, as well as a strong swing, and it’s easy to forget that this album features only piano and drums while listening to what, for all intents and purposes, sounds like a busy bassline leading a full band. The title track twists and twangs, is a bit noir, a bit late-night jazz café, but weird and woozy. ‘Gene Heard Wrong’ is another busy piece, the drums, played quietly but shuffling rapidly around the kit, as it twitching with anxiety, while the piano… the piano chinks and rolls with a nervous energy. ‘Darts’ strolls and stutters, while the last track, ‘Climbing on Mirrors’ builds slowly from dark atmospherics through softly loping beats with jarring discordant piano, and it sounds like everything is winding down… down… down.

From my own experience of lockdown – balancing working from home and home schooling a primary-school-aged daughter while my wife also worked from home, converting the living room sideboard into a desk until she installed a desk in our bedroom – devoting time – or stealing time, carving cracks in time late at night – for creative output was about the only thing that kept me even half sane. The fact that The New Awkward is far from straightforward makes sense in this context: I can relate to becoming so immersed, so invested in a project that it becomes its own world, and that its creation closes the door on the madness outside, all the texts and other messages, the screaming social media frenzy.

The New Awkward brings a lot back, and does so with mixed emotions. But throughout, it buzzes with a tense creative energy, urgent but also immersive and upbeat, the sound of unadulterated creative freedom.

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Kev Hopper – XiX

Posted: 27 August 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Dimple Discs – 22nd August 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

Weird shit is welcome here at Aural Aggravation. It was a part of the ethos of my starting this site back in 2015. Yes, it’s been that long since I decided that I wanted to strike out alone with a view to creating a platform devoted essentially to stuff that appealed to me and exploring them with more long-form, discursive essay-type writing. This of course completely went against the grain of where most media, in particular music media, is at now, and this has only become more pronounced over the last decade, in which time attention spans have largely been reduced to circa 120 characters or simply .GIFs and memes. But – presumably because my focus is on rather niche music which doesn’t always receive a wealth of coverage, rather than because of my propensity for divergence into the personal or the political – Aural Aggravation now attracts a respectable readership. I don’t feel any desire to celebrate 10 years of doing this: to do so would really be to celebrate a decade in a lifetime of stubbornness, a compulsion to write, and a musical obsession which I choose to inflict upon the world, but I do suppose, on reflection, that the rarity of the format, occasionally touching on theory, but – hopefully –without too much hypotactic wankery.

And so we arrive at XiX by Kev Hopper, who despite fourteen solo albums, and despite co-founding electronic act Ticklish in the late ‘90s, and was composer/bassist with Prescott in the 2010s, and working as a visual artist by the medium of painting for a good number of years, is still probably best known for being the bassist in Stump between 1983 and 1988. Despite only releasing one album proper, their output of singles and EPs was solid, they were all over the music press at the time, and they were championed by John Peel. This potted history throws into sharp relief just how times – and the face of the music industry, particularly outside the mainstream – have changed.

Hopper’s second album on Dimple Discs is a collection of quirky, whimsical electronic experiments. Skittery, light, and lively, there’s a playfulness which defines the pieces, even when sliding into low-end notes and minor chords. ‘Vector Prodder’ plunks and plonks, twangs and reverberates, and slides into spooky but fun territory, and in some respects it’s got 1960s Addams Family vibes. ‘Gruntian Forbes’ twists and spins strangeness into a sunny calypso groove, and this, in many ways, encapsulates Hoppers’ approach to composition on the twelve tracks on offer here – namely taking a comfortable form, and rendering it uncomfortable by warping, twisting, and distorting it in some way or another, tossing in some ethereal haze and a bucketload of l’aissez-faire oddball elements. And why not?

XiX fully embraces the spirit of experimentalism – the idea of simply trying things out and seeing what happens, and not even being hugely concerned if it’s only half-successful. That isn’t to say there are any semi-successes or borderline failures on XiX: what I’m driving at is the spirit of creative freedom which pervades. When cut free of the constraints of commercial concerns, when liberated from self-censorship, and simply creating for the sake of creating, for the joy that experimentation and making sound can bring, a work takes on a level of buoyancy. XiX is the sound of creative freedom. ‘Devils’ may be dolorous, with hints of Tom Waits, but ‘Lance The Prawn’ is an exercise in gurling synth and ridiculously OTT vocal processing (half-burying absurd couplets like ‘lance the prawn / on the lawn’) amidst bleeps and wiffles and space-age throbs and pulsations.

It’s sci-fi in its influences, but it’s Douglas Adams on the serious scale. While I’m no fan of Adams myself – I find the humour simply too cheesy, but worse than that, I find the fans of his works, who insist on referencing him relentlessly beyond irritating, I would like to think that this scaling works in context. The album’s material is not irritating or nerdy, but it is, at times, overtly strange, and nowhere more so than on ‘Brand Street Psychodrama’. It may be but a brief interlude, but it’s all the disorientation. ‘Window Seat’ brings all the chimes and gentle brass, evoking that mythological bygone age crossed with intimations of ‘made in China’, in the brittle 80s plastic sense.

Having just written about Eamon the Destroyer’s new release, it seems that this belongs in the same field, but represents an altogether different face of the experimental dice.

And this is a good thing, in that we are able to wander through very different corridors while stroking our chins and pondering the work emerging from the field of ‘experimental music’. Towards the end, there’s an urgency that builds to XiX. Or perhaps it’s just my anxiety rising as midnight draws closer.

Either way, this is a supple work, which ventures across a range of styles and forms, with the chiming, tinkling nine-minute closer, ‘The Cucurella Problem’, with its whimsical , warping lead lines and tentative, wandering bass being truly exemplary. It bends the brain, but slowly, gently, softly, and it’s kinda nice.

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Eamon the Destroyer – The Maker’s Quit

Posted: 26 August 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Bearsuit Records – 5th September 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

The thing with Eamon the Destroyer is that you never know what you’re going to get. The Maker’s Quit is different again from We’ll Be Piranhas, which in turn was quite unlike Small Blue Car (which remains a personal favourite, even if it does make me feel impossibly heavy on the inside). If We’ll be Piranhas marked a step forward in terms of experimentalism and optimism, The Maker’s Quit sees a greater emphasis on songwriting and structure – but don’t for a second think it’s in any way straightforward, and that the experimentalism has taken a back seat – it’s still very much a copilot here, and with the accent on the mentalism.

Here, the title track commences what is an incredibly varied set with a song that has the theatricality of Alex Harvey crossed with 1990s Leonard Cohen, before ‘Silverback’ confounds all expectation by bringing some shuffling funk-infused jazziness. In contrast to the fairly minimal arrangements common to previous ETD releases, this is pretty busy, then is settles into a mellow groove that’s almost loungey – bar the mid-section, which is rent with a protracted burst of extraneous sound. It’s almost as if he purposefully weaves around the line between genius and self-sabotage simply to tests us as listeners. There are some nice, light, poppy moments on here, and – albeit fleetingly – some captivating grooves. But it wouldn’t be Eamon the Destroyer without a huge helping of straight-up weird shit mashups, and The Maker’s Quit brings the lot, from frenzied jazz and post-grunge, wonky vaudeville waltzes and whistling, via electropop and slices of pan-culturally inspired melody.

More often than not, the verses and choruses are so contrasting as to seem to have been spliced from different songs – that’s when there are verses and choruses. ‘Three Wheels’ is a veritable patchwork, which compresses segments of what sounds like half a dozen songs into five minutes as it spins from grandiose heavy country dirgery by way of an intro, which even hints vaguely at recent Swans, before swerving into Europop with a hint of Sparks, through a off-kilter but gentle soundscaping that slides into laid-back salsa before winding up with a segment of jaunty indie rock. But rather than feel like an identity crisis, the effect is more that of a multi-faceted artist showing all his facets simultaneously. It’s hard to keep up, but one can only imagine what it must be like to live in his head.

The lyrics are equally fragmented, between stream of conscious and cut-ups, producing a Burroughsian, dream-like quality. This snippet from ‘The Maker’s Quit’ exemplary: ‘Saturn kid – spins and reels – in a city / Little Feet – lost in a wave – out to sea / A grandmother – nods – to a space in the crowd / Cap gun assassin – emerges – from a conjurers cloud…’ Beyond oceans and waves, it’s impossible to pin down any notion of themes or meanings. The images float up and fade out instantaneously.

‘The Ocean’ begins dramatically, a swelling, surging drone that halts abruptly, yielding to one of the most typically Eamon the Destroyer passages – lo-fi folktronica with a low croon reminiscent of Mark Lanegan, which slowly tilts its face upwards from scuffed boot-tips towards the sun…. and then all mayhem happens in a brief but explosive interlude, and your head’s suddenly spinning because wherethehellhasthiscomefrom? It’s this wild unpredictability and unapologetic perversity which is – strange to say – a substantial part of the appeal of Eamon the Destroyer.

When Eamon the Destroyer goes downtempo, as on the mournful, string-soaked introductory segment of ‘Captive’, you can actually feel your heart growing heavier by the bar, but then it twists onto some semi-ambient avant-jazz, and the sensation transitions to bewilderment.

The final track, ‘The Buffalo Sings’, is a twelve-minute behemoth is s slow, surging lo-fi electronic exploration. Face the strange? It embraces it, hard, then absorbs it by ghostly osmosis. If ever a song was less country, less ‘Buffalo’… maybe some of the western themed electrogoth songs by James Ray and the Performance are on a par on that score, but this wanders into a sonic desert without even a hat for protection from the punishing sun, and slowly, everything melts in the heat. Circuits bend and warp, and the weirdness rises like a heat haze… and it’s wonderful to be immersed in a work which celebrates creative freedom with no sense of constraint or obligation.

On reflection, with Eamon the Destroyer, you know exactly what you’re going to get: visionary hybridity, moments of aching sadness and fractured beauty, shards of melancholic memory , unbridled inventiveness and fevered creativity, and music like nothing anyone else is making. In a world where meaning seems to have all but evaporated and it’s increasingly difficult to make sense of any of it, The Maker’s Quit feels like a fitting soundtrack. It exists purely in its own space, and it’s the perfect space to escape to in these most dismal of times.

AA

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Jackie-O Motherfucker / Lo Egin / Sour Faced Lil – Wharf Chambers, Leeds, 23rd August 2025

Posted: 24 August 2025 in Live, Reviews
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Christopher Nosnibor

It’s good to be back at Wharf Chambers. Personal circumstances have meant that the trip to Leeds has been largely beyond me, but stepping into the place felt like coming home. It’s unassuming, some may even basic, but it’s got a unique – and accommodating – vibe. There aren’t many small independent venues that can keep going by sticking to a programme of leftfield live music, or being explicit in a keen leaning towards inclusivity for LGBTQIA+ and anyone else who stands outside the fence of the normies, but Leeds is a big enough, and diverse enough, city for a place like this to not only survive, but thrive. It’s kinda quirky, a bit shabby chic, and it works: the beers – local – are cheap, the sound in the venue space is good, and it’s all cool, and tonight’s advertised lineup is a cracker. Diverse, but solid quality of an international reach.

Before we come to that, it’s a strange and rare occurrence to arrive at a venue to discover that there is an additional, unadvertised, band on the bill, and even more so when the band in question has effectively gatecrashed the event without prior arrangement with the promoter, but by dint of deception. But the first band on tonight have done just that. Perhaps it’s the only way they can get gigs. Because they sure do suck, and it was obvious that they’d never have been booked for this lineup in a million years. I head back to the bar after a couple of songs, having heard enough. When they’re done, promoter and sound man (in both senses), Theo takes the mic to explain that he hadn’t booked them and that they didn’t espouse the experimental ethos of the acts Heinous Whining exists to promote. The band did not respond well to this, validating the opinion a number of us had already formed, and they fucked off in a huff. Dicks.

Thankfully, normality – of the kind we’re here for – resumed with the arrival of Sour Faced Lil, the solo project of Hilary from Cowtown. Her set starts – somewhat incongruously – with a quirky electropop cover of Bright Eyes. I just about manage not to cry. Then she swerves into swooshing space rock noise galore, and she explores the weird and wibbly, and it’s everything you’d expect from a Heinous Whining night. Live drums, looped, live guitar, and warped, undulating synths create a cacophony of sound in layers. The performance is a little tentative in places, but the audience is behind her all the way. There’s something quite enthralling about seeing a solo artist juggling myriad musical elements and instruments, knowing what a balancing act, how much effort it is to remember everything and keep the flow, and the fact she manages it is impressive.

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Sour Face Lil

Also impressive are Lo Egin, but for quite different reasons. I feel I owe Lo Egin an apology, as it happens. When I reviewed their split release with Beige Palace a little while ago, I misspelled their name as Lo Elgin, more than once (although I managed to get it right when covering Volumancer in 2013) Hammering out reviews on a daily basis means I slip up sometimes. It’s not great, and I do try, to do better but… I did really rate that release, though, and I’ll admit that they were as much a draw for me as the headliners. And the fact is, they were worth the entry fee alone. On paper, they’re perhaps not the easiest sell, bring atmospheric post rock in the vein of early Her Name is Calla, with brass – sax and trombone – crossed with elements of doom – with the addition of screaming black metal vocals. They do epic. They do crescendos. They also do ultra-slow drumming, something I am invariably transfixed by having first become fixated during my first time seeing Earth live. The drummer raised his arms to fill extension above his head, before smashing down with explosive force.

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Lo Egin

Dolorous droning horns create a heavy atmosphere. Then, out of nowhere, from the delicately woven sonic tapestry they’ve been weaving, things turn Sunn O))) and the skinny baggy jeans wearing trombone guy who looks like a young Steve Albini delivers cavernous doomy vocals as he contorts and the mic stand and then all hell breaks loose. When they go heavy, they go heavy – and I mean HEAVY, the drummer smashing every beat so it hits like a nuclear bomb. To arrive with high hopes for a band, and to still be absolutely blown away is a truly wonderful experience, and one that stays with you.

I feel I should perhaps take this opportunity to apologise to Jackie-O Motherfucker, too: in my review of Bloom, I described them as a country band. And while there are without question country elements, they’re really not a country band. They’re not really a psychedelic band, either, or any other one thing. Instead, they’re a hypnotic hybrid, and they’re deceptively loud considering how mellow everything is. What they do is simple in many respects, but in terms of genre, it’s rather more complicated, not readily pigeonholed. I’d clocked them about the venue beforehand, and they seemed like really chilled folks, and while they’re not exactly chatty during their performance, it’s apparent that they’re humble, and simply really chuffed to be playing here. The room is pretty full, too. Tom Greenwood looks like he’s just taken some time out from doing some decorating to play. He’s got paint on his trousers, and is as unassuming as they come.

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Jackie-O Motherfuker

The current lineup consists of three guitars, synth, and some electronic stuff including subtle percussion. No bass, no drums. There are, however, many pedals and much pedal fiddling throughout the set, as they sculpt a wall of reverb and feedback and a whole lot more from this hefty – but ultimately portable – setup.

The resultant sound is detailed, but at the same time a hazy blur. Picked notes – and much of the sound is clean, with next to no distortion, but with all the reverb – bounce off one another here and there, creating ever greater cathedrals of sound. I find myself utterly transfixed. Their hour-and-a-bit long set features just seven songs, and they are completely immersive. There’s no real action to speak of, just an ever-growing shimmer which envelops your entire being. In some respects, their extended instrumental passages invite comparisons to the current incarnations of Swans, only without the evangelically charismatic stage presence or crescendos. In other words, they conjure atmosphere over some extended timeframes, but keep things simmering on a low burner, without any volcanic eruptions. The end result is a performance which is hypnotic, gripping because of, rather than in spite of the absence of drama. Low-key, but loud: absolute gold.

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