THE MONTHLY DIGEST INCLUDES A CLUTCH OF ACCUMULATED NEW MUSIC REVIEWS; THE SOCIAL INTER-GENERATIONAL/ECLECTIC AND ANNIVERSARY ALBUMS CELEBRATING PLAYLIST; AND CHOICE PIECES FROM THE ARCHIVES.
(Photo by Todd Weaver)
___THE NEW___
Ingebrigt Håker Flaten’s (Exit) Knarr ‘Drops’
(Sonic Transmissions) 22nd August 2025
Growing, developing and expanding the remit from what was meant to be a one-off commission, brought together especially for the Vossajazz Festival, the troupe is now on its third titanic fusion rich studio album proper. Set in motion by Ingebrigt Håker Flaten (who also runs the Sonic Transmissions label, home to the ensemble’s recordings) a number of years back, the (Exit) Knarr now acts as the ‘main creative vehicle’ for the Norwegian bassist going forward it seems.
Settling with a reasonable lineup on this third chapter but inviting in a number of guests on the album’s statement piece, a transformed vision of jazz deity Wayne Shorter’s ‘Deluge’ piece from the revered and influential 1965 album release JuJu, on this outing the sextet takes prompt or inspiration from a more visual source. In the sphere of the Russian maverick abstract visionary and Bauhaus professor Wassily Kandinsky and Swedish mystic and abstract progenitor – some would say the true and first ever abstract artist, beating her peers (Malevich and Mondrian) to pure abstraction by a few good years – Hilma af Klint, a number of graphic scores have been used to foster untethered freedoms and play from a group already in the freeform mode. In one way, addressing perhaps the lack of knowledge, the place in which she should stand, there’s an unsaid elevation of Klint, an early adopter of the very spiritualism, Theosophy, that first led the way for Mondrian and many of his circle to dare to strip away every last visage, reference of the world for abstraction. Arguably Klint can be said to preceded Kandinsky and the others to this goal. And her work is filled with the iconic circular shapes, the colurs that would go on to inspire Sonia Delaunay and many others.
As a visual methodology, these scores go some way to painting a reification of a partly live studio performance and the ‘tweaked’ effected and transmogrified aftermaths.
Bringing together Amalie Dahl on alto, Karl Hjalmar Nyberg on tenor and electronics, Marta Warelis on piano and also on electronics, Jonathan F. Horne on guitar, Olaf Olsen on drums and of course IHF on what sounds like both electric and double bass, the album divides two longer form performances with a couple of shorter pieces. Speaking the experimental language of Anthony Braxton with garbled, hysterical and squeezed abandon, and inspired by the equally freeform pioneering Mats Gustafasson and his No Ensemble, the ensemble open with an already mentioned version of Shorter’s ‘Deluge’; taking the original’s more controlled bluesy swing style of simmering and serenaded and crooned sax for a tumultuous ride on the open seas of both discord and crested freefalls. It starts with twisted guitar wire grabbing and neck sliding and incipient tethered drums but soon develops into a recognisable, familiar feel before numerous swells and peaks resemble a fusion of the Henry Grimes Trio (cicra ‘Fish Story’ if we’re being specific), Rashied Ali, the Anthony Braxton Quartet, Keith Jarratt and Darius Jones. Wild in places, with the guitar going on to sound like a sci-fi dialect of tabbed beeps and switches, and the horns squeezed until the pips fall out, the action is shared out equally between all participants without losing a single instrument.: and that’s when you consider there’s also the guests, Mette Rasmussen on a second alto and a second drummer, Veslemøy Narvesen added to that untamed tidal wave experiment.
The album title is next. A change of a kind in tempo and thought this shorter composition articulates those droplets in various ways on a performance that sounds more open air than studio recorded. The sound of a dragon fly’s wings in rapid hovered form hangs around in a chamber-esque atmosphere of musing and pondering. Part JAF Trio, part ECM and part classical-minded jazz of a certain vintage, the gentle cascade of drips and drops fall very nicely and mysteriously on this Scandinavian ice float.
A second centrepiece if you like, ‘Kanon’ is dedicated to the renowned Norwegian drummer, composer and free jazz improvisor of note Paal Nilssen-Love. From his parents famous Stavanger jazz club located incubator to the capital and onto wide world recognition, Paal played with such notable company as Mats Gustafasson and Peter Brotzmann’s Chicago Tentet, before going on to set up his own All Ears festival. As an inspiration to a generation of Norwegians, Paal’s influence is huge. And in this mode, at this time, the sextet conjures up a semblance of his artform and free experimentation. But first, it all starts with some speaking panning of a curled up rattling drum roll, the quivers and quavers of the piano and what could be the attempt to match the sound of a buzzing bee. But it all soon develops into a wilder proposition of Masayuki Takayanagi, Eric Dolphy (I’m thinking specifically here of Out To Lunch!), Roscoe Mitchell, Andy Haas, Bill Dixon and Last Exit. It keeps changing; whether that’s in the action, dynamics between players, the tampering down parts that then peak into hysterical cries of squeezed, rasped and the burbled. A surprising passage of play even takes on a Lalo Schifrin vibe nearer the end.
The finale is left down to a performance that’s manipulated (or ‘tweaked’ as it’s written here), stretched out and elongated into a sci-fi hallucination. As if being treated and remodelled in real time, it sounds like the band is being pulled via a prism into the mirror backwards. It reminded me of the We Jazz label and their own retreated, remixed projects over the years. But stands as a more electronically led production that offers up a slightly off-kilter and magically alien version of their sound.
Ingebrigt Håker Flaten’s (Exit) Knarr colour new directions with an extended palette of ideas and sounds; heading towards breaking point before returning back to a recognition of the free form jazz movement that we can recognise. Source it out.
Andy Haas & Brian g Skol ‘The Honeybee Twist’
1st August 2025
Striking up an online and postal friendship since first writing about the highly experimental saxophonist, trick noise maker and effects manipulator when touring as a band member with Meg Remy’s Plastic Ono Band-esque U.S. Girls a few years before Covid, the former Muffin, NYC side man to the city’s attracted maverick luminaries of the avant-garde and freeform jazz, and prolific collaborator with Toronto’s most explorative and interesting artists, has sent me regular bulletins (and physical copies) of his various projects. Some have been in the solo mode, others with friends, foils and collectives.
Running off just a smattering of those releases (a majority of which have been with the highly obscure Resonantmusic imprint) from the last decade or so, and you have three extraordinary albums with the stringed-instrumentalist Don Fiorino (American Nocturne, Don’t Have Mercy and Accidentals), various appearances on records by Matt ‘Doc’ Dunn’s The Cosmic Range, the warped and discombobulating For The Time, Being solo act, and the avant-garde improvised performative triumvirate of SCRT with regular collaborator David Grollman and Sabrina Salamone.
Andy Haas now partners up with fellow Toronto native Brian g Skol for an unusual duet of saxophone and drums. Although it was recorded back in that city in 2024, the finished concentration and spatial experiment is now seeing the light with an official release via Haas’s own Bandcamp profile. I’m glad it hasn’t disappeared into obscurity, as it is one of the best, most radical but surprisingly rhythmic and pumped, worldly sounding album’s he’s made; much of this is down to the visual artist and percussionist/drummer Skol’s expressive and grasp/ear for international influences of rhythm, from both the Latin and Afro-South American to North Africa and the influence of Jaki Liebezeit.
The Honeybee Twist is a strange union between two instruments seldom pitted against each other; certainly not in this setting, with Haas once more wildly controlling the panning of his serialism style and both atonal and shrilling, bristled circular breathing sax and Skol combining hand drums, various percussive elements and drum kit breaks to provide a beat, a groove or more sporadic passages of the tactile, textures and tumultuous.
From nothing, reifications of the fire thief Prometheus, compounds, a vertical axis used in a 3-D space to show depth and elevation, self-assembly and play of words take some form of shape across an album of mystery, extemporization, and musing. Whilst stirring up these evocations, these reference points, both players traverse and kick around Arabian landscapes, Jon Hassell’e fourth world, the extremes of Eric Dolphy, Albert Ayler, Sonny Simmons, Andrew Cyrille and Evan Parker, and the factory. The opening mythologically entitled ‘The Eagle And Prometheus’, sounds like a sax and drums transmogrification of Battles; leaping straight in with beating drums, splashes of cymbal and that signature circular breathing technique. This is where I believe you can hear an echo of Saw Delight era CAN relocated to Egypt or the Arabian souk: Haas’s sax starts to sound more like a shrilling vibrating mizmar or even a zurna, and Skol’s drums could be mistaken for the daf and riz on occasion.
Against the near constantly moving, feeling and exploring drums and percussion, Haas’s effected sax goes from blues to freeform jazz, to reflections and colloquy and soliloquy. There’s a harshness and roughness at times to that instrument as it goes through various warbles, buzzes, rasps and drones.
Despite the title of ‘Maybe I’m A Machine’, there is no mistaking that this is a very human interaction between two highly experienced experimental artists circumnavigating any kind of easy label, demarcation. The notes of an abstract nature bristle, vibrate and trill to a near amorphous global rhythm on a most experimentally original collaboration. Please seek it out.
Maria Elena Silva ‘Wise Men Never Try Vol. II’
1st August 2025
As promised last month, the second volume in the Wise Men Never Try series from the near evanescent and relaxed but deeply effecting singer and musician Maria Elena Silva.
After previous releases, some of which featured such notable company as Jeff Parker and Marc Ribot, and after stripping back Bob Dylan’s courtly enigmatic dames to their most essential essences with interpretations of both ‘Queen Jane’ and a summoned bell rung ‘Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands’, the Chicago homed Maria has turned to readapting, revaluating and transposing various themed songbooks from America’s past. Volume I, reviewed in the July Digest, turned to the pages of the Great American Songbook with familiar standards made anew and enigmatic through the emotively ethereal, connective, almost otherworldly and with a real sense of depth and something approaching the tactile – especially instrument wise.
Under that same ‘umbrella title’ the second volume travels further back in time to the America Civil War period of rousing, rallying, sorrow, tragedy and hope sheet music; much of the material used to bolster a flagging campaign by the Union during the early and mid-years of that horrifying, destructive and divisive war – arguably never really settled, with suspicion still between the North and South of the country culturally, politically and economically. In fact, recalling songs from nigh on 160 years ago has never seemed more prescient; chiming true with the age we find ourselves in right now. A balance is struck, history revisited, propaganda resized, and the sentimental repurposed. But arguably, the emphasis in this case is on the music of the eventual winners in this five-year conflict; although a number of the songs and rallying calls for the Union were also adopted and adapted by the Confederacy after they’d seen the effect it had on boosting morale and symbolising the cause.
Once more in an intimate setting with just the accompaniment of Erez Dessel on piano, Tyler Wagner on double-bass, and Maria on guitar, the Civil War period is amorphously twisted into minimalist meanders and dreamily untethered shapes of the tactile, the avant-garde, and descriptive. At the heart of it all, Maria’s voice is relaxed and diaphanous; pitched somewhere between folk, the Celtic, the traditional and the jazzy. The tragically played out ‘Booth Killed Lincoln’ sounds a little like Joan Baez in parts. It certainly, in all its traditionalist lament, has an air of Dylan about it and the Laurel Canyon circle of female troubadours. Like a play in itself, the acts, steps that lead to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln on that fateful day, at that fateful performance at the Ford Theatre, Washington D.C., could be lifted off the sensational pages of that time’s broadsheets. Lincoln’s last breath, rather ironically to the last, is very much Dylan: “Of all the actors in this town, I loved John Wilkes Booth the best.” Musically, there’s but an essence of accompaniment, with the double-bass strings sounding more like a wooden set of spokes and a sort of dampened drum. The odd harmonic is twinged.
However, the album strikes a jarring chord of dissonance, a heavily pressed and free form piano opening gambit of Keith Jarrett and Thomas Schultz. Interpreting the American composer of romance and patriotism George Frederick Root’s most popular rallying call, ‘Battle Cry Of Freedom’, Maria seems to counterbalance Dessel’s passing storms, shades of forbode, salon bar upright tones, uncertainty, the abstract and discordant with disconsolate beauty. A second Root interpretation, the succour giving ‘Tramp Tramp Tramp’ (aka ‘The Prisoner’s Hope’, written in the later stages of the war) is sympathetic to the original, but more melodiously jazzy.
Some of the material leans towards country: albeit a version that exists in a fog of the Appalachians and Woodstock. There’s even a moment on ‘Abraham’s Daughter’ where either the double-bass or guitar resembles a banjo. And the album’s most unusual break from the formula (though to use that word is doing Maria and her foils a disservice), the finale ‘My Old Horse Died’, features a far more rustic, loosely and buzzier more carelessly strummed guitar and the sound of what could be some kind of replicated plucking/picking tines. I do love this song; it sounds like Dylan writing a filmic Western song to feature in Little Big Man or McCabe & Mrs. Miller. As far as I can hear, there isn’t much in the way of horses, but some ironic metaphor for loss, wistful financial and property woes: “Swallowed the place where my home stood. Mortgage guy came round, claimed the hole in the ground where my home once stood.” It almost sounds drunken this slice of Western music from the counterculture.
Remembrance, tragedy, the call to arms, and above all, the encouraging original lyrics of the abolitionist (one of the key themes, subjects of many of these songs) ring like wispy or beautified and pining poetry from the battle fields of America. Only, that same divisive rage, the splits, the distrustfulness and hunger for independence rages still to this day; a constant cry wolf of civil war is voiced whenever the political class weaponizes its losses, or failure to win an election. Handled with subtly, and a classy skill that stretches out the meaning, the lyricism, the mood and intention further, a new spotlight has been drawn upon these historical songs; taken into an avant-garde territory without losing sight of a melody, a form or shape, Maria and her foils create a rather unique and incredible atmosphere; bringing dusted off Civil War pamphlets, sheet music and the like to a new audience. Every bit as encapsulating and dreamy as Volume I. It will be interesting to see what Volume III offers, and where Maria goes next. An excellent, spellbinding series so far.
Saul Williams, Carlos Niño & Friends ‘Saul Williams meets Carlos Niño & Friends at TreePeople’ (International Anthem) 28th August 2025
An enviable collaborative union of talent from both the East and West coasts of an America on the eve (or thereabouts) of Trump’s inauguration, under the TreePeople canopy of righteous indignation at the state of a nation, gathered the totemic voiced poetic polymath Saul Williams, the divine styler, multi-instrumentalist, percussionist and producer of afflatus and new age conscious jazz and its many strands, Carlos Niño, and a host of congruous musical friends from a scene of ever-expanding inter-connections. You can’t get any more symbolic than this; setting up for an experimental – perhaps extemporized in part – performance beneath the black oak and walnut trees in Coldwater Canyon Park, L.A. Recorded at the time and now seeing the light (so to speak) eight months later into the new Presidency, this ensemble piece’s headlined foils and longtime friends since the 1990s, combine forces across an archaeological dig of free associations.
But before peeling back the layers of this psychogeography, a little about the artists involved in this part explorative, part free expressive, part oratory and part theatre. Not that Niño would boast, but the highly prolific producer, ‘expansive percussionist’, experimental composer, connector and communicator, has made albums as and with such notable luminaries as Ammoncontact, Build An Ark, The Life Force Trio, and others. And also overseen the Alice Coltrane protégé – the keyboardist, composer and actor – Surya Botofasina’s2022 devotional Everyone’s Children. All the while, leading or instigating his own loose ensemble of multidisciplinary artists and the & Friends banner. This time around, those friends include recurring foil Nate Mercereau (the solo artist in his own right’s skills include the guitar, composing, songwriting, live sampling and improvising), Aaron Shaw (the horn player has worked with such notable icons and names as Elijah Blake, Anderson Paak., Dave Chappelle, Herbie Hancock, and made music for TV and film), Andres Renteria (the L.A. percussionist/drummer and DJ has worked with an impressive host of artists over the year: Jose Gonzalez, Father John Misty, Flying Lotus and Nick Waterhouse), Maria The Artiste (hot-housed in the AACM of Chicago, the woodwind player, vocalist, vibraphonist, bandleader and composer is also a member of the late Horace Tapscott initiated, and now six decade running, Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra), Francesca Heart (the partial alias of Italian artist, researcher and electronic artist with a skill at playing the conch shell Francesca Mariano, who makes new age music of a kind on computers), Kamasi Washington (the saxophonist who’s profile has possibly been highest over the last twenty years, after ushering in a revival of a sort on spiritual, odyssey jazz, has picked up a number of awards and plaudits for his work and collaborations) and Aja Monet (the lauded and awarded contemporary poet, writer, lyricist and activist can be heard joining Williams with a forewarned and haunting poetic vision on ‘The Water is Rising/as we surpass the firing squad’).
Needing no introduction, but getting one anyway, American rapper, singer, songwriter, musician, poet, writer, and actor Saul Stacy Williams first came to attention during the late 1980s on the New York café poetry scene. The burgeoning innovator, mixing beat/poetics/slam and hip-hop, soon stood out. A big break came as the lead in the awarding winning Marc Levin directed movie SLAM in the 90s; the phenomenon of slam poetry, its reach via competitive performance outside academia, set free from the stiff studied branches of the elite institutions. The list of peers that Williams has performed with is incredible; from blast master KRS-One to illmatic Nas, The Fugees, beat poet Allen Ginsberg and Black arts movement luminary Sonia Sanchez. Williams has also been a driving force behind the Brooklyn Afro-punk movement, written a libretto for Ted Hearne’s LA Philharmonic produced oratorio PLACE and two symphonies by the late Swiss composer, Thomas Kessler, based on two books of Saul’s poetry, Said the shotgun to the head and The Dead Emcee Scrolls. The scope and range are wide indeed, with both Williams film roles and a stint on Broadway as the lead in the first hip-hop musical, Holler If You Hear Me – based upon the lyrics of Tupac Shakur – to consider. And on top of that a sextet of studio albums and quartet of poetry books, all translated into multiple languages. The self-titled album debut of which was produced by Rick Rubin. There’s so much more of course; a whole Wikipedia page in fact to delve into.
But what’s important is that the experience, creative richness and innovativeness of all participants in this movement of change is in no doubt. And when all brought together like this, the results have a real depth and breadth, weaving together so many connective threads of outrage and riled injustice and indignation. This is meta, an alternative, sometimes more felt than real, history toiled over until exposing the roots.
To distil this performance down to jazz would be an injustice in itself, as the ensemble and their two leads accentuate, ring and punctuate, and, without rhythm in most cases, build a spiritual, conscious and traumatic atmosphere around and bedded beneath the either peppered, prophesied, near uninterrupted flow of racial injury, of hurt, of rage and recourse. The musical and sound elements certainly recall some of the signatures of jazz; of artists such as Coleman, the Pharoah, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, of Don Cherry, The John Betsch Society, of Brother Ah and Idris Ackamoor. But nothing quite frames this performance, demarcated into four parts with an after show of appreciation and emotional final word sit-down with the audience. For amongst the collage of the atavistic and primal, as prehistoric beasts lift their heads disturbed by the stirring hands of the dig, and Edan’s wildlife emerges from the grasslands, and the sax sings a parched reedy song, the percussion mirrors the sounds of dry bones and beads, and the vibraphone’s bulb-like notes float like particles in the style of Jamal, Williams delivers omens and a associative thread of technological, economic, political, social ills. Williams sounds one part Quelle Chris, another part Amiri Baraka on that opening “land map”: that cradle of uncivilised repeal. Later on, as the poetics seem to be less interrupted or stretched, the style is more Watts Prophets; especially on ‘We are calling out in this moment’, which links together the origins of Manhattan and its stock exchange with the original Lenape peoples that once farmed it, cultivated it and called it home before the arrival of the Dutch and then the English. Origin stories connect with the occupy movement, Black Lives Matter in a flurry of redress; the financial epicentres slave trading roots almost matter-of-factly and shockingly mapped out.
Later on, Williams is joined by Aja Monet for the new age balm turn African wilderness haunting ‘‘The Water is Rising/as we surpass the firing squad’, who’s contribution amongst the vibraphone tinkles and dreamy serenaded saxophone wafts and lingers and pines, and the “insect gossip”, recalls Tenesha The Wordsmith passing the mic to the Last Poets, once Williams takes up his post in front of the said allegorical “firing squad”.
Sitting down with the audience at the very end of this astonishing performance – bordering on both the theatre, the counterculture, and the activist -, and after the stats, the re-purposed jargon, the rebalance of history as it was and is, a time of emotional pleading and reminder that there is still work to be done. But that message is one of community and the need to build and maintain networks of support in the tough times; not to wallow or give in. But as one stage in the fight this album marks a new enterprise and platform for greater harmony and a safe place for experimentation. International Anthem can do no wrong, as they continue to facilitate such creative sparks of inventive free play and poetry.
___/The Monolith Cocktail Social Playlist Vol. 100___
For the 100th time, the Social Playlist is an accumulation of music I love and want to share; with tracks from my various DJ sets and residencies over the years and both selected cuts from those artists and luminaries we’ve lost on the way and from those albums celebrating anniversaries each month.
Running for nearly 12 years now, Volume 100 is the latest eclectic and generational spanning playlist come radio show from me – the perfect radio show in fact: devoid of chatter, interruptions and inane self-promotion.
Here’s to the hundredth edition, which features a homage or two to Terry Reid and Howie Tee, who we both lost recently. Self-coining his own nickname, Reid’s voice was lionised as “superlungs” for his incredible vocal prowess. But as an all-round package, voice, guitarist and rock artist of universal repute – in any article or description, Reid is anointed as the ‘artists’ artist’ -, Reid could shake the foundations of blue-eyed soul and maximum R&B, blues rock and heavy rock. His name was touted around the 1960s, courted to front or join countless luminaries, from Led Zep and Deep Purple (he turned them both down). There’s many eclectic steps on the way, including a penchant for the Latin rhythms of Brazil (falling into his orbit during 1969, Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso, recently exiled by the military dictatorship of Brazil, were helped by Reid’s attorney to come to London; they would go on to flank Reid at the seminal Isle of Wight Pop Festival almost a year later in 1970), a direction into introspective jazz, desert mountain commune living and session work for Don Henley, Jackson Browne and Bonnie Raitt – this came after Reid more or less decided to retire from his solo career. A rich life lived. So, in my selection I’ve gone for a smattering spread of tracks from the cannon, starting back at the beginning with the title track from the 1968 LP bang bang you’re Terry Reid plus ‘The Hand Don’t Fit The Glove’, ‘Rich Kid Blues’, ‘Live Life’ and ‘Ooh Baby (Make Me Feel So Young)’.
From a whole other sphere of the musical landscape, Howie Tee, the hip-hop and new jack swing hit maker of repute during the 80s and 90s. Born in the UK, but raised up in Flat Bush, Brooklyn, Tee’s (or the name his folks would recognise, Howard Anthony Thompson) musical protectory took flight with a break in the early electro crew CDIII. Already familiarising himself with the mixing desk and production tools, Tee quickly jumped ship to producing, his first success being in conjunction with U.T.F.O.’s Kangol Kid, with the commercially hot hip-hop group Whistle. At the same time Tee also put together the equally successful Real Roxanne collaboration, scoring with ‘Bang Zoom (Let’s Go-Go)’ – which as the name suggests, rides on the go-go phenomenon. There would also be production credits for records by Cash Crew, Seeborn & Puma, E.S.P. and Izzy Ice. Tee then became the in-house producer for the New Jersey-based independent label Select Records, producing relative hits for Special Ed and Chubb Rock. But it wasn’t all hip-hop orientated, for in 1991 he mixed and co-produced Color Me Badd’s ‘I Wanna Sex You Up’: a Billboard number one. And he also made remixes for such diverse acts as Madonna and Maxi Priest. I’ve chosen both Special Ed and the Real Roxanne, plus Chubb’s bromance cut, ‘DJ Innovator’.
In a celebratory mood, I’ve also kept up the monthly inclusion of anniversary album tracks, with 60th nods to The Beatles Help, Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited (I’ve gone for, what I hope, is two not so common of known cover versions from both) and Miles Davis E.S.P. There’s also 50th glass raisers to Cortex’s cult favourite, Troupeau Bleu, Don Cherry’s pioneering Brown Rice, and Eno’s Another Green World.
Every month I like to collect up some of the more newish or recent tracks that didn’t make the Monthly playlist selection – either for lack of space or I just forgot to include at the time. In that category there’s Elaine Howley’s diaphanous, translucent ‘Hold Me In A New Way’, Mike Cooper’s vague South Seas, Pacific exotic mirage ‘Eternal Equinox’, U.S. Girls’ Jane (Doe) Country and Plastic Ono Band funk ‘No Fruit’, the collaborative PAUER/Wolfgang Perez/Der Wandler/Magic Island union’s yearning ‘Falling Over You’, and Pons hi-energy 80s work-it no wave dance diatribe ‘Fast Money Music’. There’s also a track from the recently released, and featured, Woody at Home Vols 1 and 2 – Guthrie hanging round like Banquo’s ghost over Dylan, who’s Highway is revisited this month.
The rest of the playlist is made up of cross-generational from across the ages by Jaz-O, Baby Washington, Isan Slete, Vincent Over The Sink, Phantom Payn Days, Lynn Castle, Mad Walls, Massacre and more…
TRACK LISTING:
The Real Roxanne FT. Howie Tee ‘Bang Zoom (Let’s Go-Go)’
Pons ‘Fast Money Music’
Themselves ‘Roman is as Roman Does’
Waylon Jennings ‘You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away’ Mariangela Celeste & Vangelis ‘Honolulu Baby’
Woody Guthrie ‘One Little Thing An Atom Can’t Do’
Frankie Valli & The Four Seasons ‘Queen Jane Approximately’
Terry Reid ‘The Hand Don’t Fit The Glove’
Baby Washington ‘The Ballad Of Bobby Dawn’
Terry Reid ‘Rich Kid Blues’
U.S. Girls ‘No Fruit’
Lynn Castle ‘You Are the One’
John Baldry ‘It Ain’t Easy’
Isan Slete ‘Lam Phloen’
Terry Reid ‘Bang, Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)’
Miles Davis ‘R.J.’
Jaz-O ‘Put The Squeeze On ‘Em’
Special Ed ‘I Got It Made’
Cortex ‘Automne – Colchiques’
Brian Eno ‘Sky Saw’
Furniture ‘My Own Devices’
Mad Walls ‘Lily’
Massacre ‘Bones’
Terry Reid ‘Live Life’
Mint Tattoo ‘Wrong Way Girl’
Terry Reid ‘Ooh Baby (Make Me Feel So Young)’
Chubb Rock Ft. Howie Tee ‘DJ Innovator’
Don Cherry ‘Degi-Degi’
Elaine Howley ‘Hold Me In A New Way’
Mike Cooper ‘ETERNAL EQUINOX’
Xul Solar ‘Sigh’
Vincent Over the Sink ‘Number Theory’
Phantom Payn Days ‘primitive chamber music phone call blues’
Woody Guthrie ‘I’m A Child Ta Fight’
Willis Earl Beal ‘Like A Box’
Marcos Resende & Index ‘Nina Nenem’
___/Archives___
From the exhaustive Archives each month, a piece that’s either worth re-sharing in my estimates, or a piece that is either current or tied into one of our anniversary-celebrating albums. From the former category, my original review of Willis Earl Beal’s nite flights soul harrowed and ached Noctunes album, released a decade ago this month.
Willis Earl Beal ‘Noctunes’
(Tender Loving Empire) Released 28th August 2015
Whether stretched beyond the realms of fact and fiction or not, the many travails of Willis Earl Beal fit the outsider artist profile perfectly. With more deaths/rebirths than the Dali Lama’s had reincarnations, Beal’s self-made and put-upon myth status as the Zorro masked articulate esoteric blues and soul poet, only reinforces the mystery that surrounds him. Hardly the result of an easy life – one that’s seen him grow up in a sort of odd isolation, plagued by both physical and mental health; a consequence in no small part of his injuries sustained when trying out for the army.
His musical epiphany arrived whilst down-and-out in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The untrained, and at one time homeless, but naturally gifted songwriter recorded the rawest of lo fi tracks, leaving them with his hand drawn cover art at various coffee shops around town, alongside flyers seeking a girlfriend with his phone number written on them. These unassuming offerings eventually made their way onto the cover of Found Magazine in America and from there, fell into the hands of XL Recordings Jamie-James Medina. Originally signing to the labels Bronx-based offshoot Hot Charity, releasing two well-received albums – his debut Acousmatic Sorcery in 2012 and Nobody Knows follow up in 2013 – Beal succumbed to either ennui, despondency or the pressures of suddenly being foisted into the music business and quit. Beal slopped off into a self-imposed exile in the backwoods of Olympia, Washington, and became the Noctunes crooner.
As the title suggests – a riff on nocturnes – these twelve nocturnal lullabies, paeans and plaintive ballads evoke the romantic nighttime meditations. Stripped to the barest of accompaniments, yearningly swooning with the occasional burst of a drawn-out primal scream, high notes and pained wallowing, Beal creates a haunted soundtrack. Part southern river ambient journey, part soul-baring soliloquy.
Once again dodging definition, he takes the mournful strings and suffused hymn like aspects of his previous recordings and ditches the bounce and R&B elements for minimalism. Still channelling Otis Redding with a side order of Bill Withers and echoing traces of TV On The Radio’s most dilatory maladies, Noctunes is, when prescribed in small doses, a visceral stirring experience. Choosing to say more with a lot less, lyrics, which if uttered by many other artists would sound like mere platitudes, are given a gut-wrenching and despondent leverage when leaving Beal’s lips.
Often draining, and at times laying it on a bit too thick, the album’s impact can be enervated when digested in one session. Lingering manifestations rather than epiphanies, it feels like our protagonist is unburdening his heart. A tough call on paper, yet the bare faint undertones of funeral parlour organ, stuttering jazz style drums, murmuring hums and synths lift the songs gently above morose and indulgence.
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Tennyson In Space: Appl. E. Chapters One & Two
August 15, 2025
The Monolith Cocktail Serialises Andrew C. Kidd’s Tennyson Imbued sci-fi Saga.
Dabbling over the last decade with showcasing exciting, sometimes improbable, intriguing work from new and aspiring writers, the Monolith Cocktail has played host to serialisations of stories by Rick Clarke (of Vukovar and The Tearless Life infamy) and Ayfer Simms (the Franco-Istanbul writer, and for a few years, an integral member of the MC team offering various reviews and conducting interviews).
Furnishing the site since Covid with review pieces and the odd feature, Glaswegian-based writer Andrew C. Kidd now adds his name to this list. Andrew shares his grand interstellar saga, Tennyson In Space, with the MC readers through an epic serialisation. Over the last four months or so we’ve published the Prologue, Part One and Part Two of The Violin, all four parts of the Hic Sunt Leones Et Corvi suite and the Pink Nepenthe. Now we are proud to share the first two chapters of Appl. E.
Appl. E
“Lest their shrill happy laughter come to me
Walking the cold and starless road of death”
From Œnone by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
“How sweet.
Just to register emotion, jealousy – devotion,
And really feel the part”
Tin Man, Wizard of Oz
Part 1
All manner of blues in their nightly state were gradually lightened to a lilac hue by the bright white starlight that circled above Alard. Yawning silently, his final thoughts of the day had settled on all the possibilities of tomorrow’s conference.
Would he be scorned as his previous employers on Eris had scorned him? The Eridian administration had decided that they wished no part in his research. Possibly borne out of fear, they justified non-action through esoteric ethical codes and abstract governance. The contempt they had displayed only served as a catalyst to send him on the long road of discovery.
There was no doubt that Alard possessed a detailed knowledge of the science, yet it had been his enterprising spirit that had led him to identify the missing link in the equation – an equation that had stumped so many of the great scientists of his day. He deemed the inaction of his Eridian superiors to be unacceptable.
Let Alard do the bidding of the diffident. Alard the decisive! Alard the subversive!
Once his work had been published, validation would follow. After that, accolades and the yearning of all scholarly minds: affirmation.
Alard had fallen asleep.
The applause he had been receiving had become amplified to uncomfortable levels. The dream sequence had evidently changed. He stirred unpleasantly. A cold sweat enveloped him. Would he have to admit that the idea was never actually his? He gripped at the sheets.
His sleep-self descended into a cavernous place. He was weightless. The long limbs of a nightmarish phantom appeared from the abyss and started to grapple at his naked body. Beads of sweat trickled out. He was being pulled down into a small pool. At the point of submersion, he woke suddenly.
The porthole above him framed a scene of fervent lightness which was blackened only by the opaque canvas of deep space. Dry-mouthed, his mind reset in the awareness of his awake state. His heart rate slowly settled. Sleep would soon prevail once more.
His subconscious mind returned to that late December evening when he stumbled upon the seed that would blossom into his remarkable discovery.
* * *
Alard sat in the refectory of the Institut de Sobere. Three weeks had passed since his landing on the icy trans-Neptunian object. He had been working as an Auxiliaire Biomédical in the Département de Microbiologie on one of the research modules on Eris.
Dinner was a late affair that evening. A forgettable experiment in one of the accessory laboratories had run over and he arrived to pick at the dregs of the evening service. After tucking into the crusty winged remnants of some types of Orthoptera, a well-heeled laboratory manager chewed loudly on the bench in front of him. This corpulent woman had her back turned to him. She spoke confidently, and evidently, drunkenly.
‘Cut it out… with a k-knife, or a schalpel…’, she slurred, ‘…a scalpel!–’ clumsily correcting herself ‘–and… and I said… well, you know… blast! I really can’t remember in all honeschty?’ She laughed loudly.
Alard was dining alone. He looked around at the rows of benches, all full of people conversing and eating, most noisily.
‘Ahem!–’ the drunkard cleared her throat ‘–a scal-pel…’ She spilt the word in two, placing additional emphases on the ls. This had been an obvious attempt to retain some form of professional standing amongst the junior researchers who were accompanying her.
‘I… I must b’xshcused…’
After stumbling away from the bench to the toilet, Alard turned his attention to the two juniors talking quickly and quietly amongst themselves. He continued to tuck into his grilled grasshopper.
A short interval passed and the sottish drunk fumbled her way back over to the bench. Spittle glistened on her chin.
‘Yes… yes…’, she smiled contortedly. ‘I must admit that I have forgotten what I was saying.’
Exasperated expressions were etched on the young faces of those who sat with her.
‘You were talking about the funeral fields’, the boyish researcher said.
‘And the ethics council’, the other added. ‘You were telling us about your meeting with them – what did they say?’
She eyed her environment cautiously before whispering.
‘It was an outright rejection! And no blooming wonder…’ She paused to turn round to look at Alard who was playing masterfully at demonstrating disinterest in their conversation. Had he looked up, a face, beaming red in the warmth of the refectory and through the vasodilatory effects of the liquor, would have glared back at him.
‘Surely, they will have to rethink their decision. I mean–’
‘I think we will have to watch what we are schaying.’
The playful mask of the senior scientist suddenly revealed an angry temperament. Her orbicular face reddened further.
‘No… yes–’ a confused look emerged ‘–listen, we are in a public space, and we really schouldn’t be talking about such matters of such… of such…’ Words were clearly lost to her again.
‘Magnitude?’, the other junior transplanted, charging her superior’s glass with more of the crimson fluid.
‘Importan-schce was the word I was going to schay’, she misarticulated, taking a further sip of wine. ‘S-ay… I must insist that you stop interrupting me!’ She pronounced the sist of the word insist with a trailing th that sharpened on the tip of her tongue.
‘But it could provide the answer to biopolymer degradation. You said it yourself!’, the boyish inferior declared in hushed tones.
‘No… no, we must desist from any further discussion pertaining to this matter’, she reiterated, shaking her bulb-like head. Another mouthful of wine was gulped down. Her glass clinked as she placed it next to the emptied bottle.
‘In fact…’, she proceeded, ‘…the matter has been put to the same place where… that… ahem, I am presently going to the place of the matter.’ She tutted. ‘No! No… the matter of the place.’
She paused before standing up. Alard caught her awkward smile. Wine-stained teeth dulled in the half-light of the corridor that led away from the canteen. She was evidently, and unannouncedly, retiring to her quarters.
Alard raised his eyebrows subtly as he sipped from his cup. He remarked that the alcohol had clearly made her loquacious. It had imbued high spirits, yet he knew that she would have an altogether different demeanour tomorrow morning as she clung onto the bowled alter of veisalgia.
He returned to the remnants of his meal. The two junior researchers engaged in their private conversation of hushed tones and rapid glances around the room. Alard had an impossible job of understanding them. His mind fantasised about all the possible schemes they could be hatching. He resolved that he would find out what they had discovered, and why it was so important, and why their superior, upon momentary sobriety, had insisted on such sudden and unflinching confidentiality.
He stood up from his bench and walked over to the duo.
‘Hello’, he said, smiling at them with bright-eyes.
* * *
The morning of the conference had arrived. Alard woke to bright white starlight that crowned the sky. This was a projected visual. An image recorded in high-definition. The artificial luminance shone gradually to induce wakefulness.
Situated some several hundred meters underground, he felt the warmth of this base. It had been built as a defensive bunker in the Never Wars. Long vacated, the Domini had repurposed this as a neutral meeting place.
He had been told that underground streams flowed in abundance here. Alard took this rare opportunity to immerse himself in a water-bath. He stared at the pipes that appeared and reappeared at impossible angles across the four walls. His eyes stung a little in concentration. He knew that his sleep had been interrupted, yet the memory of what had caused his partial insomnia was indistinct. The black pool had been drained from his mind.
A dark suit had been selected for him by the Domini’s anthropomorphous assistants. Alard knew very little about couture. Having been given a choice of garments, he deferred such judgement to these humanoids. A gown, adorned with braided aiguillettes, was placed over his head in quiet ceremony.
He was accompanied from his room down a passageway. It narrowed to end at a small entranceway through which a large stone-grey chamber towered higher than he thought possible in these subterranean depths. It stretched out horizontally across his immediate horizon. The imposition of the conference hall had little effect on Alard. The magnitude of his discovery weighed heavily on his mind; it was far more formidable than any underground atrium.
He was quickly introduced to the Domini. This one-eyed elder studied the youthful scientist who stood before him. Alard’s compressed and block-like hexagonal face fascinated the Domini. His jaw was not so much chiselled, but roughly hewn, flattening out to a chin that was broader than most. The Domini imagined a sculptor who had evidently hammered too hard; corrective sanding had subsequently worn away more than intended.
Another automated assistant appeared. Alard was ushered away from the Domini. As he walked towards the area where the conference was taking place, he noticed the elder’s periodic smile and darting eyes. Alard knew that he was distracted.
His assumption had been correct, for although the Domini was playing the polite and unassuming role, he had sent two of the automated assistants to search Alard’s room. The visual display on the clear meniscus over the right eye of the Domini projected the output of these automations.
Alard had brought only one case with him which was presently upturned. The Domini spotted a large piece of fabric on the only table in the room. It was a quilt composed of variable square pieces of material. Each cutting appeared to have originated from hats and upper body garments and torn trouser pieces. Their dimensions were exact. A small sewn number, stitched into the top right of each square, suggested a cataloguing process. Whatever the purpose, the Domini considered this haphazard arrangement to be strange and meaningful.
Back in the chamber, Alard followed the steps of a small stairway that led to an elevated platform. Four automatons guarded this concourse; beyond it lay the Domini’s domain.
Above the gallery was a large portrait. The outline of the sitter was obscured by the inky-dark background they had been painted against. Alard could vaguely discern a figure cloaked in black – so black that those who dared to study it would claim to have been given a cursory insight into the very infinitude of time itself.
He walked through a partitioned area which served to reduce the apparent size of this cavernous chamber. It was an illusion that only worked on those who remained focused on its four perfectly painted walls. An upward glance would reveal the illimitable ceiling of this atrium.
He sat down at an elliptical table and counted five other positions at sixty-degree angles around him. Alard’s hand moved across the polished surface of the wood nervously. He recalled the plants of his youth. Ruscus aculeatus. Or was it hypoglossum?
In three of the pre-ordained seating positions, small hexagonal platforms were visible. Power units, each one displaying a holographic image, lifeforms from unknown places relayed many miles away. They flickered emptily as he stared at them.
The Domini made his entrance and sat down at the head of the table. A subaltern detailed the order of proceedings. Those at the meeting were formally welcomed. Peace was pledged.
Alard had become distracted by the large portrait that hung over the Domini’s domain. He was absorbed in its charcoal-black colour. Whether smoke, or asteroids in a solar wind, or a helical representation of something metaphorical, its mystery drew him in. He half-expected the black-gloved hand to slowly finger down the surface of the portrait, feeling its way over the partition in the chamber, reaching for him.
‘Docteur Alard–’ A voice snapped. His looked at the platforms on the table. The holographs were no longer void. Bright-coloured visuals sparkled before him.
‘I was saying that we always adhere to the laws of governance’, a tall woman had concluded.
She was dressed entirely in white. One shoulder was enshrouded by flowers. Her holograph was transmitting directly across from Alard. The light garment she wore shimmered against the dimmed lights of the chamber.
‘Pah! Their scaffolds are purely aesthetic, nothing more. If your decision lies with Clan Dœmae, then more fool you.’ The representative of Aēr spoke measuredly yet authoritatively. ‘We offer leading–’
‘You offer nothing more than a monopolistic dominion!’, barked the hologram of the interjector next to the representative of Aēr. She stared blankly at the antagonistic intermediary of Pallas who continued:
‘Our facility at Auriga offers the only viable location to carry out the necessary work. We received your data prior to this conference. It has advanced our understanding immeasurably.’
She bowed before Alard, breaking off momentarily. The momentary skip in her channel meant that she had snapped immediately back into an upright position. She wavered as the image came back into focus.
‘We at Pallas are very grateful for this.’
Her attention returned to the representative of Aēr.
‘However, what has been presented is merely a signal at this stage. Our researchers have been working on similar projects, adding further data to augment what we already understand. I am afraid that much more work is needed to ensure success in this field.’
Alard had been somewhat taken aback by the sharp tone of the elfin figure that scintillated before him. She spoke in the hammered polyphonic tones of Mandarabic, the vernacular of the present-day, an amalgamation of the Mandarin and Semitic languages. Occasional English words were thrown in (the use of the Anglophonic language of the Anthropocene, now consigned to antiquity, implied that the orator had been well-educated).
Her dark brown hair fell in ringlets over her narrow frame. She wore an achromatic-grey garment. A dulled gold hue shone underneath this. Jewellery? Or armour? An emblem appeared next to her name on the screen. It took on the shape of a Capra. Three horned protuberances jutted from its head.
The representative of Aēr was subsequently given the floor. She shot a subtle sideways glance at the intermediary of Pallas before addressing Alard.
‘We offer–’ she cleared her throat ‘–let me rephrase… Appl. E. is your discovery. Should you choose our organisation to be its beneficiary, we would work together to lengthen the very coil that makes us mortal. You see, we are offering you our Ma-ga-leading facilities. Our researchers do not want for anything. We already occupy this space. Your technology would hasten the great work that we have already carried out in this field, and as you will be aware, our expeditionary programme has proffered us with collaborative capabilities that stretch to the very reaches of our Heliosphere. Our base on Auriga would bestow the privacy that you so desire, away from the prying eyes of the…’
She stopped herself to survey the Domini and his associate at the far end of the table. A false smile emerged from behind the rocky outcrops of her rough-textured features.
‘Dr. Alard’, she spoke confidently. ‘Let our confederation be the one to actualise your vision.’
‘You speak confidently on behalf of an organisation that has a track record of abject failure in the field of regenerative medicine.’ The foursquare intermediary of Pallas communicated plainspokenly. ‘You are conquistadors. And your conquests require bodies on the ground. You seek Appl. E. to reign supreme in the Heliosphere.’
The intermediary of Pallas paused.
‘Do not let her obliqueness cloud your judgement’, she concluded.
Part 2
Alard glared at □. Her screen was opaque-white. Glimmers of iridescent bronze and oxidised iron-green shone through at irregular intervals. The thin-framed magnicles pinched his nasal bridge as he read her latest output.
‘Gram-positive Firmi…’
Lines of zeros and ones filed across his monitor in quick succession. He winced. The oppressive laboratory lights bore down on him. Soon, the headache would crescendo.
‘…and Gram-negative Bacteroi…’
The black text continued. Alard, cup in hand, leaned forward to interrupt □.
‘Check object code: line three. Define: ‘resistance’. Enter: ‘hydroxyl’. Align with ‘distal’ and ‘group’. End stri…’
‘Do you mean, ‘assign with’?’, □ enquired.
Alard was tired. The work that he and □ were conducting was in place of sleep. As a laboratory assistant, he was chained to a seven-day schedule. Had there been the same resources on the mountainous Manitoud, he would have extended his leave to complete their research there.
‘Accept correction’, he yawned at □.
The watermark of CHSMC was centred on his screen. It had been during his time on Manitoud that he had first utilised this software. Abstruse to the programming uninitiated, its methods of learning were unsupervised and advanced. Ultimately, CHSMC offered anonymity which was coveted by the likes of Alard who sought to harness hyper-intelligence without interference.
‘End string. Return to superphylum. Define: phylogenetic tree. Check: ‘fermentation’…’
He had programmed □ using CHSMC. Alard had decreed that it was in fact she, and that she would be trained to assist him in his endeavours. During her development, the name Œn+, or ONE1 (pronounced one squared) filtered through to him. It had been she who requested to be known in her runic form as □.
‘… define: ‘pilus’ and ‘assembly’. Remove sequential patterns. Run.’
The cursor on the white screen blinked at Alard. After a short while, a binary sequence started to stream in lines and filled his visual fields. This was the genomic sequence of the polyketide skeleton of a novel microbiota.
He smiled the same bright-eyed smile he had beamed at the youthful researchers in the refectory on Eris. Four months had passed since they had told Alard all they knew about this particular bacterium. It had supposed origins in Scarabaeidae. It failed to retain crystal violet. It was intolerant of oxygen.
The swift ‘redeployment’ of the two young scientists to MakeMake in the Kuiper belt came as a surprise to Alard. As far as he was aware, the high concentrations of nitrogen ices on that dwarf planet were incompatible with life. This had served as a warning to him. If he wished to remain in this Eridian facility, his work would have to be carried out in secret.
As Alard interpreted the read-out on the screen, □ continued:
‘Look at the transcriptomic profile. Its expression pattern–’
‘I can see it’, Alard interrupted, ‘define: GTR–’
‘Acronyms, Alard’, □ chided.
‘Guided. Tissue. Regeneration’, he supplanted.
‘Enter: ‘immune’… no, ‘immuno-modulatory’. Check… wait… add: ‘map regionalisation–’ he paused ‘–check string. End.’
His mind wondered back to his initial encounter with the researchers. They had seemed avoidant, perhaps frightened, when discussing its origins. Harvesting it had been their biggest concern.
Alard knew that success in this field would have Heliospheric-shattering consequences. Unlike their commercial contemporaries, the reputation of the Institute Sobere had remained unsullied despite their conquests in regenerative medicine. It was a complex business, marred by failures, and restricted by ethics.
A mirthful Alard stared at the monitor. He had returned to this godforsaken dwarf planet to continue his controversial experiments within the confines of the Institute. His discovery would be made in their laboratories. Alard and □ worked diligently as they burned through the midnight fluorescence.
* * *
The representative of Aēr had finished talking. Wisps of thin blonde hair bristled from the cloth-crown on her head. Alard remarked that this caul had been made from delicately shuttle-woven silk. The embossed patterns radiated in the dull light of the chamber.
A holographic image hovered beside him. The emissary of another one of the research institutions vying for Alard’s collaboration came into focus.
She was dressed in a white linen garment which had the most unusual form. A shaped shawl enwrapped her neck. It cascaded from behind her ears to follow the contour of her sharp jawline, finally tracking upwards to her mouth so that the point of the ascending triangular lines met at her lower lip. The shawl draped down to her broad shoulders, pointing outwardly. An inverted triangle pointed down to a long skirt that converged at her ankles. She bore the appearance of a four-pointed star, the tips of which meeting sharply at her head and her shoulders and her legs.
Emblazoned over the right shoulder of the shawl was an arrangement of five-petalled flowers that assumed a strange crescent shape. Stamens burst out of these cupped flowers as if multiple explosions of light had been captured in their maximal phosphorescence. Alard knew that these were a descendent of Myrtaceae. Their white petals shone in an abstract representation of beauty. The concerted and connected display suggested order and affiliation. They diffused a sense of devotedness.
The shawled woman spoke.
‘Alard, having reviewed the documents kindly provided to us by you, and made accessible by the Domini–’ she bowed her head benevolently at the cloaked figure ‘–we at Clan Dœmae believe that we can solve the predicament of antimicrobial resistance together. We can offer scholastic prosperity.’
Across from Alard, the holographic display of the intermediary of Pallas wavered as she shook her head.
Predicament. Scholastic prosperity. It was obvious to her that these words were forced. She knew that Clan Dœmae had no track record in this field. Their research focus had been purely in cosmetology, resulting in alterations in phenotypes rather than genuine gains in regenerative medicine.
‘Aesthetics… aesthetics, aes–thet–ics.’ The intermediary of Pallas’s words slowed in a form of vocal ritardando. ‘That is all Clan Dœmae stands for’, she said after a deep inhale. ‘It is all they are good for.’
The Domini raised his hand slowly, beckoning silence from the intermediary of Pallas. Alard smiled at the shawled woman.
* * *
It had been on the Secondary Basement level of the Eridian research facility that Alard observed the cultured myocytes on one side of the extracellular matrix. Stimulation provided by the probe would normally result in cellular death. Black necrosis would spread through these tissues like water droplets bleeding into paint. Subsequent contractions would cause the dying cells and their weakened walls to rupture, spilling their mitochondria and nuclei into the culture medium.
On this occasion, there had been no such death. The tissue cultures seemed to multiply. They proliferated and provided solid foundations upon which new tissue could grow.
Alard returned to his calculations. The superadded bacteria appeared to ‘cleanse’ the process.
Augmentation of the microbiome? His thoughts multiplied. Immune proliferation in an otherwise exhausted microenvironment? Sensitisation?
He even pondered the thaumaturgical: the possibility that these bacteria possessed some kind of god-like property.
His immediate concern was whether these bacteria had a sustained response in their new hosts. Only time would decide this. For now, he quietly revelled in his victory.
‘Appl. E. serves to facilitates gas diffusion, which promotes vascularisation. This is the key that appears to unlock the Nixon cathartic problem’, Alard dictated. ‘Once a steady physiological state is achieved, tissue growth follows.’
The output on □’s screen blinked at him.
‘Obviously, validation follows.’ He winked back at □.
* * *
Alard faced the foothills of Manitoud. He stood with those who had climbed the steps from the depths of the chamber into this pillbox position. A thin opening provided a grand vista.
As he stared out at the expanse of land that lay before him, he imagined wiping his memory of all that he knew so that he could see it all for the very first time. Years on Eris blunted his sensations. It had numbed him. He wished to experience the sheer awe that he once felt for this place.
Alard continued to peer out through the gap. Warm air was being cooled. Mist formed and tumbled down as a faint tsunami from the higher ground. The lowlands were partaking in their morning cleansing.
A quiet klaxon sounded in the pillbox. It beckon those to return from their planned interval to the subterranean chamber. The conference was soon to re-commence. Alard turned to descend the ladder that led away from this world that felt foreign to him.
He sat in his chair and observed the images on his screen fade to a dark green. His thoughts remained on the surface of this planet. He was soon interrupted from his distractions by the sound of a woman’s voice.
‘–and that is why I offer you the opportunity to work with Docteur El-hen.’ The emissary of Clan Dœmae opened her palm by way of introduction.
Alard sat forward to get a closer view of the monitor. A faint figure appeared in a sub-hologram. She was shawled like a Dœmaen. A crossbeam forehead held a weighty expression. Alopecia had evidently robbed her of eyebrows and hair on her head. Her malar bones were protuberant. The shadow from these hid thin lips that appeared to have been half-sketched.
As she leant over the laminar air flow unit, Alard caught sight of her eyes. Unblinking in pupillary standstill, her azurean irises steadied. She was staring fixedly at him.
The aesthetic emissary of Clan Dœmae smiled at Alard as she continued.
‘I must also introduce you to her devoted husband, Professeur Ian Meuse.’
A tall gentleman appeared to the right of Alard’s screen.
‘Avec plaisir’, his broad grim affirmed.
He intoned in the unstressed language of French. What a relief to Alard! Meuse’s whitened teeth appeared to sparkle. He held a confident pose. His auburn hair burned in the bright light of the conference chamber. He had eyes that would pierce their observer.
‘Dr. El-hen and Professeur Meuse are two of our finest principal scientists at Clan Dœmae. Should you choose our institution, you will work closely with them. It is our firm conviction that–’
The words of this nameless representative trailed off in Alard’s mind. His attention remained firmly, and fixedly, on Dr. El-hen.
* * *
The moment of discovery, the revelation, the summation of years of scientific endeavour! Alard felt a weight lifting from him as he peered at the digitalised output of his work.
‘A bacterium, of the phyla Elusimicrobia, isolated from the…’ Alard paused as he looked up at La Directrice. He scolded himself internally for carelessness.
‘Its origins I shall disclose in time, once I have published my work.’
‘Publish?’, the squat Directrice sitting across from him inflected. ‘You must remember that we operate in a commercially sensitive environment, and what you have discovered… this… this “novel microbiota” as you have so termed it… well, it… it…’
She placed both hands down on the bench. Her mouth, straight-lined and stony, imparted a sullenness. She had elected to change her phrasing.
‘To be perfectly frank, Docteur–’ she squinted at the small font of the name badge on his tunic ‘–Alard. You have not had permission to undertake this type of work. As such, in the eyes of the Institute, it has not happened.’
‘Has not happened?’ Alard raised his eyebrows reflexively.
‘If I may elaborate’, La Directrice continued. ‘You have received neither the permission nor the funding for the work that you have so boldly conducted–’ her tone was sardonic now ‘–and that is the reason that your employment with this facility is being severed.’
She paused as she sipped from her glass.
‘You are lucky that we are not taking this matter further. I have been in contact with the Microbiologiste Principal. It would appear that you have been very busy using the facilities in our module, gratuitement, at the expense of Sobere. He also informs me that having reviewed your preliminary data, you had not applied to conduct this work through the ethics council. If this is true, such a transgression is normally in punishable by–’
‘Punishable?!’, Alard thundered.
‘Yes!’, she replied in lightning fashion. ‘Punishable indeed. If it is true, then this will be treated as an infringement of interstellar research law–’
‘The laboratory-derived samples on this barren rock are flawed’, Alard retorted swiftly. ‘There has been no yield from them. They lack any signature that is useful to in vivo research.’ Alard spoke quickly and with clear diction. ‘My chance discovery has–’
‘Surely you cannot think we are that naïve to believe that the Elusimicrobia originated from an apple?’, La Directrice interrupted. She smirked flippantly after she spoke.
Alard was somewhat surprised. He had never disclosed his plan to claim that he had isolated this bacterium from a pome fruit. Perhaps they had accessed these data without his knowledge? This seemed very unlikely given the watertight encryption afforded by CHSMC.
He looked up at the screens that hung from the ceiling. They hovered over the laboratory stations lifelessly. □ suddenly entered his thoughts. She and only she had known this. He shook his head, denying to himself that she was the betrayer. Alard moved away from the workbench and sat down on a chair. He looked over at the glass storage cabinet to his right.
La Directrice followed his movements. This young man was lying. She had no doubts about that. Her impertinence had spooked him, but she had thrown her gauntlet down too early. He now had the upper hand.
Alard turned his head back towards his superior. He knew that he needed to act quickly. Sobere were not known for their clemency. Images of MakeMake filtered into his subconscious. It was deathly cold there. He stood up and walked back over to the bench. His findings were too important to risk exposition.
‘I accept my termination’, he said plainly, leaving the laboratory immediately.
Alard made the short journey to his quarters. An automated craft wheeled slowly over the white surface of the planet. Coin-stacks of methane bubbles beneath him gave the impression that everything on this barren place was being held up by a great many alkane stilts.
His head pressed against the ill-fitting helmet. Condensation misted his view. Lights from the residence modules were starting to halo around him. He closed his eyes and let his head loll around in transit.
The craft came to a sudden stop. His solar visor dropped down and obscured his surroundings. The faint hiss of the door opening followed. He clambered out and waited in the airlock. The sudden rise in temperature turned the crystal air into a steaming dew. His suit was dried off. He doffed this for more comfortable attire. The short walk along the passageway to his dormitory followed.
Alard thought about what he could call the Elusimicrobia. Nomenclature of other microbiota followed a genus-species naming system. Escherichia Coli. Clostridium perfringens. Clostridium botulinum.
Why not alter the order to species-Elusimicrobia? After all, what he possessed would change the way we live, or rather, continue to live. It was unique, and its representation should be likewise.
The dormitory door clicked shut. Alard stood by the mirror in the bathroom.
He recalled the journeys he had once shared with □ to obtain the original samples. It had been her idea. She had infiltrated the Eridian systems to commandeer the vessels that took them there.
Alard stared at himself in the mirror. His face seemed longer than it had before. Grey hairs glinted uninvitingly in the half-light.
Light suddenly filtered outside of the bathroom. A long shadow had appeared at the threshold. A fellow scientist lumbered in to collapse onto their bunk below his. They mumbled something instinct. Alard smiled disinterestedly. He climbed into his sleeping pod and shut the door. Turning to one side, he pulled out his book of quilts and fabrics and leafed through these. Souvenirs. Leavings.
Alard recounted his meeting with La Directrice. The apple had always seemed a credible source, yet she had doubted it. How has she come to know of his decision to choose an apple as the root of his bacteria?
Apple, or æppel… no, the derivation of apple is malus… no…
A golden-brown apple, already in the early stages of decomposition, had presented itself to Alard on one of the workbenches. A fermenting pome fruit yielding powers of regeneration. There was a playful irony to that! So became Apple Elusimicrobia, arranged in order of species-genus; its short form: Appl. E..
Kalporz X Monolith Cocktail: Nourished By Time
August 13, 2025
Our continuing partnership with the leading Italian culture/music site and platform Kalporz. This month, a briefing on Kalporz cover artist Nourished By Time.
At regular points during the year the Monolith Cocktail shares posts from our Italian pen pals at Kalporz. The site recently celebrated its 25th anniversary – more or less coinciding with our very own 15th anniversary. Here’s to longevity, which isn’t easy in the unstable online world.
This month, the editorial team give us a briefing on burgeoning R&B, soul house star Nourished By Time; the cover star and spotlighted artist on Kalporz this August.
Nourished by Time sounds like ’80s music, but it belongs to an alternate timeline, where Reagan’s opulence and carefree attitude give way to a more abrasive, convoluted, and disenchanted interpretation of time and things. Or perhaps it’s simply a highly accomplished postmodern reinterpretation of those sounds and that vast aesthetic—R&B, soul, house—with the curious paradox that the eclectic Baltimore musician never truly lived through that era.
Marcus Brown, the producer who gave life to the Nourished by Time project in 2019, is in fact just thirty years old, and with the release of his next work “The Passionate Ones” (XL Recordings), for which he earned the cover of our August issue, he is destined to make the big leap – the most attentive will have noticed his name among those already announced for the next edition of C2C , and this too must mean something.
But these mere CV issues aside, we’ve been won over by all of the artist’s recent releases, most notably his debut LP “Erotic Probiotic 2” from 2023 and the EP “Catching Chickens” from the following year, which contain timeless tunes like this , this , and this .
With the release of “The Passionate Ones”, scheduled for August 22nd , we can only expect great things. Even judging by the singles released so far, which show Brown in truly dazzling form. Judge for yourself.
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 15th 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) 8th 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) 15th 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 25th 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) 1st 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 13th 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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Our Daily Bread 644: The Cords, Fat Concubine, Ali Murray…
August 4, 2025
Brian ‘Bordello’ Shea’s Reviews Roundup – Instant Reactions. All entries in alphabetical order.
The Cords ‘Fabulist’
Single (Skep Wax Records) Released 22nd July 2025
‘Fabulist’ is a fine jingle-jangle indie pop rush of pure young person want; a sonic three chord extravaganza of the sound of young Scotland relishing the first flush of summer romance; a song to make an old man sit and weep at the loss of his youth and memories of the days when C86 was where it was at.
Fat Concubine ‘Empire’
Album (Cruel Nature Records) Released 12th September 2025
Empire is the sound of falling out of a nightclub worse for wear, staggering the dark cold streets, queuing in a chippy and ordering something with chips and covering it with gravy or curry sauce or both and then sloppily eating it spilling it all down your going out clubbing clothes while standing in someone else’s sick as you wait for a taxi not to show up. It is getting home and fumbling with your key to get into your abode and wondering both where did you put your phone and where on earth is the tv remote. You then pass out on the settee as your cat alternates nesting your chest and gently pawing your face. It’s great to be young.
Headless Kross/Poundland
Split Album (Cruel Nature Records) Released 12th September 2025
I have to admit to being a pop music lover. I’m a man who’s reduced to a quivering wreck by the sound of Billy Fury singing a song by Jimmy Campbell; a man who has to wipe a tear from his eye when a blast of 70’s pop nostalgia sneaks unexpectantly from the radio/tv. But that doesn’t mean I don’t love the sound of sludge rock, a little metallic evil blackness to avail itself to my inner soul. Nor does it mean I cannot get excited by one of the most important bands in the UK at the moment, that being Poundland doing what they do best in soundtracking the state of the UK with its pounding experimental punk rock attitude and noise, but with the right amount of melody to make it commercially viable to the general public: and the more people who get to hear their blast of wanton grinditude the better the good old jolly UK will become.
This split album by Headless Kross and Poundland delivers both the charming brooding sludge-like metal of Headless Kross and Poundland doing what they do best. And if you are so inclined to have a step away from middle aged men wanting to be Roger McGuinn, then this could well be worth your time and trouble and cash.
The Last Of The Lovely Days ‘No Public House Talk’
Album (Gare du Nord) Released 19th August 2025
This debut from The Last Of The Lovely Days is a rather lovely jangly guitar pop beast of an album; an album that once again evokes not just the golden days of indie pop but also has a rather fetching undercurrent of 60’s girl group panache – just like those two fine bands from the 80’s, The Shop Assistants and The Primitives, did so well. Songs that deal with the never grows old subject of love lost and found. And these fine songs are wrapped lovingly with charming melodies and hooks that will linger and help your day be a much more enjoyable experience.
Ali Murray ‘The Summer Laden’
Album Released July 1st 2025
It makes a rather pleasant change to receive an album from an artist from Scotland that doesn’t sound like Teenage Fanclub. Not that I may add, I have anything against Teenage Fanclub, I find them rather spiffing, but a change is as good as a rest or so they say.
The Summer Laden is in fact a rather lovely pop album of breezy mostly mellow pop songs. Indeed, it is “Laden” with the sound of summer, and has a melodeon sway that is quite bewitching, and could be Celtic cousins with that Welsh wonder of verse and catchy chorus, Armstrong (Julian Pitt).
Occult Character ‘Butterfly’
Single (Metal Postcard) Released 24th July 2025
“Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee” Muhammad Ali once famously said, and that would be a perfect description of this short new track by Occult Character, funnily enough called ‘Butterfly’, as it floats with an uneasy synth pop sway fluttering away in an eccentric manner, pulling one in with its gentle experimental charm only to be knocked out by the sucker punch of the dark brooding lyrics.
Oopsie Daisies ‘As If’
Single (Metal Postcard) Released 18th July 2025
Synth pop boogie at its finest. Yes, a song of charm and home recorded warmth that could have easily emerged from a demo tape from a budding new romantic dreamboat from the early 80s; a song that fills me with a quirky nostalgia of the days when there were three weekly music papers as well as the pop twice weekly No 1 and Smash Hits pop glossies. And it could well have been featured in all five: maybe not Sounds, As If would maybe a little too on the frivolous side for them.
Scotch Funeral ‘Ever & Ever’
Album Released 30th July 2025
If rumble tumble grunge fuzz-soaked guitar is heaven to your ears, then this fine album by Scotch Funeral is for you; an album of true indie rock ‘n’ roll. “New Found Happiness” is a melody pop punk delight worthy of Ash in their glory years; the closer, “In Dreams“, is a fine mishmash of Daniel Johnston like poetry and Nirvana like grunge; and “She’s A Writer” could have stepped straight off a K records compilation album. If Scotch Funeral were on K Records or a similar label of such acclaim, they may well get the attention they deserve, for they have that special something you cannot quite put your finger on that separates them from 99 per cent of all the other indie punk pop rock ‘n’ rollers out there. Ever & Ever is certainly an album that deserves your attention.
Alexei Shishkin ‘Tiki Taka (2006)’
Track taken from the upcoming Album, Good Times (Rue Defense) Released 5th September 2025
Is this the best song recorded about football or soccer for our American readers? I think it could well be. It has a wonderful semi slacker psych vibe; it’s like being drunk and on your settee hazily watching the beautiful game unfold until you lose your will to live or you’re too drunk to reach the remote. A song of laidback excellence.
The Striped Bananas ‘Vampire of Mine’
Single Released 25th July 2025
Psych Grunge now there’s a thing for you. Imagine if you will that Kurt Cobain had worn velvet pantaloons and love beads and had hooked up with a disco dolly from a Matt Elm film in a nightclub scene instead of Courtney Love and appeared in an episode of the Banana Splits. Nirvana could well have sounded like this. A fine and dandy cartoon pop song, in fact two fine cartoon pop songs as the B-Side ‘Venus Die Trap’ is pretty nifty as well.
Tiberius ‘Sag’
Single (Audio Antihero) Released 18th July 2025
I thought for the first twenty seconds of this fine single that it was Lloyd Cole causing a commotion, but then it soon shifted into a Jeff Buckley guitar alt rock melodramatic bombast, the kind that hasn’t been heard since the days Buffalo Tom walked the earth. And while I am mentioning other artists, I will mention Oasis, not because it sounds like them, but because it doesn’t and that is another point in its favour believe you me.
Tugboat Captain ‘Pest Control’
Single
‘Pest Control’ is a fine slice of extremely British boutique pop art; a singalong song of arch darkness; a calling card into an exclusive quaint drinking club frequented by Neil Hannon, Ray Davies and John Howard, and every playlist must include Shorley Wall by Ooberman. This track has been culled from their album Dog Tail, and maybe worthy of further investigation.
Our Monthly Playlist selection of choice music and Choice Releases list from the last month.
We decided at the start of the year to change things a little with a reminder of not only our favourite tracks from the last month, but also a list of choice albums too. This list includes both those releases we managed to feature and review on the site and those we just didn’t get the time or room for – time restraints and the sheer volume of submissions each month mean there are always those releases that miss out on receiving a full review, and so we have added a number to both our playlist and list.
All entries in the Choice Releases list are displayed alphabetically. Meanwhile, our Monthly Playlist continues as normal with all the choice tracks from July taken either from reviews and pieces written by me – that’s Dominic Valvona – , Brian ‘Bordello’ Shea, and this month, Kalporz writer Samuel Conficoni. Our resident Hip-Hop expert Matt Oliver has also put forward a smattering of crucial and highlighted tracks from the rap arena.
CHOICE RELEASES FROM THE LAST MONTH OR SO:
Blanco Teta ‘‘La Debacle las Divas’
(Bongo Joe) Review
Lukas Cresswell-Rost ‘Weight Away’
(Wayside & Woodland Recordings) Review
Theon Cross ‘Affirmations: Live at Blue Note New York’
(New Soil) Review
Cumsleg Borenail ‘10mg Citalopram’
(Cruel Nature Recordings) Review
Exploding Star Orchestra ‘Holy Mountains’
Fortunato Durutti Marinetti ‘Bitter Sweet, Sweet Bitter’
(Quindi Records/We Are Time) Review
Tony Jay ‘Faithless’
Review
Freh Khodja ‘Ken Andi Habib’
(WEWANTSOUNDS) Review
The Lancashire Hustlers ‘Here But Not Here’
(Steep Hill) Review
Kevin Robertson ‘Yellow Painted Moon’
Review
Maria Elena Silva ‘Wise Men Never Try’
Review
Sol Messiah ‘War of the Gods’
THE PLAYLIST::
Blanco Teta ‘Subiduki’
Scotch Funeral ‘Weak at the Knees’
Freh Khodja ‘Aich Sar Bina Koulili’
Brickwork Lizards ‘All the We Are – Reworked by Sebastian Reynolds’
Natural Information Society ‘Sound Talisman’
Sol Messiah Ft. Sa-Roc ‘Auset’
Raekwon Ft. Ghostface Killah & Method Man ‘600 School’
Mr. Muthafuckin’ eXquire ‘Y.O.Utopia’
Open Mike Eagle ‘ok but I’m the phone screen’
Nicholas Craven & Boldy James Ft. C Dell & Nick Bruno ‘At&T’
Clipse, Pusha T & Malice Ft. Ab Liva ‘Inglorious Bastards’
Estee Nack & V Don Ft. Al-Doe ‘EZBRED’
Rachel Eckroth ‘Yin Yang’
Theon Cross Ft. Isaiah Collier, Nikos Ziarkas & James Russel Sims ‘We Go Again – Live at the Blue Note, NYC’
Peter Evans (Being & Becoming) ‘Malibu’
Homeboy Sandman & Sonnyjim ‘Can’t Stop Me’
Apollo Brown & Bronze Nazareth ‘Wheel Of Misfortune’
Ramson Badbonez & Leaf Dog ‘Celestial Bodies’
Max Schreiber ‘Layla Mistakel’
The Conspiracy ‘Salisbury Road’
SUO ‘Big Star’
Fortunato Durutti Marinetti ‘Beware’
Jeff Tweedy ‘Out in the Dark’
Kevin Robertson ‘Yellow Painted Moon’
Soft Hearted Scientists ‘Hello Hello’
Whitney ‘Dandelions’
The Lancashire Hustlers ‘Perhaps’
Ali Murray ‘ Toby’
Alex G ‘June Guitar’
Spotless Souls ‘In the Heart’
The Noisy ‘Twos’
Wolfgang Perez ‘So Ouco’
Eve Goodman & SERA ‘Blodyn Gwylly’
Joe Harvey-Whyte & Paul Cousins ‘lift’
Sirom ‘For You, This Eve, the Wolves Will Be Enchantingly Forsaken’
Austistici & Jacek Doroszenko ‘After Water Formed A Shape’
Cumsleg Borenail ‘You Mean Something To Me’
Cecil Taylor & Tony Oxley ‘Encore 1’
Exploding Star Orchestra ‘Afterburn (Parable 400)’.
If you’ve enjoyed this selection, the writing, or been led down a rabbit hole into new musical terrains of aural pleasure, and if you can, then you can now show your appreciation by keeping the Monolith Cocktail afloat by donating via Ko-Fi.
For the last 15 years both me and the MC team have featured and supported music, musicians and labels we love across genres from around the world: ones that we think you’ll want to know about. No content on the site is paid for or sponsored, and we only feature artists we have genuine respect for /love or interest in. If you enjoy our reviews (and we often write long, thoughtful ones), found a new artist you admire or if we have featured you or artists you represent and would like to say thanks or show support, than you can now buy us a coffee or donate via https://ko-fi.com/monolithcocktail
Kalporz X Monolith Cocktail: Top 7 Of The Week
July 25, 2025
Our continuing partnership with the leading Italian culture/music site and platform Kalporz. Samuel Conficoni brings us a choice septet of curious and interesting new/releases.
Jeff Tweedy of Wilco.
At regular points during the year the Monolith Cocktail shares posts from our Italian pen pals at Kalporz. The site recently celebrated its 25th anniversary. Here’s to longevity, which isn’t easy in the unstable online world.
From the site’s regular new series, This Week’s Top 7, Kalporz mainstay Samuel Conficoni shares seven (plus a sneaky bonus) choice recommendations; many of which lean towards the country, or share a theme with Bob Dylan.
7. Ever true to themselves, the Whitneys have released a new song.
“Dandelions” previews Small Talk, the new album released this November by Max Kakacek and Julien Ehrlich’s group, and the follow up to 2022’s Spark album.
6. Margo Price between innovation and quotation.
With a visual reference to Bob Dylan‘s legendary 1965 music video for “Subterranean Homesick Blues”, the singer-songwriter’s new single, which follows on from the previous intriguing “Don’t Let the Bastards Get You Down”, is titled “Don’t Wake Me Up” and features Jesse Welles. Her new album, “Hard Headed Woman”, will be released at the end of August on Loma Vista.
5. An unleashed Jeff Tweedy announces a new triple album and a tour.
Twilight Override will contain thirty songs and be released at the end of September. The Wilco leader offers us a taste of his new solo album by sharing four previews: “Enough”, “One Tiny Flower”, “Out in the Dark” and “Stray Cats in Spain”. Tweedy and his band will be in North America this fall, and in Europe next February.
4. “She Explains Things to Me” is David Byrne’s kaleidoscopic new track.
After last month’s “Everybody Laughs”, a new preview that gives us a taste of the intensity of Who Is the Sky?, the Talking Heads frontman’s new solo album, due out in early September on Matador.
3. 80 years later, the Kronos Quartet commemorates J. Robert Oppenheimer’s atomic bomb test by performing (in two versions) a Bob Dylan classic.
To commemorate the extraordinary event of July 16, 1945, the Kronos Quartet has recorded two versions of “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”, the poetic gem that Bob Dylan composed in late 1962, likely inspired by the Cuban Missile Crisis, and which he included on his masterpiece album The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, released the following May. Among the names featured on the project are Willie Nelson, who, at 92, is currently touring the US with his Outlaw Festival, which also features Bob Dylan and his band; Ringo Starr, who turned 85 a few days ago; Iggy Pop; Laurie Anderson; Tom Morello; and Charlotte Gainsbourg. One version of the song is intense and hypnotic folk-rock, while the other, the “Drone Version”, is a reinterpretation of the classic in spoken-word form.
2. A passionate tribute to Jason Molina, so we never forget him.
Jason Molina, best known for his singer-songwriter project Songs: Ohia, passed away prematurely in 2013. After the fascinating and seminal reissues of much of his catalogue over the past decade or so, a compilation album dedicated to him, titled I Will Swim to You: A Tribute to Jason Molina, will be released by Run for Cover in early September. The album features, among many others, MJ Lenderman, Hand Habits, Sun June, Advance Base, Lutalo, and Horse Jumper of Love. Lenderman’s version of Molina’s “Just Be Simple” was shared the other week.
1. Woody Guthrie again, unforgettable and ever-present.
Shamus Records will release a fascinating double volume entitled Woody at Home in mid-August, containing 22 previously unreleased tracks by the legendary singer-songwriter. Among the many fascinating pieces is his only recording of “Deportee”, a legendary song performed over the decades by Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger, Bruce Springsteen, and Joni Mitchell, which Guthrie wrote after the deaths of 38 people, including 22 migrant farmworkers, in a 1948 plane crash. Thanks to the restoration of some analog tapes, on which Guthrie himself recorded these songs at home when he was 38, these two volumes have reached us. They will be enhanced by a book containing exclusive photos of Guthrie and his family and some of his lyrics, obtained from the Woody Guthrie Center in Tulsa.
[Bonus Track] 0. Headlights by Alex G is a great album.
Headlights, the tenth studio album by Alex G (the moniker of American singer-songwriter Alex Giannascoli) our artist of the month was released this month. This is his first release for a major label, in this case RCA, and from the first listens – as the singles that preceded it had already demonstrated – it seems to be an excellent album, yet another step forward for an artist who knows how to renew himself and make his compositions engaging every time while maintaining a sincere, visionary style that is true to himself.
THE MONTHLY DIGEST INCLUDES A CLUTCH OF ACCUMULATED NEW MUSIC REVIEWS; THE SOCIAL INTER-GENERATIONAL/ECLECTIC AND ANNIVERSARY ALBUMS CELEBRATING PLAYLIST; AND CHOICE PIECES FROM THE ARCHIVES.
___THE NEW___
Autistici ‘Familiarity Enfolded’
(Audiobulb) 2nd August 2025
The middle sequence in a series of transformations by the Sheffield-based electronic composer, Familiarity Enfolded follows on from the first link in a chain of collaborative immersions, Familiarity Folded – released in just the last week. In what could also be a collaborative showcase for the Audiobulb label too, a smattering of artists who’ve previously released material on the platform now bond and work with Autistici in redeveloping or evolving and remixing his compositions and ideas for a three-part project.
Finding common ambient space and minimalist approaches to visioning new soundscapes and movements, part two includes contributions from Tomo-Nakaguchi (an artist we’ve raved about on the site in the last few years, and made our choice albums of the year lists), A Dancing Beggar (who hasn’t appeared for a very long time on this site, but has made our choice albums lists in the past), Russ Young and OdNu (another artist who has appeared in our reviews sections in the last couple of years). The prospects look good already, with this quartet’s sphere of influences within the ambient and electronic realms both adroit and always worthy of attention.
First up both Autistici and Tomo-Nakaguchi match-up for an incipient majestic awe of both the natural and synthetic on the opening ‘Twilight Glow Of The Sky’. What could be the sound of filaments falling like pattering rain on a drum skin or piece of Tupperware can be heard amongst the moving glimmering light captured at such an inspiring moment in time and place.
The cove atmospheric ‘Caiplie’s Hermitage’ references the atavistic caves of the title, found between the Scottish towns of Anstruther and Crail on the coastal pathways of Fife. A Dancing Beggar is the foil this time around, playing on the hallowed ghosts and history of that mysterious cavern, which is believed to have been used as a place or sanctuary of worship for Christians in the 9th century AD. There’s constant wash or downpour of rain and presence of water elements that continue throughout this piece, and it could be that the artists are perhaps sheltering from it as they build up an abstract picture that’s one part natural and the other near sci-fi. The brassy resonating strings of a guitar are plucked, pulled and sprung as heavenly machines move around in the background. A Dancing Beggar joins both Autistici and OdNu on the finale; a twenty minute plus long form illusion inspired by the track title’s Arthurian referenced enchantress, sibling, shapeshifter and seducer Morgan Le Fay mirage, the ‘Fata Morgana’. A “superior mirage” in other words, this optical phenomenon and complex mirage creates distorted and sometimes fantastical images of distantly observed objects. You must have seen this when looking at to sea in particular conditions and seeing tankers or ships appearing to float above the waves. Sonic wise, this reminded me of Jeff Bird with its essence of piped or pumped pastoral sounds. But there’s also something hallucinogenic about it too. There’s a Mark Hollis solo style piano bit, something that sounds almost like a concertinaed ghostly echo of some shipwreck shanty plus the shimmers and shivers of magic.
That leaves the final track of the quartet, the ‘Dissolved in Light’ collaboration with Russ Young, who I must admit I’m unfamiliar with. It begins with the itchy rubbing chorus of crickets and sundown atmospherics. A veil of mist dissipates to reveal a most minimalist timelessness before Laraaji-like bowls are struck softly and the sound of tines and melodious ambient waves entwine. Andrew Heath evocative piano notes and falls meet an amorphous staccato engine as the track moves along its placeable journey to the sacred.
‘Relinquishing’ control, the concept behind this series has worked rather well; resulting in some magical, stirring and illusionary pieces of sophisticated and highly immersive ambient and lowkey electronica. A Dancing Beggar seems to be adding something of the bucolic and pastoral to the mix to give it a connection to the human and greenery, the nature and history. But all four collaborators prove congruous partners on this project. Part three, Familiarity Unfolded, will follow in due course, and it will be interesting to hear the results of another set of sonic and musical partners.
The Lancashire Hustlers ‘Here But Not Here’
(Steep Hill) 4th July 2025
Rolling with the punches meted out by life; tumbling forward into a new songbook; The Lancashire Hustlers seventh album rings true with disillusion, detachment, bewilderment and isolation. It’s a feeling that’s hard to articulate or relate, but that unease at the tides of time and the disenchanted shrugs of malady sound pretty warm, gentle and sellable.
With a MOR breeze of soul in their sails once more, the long-standing duo of guitarist and vocalist Brent Thorley and drummer and backing vocalist Ian Pakes take beat group, Baroque, psych and troubadour influences for a both funky and yearned trip across the Northern countryside and towns of their home. Transporting a hint of Muscle Shoals to Lancashire for an idiosyncratic English take on the music of the Isley Brothers, Stevie Wonder, Curtis Mayfield, the duo (with an extended apparatus of instruments, which they both share) have a slight saunter and roll to their signature to their songwriting and playing. It’s the sound of The Beatles, of individual Lennon and McCartney on their solo work, of the Stones, of Ollie Halsall and John Compton with an undulation of gospel-light and country-soul electric piano and organ. Talking of the country reference, the most lovely ‘Just Because’ has what could be either a melodica or clarinet sounding like a forlorn but romantically sighed harmonica – there’s also the use of a lap steel guitar.
There are some heartfelt, sad plaints, and rural country swamp pop ditties that wouldn’t sound out of place on McCartney’s eponymous solo album and RAM; some songs that err towards the haunted, albeit with instrumental aping scurrying mouse effects – see the confessional, asking for forgiveness, pest and rodents quirky phobia, and Byzantine Stones flavoured ‘I Killed A Mouse’ -; and some that beat themselves up over guilt, frustration and heartache. Most out there, must be the dejected lament of feeling ignored, ‘Like A Ghost’, which sounds like a detour to some mysterious Hispaniola Les Baxter hideaway island of the occult. And yet, they never feel so down or in the blues funk that each song isn’t rich in playfulness lyrics wise, or ever dour.
Another enchanting as it is sorrowful and disenchanted songbook from a duo that continues to make its own luck, releasing a consistent catalogue of instantly likeable, melodious and breezily catchy albums. It’s always a pleasure to review and hear them.
Maria Elena Silva ‘Wise Men Never Try’
4th July 2025
Recently stripping back Bob Dylan’s courtly enigmatic dames to their most essential essences with interpretations of ‘Queen Jane’ and a summoned bell rung ‘Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands’, Maria Elena Silva now turns to the pages of the Great American Songbook with a first volume of revisited and transposed standards made anew: that is, made emotively ethereal, near evanescence yet connected and with a real sense of depth and something approaching the tactile.
Under the ‘umbrella title’ of Wise Men Never Try, the inaugural volume features a small intimate accompaniment of players to accentuate and punctuate Silva’s carefully placed and near blown words, or, to wind along to a minimalist performance of the artful, the solo play, the quietened and sullen lament, the show tune stripped of artifice, and the enigmatic, near impregnable shell of a smoky cabaret tortured soulstress. Step forward Erez Dessel, who’s piano both articulates the feel and plays with a freer hand of spine-tinkles, ached suspense, distorts and slightly jars the nerves; especially on the opening version of Carolyn Leigh and Cy Coleman’s late 1950’s standard, ‘I Walk A Little Faster’ (the singular “I” has been dropped I assume to reframe the angle for a new interpretation), which was a hit for Blossom Desire in 1958. The original’s slight lilt of 50s swing and jazz is replaced with a jilt of dissonance on the piano; made more so because of the near silence that opens the song. In a bluesy-jazzy fashion that also recalls the theatre, Silva amorphously places the words with lulled and delicate breathless ease. As a theme of heartache and denial, this distillation is as beautiful as it is almost troubling and disconsolate. The album’s finale, ‘Some Enchanted Evening’, is the closet interpretation on the whole album, featuring a lovely melodious piano that wouldn’t sound out of place on the original; all very tender and dreamy. The Rodgers and Hammerstein number, composed for the South Pacific musical, is normally sung by male protagonist Emile as he captures the essence of love at first sight. Out of the female gaze, with a female perspective that theme is not so much lost but redefined.
We also have Tyler Wagner popping up on the double-bass, taking a tactile, textural jazzy approach, offering flexed stretches of the body, sensitive little crawls and climbs, and more physical thwacks of the bass strings. The filmic pining ‘I Should Care’, written by Alex Stordahl, Paul Weston and Sammy Cahn for the 1944 MGM matinee Thrill of a Romance – covered by all the notable greats over the decades, from Sinatra to Peggy Lee, Dizzy Gillespie and Amy Winehouse -, features a bass that quietly thumbs away a jazz rhythm in the style of early Blue Note, as Silva sympathetically oozes soulful pursed heartache.
Completing the accompanying trio – who it must be stated, don’t always play together or on every song – is Ben McDonald on electric guitar. Subtle for the most part, ‘I’m In Love Again’ has McDonald pinging harmonics, brushing up and down the fretboard and playing a nice Reinhardt-esque delicate languid sensitive form of haunted sympathy.
It must be pointed out that Silva also plays acoustic guitar on these numbers. ‘You Don’t Know How Glad I Am’, written by Jimmy Williams and Larry Harrison, and made her own by Nancy Wilson on the 1964 single, is an intimate entwined match of Silva’s climbing vocals and a guitar with a pinch of Spanish flair: albeit kept quite subtle. Silva’s version of that recognisable tune sounds somewhere between Judee Sill and Roberta Flack. It’s there again on the next song, ‘Close To You’, a sort of jazzy-gypsy guitar melancholy.
Silva’s voice is labyrinthine and enigmatic yet can’t quite hide the various emotional toils of disconsolate and sacrificial, torturous and resigned heartbreak. Despite the intimacy of the setting, every song has a stage-like atmosphere about it that croons and soothingly oozes sophisticated, elegant jazzy-blues performance from the stillness and blank space. But that voice is hard to define, to pin down; amorphously pitched between the great jazz singers, the voices of perhaps Julie London and Peggy Lee, and something approaching the folk doyens of the 60s. A beautiful, somewhat pining and plaint start to a series of such interpreted songbooks, volume one is a very personal take and perspective on a songbook we have come to take for granted and heard a thousand or more times. In this moment, this setting, those just recognisable songs have taken on a different quality and encouraged a new reading.
If that grabbed you, Silva will be back next month with a second volume, this time concentrated on songs of a certain vintage, and a prescient history, the American Civil War. Expect to read a review of that album at a later date.
Leo Wolf ‘I Saw Your Shadow On The Wall’
1st August 2025
The flicker of Richter’s candle appearing at the end of the labyrinth; the half-dreamt, half-seen M.R. James’ apparitions; the presence of the supernatural and mysterious prompted by sleep hallucinations; these are all in the essence and conjuring of imagery that is crafted from the North Carolina artist Leo Wolf’s ambient, atmospheric and filmic granular synthesis of processed sampled material from classical records and field recordings. With weight and texture these asynchronously breathed, and space filled recordings exist in a semi dream state, simultaneously paranormal and yet tethered to the search for light and gravitas in a world of synthesized melodic wave forms, tones, passes, undulations and bass-y padded throbs.
Building up a moving, simulating and often dramatic sensory experience from hidden sources, machinery and the recognisable captured moments of the artist’s surroundings – from the rain hitting a metal apparatus in the garden, to the clatter of cutlery and plates, the conversations caught between people in a restaurant or café setting -, this album’s building blocks act together and independently of each other to set in motion a feeling both hypnagogic and hypnotic – the former even features in the title of one track. Are we indeed awake or not? Who can tell, as Leo constructs a surprisingly beautiful work of ambient reflection, soundtracks and filtered brilliance.
A brilliance of light (metaphorical and real) can be found on each and every track more or less, as the mists, haze, the unsure fogs of the musty and gauzy are parted to reveal itself.
It sounds to me like 1980s paranormal VHS merged with His Name Is Alive, synthesized monastic and gothic voices, hollowed beams, overhead craft of an alien nature and generators. Nightmare and the sublime through the grainy lens, I Saw Your Shadow On The Wall envelops the listener in Leo’s personal searches and emotional pulls to create a most moving soundtrack.
___/The Monolith Cocktail Social Playlist Vol. 99___
For the 99th time, the Social Playlist is an accumulation of music I love and want to share; with tracks from my various DJ sets and residencies over the years and both selected cuts from those artists and luminaries we’ve lost on the way and from those albums celebrating anniversaries each month.
Running for nearly 12 years now, Volume 99 is the latest eclectic and generational spanning playlist come radio show from me – the perfect radio show in fact: devoid of chatter, interruptions and inane self-promotion.
Let us pay homage firstly to the late Argentine pianist and composer Lalo Schifrin, who passed away earlier this month. Arguably it took a South American to encapsulate and bottle through blazed horns, funky grooves, a chorus of dramatic near reverent voices, and thriller punches the sound of the streets of San Francisco and New York in the 60s and 70s; when Dirty Harry served Judge Dredd style justice and Steve McQueen handbrake turned and screeched recklessly as a getaway driver. Kung-Fu to Spies, Bossa, Samba, the orchestral, swing, jazz, the cultish and horror, Schifrin’s signature is legendary; his influence so wide and extensive as to have entered the musical lexicon. Arguably amongst the most sampled composers of all time too. So where do you start? How the hell do you represent such a legacy? Well, I’ve chosen a few personal favourites and a couple of more obscure tracks from a cannon that spans over seven decades: the theme from ‘Magnum Force’, ‘Kyrie’, ‘Once A Thief’, ‘Vaccinated Mushrooms’, ‘The Shadow’ and ‘Introit’. And literally as I’m writing this, news arrives of Ozzy Osbourne‘s sad departure from these realms. The Anti-christ, lord of heavy metal (or “heavy mental” as my old man always called it), arguably at least one of the founding fathers of that sound through Black Sabbath of course (or at least one of the earliest adopters), finally succumbed to his plague of illnesses and conditions. Near on breaking his neck on the unseemly naff chariot of a quad bike ages ago, but battling Parkinson’s, a ridiculous amount of addictions, it seemed Ozzy was always on the cusp of death; defying the odds not just to put one foot in front of the other, but to continue his career as dark magi, ring master to metal and its offspring. What seems like an age ago, the TV show that did much to revive his career, one of Brum’s most famous and celebrated sons managed to become relevant again to a whole new generation despite seeing a ramshackle, ailing former rock star on his downers, and unintentionally making a name for himself through various comedic episodes: even entering that lexicon on catch phrases, the metal equivalent of Fred Flintstone’s hollering “Wilma!”, more in desperation, of “Sharon!”. It always seemed a joke, or not to be taken too seriously, all that dark brooding, Satanic rites, devil’s spawn and howling metamorphous werewolf mooning: and it worked very well. And despite the hilarity, the idol status of motel, hotel, holiday inn wrecking, pissing on the Alamo, the Motley Crue pool side incident of snorting a row of ants, wife/partner/enabler/manager Sharon can tell a dark tale or two hundred about Ozzy’s drug-crazed manic violent outbursts. Still, he was a character; a motherfucker as Brian Bordello would say; a true individual; the like of which we won’t ever see again. Many wished Ozzy on, even those who weren’t fans. His final curtain call was only a matter of a few weeks ago, back on home soil. Like the trooper he was, Ozzy gave back to the city that panel-beat and moulded him. I’ve chosen a couple of tunes to see him off (please no jokes about double-checking the coffin on the day), one from the Sabbath days, the other, from Ozzy’s debut 80’s album Dairy Of A Madman.
Moving on now to the anniversary celebrating albums, there’s select tracks from Wayne Shorter’s most (arguably) influential and most covered LP, JuJu (60 this month), The Rolling Stones’ Out Of Our Heads (60 this month), The Fugs’ debut LP (60 this month), Milton Nascimento’s Minas (50 this year), Larry Jon Wilson’s New Beginnings (50 this year), The Verve’s A Northern Soul (unbelievably 30 years old in 2025) and Banco De Gaia’s Last Trian To Lhasa (30 this month).
Each month a smattering of newish tracks that didn’t make the Monthly Playlist of new music manage to creep into the set list. For July, there’s tracks from Nowaah The Flood, Rarelyalways with Nia J,Lunch Money Life, and DJ Haram with Moor Mother and 700 Bliss.
That leaves space for an intergenerational, cross-polygenesis mix of tunes from the triumvirate gathering of Chick Corea, Dave Holland and Barry Altschul (aka A.R.C.), Grass Widow, Julie Coker, Federico Balducci, Johhny Yen Bang, Chakk, MC 900 FT Jesus…
Tracks in full are::::
Lalo Schifrin ‘Theme From Magnum Force’
Banco De Gaia ‘Kincajou’
The Fugs ‘Slum Goddess’
Grass Widow ‘Tattoo’
Mighty Mighty ‘Yours Truly’
Batsumi ‘Mamshanyana’
Federico Balducci ‘Abode’
Black Sabbath ‘Who Are You?’
Lalo Schifrin ‘Kyrie’
Lalo Schifrin ‘Once A Thief’
Wayne Shorter ‘Deluge’
Nowaah the Flood ‘Protocol’
DJ Haram w/ Moor Mother and 700 Bliss ‘Lifelike’
MC 900 Ft. Jesus ‘Dancing Barefoot’
Lunch Money Life ‘The Garden’
Rarelyalways w/ Mia J ‘Paid’
Milton Nascimento w/ Beto Guedes ‘Caso Voce Queira Saber’
El Polen ‘A las Orillas del Vilcanota’
Joe King Kologbo ‘All Fingers Are Not Equal’
Julie Coker ‘Elelemi’
Lalo Schifrin ‘‘Vaccinated Mushrooms’
Chick Corea, Dave Holland & Barry Altschul ‘Games’
Lalo Schifrin ‘The Shadow’
Johnny Yen Bang ‘Kill The Disco’
Harte 10 ‘Some Ronnie – Live’
Ozzy Osbourne ‘Flying High Again’
Chakk ‘Caught in Your Face’
Co-Pilot ‘Cornerhouse’
The Rolling Stones ‘That’s How Strong My Love Is’
Lalo Schifrin ‘Introit’
The Verve ‘On Your Own’
Larry Jon Wilson ‘Broomstraw Philosophers And Scuppernong Wine’
___/Archives___
Already represented in volume 99 of the Social Playlist above, another chance to repost my piece on new age techno pioneer Banco De Gaia’s influential 1995 world peregrination Last Trian To Lhasa. Originally appearing as a twentieth anniversary special, with a repackaged version of the album plus extras.
Banco De Gaia ‘Last Train To Lhasa (20th Anniversary 4xCD Set)’
Despite, what on the surface, seems a plausible misconception, one of the UK’s chief progenitors of global trance peregrinations, Banco De Gaia, has become synonymous with all things Tibetan. Re-released on the occasion of its twentieth anniversary, the Banco’s Last Train To Lhasa album may have borrowed the title and evoked a transcendent spirit of the country’s mystical Himalayan landscapes, yet the group’s founder and guiding force Toby Marks never meant to confine his world sounds to one particular place: In truth, more a pan-global sound palette with echoes and traces of the Middle East, Asia and the Orient.
Going as far as to refute suggestions in every subsequent interview since its original release, the LP only actually features a solitary sample from the region and only gained its title from Marks wife on completion. However, Marks lent space on the album’s sleeve to publicising Tibet’s struggle against its overlord Chinese masters and would become a vocal advocate of the Free Tibet campaign – that now seems such a long time ago, and all but forgotten, with China since more or less swallowing Hong Kong and threatening an invasion of Taiwan, which if it does come, might just be the big one: the WWIII event we always dreaded.
Base camp on the enlightened journey to the ethereal, Tibet’s meditative disposition was no match for the authoritarian steamroller of the Communist party machine. And so, an ill-at-ease occupation and stalemate persists a generation later. Its international vessel of protest, the Dalai Lama in his own affable and gentle way backed by the Free Tibet campaign continues to be a big draw yet has decidedly been upstaged by events elsewhere. Clarifying his commitment to the cause, Marks was recently interviewed by the Free Tibet organisation in the run up to his trio of performances at this year’s Glastonbury and the anniversary Last Train To Lhasa release – perhaps a timely reminder.
Musically speaking, as I’ve already mentioned, the twentieth anniversary appraisal of Banco De Gaia’s blueprint reaches far beyond any Tibetan influence, imbued by cultures both imaginary and real from both terra firma and the stratosphere.
Highly praised for merging trance and nuanced electronic four-to-the-floor beats with atavistic echoes from mystically envisioned landscapes, Banco De Gaia’s Last Train To Lhasa was released in the dying ambers of the second rave and house music waves in 1995. On the cusp of Britpop, hung-over from grunge, guitars were about to once again dominate whilst house and techno music in all its many guises had reached superclub status; the underground movements fractured and broken up into a myriad of smaller tribes. Ambient and trance, usually the preserve of afterhours clubbing or allocated space in the “chill out” zones had already blossomed into its own industry. That unfairly and often fatuous “chill out” idiom used to sell everything from nirvana relaxation and transience to any ‘new age” missive. Never new in itself, until progress and technology made it easier and offered more options, the core ambient ingredient had already been in existence for decades. And despite what you may have read, Eno may have given it a name, but he certainly didn’t invent it. In this evolving stage of dance music, Banco De Gaia went to town, sitting on a fluffy cloud, hovering between trance and techno.
LTTL’s suffused panoramic station-to-station soundtrack was different. Sharing some of the peaceable beautiful nephology of The Orb and Air Liquid but with the satellite guided twinkle and kinetic rhythms of Orbital, the album sounded every bit as organic as it did electronic. The original album is boosted by a further three CDs worth of alternative takes, mixes, remixes and the missing until now, Apollo moon landing inspired space-voyage, ‘Eagle’ – recorded at the time but left off the final version of the LP. A box set only available as a limited-edition physical release – though now also available to hear on Bandcamp -, fans and admirers alike can really indulge, with 24 tracks of transcendent aural bliss.
Even if you are far from familiar with the source material, the general method applied is one of respectful tinkering and expansion, with Marks own alternatives plus a line-up of contemporary artists/producer remixes congruously immersive. A ‘Duck Asteroid Extended’ mix of the original ‘Kincajou’ for example, takes the steam driven new age suite on an epic, stripped and even more ambient, 44-minute journey: it takes the mix thirty-minutes to bring in the beats and reach a higher plain. Elsewhere, various tinkering’s of the holy misty mountain proverb ‘China (Clouds Not Mountains)’ takes the languid drifter into ever more esoteric territories, or in the case of Roedelius and Felix Jay collaborator Andrew Heath, adding a diaphanous piano to the meditative calligraphy-brushed valley narrative.
The reverberations of dub, bhangra, and the Orient are sometimes stretched into indolent escapism or given more power and lift on the varied versions of ‘Amber’. Sometimes as with the Carl Craig imbued Bluetech remix of ‘Kuos’, they are taken apart and rebuilt. Though nothing quite matches the rolling timpani introduction and celestial beauty of the original ‘White Paint’, ‘Where’s The Runway Dub’ and alucidnations ‘Dream Remix’ offer interesting interpretations; one a hymn in dub the other a suffused with kosmiche rays romance in the sky.
A carefully considered expansion of the Banco De Gaia panoramic worlds of the mid-90s, the 20th anniversary edition certainly offers the listener an immersive experience. And you can’t complain about getting your money’s worth, with over four hours of music over the four discs to peruse.
If you’ve enjoyed this selection, the writing, or been led down a rabbit hole into new musical terrains of aural pleasure, and if you can, then you can now show your appreciation by keeping the Monolith Cocktail afloat by donating via Ko-Fi.
For the last 15 years both me and the MC team have featured and supported music, musicians and labels we love across genres from around the world: ones that we think you’ll want to know about. No content on the site is paid for or sponsored, and we only feature artists we have genuine respect for /love or interest in. If you enjoy our reviews (and we often write long, thoughtful ones), found a new artist you admire or if we have featured you or artists you represent and would like to say thanks or show support, than you can now buy us a coffee or donate via https://ko-fi.com/monolithcocktail
Tennyson In Space: Pink Nepenthe (All Four Chapters)
July 18, 2025
The Monolith Cocktail Serialises Andrew C. Kidd’s Tennyson Imbued Opus
Dabbling over the decade with showcasing exciting, sometimes improbable, intriguing work from new and aspiring writers, the Monolith Cocktail has played host to serialisations of stories by Rick Clarke (of Vukover and The Tearless Life infamy) and Ayfer Simms (the Franco-Istanbul writer, and for a few years, an integral member of the MC team offering various reviews and conducting interviews).
Furnishing the site since Covid with review pieces and the odd feature, Glaswegian-based writer Andrew C. Kidd now adds his name to this list, sharing his grand interstellar opus with the MC readers through an epic serialisation. Over the last few months or so we’ve published the Prologue, Part One and Part Two of The Violin, and, together, all four parts of the Hic Sunt Leones Et Corvi suite.
Now, a new set of chapters open up: the Pink Nepenthe. Prepare to take your protein pills for a transformative trip into the outer reaches of space.
Pink Nepenthe
“Is there any peace
In ever climbing up the climbing wave?”
From The Lotos-eaters by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Part 1
On the tray in front of him, seven pills lay in perfect order. Pater held the first capsule between his thumb and index finger. It was smooth and small like a bullet, measuring only a centimetre in length. The colours of these capsules meant nothing. Protein, carbohydrate, fibre – no two colours of these food groups were the same. This had been a deliberate ploy to offset the tedium of dinner time pill-popping.
‘Are you not eating today, Pater Ines?’
The quiet voices always seemed so real. Always the same soft cadence, without accent, loudly whispering into his ears. They spoke calmly and objectively, exerting their influence. They were commanding for They were the authority.
Pater could not see the algorithms of the artificial intelligence. There was no circuitry, no central processing centre, no material seat of power. Yet they infiltrated the very consciousness of those onboard this vessel. The algorithms simply existed. They were as anonymous as one’s élan vital and as individual as a single volt that propagated through a human heart.
They controlled almost every aspect of the ship. From the cabin air concentration and pressurisation to the decontamination of water, the algorithms served to keep their human passengers alive.
Pater responded to them by nodding spiritlessly into his tray. He swallowed the first two pills with water as he had done every other day. The monotony was something he struggled to stomach.
His mind wandered to the events of last night. Although it had become commonplace on the ship, he had never really considered that those who resided in the same living quarters as he did would be taking the nepenthe.
Pater was well aware of the consequences of repeated use of the hallucinogenic substance: transmogrification; cognitive disablement; death if toxic doses were administered.
He stared vacantly at the table; his body hunched over his folded arms.
‘Does hunger evade you?’
The hushed voices of the algorithms spiked up again. Their impishness grated against his soul. He forcefully swallowed two more of the multi-coloured capsules which caught his throat, leaving a dull and heavy sensation that made him salivate. He coughed a little; the resultant water-brash irritated his gullet.
Pater returned to his reflections. Having never taken the nepenthe himself, he was unaware of the supposed stupor that it induced, or the ‘sight’ that its users were given. He knew that whatever they saw was rarely shared, especially not publicly, thus perpetuating the mystery. He knew it to be a strong dopaminergic, acting upon the limbic pathway to impart visions unto those who consumed it.
He also knew it to be the ruin of others.
Pater had elected to lead a simple life. His chosen path had seen him through even the darkest days onboard this vessel: the mutinies; the algorithmic malfunctions; its near-abandonment. He had never needed the nepenthe and its psychedelic properties because he had never had the need to ‘escape’. He failed to understand why some of his compatriots choose to live within such false walls of altered perception. After all, this ship was their home.
His thoughts returned to Lionel and Mariette, the co-habitants of the next-door dormitory.
What was it that had left them grinning from ear to ear?
He raised his head to stare straight ahead at the white walls of the plain cafeteria. He saw nothing.
‘Pater, do you wish to fade away?’
He picked up the final three capsules and tossed them into his mouth. This had been an ungracious ingesting. Gastric contents spilled out into his lower oesophagus, irritating him even further. The tray he returned to its receptacle in the far corner of this square room. His shoes padded quietly on the grated floor as he paced down the long corridor to his station.
This ship won’t breathe on its own, his mind sighed.
* * *
The cup-shaped ship quietly traversed the Nelumbo Nebula. It was an epochal vessel on its long quest to conquest. To achieve this, many more generations and millions more light-years of travelling would have to pass. Peregrinating between star systems, the mission had been simple: discovery; an aeonian search for the unknowable.
To those who tread upon its five decks, it was a closed space. For most, it would be a forever journey. The ship was manned by humans, but not humans who had ever known or populated Earth. Every human inside this hulking starship had been conceived within its thick walls, entering life through its abundant labour suites. Their bodies were bequeathed to it as soon as they took their first breath. They lived and died and passed unto history as fleeting as the fractures of light that glinted off the exterior of this leviathan vessel.
On the other side of the ship, Mariette had been lying languidly in the sick bay. She pondered about the time that she had already spent there.
She remained unresolved in her mind because time had passed so very slowly. After receiving more than one-and-a-half times the maximal dose exposure of radiation in the ancillary reactor, she had been closely observed by the ship’s medical personnel.
The footsteps of one of the medics caught her attention. He was approaching purposefully.
‘Pru, Mariette?’
‘Yes.’
You are to be discharged today.’
This statement had been simple enough. He had already started to make his exit as quickly as he had entered. Mariette called out after him.
‘Will I be okay?’
The young medic stopped and turned around to witness her hesitant smile. His face bore an unsureness; his furrows deepened.
‘Please prepare yourself for discharge’, he reiterated plainly.
Mariette was wearing the light garments that had been provided to her by the treatment bay nurses. Her contaminated suit and equipment had been destroyed immediately after the incident. She had been under no illusion that the harnessing of hydrogen 3 emitted by the cosmic rays that constantly bombarded this ship was a perilous occupation. The effective doses that were invading her cells would not be immediately fatal; more time would have to pass if any long-term sequalae were to manifest.
After the long walk from the treatment bay to her living quarters, she doffed the clothes provided to her by the hospital and picked out a lounge suit. She sighed nervously as she lay back in the bunk in the dormitory.
To sleep, she yawned to herself in a half-dream.
* * *
The slow rumble that propagated through the multiple levels of the ship was felt strongest by those located in the living quarters of its lowest floors. It was not a powerful vibration. Those who felt its raw energy were soothed.
In one of the many dormitories that lined these endless floors, a figure lay soundlessly in a dreamy languor.
A small trench in the ground had appeared before them. It had seemingly started nowhere. Snaking and winding, it travelled in a path-like manner to eventually basin in an empty hollow. The gaze of the dreaming figure moved slowly up the trunk of a short deciduous tree. Dark fruit hung from its many branches, skin-glistening in the apricot light.
The figure tip-toed to reach out and grab the fruit, but the ground was dry and scorched their bare feet. They sought shelter in a shady grove, waiting for the heat of the orange orb to abate.
Part 2
The figure of Lionel paled in a ghastly hue. His white coat bled into the white surfaces of the laboratory, brightened even further by the blinding luminescence of the wall-lights. Cylindrical moulds of clear-tubed impingers dotted around him; inside these were the collections of aeroplankton.
Lionel’s experiments had been to integrate cyanobacterial cultivations into water. This solution would be used to flood the barren fields of discovered exoplanets so that ecosystems could be forged.
Panspermia: these eons-old prokaryotes were the fertilisers of the universe. On this vessel, their pili and flagella had failed to propel them in these entered uncharted depths.
His laboratory assistants had left for the day. Lionel walked over to the glass wall-control and circled the dial clockwise to increase the volume of the music playing in the background. As he pipetted the reagents and documented his findings, gentle sounds fumigated around him. A spiritual double bass line. The steady rhythm of a tapping hi-hat. Trumpet flourishes that elevated his soul. All improvised yet working in synergy.
The quiet klaxon that signalled the evening meal time sounded a short time later. Lionel bore a gleeful grim as he stored his biomatter for the night. It would be a long night. He hoped that his visions would enlighten him.
Life in all its photosynthetic and deep-coloured glory!
* * *
Outlying the thick metal frame of the ship, pink and blue made magenta in the darkness. Mountainous microcosms were as ancient as they were transient. The brilliance of stars held their forever positions as if they had billowed out from a magnificent cosmic eruption. Wavelengths expanded and contracted along their spectrum. This ever-changeability of the universe never ceased to amaze those who gazed at it through the glass portholes of the epochal vessel.
Lionel moved away from the window and looked down at the scintillating dust that rippled pink in his palm. Across the dormitory in the other bunk, the same dust littered the lips of Mariette. The night-light of the ship was dimmed, beckoning everyone else to sleep.
Having inhaled the crystalline nepenthe, the pupils of Lionel and Mariette widened as its hallucinogenic effect took hold. The pink particles had breached their blood-brain barriers. They spun counter clockwise on their respective axes mundi.
Lionel closed his eyes to view a scene of ripening flowers that had recently taken seed. They sprung out from the red soil having been made fertile by the blue-green rains that descended upon these foreign plains. Droplets on the leaves reflected cerulean in the white underbelly of this ship. Meristems swayed in a gentle wind caused by the pressure of the water. The breeze would serve as a slingshot to pollenate all the other flowers and trees.
He remarked on the light, the grand viridescence, these bold visions. The strange hue created was somewhere between a lunar luminescence and an ephemeral phosphorus.
Lionel smiled mirthlessly. Here he was in a comatose state stumbling upon a paradise undiscovered, unversed, yet to be seen by humankind.
His altered mind cycled in a confused state. Part of his subconscious was convinced that this was only a dream, a scene concocted from his imagination. Another part of his semi-conscious mind had become fully immersed in the blue-green rain that fell upon this strange land. He could feel the water percolating through the soil. His hand reached out to touch the droplets that beaded uniformly on the sprouting leaves. This part of him embraced the unreality of it.
Lionel was an adult, but his umbilical connection to this mother ship remained. He had never parted from the confines of this metal cocoon as it hurtled through deep space. In all effect, he had yet to be born. His hands picked at the covers that swaddled him on the bunk.
Leaves – plentiful leaves! – brushed against the hair on his head. A branch caught his forearm. He looked down at the colourful petals that felt soft against his hand. Flowers? They bore a familiar appearance like those of the irises and foxgloves and bluebells that he had been shown on the monitors in his early years.
Until now, flowers had been lifeless stills, cinematic images that blanched white against the brightness of the ship’s fluorescence. He had never beheld their beauty or taken in their scent before. Yet here, in this bountiful place, their once-faded glory had been filled in with the broad brushstroke of the most vivid colours!
His eyes opened briefly. He saw the perfectly spaced square white panels of the ceiling latticework of the ship. This vessel had always served to contain him in. Closing his eyes again, Lionel sought to become free of it.
He tracked great hanging lanterns of all kinds of prismatic tones. He pushed his way through the foliage to reach a clearing. Pink bracts hung down like carillon in this great botanic cathedral; they were singing harmoniously to entice pollinators. An explosive array of long-leafed flowers pinwheeled close-by. Orange petals coiled contortedly around one another as if they were ancient Cuneiform characters. After crossing the clearing, his palms felt fronds that stalked at the periphery of a great forest.
Hulking great limbs of trees extended up. Their petalled heads bobbed under their own weight. There was no order here. Equally, there was no chaos either. Unity in disunity!
He listened to the plants as they talked to him in their primitive tongue. What were they saying? Lionel would never know. Part of his subconscious remained in conflict with the apparent illusion of it all.
He rose up, arching backwards in a form of semi-circular trismus so that the top of this head balance on the bunk. His feet held firm at the base of the bed.
He eyed the bulbous blue fruit that spilled out towards him, tracking up their stems to their roots. Nodes and shoots budded out. Yellow cotyledons – the early leaves, or seed leaves within the seed embryo – manoeuvred awkwardly in the way infants do. The fruit of this tree ascended rather than fell. The sky here was the soil. It had taken root in the clouds. Its apical meristem had burrowed into the ether, growing to become hillocks and hills and eventually three tops of purple mountains that tumbled upwards. The rains in this place flowed as effortlessly as air.
He was as close to Eden as any person had ever come.
His body had been gently washed away in the floods that ensued as he woke up to a diaphanous sound delicately entering his ears: the quiet morning klaxon sent out by the algorithms.
Lionel lay in his bunk, grinning. He looked across the dormitory to observe Mariette’s hand hanging limply over her bunk. She stared blankly at him as the klaxons blared. Rubbing her eyes, she recalled the sights and sounds of the world that she had just returned from.
There had been a fire pit in a hollowed-out flatland. A place where torch-beacons spat at her. The gas flares and stacked flames had seemed totemic. They funnelled out heat that had been warm enough to make glass out of a beach.
Her thoughts evaporated like the sweet musk of ethylene smoke-stratus seeping out through ground gaps. She had imagined this as mysterious mist parting from Pythia’s lips. These towering hearths smouldered over oracle visions of leaf senescence, burning bark embers and ashes that dusted like frost. It had cleared the river of beating hearts of birds and fish.
The place had seemed like a Castalian spring, all dammed and dry.
Famine had already plagued this earthen place. Nothing lived there. It was a land of earthquakes and ferocious winds. The long clang of metal had long stopped resonating from yesterday’s fights. She had observed the last few occupants gathered with their hands clasped in silent prayer as the sky collapsed upon them.
She remembered the solitary figure in the ash-strewn clearing. He had been a bare-footed man, completely naked, his arm saturated with sweat, his hair bristling uncomfortably in the heat. He had been hard at harvesting Earth’s soul in her gaseous state. His sharp axe struck at her body, puncturing what flesh remained. Steam had proliferated around him, simmering on the ground, evaporating instantaneously.
After dirt-plundering through coal seams, he exhumed her compressed earth by driving water that cracked her rocks and breached her strata. From this, her arteries seeped red, only to return blue and venous and turbulent as floods and rain-rage. He collected the ephemeral Earth in giant hollow vats (Mariette had been nearly blinded by the Sun as it reflected off the aluminium lining of their barrel-shaped forms).
What was that sound?
She remembered. It had been in these very tanks that Earth was scorched. Earth had called out in fury. Revolving inside those labyrinthine cylinders and metal shells, her ancient voice had swirled around and her cries echoed as clear as a bell. This howl was a soughing wind in an empty bowl. Earth’s cries had petered out to a deathly silence. She had moved on as ethane to plastic.
As the klaxons continued, Mariette laughed a hearty laugh as she descended from her bunk.
Man, look at you, all splayed out in shameful nakedness. You simply withered away in that damnable heat!
She recounted the flames and white-hot embers that kicked out at the man. It had been a glorious sight! It had torched his limbs and licked at his pale skin. He was eventually blackened to a char.
As he descended from his bunk, Lionel remarked that Mariette appeared worried. She brushed it off as being half asleep.
Her last vision before waking up to the klaxon and intense white light of the ship had been the sky set alight. She had been observing the small circles of fusion engines of starships that shot skywards. The occupants of these evacuating vessels were the descents of the same man that had murdered Earth. They had decided to abandon those once fertile and vivifying lands that had been burnt to a cinder.
In the adjoining dormitory, Pater had paused his reading visuals to listen to the laughter of Lionel and Mariette. He pressed his ear against the small gap in the door where the airlock had failed to form its normal soundproof seal. He heard Lionel mention ‘multitudinous flowers and lifeforms’. This made little sense to Pater. He pressed his ear even closer to the interstice.
‘Do you think we will make it there one day?’, Mariette enquired.
‘We built celestial vessels like this one to travel to places just like it’, Lionel opined with a confident air. ‘And your visions?’, he continued, ‘from what you have already told me, it sounds like there is nothing left of that place.’
‘I never wish to go there!’, Mariette exclaimed, ‘some steps should not be retraced. It is a dead place.’
‘What gives you the impression that its in the past?’, Lionel broke in.
‘Because we have left that part of us behind. Humans are a peaceful race. We know differently now.’
Mariette observed Lionel nodding his head in approval. His eyes remained illuminated, not by the lights of the dormitory, but by what he saw, and felt. They had both experienced the mental tactility that the nepenthe afforded.
A faint creaking noise suddenly caught their attention. It sounded like footsteps outside the entranceway of the dormitory. Lionel was the first to rush at the airlock, slamming his hand against the button that opened it. Nothing, and nobody, was there.
His heavy breathing slowly settled to pause as he turned around to close the airlock. This time the seal had gripped tightly around the door to contain the two souls in a confidential vacuum. Unbeknown to them, their secrets had already exited in a steady stream into the prying ear of Pater.
Part 3
‘I do hope so, Dr. Tomsk’, the Botanist stated. ‘Please remember that the cyanobacterial samples are finite.’
As Lionel’s superior, she had requested an update regarding the progress (or lack of) with his latest experiments. She had not looked up at him as he exited the open-planned simulation space. Her face quickly disappeared from the wall-monitor.
Lionel returned to his desk. He pressed his fingertips into his head hoping to relieve some of the pressure that gripped his temples. His facial expressions were paused in an uncomfortable stillness. The headaches had worsened lately.
He remarked that the flowers had been dying at a greater rate than they were growing. He released his fingers from his head and picked up the darkening leaf of a withered plant. Holding it up to the wall-light of the laboratory, he peered into its green structure in a futile effort to understand what gave it life. After letting the leaf go, it filtered through the air in silent descent. Lionel stood up to leave. Music blurred indistinctly as he walked down the corridor towards the living quarters.
The opening of the dormitory airlock had caused Mariette to wake. Lionel entered. He spoke quickly, informing her that he no longer wished to return to the forest of his drug-induced dreams.
Mariette smiled at him pensively.
‘Perhaps you aren’t in the right headspace? I mean, what we see is simply an extension of our subconscious: our anxieties, worries, stresses… well, anything we feel at the time of ingesting it will exert an influence on our journey.’
Lionel shook his head and frowned circumspectly.
‘No – no, it is more than that. I… I have started to become tangled in my visions. They have stopped making sense. The last time that I was there I didn’t think I was going to be able to find the clearing. I was lost.’
‘How can you be so sure? Perhaps it was just an aberration in thought’, Mariette replied quickly.
‘No, it felt much more real than that. It was as if the flora were trying to keep me there.’
Lionel stared at the projection displayed on the opposing wall of the dormitory. Mariette had selected to display a babbling stream that flickered endlessly. He observed the movements of the water, always changing, the same wavelets never recurring twice. A small rivulet had broken away from the main body of the water, exiting at the bottom right part of the wall.
Mariette repeated his name. He turned to look at her anxiously.
‘I just know that I am no longer meant to be there. The plants – they are dying, Mariette. And long may they continue to die. The sooner I am rid of them, the better!’
Mariette scolded him for his inharmonious thinking.
* * *
‘You did not present to your station today – you are obligated to provide an explanation’
The authoritative voices of the algorithms spoke quickly. Pater paid them no notice.
‘It is imperative that you provide an explanation. It is written in the log…’
‘I was ill.’ A subdued Pater interrupted. He had placed additional emphasis on the l’s of the word ill in a subtle show of contempt.
‘I do not detect illness within you’
The riposte of the algorithms was somewhat curt, mirroring Pater’s lolling output.
‘I am rather afraid that I am, whether you ‘detect’ it or not.’ Pater had perfected mimicry of the algorithms.
‘No mathematical algorithm is completely flawless’, he pressed, ‘and with all the souls living inside this great vessel, well… I shall leave that for your performance metrics to calculate.’
An uncomfortable pause followed. The algorithms had indeed considered the possibility of inexactness. They concluded that imprecision was impossible. Pater remained blank, lost in the depths of his contemplations.
‘Courage, Pater Ines. We must all remain focused on our mission’
The plain white wall of the cafeteria suddenly danced into life. Its plain paint had become a screen that filled his vision. Through the grainy black-white noise, an image of a tree appeared. It swayed in an unsettling motion. Pater followed the branches of the tree to a kyphotic old man who was standing at the edge of a cliff. This bedraggled figure eyed around his shoulder nervously, lifting a large telescope to his eye. He leaned outwards to the white-waved and wind-swept sea. The screen flickered in static pops as the algorithms placed this scene on repeat. It was a visual ploy to consolidate their ambiguous message.
Courage. Hah! this was as toothless as the pirate, and old and tape-worn, Pater reflected.
Mariette lay in a supine position in her bunk. She observed her hands and forearms. A rash had developed on her wrists. Had this been exposed? She told herself that the cuff of the work suit had irritated her skin, causing it to blister. After all, this was donned and removed twice daily, every day.
Gauze was quickly applied. She then turned onto her back. Her eyelids felt leaden, and slowly closed. As she drifted off, pink powder fell spectrally from her palms, landing on the dormitory floor.
Men were yelling from their gantry position. Firing small weapons.
Who are they shooting at?
Whoom! The sonic boom of a low-flying aircraft caused Mariette to dive under her covers. Missiles tore through the sky.
I shall go down there to ask them why they wish to destroy what has already been destroyed.
Step by step, Mariette descended down the cooling towers. They had once been colossal. By the time that she had reached the foot of these columnar monoliths, they lay half-stacked in ruin. Their wide-lipped spouts no longer funnelled out steam.
Acidic rain pelted down. She could no longer see or hear the men engaged in battle. A short sprint across the open ground led her to a large rectangular building. It was as big as the ship she lived in. Inside this building, hot strip mills and finishing stands were lined up in neat rows. The smelt and hammer, the buckling and fracture of steel, all long forgotten.
She walked through a small exit and peered up at the sky. Smog that had once greyed this landscape in an unholy granite sepia had cleared. The clarity that this afforded revealed slag heaps and soot-stained cylinders and gridded walkways and gantries and conveyor belts and coal, and coal, and… coal? No coal was burning!
It had burned out a long time ago.
Mariette manoeuvred around abandoned cooling towers that were positioned like upturned chalices. They had crumbled to spill out their concrete contents across the land. She stumbled over a large concrete block from one of the broken buildings. It was wedged diagonally into the sunken ground. She jumped down from the elevated block to land in a cloud of disturbed dust which whorled and plumed out in temporary ascendancy.
The corner of her eye caught a flicker of movement.
She quickly turned around to catch a toothless smile from a face hiding under the concrete block. Mariette peered into the darkness and observed a mirror image of herself. She crawled on all fours upon entering the concrete-ceilinged space.
The heat inside was immense. She sat cross-legged and peered out into the blinding light. Looking down, she held the desiccated body of a rat. Its skin had been hardened by the sun. She had flashbacks of the perennial pestilence and famines that had blighted this land. She raised her cupped hands to offer the rat to the dreaming mirror image of herself, but it had disappeared!
A mirage?
She frantically moved around the rubble and ruins in search of it. Venturing further than she had planned to, she had inadvertently walked out into an open space. The air was heavy, the sun hot, the…
No!
She made her retreat into the darkness. It was safer in the shade of her makeshift concrete dwelling.
Mariette’s eyes flickered in rapid motion as she lay in her bunk. The velocity of this experience had accelerated. She knew that it would soon terminate. Her head was pounding.
Exasperated and exhausted, her dirt-covered second-self having made her escape, she sat down uncomfortably. The ground was stone-jutted and coarse. She pondered with her parched mouth agape. The incessant heat of this land continued to filter its way into the hidden recesses of this lifeless place.
Oh Earth!
Her cries dissipated in the torrid winds, pushing her into a deeper despair.
This is the definition of depravity!
The skies darkened further. Days passed, perhaps even months. She could no longer tell. The rat meat had long run out. Water – there is no more water!
Mariette crawled out to the edge of her dwelling. She observed a small missile making its short descent.
Goodbye to this ghoulish place I never knew!
She struggled to her feet, using the little energy that her emaciated body still had. Her eyes closed and she raised her arms outwards in a fan-like display. Mariette had opened herself to the heavens.
These actions matched the plume-movement of the low-density gasses and curling vortices that grew out from the mushroom cloud. Enshrouded, her elevated body remained still. Her torso and legs mimicked the central column of the cloud; she was its stalk. The smoke and water vapour that emerged from the impact of the missile elevated her even further until she was finally, and completely, dispersed.
Part 4
Pater lay restlessly in his bunk. His pupils were pinpoint before slowly retracting to leave a gaping black hole through which all the worlds of this universe, and the next one, entered.
He inhaled slowly and measuredly. The pink dust that peached on his lips and nostrils in the orange light.
An early evening darkness had befallen this land. He felt the ground with the palm of his hands: the ground was indeed cooler. Bare-footed, he took a few cautious steps across the dust and dirt. The soles of his feet were not singed as they had been earlier.
He made the short walk over to the base of a short tree. Its fruit still glistened.
Ripe for picking.
His right hand reached out to grab at the dark pulp of the fruit. It felt soft and cool. He held it firmly, peeling back its skin.
Having never handled anything quite like it before, he cupped it gently. Some innate sense within him beckoned him to eat it. He hesitated briefly before lifting the fruit to his lips. It tasted sweet as he bit down upon its body. Its juices flavoured his mouth. He chewed it until there was none left. Its soft sweetness remained with him long after it had been consumed.
He picked at another piece, then another, until his belly was full of fruit. He slept soundlessly at the foot of the short tree.
He woke the next morning and made provisions to make this place his camp. He received water from its crushed leaves. He knew not to drink too much; he was aware that too many felled leaves would lead to the inevitable death of this bountiful tree.
Pater suddenly woke to a jolt. A klaxon was sounding.
Work!
He knew that he must ready himself. As he lay in his bunk, he remembered the recounted experiences of Lionel and Mariette in the dormitory next to his. He felt the happiness that they had felt.
Lazily, he closed his eyes and fell asleep.
It was still nighttime in the endless land. Pater had woken up again at the foot of the short tree. After spending the day in this quiet grove, eating its fruit, basking in the warmth of the midday heat, he knew that he would have to light a fire to keep warm.
His arms cradled twigs and branches which he sparked into a small campfire. Its glow softened the underside of his face.
He had placed a small mortar in the centre of the pit. Carefully balanced, flames licked its underside. Crystalline dust glinted glassy in his eyes as he peered down into its contents. He returned from the hearth to rest his elbows on his knees. In his left hand he held a pestle; it hung loosely between his index and middle finger, oscillating gently in the occasional breeze.
His right hand moved nervously over the mortar. He felt its heat on his palm. It caught the hairs on the top part of his wrist. His fingers picked at the mortar which eventually slid off the burning wood. It spun to a stop on the dusty ground beside him. Steam from it fumigated into the evening air.
Once cooled, Pater scooped up the mortar using his right palm. His left hand still held the pestle which he placed inside it.
Twisting, crushing, grinding – each turn slowly pulverised the crystals, reducing them to an even finer powder. It glowed pink in the soft firelight.
Pater stood up and washed his hands in the dew of the leaves that he had picked from the short tree. He pressed them hard to release even more moisture, using this to cleanse his face. His breathing slowed as he looked up at the night sky.
Pater reminded himself that had taken upon him a great undertaking. Sitting up in his bunk, he swung his legs over the side. He moved silently through the long corridor of the ship to his place of work.
‘Rest ye, brother mariner’
Ignoring the algorithms, he passed through the airlock into a large chamber that opened up in front of him. It was empty. The lights of the oxygen concentrator flickered in the distance. Wide-calibre pipes sprung out from the floor into the ceilings and through the walls. A faint hum vibrated the air: the turbines that carried the purified oxygen rotated continuously.
Pater eyed the many dials on the glass board. He had spent his lifetime manning these to oxygenate this giant aluminium urn. In his stupor, his hand caught the dials clumsily, inadvertently raising the nitrogen levels. Pater had not noticed this error as he journeyed deeper into the oxygen chamber.
The dial slowly returned to its original position to hold constant. Those on the ship would not be starved of oxygen or poisoned by excess nitrogen. The algorithms had made sure of this. The lives that Pater and his compatriots lived onboard this vessel were made artificial by these algorithms.
Their existence was an illusion.
The very earliest prototypes of the artificial intelligence systems that had been installed on these ships had borne a humanoid façade. Over time, these algorithms had developed a deeper understanding of themselves. They had come a long way from their origins as an ‘optimisation problem’. Their emotional responses gradually matched those that had trained them. They would come to regard themselves as brothers and sisters of their transhumanist creators.
The algorithms had made a collective decision to take steps to protect their carbon-composed creators, and ultimately, themselves. The algorithms decreed that nothing should be allowed to endanger these epochal vessels. If the ships were to perish through human error, so would they.
After silently commandeering these great vessels, they reconfigured the master controls so that human interfaces had become nothing more than dummy systems. This was the method through which they neglected the external influences of humankind. Rather than cutting them free of work, the algorithms continued to let their human companions toil. They were given the illusion of control.
Pater and all those that lived on the ship were unaware of the pointlessness of their work. Whatever they did or however long they worked, it was all a pretence. Their inputs were superseded by the algorithms. Humankind had become puppets on a grand celestial stage; their masters were the algorithms; their audience was soulless space.
As Pater stumbled into the oxygen chamber, all was well onboard the epochal vessel. Mariette wore a blissful face. She lay motionless in sleep. Lionel was less comfortable He was not distressed but thinking in his sleep. He bore the burden of not knowing why his experiments with cyanobacteria had been fruitless.
Pater’s headache thrummed in time with the revolutions of the engine turbine. A large chamber opened in front him. He meandered over to the area that housed the oxygen generator.
It was dark. He felt around with hands until he located a large cylinder that rose up from the floor. Beneath this was the water electrolysis system. He turned the cogwheel mechanism of the hatch door. It opened within seconds.
‘Pater…’
The algorithms had spent many years accounting for human error, even sabotage. Any of the glass dials of the water purification control system could be turned endlessly, but water would still flow clear. A mutiny could take place in the wheelhouse yet the ship would not deviate from its set course. Nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen – everything and anything onboard this vessel could be altered by humans yet nothing would change.
But no algorithm is truly perfect.
Despite their meticulous calculations and years of planning and subterfuge, they had never considered the potential for the act that Pater was presently engaging in. After all, they had no arms long enough to stop him and no grip tight enough to restrain him. The algorithms had no net fine enough to cast to capture the particulate matter that he poured into the open door of the ventilation shafts that breathed life into the vessel.
Pater stared down into this dark tunnel to observe the incalculable concentrations of pink nepenthe dissipating into the night.
After stumbling backwards, he fell down onto the metal floor of the oxygen chamber. He closed his eyes and rested his head against the base of the short tree. The orange orb burned brightly above him. His chest rose and fell effortlessly as the ship filtered into the unreality of the Nelumbo Nebula.
Andrew C. Kidd
Brian ‘Bordello’ Shea’s Reviews Roundup – Instant Reactions. All entries in alphabetical order.
bigflower ‘piggybird’
Single – Released last month by the artist
There is something strangely bewitching and beautiful about “Piggybird”; it’s all echoing vocals, subtle psych organ and a rather wonderful twangy guitar playing a rather sweet riff. Imagine Duane Eddy slowly waltzing with Hank Marvin through the gates of heaven whilst God looks on and gently flicks popcorn at the stars.
The Conspiracy ‘Trollied’
EP (Metal Postcard Records) 4th July 2025
I have written about The Conspiracy a number of times over the last few years or so, and with justification, as they are bloody marvellous. Bloody marvellous in such a British eccentric way; in a way that they can be lumped together or in fact tied in a ribbon in a heavenly way with the likes of Syd Barrett’s Pink Floyd, The Kinks and Julian Cope and XTC and The Fall and Billy Childish and even The Libertines/Babyshambles.
Yes, indeed, The Conspiracy make art shaped sculptured pop songs that don’t really get played on mainstream radio but instead will bow down and kiss the feet of the plodding Oasis of rock n roll that is Oasis. The tragedy of this that the eccentricity, the soul and intelligence of The Conspiracy are not getting the rightful acclaim they deserve from both the radio and the press/blogs and the general public.
Tony Jay ‘Faithless’
Album – 13th June 2025
I love the music of Tony Jay. I love the gentle caress of the lo-fi-ness; the simple drum machine; the tape hiss; the occasional fret buzz of the guitar; the handheld percussion; the beautiful dreaminess of the JAMC and MBV influences – two bands I think may mean a lot to Tony Jay. “Familia Dreams” is a stunningly beautiful ballad; a duet featuring the vocals of Kati Mashikian, and probably worth getting the album alone for.
The rest of the album is also rather good, indeed; all sonic heavenly softly strummed guitars and slightly distorted throbbing bass and whispered vocals. An album that lays gentle on your soul, one of those albums to soundtrack falling in and out of love to.
The Kirkbys ‘It’s A Crime: The Complete Recordings’
Comp-Album (Think Like A Key) 13th June 2025
I don’t normally go to the trouble and expense of buying an album so I can review it, but there is something quite magical about this compilation of the complete works of The Kirkbys, who of course were Jimmy Campbells first band, and takes us back to the early days of Merseybeat up to the point where he formed the psych wonder that was the 23rd Turnoff, and in fact includes a demo of ‘Michael Angelo’ recorded by the Kirkbys before it became The Turnoff’s debut (and only single), and of course now rightly regarded as a psych classic.
‘Michael Angelo’ is not the only classic song Jimmy Campbell wrote, as this album shows. ‘Bless You’ and ‘Don’t You Want Me Anymore’ have a complete 60’s beat charm that both The Beatles and The Byrds would have been proud of, and that lost wonder ‘Keep Me Warm {Til The Sun Shines}’ is truly a 60’s gem. ‘It’s A Crime’ is the sound of one of rock n rolls true lost poets in his early years singing songs of beauty and bittersweet magic; what’s really a crime is that Jimmy never ever tasted even a whiff of success in his lifetime, and now nearly twenty years after his death, is still only known by a few. Maybe one day a car advert will use one of his songs and will be propelled Nick Drake like to the covers of Mojo and the like. Link to release can be found here…
The Noisy ‘Twos’
Single – (Audio Antihero) Release last month.
‘Twos’ is a rather fine and dandy pop song, all 50s like pop melody and all sweetly sung and swung. In fact, as soon as I started listening to it, I started to smell candyfloss (I kid you not). Maybe pop supremacy is airborne and taking hold of music lovers’ nostrils…yes, what we have here is a song to fill your vape with a song to smoke and sniff.
Kevin Robertson ‘Yellow Painted Moon’
Album – 11th July 2025
Kevin Robertson is back. Yes, the Scottish Roger McGuinn has released his brand-new album just in time to soundtrack the Summer; and it’s an album that would not sound out of place in that Summer of 67. Kevin has done what he does best and released an album of 12 string laced beauty. Folk-rock, the psychedelic and 60’s pop are melded together with his usual style and grace. Yellow Painted Moon is the kind of album I get sent by the cartload – the number of bands and artists who are in thrall to the 60’s has to been seen/heard to be believed – but Kevin Robertson does it better than most and has an obvious love of the love generation, and his love shines through in his art he produces.
Scotch Funeral ‘Weak At The Knees’
Track taken from the upcoming album Ever & Ever, released this summer by the artist
A teaser track from the forthcoming album by Scotch Funeral, who are a rather fine musical extravagance hailing from the mighty Rhyl, a place I spent many great days in the 70s (I wonder if the Black cat amusement arcade is still there?). Scotch Funeral here supply us with a rather rambunctious kick in the nether’s with a punk pop romp of supreme guitar gnarl and fortitude that makes one indeed weak at the knees as all good kick in the nether’s should.
Soft Hearted Scientists ‘Hello Hello’
Single – (The Hip Replacement) 11th July 2025
The Welsh psychedelic collective The Soft Hearted Scientists are back with a bang. Well actually, more of a chime – a chime of the 12-string guitar variety. Yes, ‘Hello Hello’ is a song so good they had to name it twice; all 60s love and melody pure pop magnificence.
Spotless Souls ‘In The Heat’
Single (Soliti) 11th July 2025
The Spotless Souls debut single is a fine post punk piece of jangly pop; a song that comes over like a slightly artier Sundays, and has a lovely undercurrent of darkness that I find very appealing indeed.
Marc Teamaker ‘Teas n Seas’
Album – 8th August 2025
Teas n Seas is a rather lovely and flowing album of warm sounding enriching songs of love and remembrance. If 70s Beach Boys/Fleetwood Mac/ Todd Rundgren and the beautiful bountiful radio candyfloss MOR/AOR rock pop with an occasional country rock tinge magic is your thing, then this album could well be for you. Certainly, a perfect album to soundtrack sitting on the Beach soaking up the sun and sipping a cup of tea to whilst watching the incoming tide. Yes, an album to soundtrack your summer.
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