Feel like itโs been long enough that a column such as this one can shout out a couple of โweird grimeโ releases without it being all cringey, or like itโs going to undermine โreal grimeโ or something. Besides, the people involved here have put in the graft! So letโs have a look at Adventures In The Otherworld (Living Ornaments), the debut by Jack Williams and Nick Denton as 11:11. Given a quiet digital release last year, and a tape pressing a month or so ago, its seven tracks comprise a remarkably sui generis suite that uses zen and anger to equal effect.
Williams and Denton are real ones for sure, but not the sort of underground Iโm often talking about here. The former produces asย idntmttrย and works as an engineer inย Belly Of The Beast studio, founded by the latter, who you might know better as Dizzee Rascalโs co-producer and mentor Cage. โThe Grey Areaโ is a low-key jazzy murmur of an opener, livened slightly by a sampled description of some sort of out-of-body experience: one of four instrumentals, with โDispossessedโ pitting ambient techno fluidity against weightless woodblock hits and creaking strings, โMain Feedโ bamboozling with fidgety polyrhythms and โMaranasatiโ leaning heavy into a Badalamenti/fourth world interzone. No weakeners โ yet itโs the three tracks featuring London MC Lucky Iโm Luke which illuminate 11:11โs brilliance. Hinting at mid-2010s sinogrime, Rhythm & Sound type dub techno and deep house of the DJ Sprinkles ilk, itโs its own thing for all that, never more so than on โThe Collapseโ on which Luke preaches a most compelling end-time message.
The five-trackย State Of Fluxย is the first release by Guy โGuidoโ Middleton for almost five years, and the first one sold as a physical format for way longer again. Donโt bother clearing a space in your record bag, though, because the Lifted Icons label โ from Bristol, as is Guido โ are releasing it as a Super Nintendo game cartridge. Strictly speaking I think itโs just a regular download and they send you a random old game with a new label stuck on as well, but itโs all fun eh.
Moreover, itโs not completely random as novelty artefacts go, with Middleton citing the music from theย Final Fantasyย series as his major inspiration forย State Of Flux. The relationship between console soundtracks and grime production is pretty well established, and if youโre au fait with the style Guido hit upon with his early records for the Punch Drunk label โ silkier than grime or dubstepโs average, with 80s-style synth trippage and R&B retools โ itโs not a giant leap to the world of pixellated RPGs. Heart-rush arpeggios and dark-corridor keyboard stabs permeate โAdventures Awaitโ, loverman sax and badman vocal idents tart up โEmotional Timesโ, and the melody tapped out on โGentle Heartsโ sounds not so much innocent as newborn.
Endless is the second collaborative release by Stonecirclesampler, aka NWB regular Luke J Murray, and Travis Elborough, a writer whose work frequently addresses nostalgia, forgotten histories and cultural ephemera. Itโs a one-track, 20-minute CDR released via Sleep Fuse, a sublabel of prolific psych imprint Reverb Worship, which sells its wares (such as this one) via eBay and doesnโt stream them online. Making you more in thrall to my opinion than normal, if thatโs possible, and toying with the danger the release wonโt be for sale by the time this column is published.
With Murray citing a roots of dubstep influence on this greyed-out marriage of drone, drizzle and passing vehicles, youโre advised to find parallels in his synth tone rather than waiting for a beat that will never come, and wonder if we were too hasty in turning โnightbusโ into a wrung-out clichรฉ after a hundred Burial essays. Elborough recites, in his disarmingly precise Open University narration style, a series of adjectives, placenames, landmarks and taglines (โrail musicโฆ for insomniacsโ) whose connection is unclear but which Iโm primed to believe blossoms into a cryptic puzzle when written out in full. The pair invoke J.G. Ballard, and as Endless sounds like wet tarmac and extinguished hope, why not.
I wrote about Joe Murray, under his Posset alias, back in 2019, but the release wasnโt a solo recording, as latest album Scum is. It also wasnโt covering all 28 songs on the first Napalm Death album, as latest album Scum is. A brilliant idea, albeit one which would be a terrible idea if had by nearly any other musician. Murray, in general, is a dedicated anti-musician, typically creating his sounds through cassette manipulation, feedback, analogue hiss and game-of-chance vocal cutups: the audible presence of acoustic instruments on the odd track here goes against his own grain.
And what of Napalm Death themselves, who accidentally stumbled into a kind of mainstream after this LPโs 1987 release and were met by people who couldnโt conceive of a sound this unlistenably extreme? Murray, who says he discovered Scum as a teenage John Peel listener, is a wiser head, acknowledging the albumโs โchaotic buzzing insect rumbleโ but also the depths of its arrangements and production aesthetic.
His takes are lateral thinking in extremis, of course. โYou Sufferโ โ four words in one second, extreme metalโs ultimate meme song โ is, Posseted, two minutes of unspooling tape and fragments of โwhy?โs. โInstinct Of Survivalโ and โControlโ are acoustic strums with cloven hooves, Murray intoning Napalmโs turbo-anarcho lyrics in sullen spoken word; a repeat gambit is to slow speech down to a gut-bubbling gurgle that outstrips even the most br00tal grindcore vocalist. Does โSacrificedโ seek to replicate the sound of a blastbeat as heard on a live crowd bootleg, is โPoint Of No Returnโ a post-Discharge bass barrage as reenacted on tin cans and string? Only Posset knows. Superb release!
Next up is a song-a-side split LP, released via Cold Spring, between Iggor Cavalera and Shane Embury, who of course joined Napalm Death on bass after Scum and stuck around ever since. Emburyโs taste for electronic music has been aired previously through solo project Dark Sky Burial; โOwn Your Darknessโ is his first ever release under his own name, I think Cavalera, whose quarter-century drumming in Sepultura will forever be his calling card, has produced a wide variety of electronic music since leaving the Brazilian metal giants: Petbrick, a duo from his adopted home of London, have released some fine dins.
โNeon Godsโ follows Cavaleraโs collab tapes with Vomir and Integrityโs Dwid Hellion, and its brand of noise isnโt quite that forbidding, though fair stretches of this 20-minute composition get pretty gnarly: an early strafing segment reminded me of Anthony Di Francoโs JFK project and the coda is a full-fathom blowout. Emburyโs steez is more cinematic โ as you might expect if youโve heard Dark Sky Burial, though this is distinct from that โ with something like a roided-up version of the Berlin School sound resulting at points and a welcome horror-synth interjection about nine minutes in.
Cameron Winters, who records as Kavari and โ for her most recent release โ Eel Blood, seems positioned at a curious and good intersection, as regards scenes and styles. Having made a name for herself producing queer hyperpop of the pneumatic hard dance type, a noise influence has leached into Wintersโ aesthetic, to the point where, in the case of Eel Bloodโs Scalping Gods For Their Neglect album (Venalism), itโs utterly dominant. She has a celebrity fan in Ethel Cain, it seems, and if the latterโs recent Perverts album is one of the more challenging works by a contemporary pop artist, then this punishing tape is a healthy reminder that these things are all relative.
Opening track โApocryphaโ is a scree-backed array of news clips about various things that make 2025 a dogshit time to be alive on a British or global scale โ which ironically feels a bit hackishly retro, like Consolidated or someone โ but thereafter, Scalping Godsโฆ gets to work. Certainly, weโre a long way from any kind of party mentality with โBlackreachโ, almost seven minutes of rotting, haunted-shipyard wall noise; โBody Pitsโ retains the grotesquely diaphragmatic frequencies but favours abrupt switcheroos over unbending barrages. Quite hard to know for sure if, and where, vocals feature on this album, though โYour Last Breath Canโt Be Givenโ seems to be an especially grisly exception to this, fashioning a needling drone of sorts from asphyxiated gasping.
This column doesnโt review many demos, I realise on the occasion of reviewing one. Leucotome from Manchester have just released a tape on the Crush Zone label from Todmorden, though, which theyโre calling a demo and which sounds like one too. And if you take that to be snark then consider the unplumbably murky and fascinating depths of the marginal goth/coldwave/anarcho punk/UKDIY scenes of olde โ this being Leucotomeโs sonic ancestry โ where bandsโ earliest public recordings often end up being highly prized artefacts.
The trio โ Evelyn, Fionnuala and Megan, precise contributions uncredited โ cover enough ground on these six songs for a thread of cohesiveness to be a credit in itself. โAtomic Sisterhoodโ is an arresting introduction, synths variously shimmering and grinding underneath officiously barked lyrics about bad energy, but one which wonโt necessarily prepare you for the zither-y melody and theatre-folk vox of โTricoteuseโ, which follows it, or the black-booted riff on โSmall Ritualsโ that punches up the songโs lopsided Young Marble Giants frame. โEpithalamionโ is naught but one grungily lunging guitar and a succession of two-word lines, and somehow it sounds like a lot more. A second Leucotome recording could potentially sound like a lot of things and Iโd be down with pretty much any of them.
Making your first release a cover version โ thatโs something else you donโt see a lot of. Unless youโre an X Factor winner, a 1960s pop act, or Nirvana. Or Spike, which is an alias of Hannah McLoughlin and whose self-titled cassette (on the Gob Nation label) opens with Warren Zevonโs sole hit single โWerewolves Of Londonโ, done in bedroom synthpop style. It proves a useful signpost towards the four mordant songs which follow it, in addition to being a creditably unfaithful take in its own right.
Audaciously, Spikeโs second track โTiquetonneโ also begins as someone elseโs song, Andrea Bocelli and Sarah Brightmanโs 90s pop-classical smash โTime To Say Goodbyeโ. This is a faรงade, as the subsequent two minutes of helium-trance synthesiser and heavy-lidded vocals underline. โVoca Meโ has the shoots of multiple potential great pop songs, but elects to stay eccentric and sci-fi with its arrangements, and satisfyingly so. Owen Williams, also of The Tubs and Sniffany & The Nits, takes an unspecified collaborative role on this EP, but the sense is that Spike is McLoughlinโs solo vision primarily, and one you ought to investigate if you like groups such as Black Marble or Lust For Youth circa International.
Unclear, at present, if GAX is to be written that way because itโs an initialism or because the people behind the name think it requires shouting. It may well however be a terse portmanteau of the two instruments featured on it, Vasco Alvesโ gaita de fole (a type of Portuguese bagpipes) and Seymour Wrightโs saxophone. โThe Traditionsโ / โAs Tradiรงลesโ (Infant Tree) is the London duoโs first release, recorded some 15 years after their first performances together โ at Eddie Prรฉvost of AMMโs London Improvisation Workshop, which might give you an idea of the level of โoutโ at play here.
That said, the two nine-minute scorchers on this 10-inch record donโt really wander freely in the sense of AMM ultra-abstraction (Wright has plenty of solo work that fits if you want that). โThe Traditionsโ is a mettle-tester early on for sure, with prod-yer-fillings reed abuse and fugged air blasts not only doubleteaming cruelly but persistently having silent, protracted pauses inserted, just as youโre getting acclimatised to it. Why? To keep us rubes guessingโฆ I guess. โAs Tradiรงลesโ is a drone piece, which is to say that Alvesโ bagpipes would more easily be identified as such by one of said rubes, and itโs exhilarating โ unerringly stolid as a Phill Niblock composition but with the perception of a climactic goal.
Often susceptible to the charm of a rustic drone himself โ whomst among us isnโt! โ Richard Skelton uses them, sporadically if not perpetually, as bedrock for melodic dappling on his latest release, American Memory (Folded Time). Per the title, the cassette is his latest release as Imperial Valley, a project for which Skelton holidays in Depression-era Americana (indeed doing so under an alter ego, CF Moore) and comes up with something like his take on ambient desert blues. A musician (and writer) whose references to British and Irish flora, fauna and landscape have permeated his work at every turn, it seems he can evoke bleached-white cow skulls as ably as dry stone walls.
Both of American Memoryโs tracks are eponymous, and precisely 22 minutes long. The first leans, in its earlier mode, on rangy psychedelic guitar, and a desiccated-sounding fellow adds muttered dialogue every so often โ CF Moore purports to be a field recordist, you see. A passage of disassembled bluegrass gives way to a long segment that traverses โAmerican Memory IIโ and sounds more GY!BE-like than anything Iโve heard by Skelton before. The sustained feedback that drives the last ten minutes is outwardly delicate, but fibrous and nutritious underneath, and โ yes โ forged by the power of a drone.
