Aural Aggravation

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.

AA