A common oldhead refrain you’ll probably know, if you’re the sort of person reading this, is “where have all the bad reviews gone?” Well, in my case, because the stuff I write about is mostly very niche and has minimal public profile, so it’s rarely if ever worthwhile highlighting something crap. Mista Self-Isolation, by sometimes-Yorkshire/sometimes-London electronic ironist M-G Dysfunction, offers an unusual variation by being an album which reviews itself – badly.
On its opening track, a hired hypeman gets ready to craft a praiseful intro to the tape before realising who it’s for. How, he asks, can he convincingly big up these “noncommittal hip-hop beats” and “ambiguous vague raps about how we live in a society”? The critic – Tayyab Amin – is in reality a friend of M-G, aka Fred Mikardo-Greaves, both kicking around the Leeds DIY scene since the mid-2010s (see also Theo Gowans, another guest on MSI). A mid-album skit is styled as a voicenote left for Fred, outlining the various things they find cringeworthy about the album. (The speaker speaks in the manner of a ‘label guy’ but is definitely not Panurus Productions’ own James Watts)
Here and elsewhere, this is an album which, by design, cannot come off as demonstrably sincere on any topic. Personally, I relish such emotional ambiguity, but not everyone does. ‘No Justice, No Peace’ tests the limits of this latitude by first reeling off some recognisable protest slogans (“justice for the 97”; “say his fucking name – George Floyd”); mere seconds later, Mikardo-Greaves is “trying to suck my own dick watching Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt”. Many have attempted flippancy around these issues before and regretted it. As a bonus, this track is perhaps MSI’s strongest moment musically, heavy dub techno at hip hop pace.
Moments of tenderness feature all the same, albeit with lyrics written by other people. A near a cappella cover of ‘Yesterday’, by lovers rock queen Caroll Thompson, is retitled ‘50 Words For Blow’; a set of Bridget St. John lyrics are read as solemn poetry by Naomi Macleod, bassist with Biffy Clyro-affiliated rock outfit Empire State Bastard. And the hazy synth melodies dotted, sometimes incongruously, throughout the album take M-G Dysfunction closer than ever before to an obvious antecedent of his, Hype Williams, in its splice of inscrutability and prettiness.
The Poems We Write For Ourselves (Sneaker Social Club), James ‘Henzo’ Henderson’s debut album after about five years and a folder of mostly digital releases, is by no means devoid of wit, or a knowing read or two of the culture in which it’s embedded. Clear as day, though, that the Mancunian producer loves all the stuff that goes into this double vinyl set – party bass, syncopated drums, frosty low end, guest MCs chatting shit – more so the opportunity to bundle it all up on one record. His own record!
Henzo’s productions carry that same paradoxical quality as a ton of classic techno, drum & bass and dubstep, in that the sound design is pure moody but results in something that fondles your pleasure receptors on multiple levels. Synths drone with steely purpose, beats hit with the discrete ruthlessness of a lead pipe to the head in a library and Emby – the album’s one vocalist, on ‘Worm Grunting’ – is, by his own assessment, “sorbet / ice cold, I went to Norway”. His taste in samples elevate ‘Take Stock, Touch Grass’ and ‘Plant Your Roots In Me’, whose vocals each stem from somewhere between deep house and juke; ‘Rustica Slump’ is some clipped, chipmunky 2-step light-in-the-darkness.
Rest Symbol by Rest Symbol came out in late 2023, through the An1ma label and on CD; I didn’t hear it at the time, but at some point Brian Foote from Kranky Records did, hit the London trio up and has released a vinyl edition (with one extra song) on FO, his new label. I have a nasty feeling it’s going to fetch dickhead prices soon, but you should at minimum take a peek because it’s some beautiful, incremental, medicated romance – 16rpm street soul, torchsong in the rubble of a bombsite.
Inasmuch as we’re talking sadgal vocals, shimmery keyboards, fluffed-stylus vinyl fuzz and breakbeats impossible to actually break to, we are also talking ‘trip hop, but really slow’, and if you swoon to Jabu, Birthmark, maybe Seefeel, Space Afrika at times, then Rest Symbol is lying in state for you. But it’s got its own thing, else why would we be here talking? A fair bit of side A feels like glorified sketches, though these too can open floral style – but when, on ‘Skin’, Rest Symbol’s Moreiya emerges from the shadows for a knockout lead vocal, it begins a second side that builds to the outrageously ecstatic stringed ambience of ‘Twelfth Hour’.
As Leyden Jars, Mark Courtney and Natalie Williams have scratched out their own microniche in DIY tape-culture songcraft: cloudy configurations of dub, folk and noise moving with a mollusc’s urgency and intimate as the grave. Illusory Truths, a cassette album on Australian label Altered States, is torchy and murky enough to make the columnist’s segue from Rest Symbol an obvious choice, though where that group give the impression of a profound acquaintance with club culture, the Bristol sound Leyden Jars recall is the 90s-into-00s likes of Movietone and Crescent.
Drumbeats, where used, are programmed rather than played, but carrying a twiglike fragility and abstract enough to feel human-fallible (cf ‘Danger Of Inaction’). The dub/folk connection is at its fleshiest on ‘Du Beast’, where a harmonium exhales dolefully amidst action-painted sci-fi electronics: I’m not the first to bring up the King Tubby continuum in regard to Leyden Jars, but it’s majorly baked into this one. Williams’ vocal approach varies from improbably blank sub-Julee Cruise crooning to lost-at-sea harmonising to, on the penultimate ‘Glo’, some Welsh language balladry. ‘Scaledown’, which follows, runs to nearly ten minutes and orders itself around a footloose clarinet made all the more impactful by the duo’s zeal for treating it dub style.
Pianist Jack Elliot Barton and saxophonist Isaac Robertson comprise Wetroom, under which name they’ve recorded a debut album, Managed Decline, and had it issued by Opal Tapes. By no means wedded to any genre over nearly 300 releases, this may though be Opal’s first foray into jazz with, shall we say, a friendly demeanour. Both formerly in a London ensemble, Nonstatic (Barton has since moved to Barcelona), in this duo format Wetroom avoid overt gestures to funk, drop the median tempo and craft a seductive, sparse sound that leans into noir without laying it on too thick.
Either or both of Barton and Robertson are also credited with ‘electronics’, but their presence is usually subtle. The opening three pieces set out Wetroom’s stall: foley effects or perhaps field recordings feature in opener ‘Doldrums’; a thrum of digital reverb enters towards the close of ‘The Gannets’; ‘Any Job Of Work’ begins like Bohren & Der Club Of Gore and goes on to run Barton’s piano through something to make it sound campanological. Yet much of Managed Decline could have been recorded 70 years ago without any profound differences in sound, the duo prizing melody over testing the boundaries of their instruments.
Ajay Saggar came to Manchester from Kenya as a preteen and lived in the region for 15 years – playing in a noisy indie band, Dandelion Adventure, for the last few – before moving to the Netherlands in 1991, where he’s been since. As such, and as much as Saggar has maintained a highly admirable rate of creativity in a wealth of different setups, New Weird Britain hasn’t really felt an appropriate place to shout it out – until his latest album as Bhajan Bhoy, Summer In St. Mary’s.
A double vinyl set released through his own Wormer Bros. label plus two North American ones, Feeding Tube and We Here & Now, it comprises eight instrumental pieces, each around ten minutes long, performed on an organ in St Mary’s Church, South Cowton, a remote village in the far north of North Yorkshire. This is a really special listen on an acoustic, compositional and conceptual level; historical too, for that matter, the organ being slightly older than any currently living person and the church dating from the mid-15th century.
Those who find particular bliss in other contemporary churchbound musicians such as Kali Malone are advised to investigate, although I wouldn’t consider Summer… straightforwardly ‘drone music’ in that sense (‘Alice Wycliffe’, titled after the wife of the church’s architect, is positively brisk-paced). Here, though, is a demonstration that sometimes one only needs one essential idea to make great art.
Anyone with an interest in historic British sites of Christian worship could do worse than scope out Tristan Rhys Williams’ Instagram account, as this Anglesey-based sound artist documents their visits to such places – likewise various neolithic sites of interest – with pleasing regularity. Williams’ latest release is a split cassette with Ob Od Aeourth, who has also used the aliases Johann Wlight and Itdreamedtome while maintaining a truly enigmatic presence in the underground.
The split, titled Dylan Eil Ton and containing a quarter-hour track apiece, stems from a prompt by Dafydd Roberts, who’s releasing this on his label Listen To The Voice Of Fire: read the Llyfr Gwyn Rhydderch, a 14th-century manuscript most notable for forming the basis of the Mabinogion, and record music responding to the use of colour in its prose. Two powerfully arcane passages of real-world gothic ambience materialise. Williams’ title piece is swelling, unsettling and Coil-like, with cryptic, whispered voices and what sounds like found percussion; towards the climax, we seem to have gone down to the sea on a blustery day. Ob Od Aeourth’s side, ‘Red Rowan Berries Dye Druid Robes Black’, finds acoustic succour in scraped stone and flowing water, early and late in its duration, with a bed of slow, gaseous synth tones taking hold elsewhere.
Although Soil Leaf Root, a 53-minute sound collage released on tape through the Collapsing Drums label, is only partially British in its genesis, the British part is one overdue an appearance in this column, and the legacy of colonialism hangs over the parts which aren’t. Paul Nataraj is a Blackburn native working in the approximate areas of turntablism and plunderphonics; Masimba Hwati, co-producer of this album with Nataraj, lives in Vienna but much of his artistic practice relates to his Zimbabwean nationality, this project included.
What we hear on Soil Leaf Root relates to Nataraj’s recent touring installation Repetitions Of 108, which comprised nine turntables playing modified LPs. One of these, pictured on the Bandcamp embed above, looks like a delicious pie but is actually a covering of calico fabric, dyed with mud from the location where a fully independent Zimbabwe raised its new flag in April 1980. Here, it provides a drifting, abstract backdrop for Hwati’s hefty archive of field recordings and Nataraj’s Stockhausen-into-Steinski approach to cutting shit up. As with many archivist recordings like this, I’m torn between wanting to know the source of every sample and appreciating the mystery retained for this excellent release’s credits.
North and South Yorkshire, London and Manchester are all places that have claimed Rosey PM, or vice versa, at some point. Her latest EP For My Sins (Blancmange Lounge), four songs and a 44-second outro, was recorded in Sheffield early last year, and capital city goofballs can see Rosey playing live later this month in Hackney’s Shacklewell Arms, alongside recent NWB hot item Spike and for a generous £0.00.
Time was she dubbed her music “pyjama jazz”, but on the evidence of this EP has since inched towards a less easy, more unsettling place, though not to the point of abandoning a pop sensibility. A flute slaloms through EP opener ‘My Sweet Moon’, and a bashed-up-sounding autoharp is at the centre of ‘Do I Need To Know?’, which is sort of on a Vashti Bunyan tip but has an R&B tearjerker register to its vocals. ‘Space Suits’, which follows it, clings still more tightly onto the spartan soul singer thing, and is boosted by the synth layers of co-producer Oliver Harrap. Inviting, though far from pandering with it, and a really nice set overall.
A hint of 1970s folk-rock becomes the dominant mode with The Making (The Barne Society), Lavinia Blackwall’s second album under her own name since the end of her previous group Trembling Bells. A fine group they were too: wiggy, woolly, spontaneous, at least a little Incredible String Band-y… all things The Making is essentially not. This is a Top Of The Pops, verse-chorus-verse version of 70s folk, and it’s an absolute delight.
Blackwall is much more evidently the bandleader here than either she or co-vocalist Alex Neilson were in Trembling Bells, but this is enough of a collaborative collection for the term ‘solo album’ to feel a misnomer. ‘Scarlett Fever’ is mostly just her vocals and piano, something like Maddy Prior with Kate Bush’s airs and graces, but there’s some flute from Laura J Martin in there too – and its lyrics were, one reads, written by Blackwall’s old history teacher.
A trumpet/trombone pairing, Richard Merchant and Ross McCrae, lend a slightly demented village fete feel when they appear; ‘My Hopes Are All Mine’ not only exemplifies this but ropes in Maggie Reilly – that’s Mike Oldfield 1983 hit single ‘Moonlight Shadow’ vocalist Maggie Reilly – to do the BVs. What a team! Blackwall’s career to date had only hinted at her pop songcraft prowess, but it’s apparent on just about all The Making’s songs; the only misstep, for this listener, is ‘Morning To Remember’, and I’ll grant that my basic intolerance for the Small Faces’ novelty song output is the main issue there.
