Posts Tagged ‘Experimental’

M-G Dysfunction – Mista Self-Isolation

Posted: 20 June 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Panurus Productions – 20th June 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

You’d think that cassette labels would be not only niche, but few and far between, and in the main, they are, but Newcastle is home to not one, but two labels who provide a near-endless supply of releases to satiate the need for weird shit the world over, with Cruel Nature Records being one, and Panurus Productions being the other. The labels have a considerable amount in common, too, not least of all in that they both favour music that’s of a quality, rather than a style.

The latest Panurus release is a perfect case in point. The label’s previous offering, a split release from Belk and Casing was a raw blast of guitar overdrive. In contrast, the third album from M-G Dysfunction is of an altogether more experimental bent, leaning toward hip-hop and beat-driven electronics, but once again marking the close connection between the scenes in Leeds and Newcastle, both of which have become significant spawning grounds for the offbeat, the difficult, the wilfully obscure.

According to the blurb, ‘Mista Self-Isolation is the fullest realisation of the M-G Dysfunction project to date – a record of trepidation and humour, of lopsided passion and warped poetics. This album is about surveying the wreckage of monoculture and navigating the act of making music amidst a land-grab of rights, melodies and rhythms by people who never liked music in the first place. It’s about properly honest artistic expression – what “keeping it real” looks like, sounds like, feels like in 2024. It’s about getting some official beats and saying fly shit over them.’

That it’s quirky may be obvious, but it’s a necessary headline observation. On the one hand, it’s white rap, so there’s an awkwardness, but on the other, there’s some dirty experimental electronic noise layered over the beats, and this is an act that shared a stage with Benefits, a band who may have made their reputation by being angry, shouty, and noisy, but who aren’t without humour or an appreciation of nuance.

As tracks like ‘Roger Daltrey (Permanent Record)’ illustrate, M-G Dysfunction are multifaceted – something likely to leave many quite nonplussed. How can they do jokey, daft, a bit random and be serious at the same time? In truth, the answer is simple: because human beings are complex creatures, capable of a vast range of emotions and infinite ways of expressing them. It’s something we seem to have lost sight of in recent years, when everything has been boiled down to binaries, and everything is a conflict because the lines have been marked in such either / or terms. It’s no longer possible to be a woolly socialist: suggest that, I dunno, people on disability benefits are right to receive free prescriptions, and you’re labelled a left-wing extremist, a communist, and by the way, disabled people should get back into work or die. Something is severely fucking wrong with this picture.

Back in the early 90s, genre crossovers were all the rage, and the Judgement Night soundtrack was a real watershed moment that took the idea of rock / rap crossover, first witnessed in the mainstream when Run DMC and Aerosmith did ‘Walk This Way’ to the next level. At that time, it felt like a new future was emerging, and perhaps, even a future where boundaries and differences were dismantled. But here we are, and times are bleak.

But with Mista Self-Isolation – an album which is by no means an exercise in buoyant pop tunes – M-G Dysfunction show that in 2025, there is still scope to create something that speaks of what it is to be human.

The structured, beat-led songs are interspersed with self-reflective spoken word segments, spanning CBT meditation and contemplations on experiences and life in general. It is truly impossible to predict the twists and turns this album takes.

’50 Words for Blow’ comes on like a hip-hop-inspired barber’s shop quartet, while ‘John Wick’ is a critical memo, and the title track is abstract, minimal, dreamy but quietly intense. ‘Junglists Only’ is a perfectly executed pseudo-banger which knows it’s absurd and works because of it. The last song, ‘All that is Solid Melts into Deez Nuts’ evokes both humour and at the same time draws attention to M-G Dysfunction’s hip-hop credentials. If you know, you know, as cunts say, but for those who don’t, it’s a reference to Dr Dre’s ‘Deeez Nuuuts’ from The Chronic in 1992.

Postmodernism is alive and well after all, at least in some quarters, and it’s very well in the world of M-G Dysfunction. There is a lot going on on Mista Self-Isolation – and it’s all good.

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Hampus Lindwall – Brace For Impact

Posted: 19 June 2025 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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Ideologic Organ – 20th June 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

In his liner notes, Robert Barry suggests that ‘Brace for Impact might just be the first album of post-internet organ music’, and goes on to explain that ‘it is a record weaned on networked processes and algorithmic thinking, a suite of tracks which build their own systems then push them to the point of collapse. Lindwall is not a programmer, but he will wield whatever technology is ready to hand much as Chopin made use of the richer, fuller sound of an Erard piano. From the software subtly weirding the interior textures of ‘Swerve’ and ‘Piping’ to the juddering, kernel panic of ‘AFK’ and ‘À bruit secret’, these are works of music unthinkable without the ubiquitous experience of life lived online. Imparting that hypermodern aesthetic sensibility through the austere sound of a baroque organ only heightens the anachronistic sense of temporal disjuncture characteristic of days spent rabbit-holing through ever-multiplying stacks of browser windows. The vernacular of Web 2.0 is here re-transcribed in the ornate script of a medieval illuminated manuscript.’

As Barry also suggests, the organ has been undergoing something of a renaissance in recent years, and cites a number of significant organs which have been recently restored, including the grand organs at the cathedrals of St John the Divine and Notre-Dame (New York and Paris respectively, and, not so much closer to home but on my very doorstep, York Minster, which ‘heralded a “once-in-a-century” refurbishment of its own 5,000-plus pipe instrument’.

It marks something of a shift from an album I reviewed around maybe fifteen years ago, the details of which elude me now, which was recorded on a series of broken-down and dilapidated organs from around Europe which wheezed and groaned as if gasping out the last breaths from their collapsed lungs.

Brace for Impact is an altogether more vibrant work, although as much as it celebrates the organ and the instrument’s sonic magnitude, it also reaches far further into exploratory sonic territories over the course of these five compositions.

The title track features ‘a highly saturated and distorted electric guitar, performed by collaborator and SUNN O))) founding member, Stephen O’Malley’ – and ranges from tectonic crunches, machine-gun rattles and alienated whines rising from the kind of dissonant dronescape only O’Malley can conjure. And so we brace… and then we swerve. The collision fails to materialise during the ten-minute dark ambient swirl of the second track, spreading ominous overtones and watery, echo-heavy plips and plops. The muffled beats are akin to listening to a minimal techno set overlayed with a piece from the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, performed in the Blue John Cavern, and it shimmers accordingly, slipping into off-kilter fairground trilling in the final minutes.

The final diptych of compositions rally ventures out: both ‘AFK’ and ‘Piping’ extend beyond twelve minutes. The former brings jolting discord and drama, lurching stabs that manage to bring a crazed dance feel to the sound of the organ before swinging into a circus-type jive. It stands out as perhaps the most playful track on the album. There is a playfulness to ‘Piping’, too, but it feels more like it belongs to a film soundtrack or theatre performance, and it whirls and winds and spins and pirouettes it way to a pretty but perhaps confused conclusion.

Brace For Impact is very much a non-linear work, and one which stands, uncertain of where it’s going next. But is it unquestionably interesting, not to mention disorientating, and it’s a work which seems to bend time as well as notes. It’s an album to lose yourself in.

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Psychic TV – A Prayer For Derek Jarman

Posted: 15 June 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Cold Spring Records – 23rd June 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

It may be a heretical stance, particularly as a big fan of Throbbing Gristle, but Psychic TV never really did it for me. They felt a bit meandering, wanky folky, in the same way as a lot of David Tibet’s stuff does. This may be to my detriment, and I may be missing the joys and benefits of a huge catalogue, but… I can shrug it off, and I will live.

TG and seminal filmmaker Derek Jarman were kindred spirits, provocative, avant-garde, and testament of their reciprocal artistic respect is cemented in their 1980 collaboration, where TG soundtracked Jarman’s movie Under the Shadow of the Sun (with the soundtrack being released some four years later).

A Prayer For Derek Jarman was recorded later, on LP in 1985 by Temple Records and subsequently reissued as an extended CD version by Cold Spring in 1997. As the accompanying text explains, ‘Unavailable for almost three decades, this collection from the Cold Spring archive has been repackaged and remastered with new artwork. A documentation of the soundtrack work created by Psychic TV for the film-maker and artist Derek Jarman, it serves as a demonstration of why PTV were one of the most important groups in the underground scene of the 1980s and 1990s.’ The material on this disc was – as far as I can discern – last available in 2011 as part of the Themes six-CD box set, also released via Cold Spring, and this represents a solo release of disc two.

There’s no mistaking that both Jarman an PTV were important, although I would personally rank the former above the latter – that may be a rather subjective position to take, though, and there is no denying the immense shadow Genesis P Orridge would cast over the scene for many a year and perhaps an eternity.

The titular ‘Prayer For Derek’ is intended as an invocationary prayer and is based on Tibetan rituals; a collage of sounds including field recordings of the lulling waves running aground on the shingle beach opposite Jarman’s Prospect Cottage in Dungeness, Kent, home of some of the UK’s best preserved ‘sound mirrors’ – alongside bird song, crying babies and massed ritualised chants to aid the late director in his after-life journeys. It follows the seventeen-minute churning abstract noise whorl that is ‘The Loops Of Mystical Union’ – and which is, on balance, as good as any of Throbbing Gristle’s expansive dark noise works, and ‘Mylar Breeze (Parts 1 & 2) on which the promo for the album is predominantly pitched, and the ‘Mylar Breeze (Part 3)’. These compositions are piano-led and border on neoclassical. Dainty, charming, and musically eloquent, they certainly mark a departure from the work more commonly associated with Orridge or PTV, as well as evidencing the reasons why they are such a difficult act to pin down, or even distinguish the ‘good’ and ‘not so good’ works in their immense and wide-ranging – and variable – catalogue. With its echoed, looped vocal layers redolent of Gregorian chants, it’s not so hard to determine why ‘Mylar Breeze (Part 3)’ is not mentioned in the promo, although it’s entirely captivating.

As the accompanying text observes, ‘Other tracks feature elongated drones, washes of dissonance, melancholic guitar chime, evocative piano scoring, Burroughs cut-ups, gothic chants and snarling dogs.’ ‘Rites of Reversal’ marks a clear contrasts from the delicate piano-led compositions, diving in with some hard-edged grinding oscillations, which, again, lean more toward the kind of dark noise that was the TG trademark.

A Prayer For Derek Jarman is broad in scope and mood, and this is as appropriate is it is likely deliberate. It certainly presents the more experimental aspects of Psychic TV, and as varied as it is, the quality is also there.

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BLOOM – The Improvisation Sessions (Vol I)

Posted: 12 June 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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11th June 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

Some artists thrive on collaboration. Deborah Fialkiewicz is one of those. While she’s prolific as a solo artist, the volume of collaborative works in her discography is also noteworthy: when she’s not working as part of SPORE, she’s part of the ever-rotating lineup of BLOOM – and that’s before we touch on the frequent collaborations with (AN) EeL, the most recent of which was only released three weeks ago.

The Improvisation Sessions was recorded live May of this year, with a lineup of Dan Dolby, Deborah Fialkiewicz, and John Koser, marking an expansion from the duo which recorded the trilogy of Parallel Minor, Besides, and Hybrid in 2020. Fialkiewicz is without doubt an artist with range, but one who favours the dark end of the ambient spectrum more often than not, and this is very much the case here.

The Improvisation Sessions features two longform tracks which would quite nicely align with a vinyl release.

‘Chameleon Soul’, which spans a colossal continuous twenty minutes, begins with low, rumbling ominous drones, but soon escalates to a busy, buzzy criss-cross of sounds, interweaving and interlacing, leaving one’s head in a spin as if after trying to trace several flies flitting about the kitchen on a hot summer’s day for any period of time. It’s a morass of warping tones overlaying a ballast of churning noise, and any comparisons to Hull luminaries Throbbing Gristle or Merzbow are entirely justified.

The layers of distortion only grow denser and gnarlier as the track progresses, crashing waves of white noise blast in from one side and then the other as they really push to test the stamina. And then you realise we’re only six minutes in. This is a positive: plenty more left to enjoy… Enjoyment is of course subjective, and enjoyment of this requires being appreciative of a dizzying, disorientating assault simultaneous with a full-on white noise blizzard.

The momentary lulls, the spells where they pull back from the precipice of all-out aural obliteration, are far from mellow, as serrated spurs of hard-edged drones, wails of feedback and brain-melting extraneous noise conglomerate to seismic effect. There are some nasty high-end frequencies knocking about in the mix, moments were one has to check if the whistle is coming from the speakers of if it’s that troublesome tinnitus nagging again, and said frequencies rise from a battery of ugly distortion, bone-shattering blasts of which simple explode around the twelve-minute mark, and from hereon in, things only grow harsher, more corrupted, more intense, more difficult to withstand. We’d be inching into polythene bags on heads territory were it not for the variation, but the last three minutes or so are fractured, damaged, and agonizing – part power electronics, part circuit meltdown.

As the world becomes evermore and increasingly fucked up, I find words fail me more by the day. It’s harder to articulate, and this is where I’ve found that sound has come into its own. Sound as the capacity to convey something beyond words, something that lies in the most innermost parts, giving voice to the subconscious, even. On The Improvisation Sessions, BLOOM convey anxiety, gloom, pessimism.

‘The Dark Room’ is indeed dark, constructed primarily around a fixed but thick, distorted hum. Oscillators whine and whistle, and something about it calls to mind Whitehouse around the time of Never Forget Death, when they discovered low-end frequencies and restraint, the impact of a low undulating wave and subtle tweaks of reverb.

It rumbles and drones on, eddying and bouncing around in a shrilling mesh of dissonance. There isn’t a moment where this is an easy listen, and so often, it sounds as if the equipment is faulty, whether it’s a stuck loop or generating unexpected noise.

This set hangs on the edge of ambience, but be warned, it’s dark, and noisy at times, to the extend that it may shred your brain. For me personally, that’s my idea of fun, so it gets a two thumbs up, but for the more sensitive, this is a release to approach with caution.

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Felix Kubin – Der Tanz Aller

Posted: 9 June 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Futura Resistenza –16th June 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

Much of Felix Kubin’s work since the turn of the millennium has involved radio, although film and theatre and other soundtrack works have also been a feature. Der Tanz Aller is one such soundtrack work, which was ‘created for the performance of the same title by the experimental arts collective LIGNA. The group specialized in site-specific, participatory works. Der Tanz Aller is based on Rudolf von Laban’s radical 1920s concept of ‘Bewegungschöre’ (movement choirs), collective dances in public space that aimed to reimagine social order through shared movement.’

The context and objective behind the composition are particularly useful to be aware of when listening to this album in isolation, as Kubin sets out: ‘When the performance group LIGNA approached me in 2012 to compose music for a play based on Rudolf von Laban’s revolutionary kinetic theories and so-called ‘Bewegungschöre’ (movement choirs), I thought of a soundtrack that would be both rhythmically engaging, abstract and mechanical. I knew there would be pre-recorded voices talking about his philosophy and guiding the audience via headphones. So, I had to leave some “air” in the arrangements, allowing the visitors to concentrate on the spoken words, while simultaneously becoming dancers. In LIGNA’s conceptual works – just like Laban’s idea of the movement choirs – the audience members become the performers.’

I shan’t dwell too long on the conceptual aspects here, beyond noting that this predates John Cage’s 4’33” by more than two decades, and while Cage’s silent work was on many levels a quite different proposition, the way in which any sound made by the audience – be it a cough or the shuffling of feet or the creaking of a chair – immediately becomes part of the performance indicates clear common ground. Likewise, William Burroughs’ cut-ups, which invited ‘creative reading’ whereby the engagement of the reader and their experience and perception was integral to their success, arrived some thirty years later. As such, ‘Bewegungschöre’ represent the cutting edge of avant-gardism, belonging to the era which brought us Duchamps’ readymades and – perhaps more pertinently – Tristan Tzara’s directions to make a Dadaist poem.

For the most part, the ‘air’ in the arrangements is apparent: there is space, separation, and while we can only imagine the prerecorded voices talking about Laban’s philosophy through headphones, it’s possible to get a sense of how it would work. But then, occasionally, Kubin’s compositions get father more busy, as on ‘Dämonen der Zerstreuung’, with big band percussion and noodlesome orchestration that’s of a strong jazz persuasion, but has a whole lot happening, and often simultaneously. There’s drama with orchestral strikes, and creeping, urgent glockenspiels that bring a noirish, detective movie feel – not a chase scene, but a cat-and-mouse scenario.

There are some spoken-word passages, in German, as on ‘Raumstunde Vera Skoronel’, accompanied by evolving sonic backdrops, the likes of which I find hard to imagine inspire dancing, but spasmodic twitching and erratic lurching, while the title track is a slice of jerky, and quite insular and intense, Kraftwerkian synth bleepery, and ‘Rotes Lied’ is a perfect exemplar of sparse, spaced-out, glooping, blooping, reverby weirdery with occasional chimes and stuttering shot of snare. There is plenty of air here, as you sit and wonder what exactly is going on?

Who knows? And does it even matter at this point? The percussion builds from all sides, and the nagging away – until suddenly it doesn’t.

The unpredictability of Raumstunde Vera Skoronel is its strength. It is weird, unexplained in many respects, beyond simply the initial onboarding awkwardness. We should probably celebrate this weirdness, this sense of separation. Raumstunde Vera Skoronel is never dull, but always strange and alien – and these are reasons to appreciate it.

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Sicker Man – Stop The Gravy Train / Hollowed

Posted: 6 June 2025 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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Limited Edition 7" Dubplate / DL Blank Records – 13th June 2015

Christopher Nosnibor

Tobias Vethake aka Sicker Man has spent a quarter of a century doing things differently – differently from other artists, and differently in terms of his own sound and approach to making music.

As his bio points out, ‘as our world changed a lot during the last 25 years, so did his music. On his last release, KLOTZ WENZEL VETHAKE, the interaction with other musicians and the political dimension of a musical wake-up call became a main focus… The single „Gravy Train / Hollowed“ marks a new and fresh look at both, his musical history and present. It features Sicker Man’s love for dub, noise and electronic music as well his passion for classical composition and spiritual jazz… ‘Stop The Gravy Train / Hollowed’ feels like a collaboration of Moondog and The Bug’

It certainly does. For these two pieces, Sicker Man has enlisted saxophonist Matze Schinkopf, and

How many ideas is it possible to pack into four and a quarter minutes? With ‘Stop The Gravy Train’, Sicker Man manages more ideas per minute than it’s possible to even begin to count. The piece starts with a low, grinding bass and industrial hums, before the saxamaphones enter the mix, interweaving through and across one another. They trickle smoother, teasing with points and counterpoints, laid-back and mellow over the simmering rhythm section, the bass and the beats building currents beneath. Around the midpoint, the piece makes a change of trajectory, the gentle jazz giving way to something altogether more urgent and driving, locking into a robust groove with low saxophone punching rhythmically and in syncopation with the whip-cracking snare and palpating kick drum.

‘Hollowed’ is different again: a swampy surge of seething electronica, a morass of meshing noise – at least to begin, and then it melts into a rather pleasant swaying jazz work, a clip-clip beat nodding along nicely. Swells of noise bubble and surge, but don’t quite break through, and industrial grooves settle in while the saxes tootle off in different directions, hither and thither to brain-melting effect.

‘Genius’ is a word which is chronically overused and often severely misapplied. Is this a work of genius? Maybe not, but it’s got to be close. There’s no question that it’s wildly inventive, and unexpectedly listenable, while challenging every musical preconception.

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Deborah Fialkiewicz / (AN) EeL – Compelled by Nature

Posted: 24 May 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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19th May 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

Deborah Fialkiewicz’s neoclassical album Ad Vitam Decorus, has been in Bandcamp’s neoclassical ambient bestsellers chart for fully five years now, although she’s hardly been resting on her laurels and basking in the success since it’s release, having released a slew of works in a range of genre styles, with this, the latest, being a collaboration with (AN) Eel, who describes himself as ‘An Experimental Vocalist & Full Bodies Inhabitant of this Colorful universe’. His output is also remarkable, and his catalogue consists mostly of collaborative efforts, this being his second with Fialkiewicz (the first being Inkworks in April 2022)

Although the words are (AN) Eel’s work, those which are published on the release’s Bandcamp page could easily be about Fialkiewicz’s friendly foxy visitors, who she feeds and often photographs and writes of online:

Two Foxes, Out of Boxes,

In Your Garden

Seven Tales

Shape Shifter, Sun & Moon

Shadow Dancers, Rod & Womb

Silk and Cobwebs,

Perhaps this is simply an indication of how closely attuned this collaboration is.

Compelled by Nature contains two longform pieces, each hitting that magical twenty-three minute mark – meaning it would be ideally suited for a vinyl release, but in its digital form, has the feel of a ‘classic’ experimental electronic album, the likes of which you’d find on Editions Mego or Ici, d’ailleurs. The two compositions break down the title: ‘Compelled’ and ‘By Nature’, bringing an element of linguistic play into the frame.

‘Compelled’ offers up some fractured drones which crack and lurch in volume and frequency. As the piece progresses, looping, repetitive motifs emerge, atop of which gurgling, chattering, insect-like scratches emerge, chittering and bibbling, rising and falling, and when these incidentals fall to silence, the repetitive underlying sonic skeletal frame of the composition sits sparse and alone, becoming thoroughly hypnotic. The experience isn’t dissimilar from watching waves lap the shore on a calm day with a gentle tide. In time, 16-bit bleeps reminiscent of 80s arcade games ripple through an ever slower, evermore dolorous droning of a slow-strummed bass guitar. The vocalisations are eerie, ethereal, haunting – spiritual, but somehow detached from the world as we know it, a keening, crooning, mewling. It may or may not be wordless, but is in some ways similar to Michael Gira’s wordless articulations during the immense, immersive sonic expanses which have defined Swans output and performances in recent years – it’s not about song, or structure, but transcending sound and language. And in this context, the title, ‘Compelled’ takes on a clear and specific meaning: this is not music made for entertainment, or with an audience in mind, but music made because it needs to be made, the product of creativity as an outlet, a necessity as a means of getting through life in this insane world.

‘By Nature’ begins with distorted, distant babbling voices over a low, ominous drone, reminiscent to an extent of the start -and end – of ‘Pornography’ by The Cure. It’s dark and oppressive, not to mention somewhat disorientating. There are fragments of sampled narrative, but there are glitches, fractures, which disrupt it, and against this infernal, churning drone, chiming bells and similarly innocuous sounds take on a disturbing sense of portent, a certain horror-like suspense. Anyone familiar with the tropes of horror as a genre will be aware of how the most successful horror works because it transforms mundane situations to a source of fear by adding an undercurrent of the unknown, and / or a foreshadowing of nightmarish events ahead. This brings that quite specific sense of something bad about to happen. The digital bloops, computer game chimes and laser bleeps of ‘Compelled’ return, but this time against an altogether more sinister backdrop, a drone like a black hole opening up to swallow the entire solar system.

So many of the sounds are familiar, even if only vaguely so, but their collaging and recontextualization strips them of meaning by contextual connotation, and so what we find ourselves facing is something quite alien, and as such, uncomfortable, unsettling, even scary. What is this? What does it all mean? Only Deborah Fialkiewicz and (AN) EeL know – or perhaps even they don’t, really – perhaps – and it seems likely – Compelled by Nature is a work of instinct, something which happened because it simply came to be, and is as it is by happenstance. I can believe this is most likely, and that Compelled by Nature is more about process than product. It’s a compelling work. It is not, however, an album to be listened to in the dark.

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Ancient Psychic Triple Hyper Octopus – Put Emojis On My Grave

Posted: 24 May 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Not Applicable – 23rd May 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

For about five minutes, AI looked like it may provide some entertaining diversions in terms of creative potentials. It wasn’t so long ago that it produced glitchy, idiosyncratic writing and wild art that was so wrong it was hilarious, and lame synth-loop electronic music which had neither style nor substance. It didn’t look like the threat to humanity that dystopian sci-fi novels had portrayed.

But then more information began to emerge about how AI was ‘learning’ by essentially stealing from all available sources. AI is the worst plagiarist imaginable, and nothing is safe or sacred. Then there came the reports of the vast amounts of energy, and water, required to power it, and it started to look like AI will doom the planet by sapping its resources instead of going rogue and obliterating humanity. But then…AI evolved, and fast. In no time at all, people stopped having additional limbs and appendages, the writing transitioned beyond repetitious babble, and people have begun to use to AI chat as a substitute for expensive therapy, despite reports of rogue AI advocating suicide… and as its usage accelerates and it morphs into the nightmare of sci-fi dystopia we’d dismissed just a few months ago, so the use of energy and water increases exponentially. One way or another, it does now look very much like AI will finish us.

And so there’s a certain discomfort in approaching Put Emojis On My Grave by the spectacularly-monikered Ancient Psychic Triple Hyper Octopus, an album which is sold on the way it ‘boldly explores AI and improvisation on an album of freely improvised, experimental electroacoustic music’.

It features, as the press notes put it, ‘a new lineup of celebrated, British musicians’ (Alex Bonney (trumpet, bass recorder, Strohviol), Will Glaser (drums and percussion) and Isambard Khroustaliov, aka Sam Britton (electronics), and ‘ claims to forges ‘a new musical language’, with an album ‘which eschews traditional musical composition, seeks instead to “adopting the language of AI’s deep learning failures and glitches”, attempts to imagine how AI could make a positive contribution to the creative process’.

It’s hard to know how to really assimilate this. The six compositions which make up Put Emojis On My Grave are fine examples of exploratory jazz, with wandering trumpet tooting in meandering lines across clanking, clattering abstract percussion which sounds like cutlery and wind-chimes being knocked about while bleeps and bubbles interject seemingly at random. It has that avant-jazz, experimental, iprov feel which is in some ways quite familiar in its own strange way. That is to say, while it’s niche, the sonic experience is very much representative of a certain field. A field filled with jackrabbits, apparently.

‘Goats on Helium’ is bubbly, bibbly, scratchy, scrapy, wheezy, groany, a splatter and clatter of sounds piled up and colliding all over, and it gets pretty messy over its six and a half minutes. Warping drones and scratching, gargling abstract drones twist around deranged brass tootlings and crashing cymbals on ‘The Adiabatic Flux Differentials of the Id’, and I would challenge anyone to find a title that’s posier, more wankily intellectual than that this year. And while it’s a bit jazz-jizz in places, it’s certainly better than the title suggests.

This is, in my opinion, a fair summary of the album, a work which is concerned with space and time – not outer space, but inner space, the space which our minds explore in reflection like the clatter of 1,000,000 bongos, the space – or distance – between concept and execution, and virtual space, those our other selves occupy, both in the moment and, subsequently, leaving echoes and traces in infinite corners of the virtual world. It’s impossible to discern where the musicianship cedes to AI intervention here, which is certainly in its favour – and if Put Emojis On My Grave is used to train generative AI, then it could confuse it for a while, making for some interesting results. And Put Emojis On My Grave is certainly interesting.

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Ashley Sagar – M/A/R/R/S tools

Posted: 18 May 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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3rd February 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

This one may have started at the beginning of the year, but is an open-ended project which has been added to over the subsequent months, meaning that there’s more to absorb now than there was previously, and some five months in, it seems like a reasonable point to take stock of the progress so far. Although released under his Sunday name and therefore perhaps not a release that leaps out, Ash Sagar has been operating as Meanwoood Audio for a while, as well as being involved in numerous Leeds / York based collaborative works, notably The Wharf Street Galaxy Band and Neuschlafen, and perhaps notably the one-off experimental improv collective Beep Beep Lettuce, who will one day be hailed as a 21st century Big in Japan or Immaculate Consumptive. Well, we can but hope.

M/A/R/R/S tools is one of those albums that could only ever exist in the digital age, consisting as it does of some fourteen experimental pieces with a running time of around a hundred and eighty-five minutes. Yes, that’s over three hours – even longer than recent sprawling Swans releases.

Sagar’s notes are succinct – or scant, depending on your perspective – summarising M/A/R/R/S tools as ‘Audio recording from tests of building tools in SuperCollider for Meanwood Audio Recording & Research Services {"M/A/R/R/S"}.

My instinct is – because my instinct is dictated by my brain, which is brimming with stupid nonsense and is excessively prone to misfired associations – is to ‘pump up the volume’. But this proves to be rather unwise, as the release contains an endless stream of unsettling discordant rumbling, hovering hums, and fizzing extranea which is just around the tinnitus range.

‘Audio_25_01_20_1’ makes me feel tense: it reminds me of a ‘breather’ in a Teams call – there’s always one freak who positions their unmuted mic right in front of their open, gasping mouth, and the sound is like a gale on a mountain top.

Dripping, dropping, dribbling electronic abstractions dominate, with microtonal bibblings running on and on, sounds like twanging elastic bands and scratches and scrapes, atonal strings and R2D2 malfunctioning. I recall running my nails along an egg-slicer as a child. It’s a memory I had largely forgotten until hearing this remined me. M/A/R/R/S tools offers up an oddball array of sounds, and it feels random in the extreme. Oftentimes, it’s barely there, or it’s nothing more than the rumble of passing traffic or a distant radio. Occasionally, there are stuttering drums. Other times, there is not much at all.

This is a work which has been a long time in development: there are two full live sets, recorded five years apart, with a set recorded in London sitting at the midpoint, and another live set, recorded in Leeds, drawing the curtain on this colossal release. The fifteen-minute London set is a challenging work, which confirms what anyone who has seen Ash live will already know, and that’s that he in unafraid to test an audience with monotonous, woozy oops which are as uneasy on the intestines as they are on the ears. This is reinforced by the thunder-filled, sample riven discomfort of the Leeds set – something that his set in Leeds just this last weekend extended still further. Distorted, heavily reverbed and practically impenetrable vocals spitting out randomly sequenced words cut through the speakers, and it’s almost too much, too disorientation. A derangement of the senses. Both John Cage and Brion Gysin would have been proud. It’s dark and murky, and droning notes quaver in the background.

M/A/R/R/S tools is not an easy listen, not only on account of its duration. Despite its superficial minimalism, there is a lot going on. And none of it is kind, comfortable, or particularly easy on the ear or mind.

AA

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Ava Rabiat – Elektro Erotyk

Posted: 14 May 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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23rd May 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

It seems that Ava Rabiat can turn her hand to practically anything: in Gdańsk and based in Berlin, her work spans sound, experimental electronic music, visual arts, production and costume design for film and theatre. Elektro Erotyk stands as her debut album, and is the first instalment of a projected trilogy

We learn from the notes which accompany the release that ‘In her artistic process, fleeting thoughts and inner sensation transform into sonic reality, creating a space for interaction – a communication beyond conventional language.’

‘AVA’s texts oscillate between self-dissolution and physical intensity. She maps the boundaries of the self, explores extreme states and the longing for connection—directly, without detours, in raw immediacy. She deconstructs sound and reshapes it until it resonates with her physical experience.

‘Polish, AVA’s mother tongue, serves as the primary language throughout the album—a deliberate choice to explore her origins and emotional vernacular. The melodic qualities and sonic characteristics of spoken Polish become instruments themselves, with words valued as much for their sound as for their meaning. Breath becomes an instrument connecting inner and outer worlds.

‘True to its title, Elektro Erotyk embraces the erotic dimension of composition—found in the unity of mind and body, in moments of excitement and elation, and in intimate contact with one’s own self. The erotic emerges not merely as a sexual force but as a deep life energy—a creative power that drives artistic expression.’

She breathes and whispers, and speaks in low tones – sometimes her voice tracked multiple times – over a curious conglomeration of sounds of unplaceable origin. Clanks thuds and chimes, ominous hums and subtle, almost subsonic undulations. ‘Toi at Moi’ certainly has a sultry, erotic overtone, not to mention an almost dubby vibe, but there’s an undertone of something dark and hidden, too. A droning organ wavers its way through ‘Cofnij Czas’, accompanied by a simple bassline which wanders about hesitantly. Ava croons, soulful and seductive, over an increasingly tense and eerie oscillation, while elsewhere gloopy synths and backwards tapes stutter and jolt amidst collage-like layers of sound and fractured fragments of vocal. “There is still hope”, she murmurs on ‘Fool’s Fire’. “Hope… hope… hope…” With each repetition, this assertion feels less convincing.

Everything is swathed in cavernous echo, and everything feels vaguely surreal, dream-like, with glitches and flickers behind curtains and withdrawing into dark shadows as if making their presence known but without wanting to be fully seen. As such, an air of mystery hangs over Elektro Erotyk, each scene viewed only through fleeting glimpses, hints, allusions. It’s an intriguing set of pieces. Sometimes unsettling, often strange, Elektro Erotyk is always compelling.

AA

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