Monolith Cocktail Blog

In review: a world of sonic discoveries. Dominic Valvona

Becca Bartlett ‘Me, Myself And A Mirror’
Released 24^th July 2026

The burgeoning Newfoundland singer-songwriter Becca Bartlett is wise beyond her years both creatively and emotionally, pulling on the heart strings but not in any kind of overblown sense, but subtly and with enough atmosphere and musical skill to serve up age old themes of self-identity and how to hold on to it. 

Losing something of herself to appeal and seek validation, Becca seems to have already turned the page by the sounds of the sophisticated, but easily pulling on the emotions, set of songs: the current Berklee College of Music student’s debut EP no less.

Whilst finding a way in the world, and despite the yearns, lament and often plaintive subject matters and lyrics, Becca’s musicianship and vocals seem confident and at last, comfortable. Piquing my interest anyway, especially with the opening tree bug ‘Cicadas’ malady come beautifully heart aching cathartic release, her music is fresh introspection of atmospherics, country, the American 90s indie singer-songwriter scene, and folk-pop.

It begins with that already mentioned opening country-twang voiced – like the Cowboy Junkies meets Junita Stein; and even a touch of Tim Buckley – encouragement of finding one’s own place in the world despite the views and actions, the cold shoulder or discouragement of others – friends, or so-called friends, peers and romantic attachments. But with a range that is suffused with a hurting and yet enduring voice, sympathetic soft guitar and piano, and an attentive, comforting use of drums (just a few subtle uses of splashes and shimmering crescendos to stir the troubled waters), Becca can wisely rise through the scales and find the odd surprising note or two to turn even the most familiar sounding of ballads and releases of the spirit into something very interesting and deeply felt. Joni Mitchell is mentioned in the references, and it’s not immediately obvious but ‘Cicadas’ does have the air about it of a Joni song in its choice of these arcs and rises.

The title-track itself draws on the emotional wellspring that motivates and charges each of the EP’s six songs. Anecdotal wise, and it’s easy to imagine when you hear it, Becca has been overcome when performing ‘Me, Myself And A Mirror’. Written as a response to rejection (specifically mentioned, a rejection letter from her dream music school during a particular period of turmoil, when “nothing she accomplished felt like enough.”), this song is one of endurance, of overcoming the turbulence to finally see in that allegorical, metaphorical and all too real mirror a person worthy of acceptance and self-worth. Once more tugging at the proverbial in a dreamy hunger of dusted drums and country-folk-soul.

The rest of this generous EP’s songbook reminded me in part of a less esoteric Gillian Stone (the fellow Canadian artist who was once a writer on this site), of Neko Case and Jenny Lewis of Rilo Kiely fame. The ecologically distressed Cassandra laments of ‘Tears Of Gaia’ feature a lovely watery tumult of piano and performance not too dissimilar to Tori Amos, whilst ‘The Static’ has an air of Celtic-country to its longed ache for a mended and entwined heart.

Even the most jaded will reconcile with their tear ducts upon hearing this brilliant songbook: A captivating if heart aching debut from an artist with much to share.

Free Form Society ‘Jam Session #1’
(Free Form Society) Released 22^nd July 2026

New beginnings this month, or at least the burgeoning anticipation of a team-up from the Argentine pairing of filmmaker, composer and sound artist Melisa Aller and Rob Conlazo of maverick favourites The Reynols.

A fresh enterprise, the Free Form Society is an umbrella for new musical improvisations and label activities, and a platform for experimenting further with “expanded cinema”.

Not so much a manifesto, the rules of this platform are scant (“no repetition”, “no rehearsals” and “no corrections” being the main ones), but include the abandonment of most restrictions in creating immersive improvised experiences of image, cinema and sonics.

Step forward the multi-talented Aller, who’s oeuvre includes experiments with Super 8 film (its apparatus and processes), the notable debut feature film Las Decisiones Formales and the Oberhausen International selected Caida triptych. Since 2013 Aller has been composing the soundtracks to her own films, whilst also releasing a couple of studio albums (2024’s Plastiques and 2026’s Destruktion), and taking part on various musical experiments with CS8 and EPM.

With a haywire provenance dating back decades, Conlazo’s day job sonically with The Reynols has so far produced at least 120 albums since 1993. A list of their collaborators and foils over those years will tell you all you need to know about the direction of sonic travel: Pauline Oliveros, Lee Ranaldo, The Nihilist Spasm Band, Damo Suzuki, Paul Dutton, John Oswald, Michael Snow, Alan Licht, Birchville Cat Motel and the Acid Mothers Temple. Alongside this outsider unit Conlazo has maintained an independent visual and conceptual art practice.

Brought together in this open-ended configuration, the pair now cruise, pummel, speed and also float through a both sleazy leather Vega and more Japandorf and Dinger motored extemporised cosmic vacuum on the project’s inaugural jam session.

One solid aural operation of sonic propulsion and vortex giddy, zero gravity noise oscillations, this twenty-three plus minutes session, recorded live in Buenos Aires, keeps up multiple passages of rhythm and momentum as it first lays into a psychobilly space rock tunnelled beat at the start: this arriving after what sounds like the astral chinking glassy wind chimes and the steam engine chug of the last train to Lhasa.

From skying to the Spacemen 3 and Acid Mothers, then beamed through the cylindrical reverberations of the space time continuum, there’s reference points to CAN, Johhny Marr, Hawkwind and industrial gothic rock. But the action moves on organically into a surreal lunar soup and the whirly uncertain space of the off world with distortions, metallic alien vessel architecture, a garbled use of tribal South American voices from Castaneda’s dreams, and Moorcock adventure. All the while a guitar, both in tremolo and reverb mode, strings out and wrangles suitably galactic hymns, contours, unrestrained scores and undulations whilst the filters and effects loosely circle and hover overhead.

A suitably imaginary inner and outer space is invoked through this spectrum of experiences, influences and the spirit of improvisation to set in motion a free form idea of collaboration without perimeters: a unique funnelling of multimedia disciplines into something uncharted.

Hui ‘Zerbricht Fels’
(Jollies) 6^th August 2026

An inner and outer space menagerie of organic and synthetic biospheres and growth await the listener on this latest enterprise and union from Johannes Schebler and Sven Fritz; both electronic artists creating electronic eco-systems and fun, bobbled, bubbly and mysterious mutations under their respective Baldruin and Ervin Omsk alias.

Though connecting via label overlaps, the two had previously never met in person; not realising until recently that they both resided in the old German spa town of Wiesbaden, located in the Southern western state of Hess. Incongruous perhaps to that town’s famous old worldly German Kingdom vibe, the result of that creative partnership showcases each individual’s signatures of digital micro and macrobiotic life synthesis, and surprising sonic outcomes derived from fever dreams and surrealist juxtapositions of sci-fi, nature and a candy crush arcade machine giddy transmogrification of funny and more woeful, worried voices.

In the German vernacular that album title translates as “Breaks rocks”, whilst the track titles remain partly vague and partly inquisitive prompts; gateways you could say to a discombobulation, a twist and Dadaist/Fluxus sound off-world of alternative futurism and the view from both below and above the microscope of lunar playfulness.

And for your admittance into this attractive and absorbing fantasy, you can expect to her the very sounds of crystallised growth; the pitter patter and fanning of not quite rhythms and beats but something like it; the yip and zip, the mewl of furballs and high-pitched transformed voices; and a sort of dulcimer spindle of possibilities using hollowed out pipes and tines to play out a tune across a cavernous hideaway of stalactites.

If reference points terms – the old “you listened to this, so check out these curious companions” manner of finding similar bedfellows -, this exotic and galactic field work reminded me in part of Carmen Jacci, Mir Calix, the Italian Atretetra label’s output, Sakamoto’s floppy disc experiments and even, probably wide off the mark, Walter Smetek.

Adventurous in one way, the partnership lubes up their mechanicals, metallic filaments and percussion, and alien oddities for a promising collaboration of hyper-vivid and more nonsensical experimental and living, breathing, existing biomorphic play. 

Motohiro Nakashima ‘Sea Of Thought’
(FLAU) 12^th August 2026

Beautiful deterioration and the art of salvaging something meaningful, contemplative and worth holding on to from the events that seem set to overpower or engulf us; these are the considered subtly relented and forgiving musical evocations that emerge from both the diaphanous and the near shapeless perspectives of Motohiro Nakashima’s guitar renderings and electronic effects apparatus.

The Fukuyama (Hiroshima Prefecture) born, and Nara based guitarist uses delicate and floated picking skills, the worn cassette loops method of Frippertronics, self-built instruments and his collaborating guests’ own enervated forms of accentuation and near amorphous formed renderings to formulate and address the “contradictions and quiet helplessness embedded in contemporary life”. A fragility that is represented by the enervations of textures, of surface atmospherics and a technique of layering pioneered by Fripp (especially on the No Pussyfooting) and Eno (Discreet Music) that is laid down like a wash or bed for fellow label mates and fellow Japanese artists ARAKI Shin, marucoporoporo and Kumi Takahara to dreamily or introspectively add their amorphous ideas of observational expression and traversing feels.

Shin, whose participated in recordings, live performances, and compositions/arrangements for artists such as Aimyon, Sonoko Ito, Exile, Chemistry, Miu Sakamoto, Sawako, Shingo Sekiguchi, and the Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra, contributes a form of near Fourth World and dry raspy suffused blows of saxophone to a number of tracks: sometimes almost sounding like the fuzz or fizzle of static, a mysterious substance and vapour, and at other times more like a wafted and near airy clarinet or oboe sound.

Singer and songwriter marucoporoporo can be heard vocally on the whispery, near breathless ‘Sea Of Thought’. Her voice could be described as ghost-folk, with a touch of the ethereal, as it emerges from the trembled minimalist washes and soft airs of consciousness over the waters.

Bringing a touch of Alison Cotton, of evocative chamber pastoral music and an abstract veneer of nature to these interconnective suites and emotional erasures, the Tokyo-based multi-instrumentalist and composer Takahara offers some sublime and gentle peaks of yearning, mulling, sentiment and drama: at one point building towards a more minimalist version of Sigur Ros, and at other times more like Simon McCorry.

Nakashima’s guitar picks, loops and permeations themselves reminded me in part of Junkboy, Steve Gunn, Myles Cochran and Peter Broderick. Taken altogether with the cyclonic effects of celluloid and taped memories; the near venerated and spiritual passages out in the pastures and fields, anointed by a sense that a great weight and miasma has been lifted; and the very subtle use of drums (see the Tortoise-like post-rock-jazz pining ‘Cycle’), this reminded me of a more washed out version of Robert Musci’s ‘Blue’ union with Massimo Mariani and Giovanni Venosta. But it feels very much a part of the whole FLAU family and its ascetic too; another understated album of meditations, reflections shaped from more sombre themes yet made somehow more introspectively pleasing and lightened.

Neon Crabs ‘A Big Dumb Racket’
(Metal Postcard Records) Released 28^th July 2026

Here we go again, round the Pere U-bend with a Unabomber MC 900ft Jesus and Eastern European blade runner dominatrix in tow; another “dumb racket” from the misanthropic transatlantic dust-up of Andy Goz and his Neon Kittens foils Nina K and Hope and their Dallas Internet pen pal Matt Nauseous of Occult Character and Legless Crabs infamy.

No longer a burgeoning venture or sideline collaboration, the Neon Crabs project is at least four or five releases in (probably more, as the label and all the participants seem to release tracks every other month without fanfare or through a very tight number of controlled outlets; unfortunately, the MC not being deemed worthy enough to get the memos). And it’s obvious, despite the rile, nausea and petulant aphorisms of derision at the state of the world, they’re having a laugh pulling together and distilling their respective musical influences and distain into a fusion of new and no wave, post-punk (both of the spikey and the danceable kind) and the industrial.

Made in the collaborative long-distance mode – a necessity of the Covid pandemic age -, Andy and his Fall-like femme fatales in York match or discombobulate and harness the energy and despondency of their Texan counterpart across four tracks of varying disturbed speaking and scuzz.

The buzz hallucinogenic turn sinister grab of the 70s and 80s, ‘Altered States’, could be a Fripp’s turn on ‘It’s No Game’ via Disco Inferno; a lyrical smash up of Coupland, Easton Ellis and Lanier, whilst ‘Invisible’ is roughed up Iggy and the kind of “your pretty face is going to hell” jolted dance and street jive evocation of The Stooges breaking bread with Biting Tongues: an ode to the ignored that takes on a near stalker and ominous tone.

Nina K is on duty like a chatroom AI version of Michi Hirota on the second half of this EP (I’m it calling that, but I’m not really sure if it’s an extended single or a short EP). Kas Product in a technocratic feudal and online broadcast of removed entertainment wars and Internet addicted and addled porn runs in a kind of automated style on ‘Prison Of Imagination’, and has a blast with the Poison Girls, Black Randy and PiL on the just as pornified and sleazy dissection of branded ownership dystopia, ‘Letter To Dog’.

Prolific to a fault, with a track and project, a new album or EP every other day, it’s hard to keep up, but Andy, Nina and Hope’s maverick disgruntled and fun times cynical match up with the idiosyncratic Matt has both the legs and promise. 

Raymond Roussel ‘No One Asked Us Yet’
(Halocline Trance) 21^st August 2026

The second of two releases on the Halocline Trance label this month from the idiosyncratic musician, band leader and cultural theorist Eldritch Priest, the French polymath imbued Raymond Roussel trio alias sees Priest once again acquainting himself with those jazz roots after various curious chamber experiments.

Not so much an accompaniment or moiety, but from the same hand, Priest’s other release this month, Too, So Like Nothing, sees three of his piano compositions performed by the notable Roger Admiral, whilst No One Asked Us Yet has the Canadian polymath back on guitar, leading his trio into ever wilder, more avant-garde spaces and dreamt-up spells of somnolent phenomenon and untethered conceptual freeform expression. 

With visionary aplomb and a deft style of conjuring up a fusion of ideas and angles, Priest is aided in his ideas, transferences and wanderings by fellow Canadian foils James Meger (on bass) and Brady Cranfield (on drums and electronic effects manipulations and filters).

For the record, Meger is described online and in the PR notes as ‘an active bassist and composer working primarily in the fields of jazz, free improvisation and rock music.’ And has worked with both local and international talent, including such noted company as Wayne Horvitz, Lori Freedman, Ig Henneman and Kris Davis, whilst also playing in Ron Samworth’s Dogs Do Dream, Peggy Lee’s Echo Painting, Sick Boss, The Alicia Hansen band, The Bruno Hubert Trio, Ten Thousand Wolves, The Now Orchestra, Cow Trance and others.

Cranfield meanwhile is ‘a Vancouver-based sound and visual artist, musician, and writer.’ He’s a holder of both a MA in Communications and an MFA from Simon Fraser University. ‘He’s also the founder and co-organizer (in collaboration with the artist Kathy Slade) of the ongoing public art project The Music Appreciation Society, and frequently collaborates with artist Jamie Hilder. He is currently also a member of the improv/electronic/jazz trio Alfred Jarry and the duo Vomit Fraud with Kay Higgins.’

Priest meanwhile has been working as a composer and improvisor for twenty-five years. His compositions include explorations in the chamber vernacular as well as solo works, some of which have been performed in ‘North American and Europe by interpreters such as the Arditti Quartet, Quatuor Bozzini, Philip Thomas, Continuum, and Arraymusic’. This practice is described on his bio as being characterized by an ‘ob/excessive approach to melody, not in a systematic or meaningful sense, but in the sense that they don’t stop and tend towards the absurd.’ ‘His improvisational work is like this too but improvised. Along with John Mark Sherlock, he co-founded the Toronto-based experimental music collective Neither/Nor, which in the early noughties commissioned and performed works by an international array of musician-composers.’

At present he’s a billed as an ‘active member of Vancouver’s improvisation and experimental jazz community’ as one half of Alfred Jarry, a duo that takes its name from the inventor of ’pataphysics – “the science of imaginary solutions that symbolically attributes the properties of objects, described by their virtuality, to their lineaments.”

‘Alongside his musical practice, Priest has pursued a career in academia as a cultural theorist, where he writes on sonic culture, experimental aesthetics, and the philosophy of experience from a ’pataphysical perspective. His writing has appeared in several journals and books including Theory, Culture and Society, Postmodern Culture, and AM: Journal of Art and Media Studies. Additionally, Priest has published two manuscripts—Boring Formless Nonsense: Experimental Music and the Aesthetics of Failure (Bloomsbury 2013), and Earworm and Event: Music, Daydreams and Other Imaginary Refrains (Duke University Press 2022). With members of the experimental theory group The Occculture, he co-wrote Ludic Dreaming: How to Listen Away from Contemporary Technoculture.’

The exhaustive list of credits continues, is fattened even more, but before this becomes just a Wiki entry let’s move on to his trio’s latest soundboard and art-rock-jazz imbued album of the inquisitive, the mysterious, the abstracted and the freeform.

Taking at least a page out of the book of the infamous and conceptually renowned French poet, novelist, playwright, musician and let’s not leave out, chess enthusiast Roussel, Priest and his foils riff not only on their own improvisational sounding arrangements but both on a lamentable lovelorn tradition and one of Bill Evan’s more pleasant swing numbers.

Roussel, beloved of the surrealists, exonerated by such leading conceptualists as Duchamp and revitalized by the Oulipo and Nouveau Roman thinkers, was famously ignored or heavily criticised whilst he lived; his homonymic puns, his coded layers dismissed by his peers, although in later years, his genius became a springboard, his books (including possibly two of his most well-known, Impressions d’Afrique and Locus Solus) a catalyst for his scions and the generations that followed – a big influence no less on Duchamp’s symbolic large glass, early installation work, The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even. Somehow as the umbrella over Priest’s trio, their investigations and mirages, his legacy and processes seem to have been absorbed into a musical language that seems at first wildly loose and challenging to measure or make sense of. Here we see hints and peaks of what we know as the most out there and infused of jazz styles, an embrace of far out rock and post-rock, the electronic manipulations and dial twiddles of Squarepusher and Warp, and the more lunar and floated and drifted atmospheres of space.

There’s certainly prompts title-wise, from sleepwalking to venturing out beyond the great beyond on the album’s finale of mirage-feeling surrealism and musing moody rolls across an amorphous border between reality and the ether. More obvious, and as briefly alluded to a paragraph ago, there’s a languid come Zappa take on Bill Evans’ ‘Five’ – actually a combination of Wes Montgomery, Steve Vai and Allen Holdsworth finding common ground in the strung-out machinations of space. There’s also a dreamy fusion of the marooned and the reverberatingly cosmic on the trio’s interpretation of the old traditional ‘Black Is The Colour’ folk song; long since adapted and remoulded over the decades and centuries; it’s original writer long since forgotten I’m sure, with among its most famous takes being that of Christy Moore in the Celtic mode.

Elsewhere the action is both surprisingly attentive if avant-garde, with of course passages and whole tracks that seem serial and to follow no linear progression as such. It reminded me in places of everyone from Pat Methany, Jeff Parker, Last Exit, Bill Frisell, Wolfgang Muthspiel’s work with Brian Blade, Tonbucket and some of the guitar centric releases on the European ACT label. But a big surprise, though it may only be me hearing it, ‘Luster’ convinced me that I was hearing Radiohead for a minute; the electronics, an understated Aphex Twin. At one point on the drumsticks scattered, click-clack rolling and oscillated ‘Derelict Lounge’ Priest’s guitar takes on the sound of a violin.

Bent out of shape and then take on various flights of inquiry and the distorted, each performance seems to exist in its own space and time; dialled into its own special language and intelligence. A most remarkable and abstracted record.

Spaer ‘Lessons And Nonsense’
(VHS Records) 20^th August 2026

An amorphous electic songbook of accumulated lessons learned and quirkier nonsense picked up across a decade or so, the solo project of Psymon Spine co-founder Peter Spears is an idiosyncratic package of observed oddities, curiosities and the more poignantly disenfranchised and disenchanted.

With disarming psychedelia, a pop naivety and embrace of the Beach Boys sublime harmonies and their whimsies (the album that really wasn’t, bundled together mostly out of scraps from the abandoned SMiLE sessions, Smiley Smile is referenced in the Spears PR notes, but even Wild Honey, Sunflower and Surf’s Up could be cuddled into that love-in) via the Animal Collective (Panda Bear especially, but also the Geologist’s solo projects too), Cloud and Terror Pigeon, the Spaer version of Spears is a strange bedfellow of the Psymon Spine group sound and ideas. Each song is from the same artist’s palette, but mixed differently, with the opening wistful cartoonish Aesop’s tale come universal observation of friendship through futility, ‘The Salamander And The Snail’.  After witnessing the titular characters sharing a flip flop (I’m sure there’s point to be made here about manmade plastics and rubbers ending up thrown away or lost in the natural environment; here used as a handy makeshift boat or float, but usually a blight and hindrance and poison on the landscape) whilst attempting to navigate the cyclonic current of a river in Vermont, Spears has turned his musical sketch into a swimmingly concertinaed and bellowed wave of all those already mentioned Beach Boys influences.

And yet, there’s also a pastoral washed drawing board of references and experiments that wander off into their own world of influence and observation; including dalliances with the indie dance music of the early 2000s, Todd Rundgren, 70s solo artists of a certain pop-rock bent, prog-lite, Duncan C’s Fairlight and smoke machine years, Sam Flex, Bright Eyes, The Shins and The Unicorns. There’s what I would term a Balearic-like sound to the acoustic guitar at times on the Bergmann meets Wes Anderson nostalgic kick, whistled and cooed, ‘Indie Movie’, and even a campfire Fleet Foxes vibe meets Pixies moodiness to the “earnest” meant Autumnal love ode ‘The Woodstove’.

By the time we reach the finale of ‘These Bugs’, where the well-intentioned smacks straight into reality, Spears has corralled both his former bandmate Jon Becker in on Mick Ronson-style rock-out guitar and former collaborator, the singer, performer, bandleader and composer Kate Mertucci on vocals. With a touch of both the country twang (almost in jest), some hint of The Dears, Telenova and Blonde Redhead, Mertucci  says sorry in a both touching and almost tongue-in-cheek dramatics as she deals with an infestation of ants: a true story ramped up to a sort of indie-dance rock opera, inspired by Spears’ own Vegan girlfriend and her principles suddenly overrun by marauding ants in their thousands.

Alluding to enquires about his own characterisation, a philosophical whimsy of a thread runs throughout this mini album (or extended EP if you will); all real concerns, woes, worries, anxieties and the more pleasing aspects of the daily grind are washed over by an amorphous feel for melody, feel and the quirky twists and turns of a mind set loose to wander and ruminate life’s foibles, set to a most pleasing soundboard of ideas.  

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