As best possible, it’s healthy to ignore rank and downplay reputation, certainly in the circles being addressed in these columns. Let’s put everyone on an equal footing and have it that the most exciting and chatter-worthy pick of any given crop can easily be some barely-released nano-edition made by people whose existence remains in question. Alternatively, you can have a new album by Ramleh, a world-renowned name in British noise and experimental rock, and lead with that one because it’s great, and inspires feelings.
Recorded as the long-settled Ramleh trio of founder member Gary Mundy plus Anthony Di Franco and Stuart Dennison, Hyper Vigilance (Sleeping Giant Glossolalia) continues the group’s recent trend for releasing sprawling albums. This one is a little shorter than its two predecessors, The Great Unlearning and Circular Time (it’s also the same length, to the second, as Load by Metallica), which has in turn been reflected in their modern-day live performances, where the intent is to exercise their abrasive noise and psychedelic rock muscles equally. The eight songs rarely (though occasionally!) make for a calming experience, but anyone hoping for flashes of Mundy’s youthful Ramleh, all grinding machines and gratuitous confrontation, is advised to recalibrate.
Acoustic guitar and viola feature on ‘Thunberg II’, Hyper Vigilance’s divertingly titled opening number, amidst greyly-glinting spaghetti western spacerock. Musical bedfellows of decades’ standing, there’s no question that Mundy and Di Franco work to each other’s strengths, but it’s still intriguing trying to unpick their results of their respective approaches on this album. Lyrically speaking, Mundy favours rockist refrains, Di Franco polysyllabic tonguetwisters – exception: the 19-minute ‘New National Anthem’, where he gobs “Too much masturbation! Too much Game Of Thrones!” over big-booted industrial thump – and when the latter’s synth is placed prominently in the mix, as on the release’s two instrumentals ‘Into The Termite Mound’ and ‘Nityapralaya’, it makes a very heavy album positively airborne.
The second release by Annie Gardiner as Excellent Birds is an all-synth affair, and indeed a one-synth one. Digital Leaves, a cassette on her own label Crystal Fuzz, is a tribute to/showcase of the Yamaha DX7, one of the first affordable synthesizers and a staple of 80s pop. Gardiner however taps into the DX7’s ambient credentials, resulting in vaporous, slightly desiccated churchy whirring which, by my reckoning, represents a newly unveiled style in the artist’s diverse body of work to date.
A member of various bands for nearly 20 years, mostly in Bristol, Gardiner has a longer list still of studio credits spanning the city’s underground, and is also employed by BIMM University as a songwriting lecturer. Would she, from her learned seat, make the case for these three longform, predominantly instrumental pieces being ‘songs’, as I suspect many musicologists would not? To be clear, the answer should have no bearing on your willingness to sink into this enchanting 43 minutes. Blocky, chiming chords waft over shivery drone on ‘Lotus’, which opens the tape, developing into something sparser and more abstract; ‘Tetrapanax’, its companion on side A, pushes the DX7’s infamous ‘glassy’ sound to its limit and embeds some deeply treated shoegaze-beyond-shoegaze vocals. The second side is taken up by ‘Giant Butterbur’, where organ mode is employed for maximum drone effect and a gentle bass pulse approximates the very state of being alive.
Glasgow composer Iain Ross has music purporting to be as much as two decades old on his Bandcamp, but the Effective Dreaming alias looks to have been newly minted for Dream Catalogue Vol.1, on Sweden’s Fleure Tapes. The J-card is crafted (by Ross himself) from a very thin sheet of copper which has corroded in a most aesthetically pleasing manner, making a mondo neato art piece that justly whets one’s appetite for this hour-long new age bubbler.
Not to suggest that Ross, who hosts soundbaths every week or two around Glasgow and released this tape on the day of summer solstice, is less than committed to the culture, but in practise Dream Catalogue Vol.1 is unlikely to pass for unerringly functional new age music, teeming as it is with queasy keyboard tone and jolting vibe shifts. Plenty of what transpires is uncomplicatedly chocolate-box gorgeous, rippling melodic cleanness building layer by layer, but equally there are passages nine or ten minutes into each side where Effective Dreaming seems to be approaching ‘ambience’, as a concept, from a Coil-esque and thus somewhat malevolent place. All of which makes this release right on the (copper) money for any NWB column.
Hereford duo Alula Down have featured in here before, six years ago and as half of a split cassette with Jacken Elswyth. I admitted then to having sparse knowledge of Kate Gathercole and Mark Waters’ general background, indeed the detail of them being Elswyth’s parents had escaped me until more recently. The inclusive familial tradition in folk music culture is one of its richest qualities, so this is something to be celebrated in my book. To underline the point, Alula Down’s new self-released cassette Leafing Through finds Elswyth contributing her trademark banjo to ‘Hibernal’, its opening track, with Waters doing likewise on a 23-minute bucolic builder which combines repetitive figures and untethered wanderings. Gathercole’s harmonium creates a droning bed, as does the “breathing” credited to second guest Mo Budd; a folk interpretation of Can doesn’t feel too fanciful a descriptor.
Leafing Through’s second side is a collage-based document of Hedge Singing, a participatory walk around Hereford led by Gathercole in February of this year. You get improv-sounding jabs of string instrument, church bells, birdsong, youthful chatter, tape loops (or their digital equivalent) and, in toto, a highly satisfying accord between the sense of what it was like being there and the alchemical potential of the desktop editing suite.
Felix Drake, another Bristol dweller and far from September’s last, has featured in NWB once before, but as helmer of a label (Bliss Archive) rather than a musician, in which guise he reemerges as sludgy electronic producer Jackson Veil Panther. If, a cassette EP released on Weighted My Hand – another new local short-run repository, this one the doing of Dylan Mallett aka Silver Waves – is the first JVP music for half a decade, proclaimed unfinished by Drake. The four songs here were all that survived from a broken hard drive, so this release is their bravery award if you like.
This biographical detail does prompt you to listen to If with slightly altered ears, wondering to what extent its rough edges are by design. The intro to the title track sounds like a floor tom being soundchecked, which remains as the rhythmic basis for its five remaining minutes: electronics clash, clack and feed back, with unknown-to-me vocalist Jerome a ghostlike presence in the mix. ‘Nothing But Red Light’ is like jungle assembled using kitchen scissors and electrical tape, then slowed down to purgatorial tempo; ‘Your Loss’ is dub music by (sound) design, I’d say, but its drawn-out drops have a funeral doom attitude. Finally, ‘Fake Heart’ is the EP’s first meaningful concession to melody, though its Detroit techno-esque synth motif is scuffed up and paired with jarring, thorny drum programming.
Weirdos Inc., a label from Vancouver, describe Rali Pibs as “mysterious” on the occasion of releasing U Paradise, his debut 12”. Possibly they are thinking in terms of personality rather than biography, seeing as I know his real name (Rob Prokopowycz) and location (Bristol, again), which compared to some of the noisy ninjas indulged by NWB is a veritable deluge of information. It is true that Prokopowycz has not been greatly prolific or visible on a local level, but U Paradise may change that thanks to its interesting and atmospheric reading of various techno strands.
‘Au Co (Club Mix)’ cruises at moderate pace, somewhere between dub techno and tech-trance; ‘Ritual Loops’ somehow manages to marry DJ Sprinkles-type nocturnal ambience to frantic drums without those components seeming wholly unsuited to each other. ‘Sensitive (Distil Instinct Mix)’ floats on a bed of housey sighs and programmed beats that evoke handdrums; ‘Shaka’ is where it gets serious, in a sweaty ‘Nitzer Ebb get a Berghain do-over’ way. Babylon DiBergi, a name with no online reference points unrelated to this release, is credited as a featured artist on the more chipper techno snaker ‘Severance’, and ‘U Paradise Groove’ is murkage equally sleazy and queasy, on par with those Rezzett releases in making you feel like you’re overheating in the club.
Both Lord Tusk and James Massiah are aesthetically and topically ‘London’ to a degree as profound as any given music hall hoofer from a century ago. ‘Might Be The One’ is their second collaborative single – released, like their first, via Accidental Meetings, which has one foot planted there and the other in Bristol. It’s a two-track 7-inch, with the original mix supplemented by a dubbier instrumental ‘(Version)’ on the B-side in the classic reggae style; Tusk aka Ibrahim Abba-Gana produces, Massiah dishes up his rap-informed poetry over the top.
The vocalist’s lyrical speciality, the ennui brought on by spending the wee small hours doing drugs and shagging, is not going to be universally endearing, but thanks to both his turns of phrase and just-out-of-bed tone Massiah does come off like a floundering everyman rather than an oily lothario. This all takes place over elegantly heavy bass music that gestures to both digital dub and 90s techno – I keep thinking of Leftfield as a node of comparison, though I would guess that the two artists, who have both also featured in Dean Blunt’s Babyfather project, arrived at this style via a different route.
Toru Yoneyama, a Japanese fellow in London, has some form as a DJ, but Rescue At SW4 (The Trilogy Tapes) appears to be the first time he’s released his own productions, credited as Toru. How’s he chosen to make his bow? Only via a 92-minute cassette whose opening track alone is just under 19 of those minutes. Hubris or what? Well no, that’s when you don’t pull something like this off. When you open space fissures of humidity and leaking-battery-acid analogue confoundment in the form of elektro-industrial hardware wigouts… you have proved the (to me only hypothetical) doubters wrong.
‘052 T.HOLE’, that opening track, is perhaps Rescue At SW4’s biggest punisher too. In due course, Yoneyama gets busy with some almost techno-conventional synth riffs, though on ‘BITT 35ER’ he cruds up the sound design bigtime and makes the beats dance around them like Jamal Moss at his most eccentric. ‘254 222 BC’ and ‘264 T223’ both have a dub techno chassis, but the vehicle overall is a many-times-over cut’n’shut welded from apocryphal Goa trance tapes and barely-acknowledged Legowelt alter egos. That means it’s music that acts like it has all the time in the world, and the world is effectively lawless: as such, my favourite release of this column.
Here is some sound sculpture, to coin a phrase, that makes exquisitely pointed use of amplification and distortion yet which feels attuned to the natural, non-technological world – converting the curvature and growth arcs of vegetation into soundwaves, making incidents of chance balance out. It’s a tape of improvisations by Tara Cunningham & Caius Williams, titled Engine Songs and released on the Infant Tree label: the musicians, both London-bound and at the younger end of the improv scene age span, maintain a busy performance schedule with one another and others, but this is their first duo release since early 2022.
It feels notable, and unusual for an improv recording, that neither musician is given specific instrumental credits for Engine Songs. Cunningham is predominantly known as a guitarist, Williams moves between the bass guitar and double bass. Some of these 11 instrumental pieces could be considered to have rock music in their DNA – at least as much as, let’s say, Gastr Del Sol – and others are more comprehensively decoupled from ideas of linear structure. It’s all lovely tensile fare, though, restrained in mood but free-range in spirit and execution.
To sign off, some avowedly fuck-off noise music, both by Bristol-based artists: Ecotage aka Isaac Windsor (who’s done a few bands on the punk side of things) and Prior aka Lauren Newberry (first project I’m aware of). They have one longish track apiece on a cassette released by Eggy Tapes, and share a common theme of “manmade ecological horrors” in their label’s words. This is basically Windsor’s regular beat on Ecotage’s small pool of releases to date, telegraphed by the ‘early 90s vegan metalcore band’ style graphic design, and on ‘Leachate’ harsh, frazzled metallic tones are repeatedly shouldercharged by deep bass blowout with defiled dialogue and something that may once have been a vocal. Textbook ruffneck power electronics in other words.
Newberry, whose themes as Prior tend to come off as more insular/nihilistic, titles ‘Bantar-Gebang’ in reference to a colossal Javan landfill site, looping an introductory sample describing its effects on local people’s health. Her arrangements are more subtle and less thuggish than Ecotage’s, which is not to peg this side as the easy-going option: there’s the ghosts of dub in the approach to reverb, I think, and something solidly leaden rings through the tumult often, taking us back to the early industrial/proto-noise movement where it (sort of) all began (this month).
