Monolith Cocktail Blog

A world of sonic/musical discoveries reviewed by Dominic Valvona. All entries in alphabetical order.

::: Image of Kai Graig courtesy of Christian Cody

A DAAM label double-bill:

Mico Boule ‘Cellular Degradation’
Kerchief ‘At Knees Start’
Both released on 15^th August 2025

The soulless, divided online world we’ve all tuned into and have at least some small part in making has eroded our liberties, our mental and physical health, commodified our lives for not much more than convenience, and remodelled our reality to suit certain agendas on both the left and right. Tied like hostages to a smartphone screen – to an infinity of newsfeed scrolling soundbites and narcistic attention seeking – society is heading into an abyss of loneliness and detachment: with empathy itself is on the line.

The first of two releases from the highly experimental DAAM platform is a sonic avant-garde and unabated disconsolate poetry of the consciousness stand against this encroachment and control. Aligning themselves to the machine, to the algorithmic mechanisms and code, Michel van Collenburg of ambient-punk Nobuka note and Stefan Kollee of the alternative art-pop and super punk trio Oh Hazar combine forces under the Mico Boule heading.

The Dutch duo create an atmosphere of transmissions, the kinetic, both unrhythmic and rhythmic drums, tubular electronics, electricity, the submerged, the industrial and the kosmische. The production is both lo-fi and degraded, reminding me of the underground cassette culture of both the punk and post-punk electronic experimental scenes in Spain and Italy during the late 1970s and 1980s. And so, it sounds sometimes like a found relic from those times and yet feels very contemporary.

In an ambience that is both sci-fi and metallic, the very fibres of the cables and wires is alive and breathing with static, frequencies and meter readings. And through it all there’s a coarse produced beat or bounce and padding of drums and an obstructed and filtered vocalised poetry of the frustrated, detached and disenchanted from the avant-garde art scene, and the early days of analogue experiment and sound art.

If I had to name reference points, perhaps Richard H. Kirk at his most out there, Sutcliffe Jugend, The Rita, Throbbing Gristle, Nocturnal Emissions and Loris Cericola. But Cellular Degradation is in truth a unique experiment and encapsulation of our online captivity.

The second release from the DAAM hub is a new project by the psych doom and post-metal One Eyed Ancestor instigator Ben Wiggs. After many years away from his UK home Wiggs is back with a more avant-garde sound collage of both recondite sourced noise and voices and wildly effected but more obvious sounding drums and guitars.

Under the head covering Kerchief moniker, Wiggs expresses signs of ‘existential bewilderment’ and more random, extemporized experiment through both the near menacing and playfully challenging. But At Knees Start was actually ‘born’ from grief: a reaction to the passing of Wiggs’ father. He’s found a way to engage with these feelings, and with the abstract on an album that sounds like This Heat, Faust and The Sun City Girls being transmogrified by Le Forte Four and Nam June Paik.

Amidst the musique concrète, the reconfigured and manipulated voices that blend into the reconstructed accumulation of sounds, conversations and passing speech, there’s plenty of broken up readings and needle-like stylophone signals from a paranormal and mysterious radio set.

Framed in part as ‘ultimately a celebration of understanding how little can actually be understood’, the atmosphere is often heavy and darkened, the voice-like sounds near bestial and alien. That unpredictability throws up hysterical scribbles and unnerving surges. The drums – when they do arrive – are often crushing, beaten or pummelled like a punch bag or just really noisy: more heavy ‘meta’ than heavy metal. It sounds like a merger of Swans, Valentina Magaletti and Sunburned Hand of Man in those incidences.

Wiggs creates a sonic and expressive musical language whilst falling deep into the avant-garde on an album of untethered fearlessness bereft of control: and all the better for it.

Kai Craig ‘A Time Once Forgotten’
(Whirlwind Recordings) 8^th August 2025

Keeping up with, and at one, with the old folks, the burgeoning jazz drummer talent that is Kai Craig makes a real impactful statement on his debut album A Time Once Forgotten. Crossing timelines and digging back and forth between eras, his own informative study and influences, inter-generational homages bound on a record imbued by, and riffing off an incredible legacy of jazz luminaries from both sides of the Atlantic. A Cross-continental, you could say, draw of pioneers find their work rejuvenated and given a new lease of life and zest amongst a set list that also showcases both Craig and his band mates’ own skills as original composers.

Framed in part as a summary of ‘everything that’s bought Kai to this point’, this inaugural album pays its dues to the old guard whilst simultaneously projecting the future with a touch of originality and improvisation.

But before we delve any further, a little background is needed for those that haven’t yet cottoned on to the young drummer extraordinaire, now in the spotlight. The Brighton born Craig was hot housed at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, ‘mentored’ by the American jazz and soul drummer of note Gregory ‘Hutch’ Hutchinson – who now looms large over this recording with the producer’s credit. Only graduating quite recently (2022 to be exact), Craig has gone on to work with Soweto Kinch, Seamus Blake, Raynald Colom, Francesco Cafiso, Jon Gordon and many others. Craig moved to Paris for a time, soaking in the local jazz scene, before another move to NYC – a city that’s more or less his base for the foreseeable future. The debut album though has been recorded in Köln, Germany, with a talent pool of inspiring new generational talents. Some have worked with Craig already, including the French bassist Géraud Portal. Whilst others have either crossed paths or found themselves in similar European jazz orbits. Both saxophonist, composer, educator and former Young Jazz Musician of the year nominee Sean Payne and trumpeter James Copus played with the titan of British jazz drumming Clark Tracey. Other strands include the ACT label – one of Europe’s most important jazz labels for fostering new talent and new collaborative projects in both the contemporary and neoclassical fields -, with Payne’s extensive credits including stints with one of the label’s key signings Gwilym Simcock. But the connection is with Rainer Böhm, the outstanding and acclaimed German jazz pianist, who not only released his own solo-headed album on ACT but has appeared in collaborative unions with Dieter Ig and a number of others on the label over the years.

As foils to Craig’s lively but also tactile expressive drums, all four acclaimed artists and soloist virtuosos pitch in composition/arrangement wise. As a show of Craig’s generous spirit and willingness to share, the opening track ‘Namesake’ is from Payne, who Craig describes as ‘his closet friend both personally and musically’.  Announced by a splash of cymbal and dusting of the ride, a bounce on the kit, Payne’s composition recalls Blue Note at its best, with a scene from a NYC skyline, and a touch of Sonny Rollins and Art Blakey.  The piano is more attuned to Cecil Taylor and Herbie Hancock – as it is throughout. Payne, credited along with Craig, is also half responsible for the album’s closer too, with the nod to Jack De Johnette – the American drummer, pianist and composer who worked with such deities of the jazz form as Charles Lloyd, Freddie Hubbard and Keith Jarrett – ‘Afterthought’. A controlled maelstrom is reached on a short goodbye, with the sax and drums pretty much tight, busy in the wash.

Later on, we get Craigs’s own Blue Note inspired ‘Dealin’’ – choosing the lates 60s period of that label’s iconic catalogue. There’s a swing this time around, the sound of the bright lights and trumpet of Roy Hagrove on a score that offers freedom to the piano and a stretching and expanding of the double-bass. Another Craig number, ‘The Chieftain’, elicits a certain emotional tumult and pull. As with the majority of tracks, there’s a reference to a particular drummer, this time around the American legend Jeff ‘Tain’ Watts, who worked with such icons as Wynton Marsalis and his brother Branford, Alice Coltrane and Betty Carter. Craig’s personal gratitude is played out in part on this original composition, which crashes and skips, rests and rolls in another example of controlled tumult. Almost like a warm-up, a run over the kit and show of the tactile, this opportunity highlights the drummer’s superb command of the descriptive and near improvised.

Giving praise to mentors and luminaries alike, the rest of the album is made up of takes on both the obscure and wider known compositions of Wayne Shorter, Fred Hersch, John Taylor, Kenny Kirkland and Michael Brecker. Whilst Shorter is rightly revered and been covered multiple times for his earlier work, his JuJu and Footprints, Criag and his ensemble have chosen to home in on his lesser celebrated 80s period, with a transformative take on ‘When You Dream’. Appearing on the 1985 LP Atlantis, a work known for its own group compositions and arrangements, and with the addition of Brazilian and funk influences, this as dreamy as the title suggests mirage is smooth with a hint of funky jazz fusion and synthesized rays – sounding a bit like a keytar or Stanley Clarke, and unmistakably 80s.

There’s a trio version of the American pianist, composer and prolific Grammy nominee Hirsch’s – who I must admit to my ignorance, I know very little of – ‘Phantom of the Bopera’ that kicks off with rubbery loose double-bass and harmonics. It’s a delightful swung and swinging translation, with hints of New Orleans, the Blues and the freeform, of Cecil Taylor meets Toussaint. Different and yet similar at the same time, with the piano in my estimation taking the spotlight – quite rightly too, as Böhm is an astounding player with a hand in the classical and freeform, the modes and untethered realms of jazz. 

The self-taught pianist John Taylor is, I must readily admit, someone I’ve never come across before. In a homage to not only Taylor but the European school at large, Craig has chosen to transform ‘Dry Stone’; re-modelling it with experimental elan into something more bluesy, tactile and weeping. Undulations and breaking waves of drums make for an unstable foundation, as the trumpet bleats in plaintive and sensitive tones.

Moving on, and there’s versions, adaptations and rejuvenated visions of both Kirkland’s nighttime serenade ‘Midnight Silence’ and Brecker’s obscure ‘Lunations’ – which I believe is very difficult to get hold of. The former by the renowned American pianist and keyboardist, is given a little more energy with the influence of Elvin Jones style drums. The romantic allusions remain, but the vibe a touch tighter and tauter with small drills and bounces off the kit. The latter, by the impressive and ridiculously prolific American saxophonist of choice across rock, jazz, blues, experimental and pop genres (as a soloist, session player and sideman, Brecker’s credits run to 900 albums; from Zappa to Lennon) is a rattle and shake-up of the funky and swinging. Again, there’s a trace of Orleans at play, and some Latin, on a most stirring and fired-up performance: the horns positively sing. Whatever the material, Craig and his troupe make it their own.

It would be easy for Craig to leap in, perhaps overexcited and in making an impression launch a wild and showboated turn. But despite the passages of tumult, the maelstrom waves that crash on the cymbals, it never feels uncontrolled or overstated. Every drill, roll, shimmer, wash and bound, skip feels purposeful. Each musician gets to perform take a turn in performing a near solo role or in lead position; sometimes sharing the duties, sometimes playing in triangular or doublet formations.

Dipping in and out of the decades, recalling times past, Craig does a lot of justice to his mentors and inspirations whilst announcing his arrival on the stage of contemporary jazz. An excellent, dynamic start from a drummer with so much more to give and space to grow. ‘A Time Once Forgotten’ is a contender for brightest hope in the jazz field this year.

Crayola Lectern ‘Disasternoon’
(Onomatopoeia) 15^th August 2025

Once again bathed in the same South Downs of Southeast England water, on both the West and East Sussex coasts, Chris Anderson’s Crayola Lectern project waltzes and serenades to the final curtain call song at the end of the pier show. In nostalgic recall to an absinthe green kaleidoscopic sepia filter of eccentric English psychedelia, Anderson’s melancholic fears, losses, bereft sentiments and grievances are made diaphanous and beautiful; swelled with the influence of matinee film scores, and music from the stage, theatre, music hall and recital: wallowing has never sounded so pretty and sublime.

With drummer and percussionist Damo Waters (of The Electric Soft Parade, Agebaby and Spratley Japs, amongst many other aliases, note) and trumpet/cornet and glockenspiel player Alistair Strachan as foils, and guests Christian ‘Bic’ Hayes (of the Cardiacs) on guitar and Maria Marzaioli (the CV includes YOU&TH and Slum of Legs) on violin, Anderson’s ensemble embark on a quasi-sort of maverick English rock opera through the strange/estranged times in which we have been unceremoniously dumped.

Finding sentiment, romance perhaps, and at least relief on the way, Disasternoon is like a Van Dyke Parks and Brian Wilson almanac rewrapped in the studio of Robert Wyatt and his artist wife and foil Alfreda Benge. The latter’s indelible water mark is not just musical but visual, with Alfreda’s artwork furnishing the cover. But Wyatt is the main influence at play; suffused in every bar, every phrase and subtle eccentric twist: lyrically the dreams of Hockney’s California; holding hands on the motorway in that dysfunctional, uncomfortable way us English do in displaying romantic gestures and touching declarations of love or sex; and room for a less than vitriolic spitting but upset rile against various injustices, the erroneous societal declines and effects of the ever greedy billionaires’ club in that quintessentially polite and poetic polemic English way.

Wyatt isn’t the only inspiration or influence in town, however. Across eight tracks (which I firmly believe is the best length) there’s a brilliant sadness and quivery aria-like theremin-like warble of The Beatles (especially McCartney’s turns), Virginia Ashley, Louie Hardin, Syd Barrett, Blue House, Talk Talk, Mercury Rev, Jeff Lyne and SFA (more Phantom Power and later). With a woodwind and brass section pitched somewhere between colliery band, English tea dance jazz, chamber, psych and late 1960s Abbey Road, and a wistful sieve of dejection and a military-style roll of the snare, this album finds a real emotional pull and drama throughout.  Captivating, at times near innocent, and yet rejecting the stale miasma of coastal town malaise and bedsit land. Nostalgic in a sense, and yet timelessly captured in a place that hasn’t really moved on: England’s dreaming and all that. From Lincolnshire Georgian market town to the adoption of a South American and Falklands Island swan (yes there are the occasional times when Anderson pays homage or notice to his past life and birth right up North, or times when the references are that much more exotic or international), something personal and intimate is reached. The vocals deliver that sense with a mellotron inspiral psychedelic filter, part Wyatt, part Barrett and part Mark Hollis.  

The album can be unassuming but is nevertheless ambitious, bookended as it is with two overture-like suites – the opening cornet blown song of decline ‘Sad Cornetto’ (I’m getting evocations of Brian Wilson’s SMiLE, albeit lost in the English music hall) and grand finale plaint rock opera ‘Coscoroba’. It can border on a controlled rhapsody at times, a chamber piece lost at Lewis Carroll’s garden fete, or the sort of score that evokes the 1920s English silent cinema and later productions of a fairytale, or at one point, a Graham Greene filmic adaptation – I must also point out, I wrote down Bernard Hermann and Alex North.

Better on every single play, an extraordinary achievement, and one of the year’s best albums by far.

Julian Cubillos ‘S-T’
(Ruination Record Co.) Released on the 25^th July 2025

Totally passing me by over the years (my fault), this introduction to the L.A. born and raised, but Queens NYC based, multi-instrumentalist, singer-songwriter, producer and artist Julian Cubillos is a very happy one; albeit the themes circling and bandying around on this latest songbook of instant infectious hooks are often dreamily and disarmingly full of anxieties, of personal and heartache travails and various challenges at re-discovery.

Bringing myself and everyone else in the same boat up to speed, Cubillos has released a number of albums under his own name, but also been on hand to act as foil to Ivy Meissneri in her Little Mystery project. Very much in demand we’re told, the CV mentions the sharing of stages and recording sessions with such notable artists as Okkervil River and Will Self, The Antlers, Christian Lee Hutson and Alena Spanger (the list does go on). But this latest, self-titled, album has been a long time coming; its predecessor, In Heaven, was released back in 2018. However, the material on the simply entitled Julian Cubillos is credited in the notes as ‘largely a run-off that had accumulated around the making of 2015’s big-swing alt-rock opus Evil’. What an accumulation of material to have: as this record will prove over time.

It clocks in at repeatedly playable thirty minutes or so, with every track more or less instigated by a repeated loop, a line or drum beat of some kind. Quirky off-steps hit softly with a sound that effortlessly and without any straining seems to hark to a lo fi Prince and Sly Stone (I found this hard to believe when I first saw it referenced, but ‘Family Affair’ Riot era is definitely there on the album’s wavy high-voiced hushed lead single ‘Price Of Guilt’) on some songs, and Beck, Todd Rundgren, Thiago Nassif and Vovô Bebê (the two latter references especially on the now wave South American-esque floppy and bendy ‘Talking to Myself’). But I’m picking up Harrison vibes a lot on the opening solid stroked woody guitar repeated rhythmic, rubbery bass burbled and eventual wildlife Foley escape routed ‘Returning’ – there’s a ‘Departing’ too, albeit a reverberated farewell of hidden sourced movements, comings and goings and switches with a synthesized ambience that feels like a captured point in time, a mood and abstract way of quantifying leaving.

But just as you get some kind of hold on the album, Cubillos suddenly strikes up a fuzz-grinded grunge guitar crush as he defiantly finds his voice and identity after years of being sidelined and perhaps reluctant to be his true self, on the near pissed, ripping and keytar-like Prince solo attitude ‘I Used To Be Someone’.

As disorientating as the concept, the feelings beneath and put to song, this album conveys tough topics and sentiments with levity and a playfulness. In and out of dreams, of states of anxiety, of post therapy, fear, episodes of Attention Deficit Disorder joyriding and paranoia, Cubillos’s ‘holistic vision’ uses a rich palette of colourful pop, new wave, no wave and indie-rock references with which to do it.

Dolores Mondo Stash ‘Dirt Collected Reminiscences Like Rivers Of Molasses’
(Cruel Nature Records) 1^st August 2025

Accumulated memories, half-forgotten or distorted, collect like syrupy silt on the banks of distraction, in an exercise of self-exploration and cerebral learning.

Romanian solo artist Dan Tecucianu’s latest album under the Dolores Mondo Stash appellation is a disorientating experience of the caustic, distorted, crushing, harrowing and phantasmagorical. Drowning or pulled beneath the electronica, the guitar and hidden sourced barrage of reverberated noise, fizzles and mooning, looning stretched time capsules, Tecucianu’s cortex is opened up to reveal a both peculiar and emotional scowl of cold alienation, coping strategies, haunted past lives and psychological states of unnerving episodic trauma and compulsion. Or at least that’s what it sounds like to me.

Dirt Collected Reminiscences Like Rivers Of Molasses is mind map or mind-field of degraded quality transmissions and recalls that stretches between the haunted industrial rumbles, envelopes and metal noises of Joe Potts, John Duncan and Throbbing Gristle and the strange ambient industry of Cementation Anxiety, Pressed Flowers and Skinny Puppy. And yet ‘Empty From Here On’, with its use of hysterical voices and various time warped effects, mixes House music with jazzcore and breaks for something altogether different: slipping in and out of consciousness. ‘Streams Of Compulsion’ meanwhile, which follows it, is like a lost 80s synthesized VHS horror score by Alan Howarth or John Carpenter. And the distressing howl of industrial inferno that is ‘The Wildlife Left Orphan By The Fire’ soundsa bit like the Aphex Twin’s ‘#4’ in parts, but also like Einstürzende Neubauten soundtracking Gary Simmons Ashes To Ashes chalk on board piece.

Elsewhere it’s the sound of aerial guitars, primitivism rhythms and percussive elements, the foreboding and forbidden, cold winds through the Cerebrum, a stimulus of distortions, and dying requiems. Really very interesting. A true immersion into a complex mind of memory reallocation and re-engineered cerebral therapy.

Escupemetralla ‘Exotic Matter of the Universe Series of Albums: Sublimado Corrosivo, Burros de Dios / Asses of God, Vida y Color, The Third World Chickenpoxp, Multimierda’ Independently Released during July 2025

Corrosive hallucinations, hauntings and paranormal activity from Spain’s past lives – Inquisition, Civil War, Fascism, Catholic complicity, Separatism, Latin America, Soviet influence– are dredged up once more by the obscure and hidden Escupemetralla network of anonymous trick noise makers and acid magnetic degraded invocation experimentalists.

Scions of Spain’s previous underground diy cassette tape culture of the late 70s and 80s, the collective, the cable behind this platform now dumps a bundle of relics (originally concocted between 1988 and 1995) upon the poor unsuspecting public. Five albums of varying bastardised folklore, menace, acid-tunings, Foretan transmitter frequencies, séances, Communist occult manifestations, Soviet fetishism, apparitions, drills, avant-garde sampling, fucked scratching electro, tape experimentation, Catholic guilt, supernatural psychogeographic atmospheres, noisy meat beat manifestos, holy disorder, self-flagellation and the defrocked.

Re-floated, re-charged for another century, and painfully still relevant, this scrawl of anarchic frazzled, static-buzzed, flipped, churned and reversed industrial house music beat-up of non-music is as daunting, hysterical and cryptic as it is transfixing.

The best course of action is to just leap into this generous dispatch, which at any one time recalls Esplendor Geométrico, Hunting Lodge, Foetus, Quaxer, Landscape, Joe Potts, Coil, Revolting Cocks, Nocturnal Emissions and Basic Channel. Visitations from scarred Spain and socialist phantasmagoria await anyone who dares to delve in to this curious sonic mission.

The Northern Lighthouse Board ‘Lost Worlds’
Released on the 13^th July 2025

From the spiritualist parlours of Victorina to the pastoral spirituals of the English church, the mysteriously veiled artist/artists behind this hauntology certainly seem skilled in creating the right supernatural, hermetic and unearthly atmospheres: atmospheres that are as eerie as they are near magical and dreamy.

The fifth album from this esoteric board of northern lighthouse keepers – if reimagined by H.P. Lovecraft or M. R. James – once more conjures up visitations and strange mist circling vapours of arcane secretive meetings in sanctified and reverent locations. From the séance performances of Mina Crandon and Florence Cook to what could be the site of Atlantis itself, the Lost Worlds of the album title gently beckon the listener into a manifestation of 70s/80s analogue and kosmische electronics, hymnal and choral mimicked music and occult soundtracks.

The familiar sounds of pealing parish church bells, the song and communications of a menagerie of woodland birds (from crows to the higher pitched and more melodious of our avian friends) and the reverberated and cloaked conversations of people in the ether are absorbed into a soundtrack of tubular and sustained or wafted wave forms and synthetic modulations, bulb-like notes that float around like pollen, and various ghostly effects. Sometimes this can sound like the Tangerine Dream’s space generator mating with the Fortean transistor, or like the Belbury Poly and The Balustrade Ensemble settled in the pews with Elgar under stained-glass light.

The sound of the air, both prickly and cold, blows through shadowed trees, hollows and sacred clearings, whilst polygons and crystals emerge from the various synthetic apparatus to create a convincing score to a phantom and sorcery, magik, wiccan film yet to be made. I’d recommend this curiosity of Victorina and beyond hauntology to those with a taste for Drew Mulholland, Jodie Lowther, Garden Gate, Angelo Badalamenti and the Focus Group. But also, for anyone into disturbing atmospheres both enticing and foreboding and mysterious.   

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