In review: a world of sonic discoveries. Dominic Valvona
Photo Credit: Jeremiah Chiu by Brian Guido
Beat Keller & Jorge Espinal ‘El Agua Es Lava’
(Defkaz Records) 16th October 2026
Two lone swordsmen of their guitar art in combative experimental mode, the collaboration between the Swiss musician Beat Keller and his Peruvian-born foil Jorge Espinal is an exercise in instrumental transmogrification and the avant-garde.
Aligning respective disciplines with alarming, jarring and haywire results, the composer, sound engineer and, importantly and most demonstrably in this case, guitarist Keller entangles and tabs away to the meta contributions of his Buenos Aires-based trick noise maker. In a serial mode of a kind, with barely anything that would constitute the musical or the rhythmic, El Agua Es Lava (which I believe translates as “the water is lava”) skewers reference points from the most technically fucked-up of jazz guitar sparring and hysterics to the art school performances of Fluxus and their ilk, hardcore music, the industrial and erratically uncategorised.
Hi-pierced squalls and babbles of recognisable electric guitar shredding and fret gymnastics career or scramble across beaten metallics, workshop tools percussion, data coded squeals and thrusted oscillations. From the factory to volcanic explosive backdrops and the spine-chilling, distressed musicianship of a strange and alien kind builds up a crazy exploration of collaborative energies. Interesting sounds emerge: the growl of a revved-up guitar, the distorted coarse wiring and the belted drum kit that sounds like its being shoved down an iron fire escape.
But if you want a summary, and one of my descriptive go-tos, then imagine Gunter Schickert, Bill Orcutt, Steve Vai and Don Fiorino going to work like samurai guitar wielding mavericks against Glenn Branca, Fennesz and Last Exit.
Brama ‘La Raive’
(Airfono) 25th September 2026
Part of a much championed (including on this site) dynamic celebration of the Occitan language and it’s haphazard and continuously hampered cultural ties, the four-piece psychedelic-rock band Brama follow in the footsteps of fellow revivalists Cocanha this year in releasing their very own album.
I reviewed the latter earlier this summer, detailing or at least dipping into the context and foundations of the Occitan scene. So, excuse me if this does seem familiar, but here goes a very brief outlining of that history.
Playing on France’s foundations, pulled together in dominating fashion from various connected but distinguished former independent kingdoms and regions, and the erosion or indeed forced erasure of languages and cultures like the Occitan, the Clermont Ferrand quartet of Brama whisk and conjure up a “path between dream and reality, memory and imagination, where dance becomes a space vivid with memory.” They title this convergence “La Raive” or “The Rave” – an indication of direction and mood.
Though some nationalistic movements seem more in favour than others, France’s flirtations with fascism during the time of the Vichy regime’s collaboration with their Nazi overlords during WWII infamously, and most dangerously, used various folk traditions as state and ideological propaganda. Wrestling those same traditions now, and within the context of attacks in more recent decades on Occitan speakers and its alliance or take-up by activist groups locking horns with the French government, the recent musical forces behind this revival wish to free it from the forces of conservatism, misogyny and the stain imposed upon it by the tyrannical.
Whilst a far more in-depth and researched take is needed on all the ramifications, the nuances and the political outcomes, the strife and acts of resistance that have been imbued within this group’s sound and lyrics can be traced back to the patchwork of Medieval realms in what is now Southern France. A romantic language porously spreading out from its geographical namesake (loosely, I believe, formed on the model of Aquitaine, which is now known as Languedoc) into pockets of the Pyrenees (and so Spain too) and further afield into Italy, Occitan is roughly still in use, spoken by at least (depending on where you get your stats) a couple of million people. It’s poetic and lyrical turns, its polyphonic harmonies now, in part, provide manna and liturgy for Brama’s new album. And though I’m not sure if this instrument can be solely attributed to Occitan culture, the band use that most evocative of wound-up strung and drone intense instruments, the hurdy gurdy – credited to band member Amandine Pauvert.
But as this is, at least in part, a rave-up, the music is at least vibrant and animated; a danceable spell of Occitan etymology and ethnology twinned with excursions of motorik (Neu! via Beak> and The Soundcarriers) Krautrock and the electrified microtonal frills, dotting, dabbing and tabbing of Franco-Arabia. In fact, and I really wasn’t expecting this, Brama would be a great live partner to Qubec’s Angine de Portrine.
They begin, however, with an almost entirely vocal arrangement opener: save for a subtle hurdy gurdy drone that becomes one with the tones of the chorus of voices. Spanning the ages on short waves of passionate harmonious resonance, the quartet offer up a sort of vocalised liturgy come shoe-in for the next track, ‘Belou de jorn’, a more animated burst of motored lively dance-rock; a mix of the already mentioned AdP but also, strangely, Stereolab.
There are songs that groove and songs with a message, all mesmeric and hypnotic. The signature sound of souk-rock disco, the more fuzzed-up, and the near cosmic and starry is experimented with further on every track; as its title suggest, ‘Luminar’ seems to be transmogrifying a borrowed 70s Bee Gees tune and mixing it with the Arcade Fire whilst gazing at passing satellites and shooting stars, and ‘Belou de Nuech’ projects an astral journey to Java via Faust. ‘Niurada’ is like a cross between Alice Dona and Ladytron, played out to the pastoral sound of the cabrette and scrunchy guitar pedal effects.
The hurdy-gurdy drones evoke everything from medieval Occitan and the group France to the Celtic and psychedelically rural, whilst that microtonal guitar and the vocals fit the North African French diaspora. Imagine that all wrapped up in an electrifying Krautrock cornucopia of dancing and raving, and of motoring, and you’ll nearly there. For this is a pop-y like accessible cosmic renaissance of the “d’Oc” culture delivered with fuzzed and scuzzed energy and plastique tubular rhythmic finesse.
Jeremiah Chiu ‘Edge Conditions’
(International Anthem) Physical Release: 9th October 2026/Digital 27th October 2026
Modulating away from and decoupling, and yet once more working alongside his foil of recent years Marta Sofia Honer and band mates from the Small Medium Large ensemble, synthesist imbued composer and multi-instrumentalist Jeremiah Chiu unveils a soloist titled architectural and environmental inspired textural and rhythmic project that’s one part electronica of a 80s and 90s vintage pedigree, another part body music, and yet another that evokes the electronic, the floppy disk cut-ups and environment luminaries of Japan.
Edge Conditions features a pool of talented West Coast and Chicago hot-housed musicians; many of which have either released records on or been a loose part of the International Anthem label family. Whilst drawing upon the amorphous threads of Chiu’s previous collaborations with Honer, but also with the grandee of new age experimentation and fourth world peregrinations, Ariel Kalma, the former Chicago breed and L.A. based artist calls in favours from the Japanese musician, composer and artist of note, Takako Minekawa; the Japanese-American multi-instrumentalist, saxophonist, composer and poet Patrick Shiroishi (previous projects that I’ve reviewed include a match-up with Dave Harrington and Max Jaffe, plus involvement with the underground super group, Water Damage); Chicago jazz trumpeter, composer and bandleader or repute and influence, Marquis Hill; producer, multi-instrumentalist, trumpeter and instigator of the band Whitney, the alter-ego Resavoir and the Les Sons Du Cosmos trio, Will Miller; and the all-rounder percussionist and drummer with untold sessions and collaborations under his belt, plus a quartet of solo albums, and appearance’s in the already referenced SML troupe, Booker Stardum.
Possibly Chiu’s most unique foray into the rhythmical, Edge Conditions combines the plastique with the organic; the synthesized with the electroacoustic; and the concrete with the materials of space. Beats and tempos run out through an apparatus of effects merge with ease with more live or studio played drums, an essence of viola and hazy airs, breaths of trumpet; all of these sounds, patterns and wave forms meeting with the titular edge of both the abstract and the very real buildings, the public and shared spaces, and the places that converge glass and metal with a constant shimmered, bobbled and springy interactive dances and movements of either celebration, joy, introspection and cosmic mystique.
Futuristic and yet retrospective in recalling everything from the Yellow Magic Orchestra and its members various solo projects (I’m reminded of Sakamoto’s Esperanto LP on this album’s earlier tracks), plus their Japanese peers of Yasuaki Shimizu, Hiroshi Yoshimura, Susumu Yokota. This is layered up with shades of Lukid, μ-Ziq, Richard James in both his Aphex Twin and Polygon Window guises, Casino Versus Japan, Robert Hood, various House music and minimalist techno pioneers, and on the album’s metallic acid-house dance number ‘Night Fog’ a meeting of minds between Carl Graig and Felix da Housecat on an imaginary DJax Upbeat 12”.
You have the serious juxtaposed smoothly with club rhythmic body movements; and an assortment of instruments and effects that are often relieved from their serious avant-garde origins or loftier aspirations to just, well…dance around like Richie Hawtin’s Plastik “Men” or polygons and shapes lifted from their staid stasis as materials holding up the edifice of the city. Tracks like ‘Interface’ sound like a calculus centre of Tortoise and Holy Fuck quivery and chemistry wobbled body-rocking popping, whilst ‘Non-narrative’ is like some kind of techno funk from the Warp label of the early 90s. A contrast to both would be the sci-fi operatic VHS score of the fallen, ‘Sentimental Object’ and the Japanese garden wistful lingers, the metal scaffold tapping and the John Zorn like electronic valve instrument (performed by Miller) effected discombobulations and warps of the Fourth World and Ariel Kalma starring vapour thruster title-track. ‘A.M. Fuses’ is another danceable wavey number; worth mentioning for its Aphex and Sakamoto floppy disc cut-up breaking and paddled metallic tubular currents. This is one of those albums you’ll need to revisit often, with its true potential, its magic and groove revealing itself over time; on the fourth play through I’m still picking up on and noticing more modulations, clever interplay and sounds. It won’t light the world on fire but is none the less impressive and immersive for it. A really cool album of possibilities that dances to a mood and rhythm that many of us will find familiar but inviting.
The Corrupting Sea ‘Longing’
(Somnimage Records) 7th October 2026
At the helm, navigating the release of ambient and electronic music from the peripherals for the last decade (anniversaries looming) through his Somewherecold Records label venture whilst also spearheading his very own alias vehicle, The Corrupting Sea, Jason Lamoreaux once more sets both his measured philosophical quandaries and abstracted landscapes and scenes of personal joy, meditation and the existential to a subtle, immersive ecological ambient score.
Before we delve in, I must show my gratitude to Jason and his highly prolific label for offering room and a platform for two of this blog’s biggest champions and American pen pals, John Lane (masquerading wonderfully for years as A Journey Of Giraffes) and Violet Nox. It’s in this role alone that Jason can be held in high regard; offering up a vital showcase for those underground artists staggeringly ignored by the mainstream and even some of the snottier media outlets. I’ve merely dipped in from time-to-time but reviewed quite a haul of those albums over the years; some I’d suggest were every bit as important and good as anything turned out by Warp, Mute and the usual crowd of more celebrated and trumpeted labels.
Twenty-four albums in, with number twenty-five on the horizon (marking another anniversary, and the release of a very special collected works edition of the sonic saga so far), Longing draws on Jason’s own plaintive reminisces, the pains of missing out on exploring the environments, both the awe inspiring and the more intimate spots in nature, that have now become prohibited to hm due to illness. Candid if you ask him, and in the notes to this particular album, Jason has suffered for a long time with physical and mental disabilities; ones that cause extreme exhaustion and fatigue, and for obvious reasons make these youthful treks and communions of the past seem out of reach or difficult to replicate: There’s a specific recall in the notes of summer vacations spent in Yosemite National Park, scored aurally and sonically through the Andrew Heath-like lower-case trickles of piano notes, the churned vapours, the turbine like atmosphere and the language of the aviary on the rhetorical ‘Where Does One Go When One Can Go Nowhere’.
Through the main usage of ambient moods and feelings, Jason ponders with the prompt of descriptive, inquiring titles, the places held dear; scenes and locations of great importance, ones that evoke episodes from his life of safety, curiosity and encouragement. Incipient beginnings of near nothingness gradually take on a soft melodic quality as they grow and build upon the tunnelling rays and tubular synthetic wave forms that seem to convey a real depth and expression of the ecological set pieces, or the memories reflected in each track title.
Surveying a wondrous, mysterious and almost alien-sounded typography, Jason merges cleaner synthesised sounds and hidden sourced machine constructed atmospherics with field recordings of water sprays, moist dripping caverns, and the reverberated song and communications of birds. Some tracks sound more natural than others, whilst some could be said to be almost sci-fi, a touch off-world. Veils descend across fabled lakes with crystallised notation; what could be described as blizzardy specks move cyclonically in a synth-made whiteness; bucketed waters are scooped up in a fashion under the dripped dampness of a cave; and Forest Robots vibes are recalled in the gentle joyfulness and electronica celebration of ‘Tree Swings and Climbing Trees’. All the while that central sensibility of longing is drawn upon to create an album that’s simultaneously as pining as it is aspiring: the mood music of someone forced to watch from a distance, yet feeling some of the vitality, the enormity and inspiration of those landscapes and specific sites, memories that hold a special place in his life.
Allison de Groot & Rich Ruth ‘S-T’
(Western Vinyl) 2nd October 2026
Who knows what a Rich Ruth (the persona alias of Michael Ruth) produced Allison de Groot project would have sounded like in the end; that original remit and plan instead evolving into a shared titular collaboration of equals, with both creative sparks writing together, sharing and developing ideas conjured up in a Nashville studio over the course of a year.
The solo endeavour of the clawhammer banjo maestro of repute de Groot, this traversing work has grown from its incubator southern rooted projection into something, perhaps, much larger in expansive scale and deeper in layered immersive soundscapes. If much of the inspiration derives from that instrument of choice, the introduction of Ruth’s own multi-instrumental rack, plus the contributions of the Canadian and Berklee hot-housed violinist Patrick M’ Gonigle, and the erred wavy mirage-like steel peddle phrases and lines of Ruth’s oft Shrunken Elvis bandmate Spencer Cullum, have all added to the stirring evocations and scored environments that materialise from a reimagined Americana and abstract ambience.
Associated with ‘old-time tunes’, traditional American music and bluegrass, the clawhammer banjo takes its name from the claw-like posture that’s used by the player to ‘hammer’ the strings. This technique is said to emit a gentler and more melodic sound overall, and in this case, effortlessly blend an essence of its country origins with something both transcendent and cosmic: carrying the listener off to planes and places that exceed the borders of the American South and the home of country music itself.
Hear and Be Yonder David Casper and the tubular cascades of Mike Oldfield are transported to the prairie and wheat fields of a more abstract Nashville environment, as a synthesis of neo-classical and chamber dreams are woven together with the hallucinatory, and the more recognisable invocations of flowing, running rivers (the opening Oldfield-esque and dawn awakened light emitting Daniel Lanios golden rayed score ‘Nervion’ is named, I believe, after the Spanish river that runs along the ports and shipyards of Bilbao, out into the Bay of Biscay). Tracks like ‘New Intervention’ reminded me of Glass and Cage relocated to the old West, whilst ‘10-14’ was more like Tortoise panning for gold on the reservation with The Green Kingdom and Laraaji. But the banjo arpeggiator ‘Sorgin’ has a certain Japanese sound of paddled spokes and dulcimer-like woody bobbles, whilst ‘Rocks From The Moon’ could be Suzanne Ciani catching solar flares with Cluster. Imagine, if you will again, that Eno had produced Andrew Tuttle’s Fleeting Adventure, or Marisa Anderson had got together with Bruce Langhorne, for that’s about as close as I can get to describing this transportive new album from the collaborative partnership of de Groot and Ruth. And it must be one of the first albums of its nature to lift the clawhammer banjo from its origins and purpose to different heights, moods and fourth world-esque visions.
Miska Lamberg ‘presage’
(Discreet Archive) 2nd October 2026
And it all amounts to this: the minimalistic but deeply conveyed melodic score that builds into a haunted and sad dreaminess of the Boards of Canada and there like. Yes, the latest sound art or installation-like enveloped immersive experience from Miska Lamberg takes its long-form time to reach a certain gravitas of sound waves melody and feels that make the whole journey worthwhile.
Aptly released via the Discreet Archive platform – a label synonymous for allowing artists with such grand explorations the scope and time to breathe – Lamberg’s forewarned omens on presage use the environment, the hidden and obscured background field recordings of movements, the uncertainty and anticipation of various shortwave radio transmissions, and atonal drones and hums to conjure up a mysterious, sometimes near supernatural and alien landscape.
Lamberg’s biographical blurb states that, ‘pieces have been featured by record labels Sawyer Spaces, Dragons’ Eye Recordings, Falt and PRESQUE TOUT, and in exhibitions and performances at Museum of Technology, Urban Apa X Ateneum, Lighting Mind, Kamara, Swedish International Film Festival, Galleria Kalleria, Penthouse Collective’s gallery space, modern dance festival Tanssivirtaa Tampereella, and KATOAVA Collective’s various events and projects.’ And so, from the conceptualism of the art world to the studio and site specific, Lemberg has covered quite an array of sound experiments and sonic projects to build whole worlds out of not much more than the atonal and recondite. But this time around, prompted or indeed inspiring the stanzas of Minja-Milia Ikonan – which you can find included in the bandcamp description -, Lemberg’s presage evokes an assemblage of Helsinki environmental sourced recorded weather fronts and more disturbing ominous going ons.
Stormy but weightless winds, as noted by Ikonan, billow in across what could be described as cliff tops like synthesised airs: a mist even. Like early Kluster causing a venerable imbued mystique or even cathedral era Tangerine Dream, the atmospherics are liminal: between the otherworldly, the esoteric and sci-fi. Giant strides and brushed walks through grass and upon concrete are interspersed amongst the percolation of something boiling on the stove and the buzz of unidentified insects and those shortwave blizzards of crispy radio waves and radioactivity. This is track one by the way, which suffuses each strand, each tonal layer slowing and gradually over nearly twenty minutes.
Track two starts with an interference in the fabric, hisses and the looming presence of something from beyond. Again, hidden generators and machinery are obscured underneath a sort of greyish film, right up until that descriptive build-up of saddened but moving melodic sound waves that I described in the introduction.
As an experience its certainly an immersive one; a 4-D surrounded environment of the alien and yet familiar, reimagined through an apparatus and process that invokes the descriptive.
Light Conductor ‘Sequence Three’
(Constellation) 25th September 2026
Vapour trails and the luminescent heat patterns of distant planets are conjured up alongside soft hues of abstracted circular colours and amorphous transcended spiritualism on the latest and final sequence from the Montreal partnership of Stephen Ramsey and Jace Lasek: with Lasek’s Besnard Lakes band mate Olga Goreas orbiting as a third moon to the duo’s planetary base camp emissions of synthesised and vintage analogue psychedelic ambient slow-release space rock.
After two previous volumes, Light Conductor (a sort of vessel for the Young Galaxy’s Ramsey and his Besnard Lakes’ foil, Lasek, to pursue visionary drone scapes on distant planets) envision a diaphanous and mysterious escape to off-worlds; the utopia of World Expos and astrophysicists channelled into a long form kosmische and shoegaze imbued immersive experience in which the duo “…apply rockiest sound design to minimalist tracks.”
Through prisms of Fairlight synth, hints of 80s sci-fi VHS scores, Vangelis, Tangerine Dream, Zoon Van Shook, Iasos, new age music of a certain vintage, burbled submerged bass lines and touches of Moebius, our astronautic musicians follow the cosmic rays, watch for visitations from mystical aviators, pray at the altar of sci-fi, and make concrete the abstract perimeters of celestial feels and horizons. All the while they teether themselves to earthly concerns and dystopian crisis with the apparition broadcasts of financial ruination and the crash on the album’s middle marker, ‘Ghost City Radio’; a near Cassandra ominous Evangelistic rebuttal of Wall Street, the Stock Markets and Capitalism as par the course for the millennial generation, put to a saddened vapour, some sharp lifts, bobbed bass, and synthesised pre-set rhythms: a union between John Michal Jarre and University Challenged.
There’s some beautiful, and again, spiritual like expansions to this five-track suite of space dust particle shimmers, curvatures and spectral rainbows. And when Goreas’ signature wispy and husked shoegaze-y vocals emerge on the lush space aviary ‘Omenize’, those lunar mirages transform into a healing balm. The truly long form finale, ‘Supercontinent’, as epic as its title, features another cosmic menagerie alongside its drones, evocations of Cluster, Eat Lights Become Lights, and its plastique shuttled rhythms and metallic language
An immersive experience and cosmic opus of kosmische inspired slow-psychedelic and shoegaze rock from this Canadian collaboration; the perfect ending to a triptych sequence of such materialised interplanetary and otherworldly peregrinations and slow-burn releases of transcended escapism.
Mousecunt ‘Orgasmic Mouse’
(Infibulate Records) 25th September 2026
The inaugural release from the newly orchestrated Infibulate Records label, seeks to make its mark with a most controversially reactionary piece of Goth-synth-barbarity and industrial-EDM bad taste-riven polemics. Torture porn for the lugholes; repulsive lyricism aimed at unsettling; the anonymous Iranian band must have had to dodge the authoritarian camarilla’s morality police (surely) to unveil such filth, bloodiness and sexual depravity.
Information wise, we know that this group features “a woman” performing on Nord synths and vocals; “a man” performing on a Gibson guitar, Hofner bass and sharing vocals; and one more “man” on Tama drums. An anonymous line-up is mixed and mastered by another anonymous engineer in the USA; their task, to produce a sonic assault upon the senses from fortnight session played at a private studio in Azerbaijan earlier this year. They’ve been working under the anonymity cloak of darkness, we’re told, since 2022: and for good reason.
Explosively digging and wrestling in the dirt with themes of extreme artistry practice, domestic violence, volatile (to say the least) relationships, religion, humiliation and abandonment (through the most harrowing of Freudian prisms), the trio let loose with the obscenest lyrics I’ve heard since “GG” Allin or Throbbing Gristle.
Told through an “unreliable narrator” in an autobiographical-like (though it also says “from different perspectives”) style of protestation, name calling and accusation, and with barbed slugged shots of the near physical, Orgasmic Mouse could be deemed a quasi-concept album of a sort. At least joined together in a very abstract form; threaded together by a similar if changing moody production of dungeon abusing vulgarity, maximalist scopes, knife sharpened synths, both death metal guttural and more ghoulish coquettish vocalisation, and horror cult EDM.
It can be an uneasy and even vilely offensive if not dodgy listen lyrically wise – the opening gratuitous perversive analogies and troubling descriptive rage of ‘Fucking The Mirror’ being the worst -, but seems to indulge in the swamps of such criminality and extremism to reach the pit of hellish confession, and to rattle the foundations: In grappling with their subject matters they’ve dredged up the most caustic, spiteful and disturbing dialogues and poetry.
Because of their provenance, it’s impossible not to connect the dots: An Iranian goth-metal-synth-EDM-metal-art band dangerously sailing close to enraging the Islamic Republic’s sensibilities and rule of law. I can’t imagine, considering the recent bombardments from the USA, and the possibility of regime change, and the years since the Arab Spring of continuous opposition against this same regime by a sizeable (often young) part of its population have made it any easier to exist making this kind of music – so many artists, and protestors of recent years have ended up raped, tortured, disappeared or executed (and it must be said, with fuck all help, support or protest by the same brigades marching against Israel and the West week in, week out). Of course, it’s easy to see how reality being referenced and played out on the ghoulish, horror of this album – perhaps mirroring it far too well; the violence is everywhere: from the physical to insulting and sexual.
For a reference, imagine Ministry or Revolting Cocks going toe-to-toe with Xmal Deutschland, Alien Sex Fiend, Mercy Girl, Rosaceae and Nine Inch Niles.
How this will go down is anyone’s guess, but from a label built on provocation and the extremities of contemporary music, it’s a successful launch of offending, violent and more sensory punkified gothic dance music and tortured art performance.
Antonio Raia ‘Σ [sigma]’
(Kohlaas Records) 1st October 2026
Not the focal draw, but as part of his collaborations with fellow Neapolitan artist Renato Fiorito, the body, soul and environment amalgamated – like a united flow – saxophonist, composer and improvisor Antonio Raia has both appeared and been mentioned on the Monolith Cocktail twice: firstly with a premiere, shared with our Italian pen pals at Kalporz, of the eighteen minutes long ‘‘Too Many Reasons’, and then a couple of years later, as part of the greater contextual piece on Fiorito’s Lustra album
The former saw the amorphous saxophonist Raia and his sound artist foil join together to capture the abstract atmospheres of cerebral reconnection; a sonic field in which to escape the stresses and weight of the Covid pandemic. Produced in lockdown, in the partnership’s native Napoli, this imagined space, in which a faded, fuzzy pining and wandering saxophone wafts around a rotated motorised humming and propeller purred windy and airy isolated soundtrack, brought together two experimental composers looking to create an ‘intimate and visceral experience’.
The latter of those two pieces was described at the time as ‘a votive offering of gratitude and devotion’ to that same city; attributed to Fiorito this time around, the track and album was promoted as his ‘personal vision of Naples’. Raia on his part, popped up on the crackling fireside, faint melodic and reflective softly rasped saxophone memory of ‘3694’.
As resumes go, Raia’s includes the critically applauded 2018 debut solo album, Asylum, and the 2023 published soliloquy book, La memoria bucata –a project developed through the sonic manipulation of archival materials by the theatre director Antonio Neiwiller, who passed away prematurely in 1994. In 2024, at the invitation of filmmaker Béla Tarr, a key figure in radical contemporary European cinema, he conceived and realised Facing Béla Tarr, a sound action for saxophone and waterphone based on the film Prologue. Two years later, and bringing us right up to date, in early 2026 he composed and released the soundtrack for [campanamuta], a six-act radio work by Martin Errichiello produced by the Italian National broadcaster Rai Radio3. During that time, he’s also managed collaborations with Alvin Curran, Elio Martusciello, Mike Cooper, Chris Corsano, and David Ryan and others.
Merging once more with his environment – this time the former Wasserturm Berlin water tower, located in Prenzlauer Berg -, Raia uses the architectural acoustics within this long-since decommissioned space to form a bond with the atmospherics and his instruments of choice – in this case both the baritone and alto saxophones and the Japanese Koshi wind chimes. Almost uninterrupted, recorded without overdubs by the Grammy and Emmy Awards-winning producer Francesco Donadello, Raia lets his feelings being roused and stirred, prompted by this peculiar utility turn studio – the oldest such water tower of its kind in the city, built in 1877 and still in operation up until 1952.
But just to draw from further afield too, the album’s title is borrowed from the Greek alphabet, and the album’s only sax-free performance, ‘Veils of Echo’, has a decidedly Morricone-y feel to it – the chimes brushed and swept in glissando style like crystal glass are accompanied by an Alessandro Alessandroni-like reverberated whistle.
Invoking the blues, the noirish, an essence of the 1960s New York jazz scene, and the venrable, Raia’s soundings and dialogues with the reverberations and echoes traverse the lower register honks of a ship’s funnels to the near amplified blows of a near dry spittle and the cyclonic spirals of bird-like higher tones that fly towards the studio’s ceiling. I’m reminded of Jonah Parzen-Johnson’s own solo soliloquies, the explorations of Timo Lassy, and John Buckingham’s parts on Bill Dixon’s Son of Sisyphus album. Also, the Instagram video uploaded and shared soloist musings and outpourings performed by Andy Haas in the gardens of the Modern Art Museum in NYC during covid – just an individual playing and conversing, sending vibrations out into the environment.
You get to hear (I’m assuming) Raia’s voice on the album’s finale, ‘Body and Cipher’. Taking a near liturgy turn of religious holy mantras and cantos, venerated choral voices meet with the deeper and bigger sound of low honked, near tuba-like, sax.
Suffused amongst those instruments, which can be quite melodic and even tuneful at times, even sympathetic, yearned and responsive, are sounds that can only be described as paddled, or full of texture.
The sounds of extrospection, of mystery, of the mournful and the dreamy can be heard across this album’s various ruminative wanderings and reverberations; a combination of the physical and improvised, all prompted by that site-specific recording space.
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 able, then you can now show your appreciation by keeping the Monolith Cocktail afloat through the Ko-Fi donation site.
The End of the Month Playlist For September 2026
September 29, 2026
Our Monthly Playlist selection of choice music from the last month. Curated by Dominic Valvona & Matt Oliver.
Choice music and sonics from the last month (or so) picked from our reviews, but also featuring the tunes we missed out on or didn’t get the room to feature at the time.
Curated by Dominic Valvona with choice hip-hop cuts selected by Matt Oliver and some tunes lifted from reviews by Brian ‘Bordello’ Shea. Includes entries from the Ukraine to Turkey to Somalia, the Americas and Europe. This month’s courtesy of featured artist Juga-Naut.
Please note: The Monolith Cocktail has given up its accounts on both Instagram and bluesky. You can find the blog on WordPress, in every search engine going, or on Facebook and X. Or if you don’t want to miss anything, you can sign up to email notifications.
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 able, then you can now show your appreciation by keeping the Monolith Cocktail afloat through the Ko-Fi donation site.
The Track List For September 2026:
Dragonflies ‘Slower’
megiapa ’11.11’
Your Old Droog & Evidence ‘Brighton Beach’
Pastense ‘Colors in the Puddles’
Al-Khemetic, Sa-Roc & Dezarie ‘Power Bars’
Regina Collage ‘First New Place’
Crystal Eyes ‘Pretending To Be People’
American Motors ‘no horses’
Devon Church ‘Vast As Space’
Boycalledcrow ‘mantis man’
Baba Zula ‘Kutsal Zeytin Halayi’
Juga-Naut ‘Never Nothing’
Che Noir & The Uce ‘Urban Essence’
Jam Baxter ‘Whole Sky’
Dur-Dur Band ‘Adigaa I Dhalanrogey (You’ve Changed Me)’
The Male Pattern ‘Charlie (The Robbery)’
The Bordellos ‘Oh Nora’
Greg Freeman ‘Cahokia’
Party Dozen ‘Euro Stomper’
White Ring ‘CATATONIC’
Blu & Sndtrak ‘LA’
Michael Christmas, Chris Crack & Girl Talk ‘Garfield Hated Mondays But Didn’t Have A Job’
Blockhead, Proleter & Arms and Sleepers ‘Garbage Time’
Datkid, Illinformed & Dumb Logic ‘Narcotic Athletics’
Dollar Brand, Don Cherry & Carlos Ward ‘Bra Joe From Kilimanjaro’
Hieroglyphics, Casual, Opio, Phesto, Pep Love & Del The Funky Homosapien ‘Hard Numbers’
Curly Castro, shemar, Blackchai, Sunmundi ‘New Mutants’
Super Scintillant ‘Phase IV’
Xqui & Pyramids of Phobos ‘Progressive Modernism – Strings Version’
Mike Gale ‘Our Place’
Jon Tye, Amine Mesnaoui & Cubenx ‘Morning Glow’
For The Curious and Those Wishing To Catch Up On The Last Month’s Posts, Here’s The Links:
Perusal #83 – Super Scintillant, Érick d’Orion’s ‘Mes fantômes’, The Bordellos, Devon Church, Dragonflies, Leenalchi, megiapa, Stylianos Ou
Our Daily Bread 661 – Fran Ashcroft, bigflower, Cut Chord, The Free Four, Herb DiamantE, The Male Pattern, Minot, Neon Kittens, Spygenuis
Perusal #83: megiapa, Stylianos Ou, Devon Church, Dragonflies…
September 16, 2026
In review: a world of sonic discoveries. Dominic Valvona
Photo by Robert Macaisa for Off the 405, Courtesy of Getty Museum
An Ambiances Magnétiques Label Double-Bill
Super Scintillant ‘Tarot’
Érick d’Orion’s ‘Mes fantômes’
(Ambiances Magnétiques) Both Released 25th September
Two similar(ish) spheres of influence and conceptual works from artists aligned with the Canadian label’s “adventurous music-making” aesthetic this month. Only appearing recently on my radar, the Ambiances Magnétiques platform is based on and around the province of Québec; it’s stock in trade to showcase interesting, explorative and avant-garde releases from both some heavy hitters in the form and burgeoning fresh talent.
Firstly, the debut collaboration between the performer, electronic musician and artist Nicolas Bernier and his foil, the notable bass clarinettist, lecturer and professor Mélanie Bourassa, Tarot. With everything that title might allude to, from its Kosmische and early analog conceptual traditions to its hermetic and esoteric connotations, its symbolism and prophetic omens and warnings, that umbrella is used amorphously to explore and shape electroacoustic and modular apparatus conjured atmospheres and descriptions manipulated, or so it sounds, in real time.
Both partners on this sonic mystery and sci-fi adventure, draw upon their extensive backgrounds; Bernier with both his merging of musical and artistic projects, and his extensive prolific catalogue of collaborations, including with leftfield underground hip-hop Antipop Consortium con-founder Beans, and Bourassa with her study and teaching, and depth of experiences working with the Québec Symphony, the Metropolitan Orchestra, the Montreal Symphony and Violons du Roy.
Crossing the classical, the avant-garde, even hints of jazz with that “super scintillant” of electronic sparks and effects, the signal from Bourassa’s bass clarinet is routed directly into Bernier’s “rig”, allowing him to control the parameters of his system using her output. That’s the underlying method that sets in motion a both alien and reimagined pastoral investigation of the instrument; transduced and transformed from its familiar bass-y tones and higher flutiness and cyclonic flutters to sound both of its tradition and yet astral and part of the Fourth World legacy of Hassell and Roberto Musci too.
Fibres, metallics, space craft mechanisms, counterflows, the tubular plastique and unsettling whispers move around or directly reverberate off the bass clarinet’s audible finger work, its space bird-like cries, duck billed croaks, its squeezes and piped melodic spirals and song.
There’s one point where the clarinet travels almost to Egypt – not without diverting via NYC Gershwin and a stalk in the bush -, another where the instrument reminded me of Park Jiha’s work, Sakamoto and Arve Henrikisen.
It’s a both kinetic and improvised entwinning of the two disciplines and their scopes to perform a contemporary ballet of machine engineering and the acoustically amplified and breathing. A stellar futuristic whisk and more majestically adroit collaboration of mystique and atmospheric stirrings that can sometimes being near hymnal and other times unsettling or at least filled with a sense of in trepidation.
Delving much further into a metaphorical Venn diagram of supernatural and paranormal alluded untethered jams, Érick d’Orion‘s septet assemble of eclectically concentrated musicians’ tune into the psychic to communicate with old and new apparitions. I say apparitions, but this is a live (by the sounds of the audience appreciation) draw of influences, inspirations and record collections plucked from the ether or pulled from past experiences to march and rollick all over any semblance of preparation.
The multi-disciplinary audio artist, composer and improviser of note has shared his skills and exploratory travelling mind with such notable company as Evan Parker, Martin Tétreault, Otomo Yoshihide, Robin Fox, Ilpo Vaisanen, Alexandre St-Onge, Sam Shalabi, Günter Müller, and eRikm. An enviable and diverse list that now comes in handy on this expedition beyond the paranormal.
Gathering together Marie-Pierre Brasset on synths, Émile Boucher Cloutier on percussion, Michel Potiron on electric guitar, Réal Gagnon on drums, Stéphane Beaulieu on electric bass and Nicolas Gobeil on trumpet for an invocation and dance with the phantoms of past musical excursions and memories (both the conscious and unconscious kinds), Érick plugs into a Fortean amplifier to create an Acid Mothers Temple-Last Exit scuff and splash of Poltergeist activity at a Sly & The Family Drone punch up with Fugazi and The Pop Group.
Over two sides (though my edition came with an unnamed bonus track) the troupe of sonic psychic investigators communicate with feedback and foldback invoked ghosts, unholy disorder and knocked transmissions from beyond even Mina Crandon’s imaginative cons, before the tempo, the direction of travel changes towards a sudden lilted sympathetic echo of Don Cherry’s cornet trumpet that soon apes the bugle call of some lost fort in a matinee film. But then, just as you get a pause in the action, a handle, we roll up into the freeform drumming prowess and wild kit turnouts of Milford Graves and Tatsuya Yoshida. But again, we then leap into the gargled revved-up attitude of hardcore and jazzgrind, of a leaderless and instrumental live Black Flag and the Dead Kennedys pulling out a knife on the Red Hot Chilli Peppers.
And that’s only track one, ‘Spectres’: which to be fair is over twenty minutes plus in duration. ‘Ectoplasm’ is shorter but no different in its mix of ideas and improvised scope, starting with occultist atmospherics, Faust-like ceremonial ominous punctuations, and metal shredded guitar. However, it takes hold of a groove of a kind, or a momentum; a space rock flight of fantasy over Tangiers, with elements of Hawkwind and Amon Düül II and the Arabian desert trumpet evocations of Lee Morgan and Chet Baker. Metallic whips lash at the spectacle, whilst electronic apparatus concoct zips, the bass a growl, and the drums scuff and gallop towards the demonic icon.
I will just mention that third track, which begins with a hand drums and group effort embrace of Afro-funk before switching to the esoteric procession and ending up once more in the hardcore and jazzcore realms of free enterprising dread: it actually reminded me weirdly of Wicked Lady, and also has an air of prog and metal about it too.
If Ill Considered and Scarla O’Horror spent more time skateboarding in the late 1980s or hooked up for a musical collaboration with Laddio Bolockos and Massacre than this might well be the result. And if that doesn’t pique your interest then nothing will.
The Bordellos ‘Oh Nora’
(Metal Postcard Records) 11th September 2026
No, not a tribute (as I initially thought when seeing the title) to Nora Batty the pinny wearing, wrinkled stockings and hair nut costumed stoic and hard-faced muse of Compo in that quintessential English comedy of life in a Northern town, Last Of The Summer Wine, the protagonists of this latest song from the maverick family band, The Bordellos, are two star crossed lovers/singers sharing the same name; neither of whom are aware of each other’s romantic infatuation with the other. Both Nora’s – one an aspiring younger singer trying to crack the music industry, the other, in her mid-sixties, finding a newfound cult status after her 1970s flopped LP is picked up by a new generation, and once again appearing on stage – love one another from a far without knowing it. And it’s that relationship, or the simultaneously tantalising and both hand-wrung agonising over the prospects of what could be that are so movingly and whimsically sung about on this latest single.
Taken from what could be (if the band’s co-founder and the vocalist and acoustic guitar player of this song, Brian ‘Bordello’ Shea, ever gets the time) a larger planned musical entitled ‘Oh Nora – A Small Town Story’, this single sets the lo fi sympathetic plaintive tone; a sort of grim up North version of folkish-country Dylan with a lilted lean towards Simon & Garfunkel’s ‘Mrs. Robinson’, and yet unmistakably low rent English kitchen sink romance. Brian’s son, Dan Shea (of Vukovar and Beauty Stab fame, also known to have penned the odd piece for this site over the years) can be heard weeping a haunted malady of steel pedal wanes and quavers, whilst Uncle and brother Ant Shea completes this disenchanted but romantic trio on harmonica and vocal harmonies.
Perhaps one of the band’s most charming, less acerbic and jokey polemics on the state of the nation, yet set to small town suspicions, bigotries and the unwillingness of some to accept change, Oh Nora’s central characters are used to demonstrate a continued sneering and outright homophobic prejudice to same sex relationships and of openly gay people in close-nit communities: especially in towns long since left to rack and ruin by not only Tory policies but Labour’s too.
There’s a real tenderness here, even nostalgia (though not for the 60s of homosexual criminality, nor the early 70s when artists were obliged if not forced to hide their sexuality even in a supposed “gender-bender” age), yet it’s saved from being truly saccharine by The Bordello’s signature lyrical takes on the everyday detritus of pop culture, of fumbled love affairs and the innocuous habits that immediately conjure up life in a Northern town of old: This is a liaison that is quintessentially both English and Northern.
It remains to be heard what can be expanded upon, but The Bordellos certainly have the groundings for a sweetened if self-depreciating propounded musical.
Devon Church ‘The Shame Of Winnipeg”
(Ruination Records) 18th September 2026
Taking its cue, I’m sure, from Leonard Cohen’s (written with his collaborative foil Sharon Robinson) languorous rile at the rotten state of the world, ‘Everybody Knows’, NY producer and songwriter Devon Church encapsulates the underlying sour and the disenchantment of that 1988 anthem to despondent protestation and cynical beguilement.
Originally released on Cohen’s I’m Your Man LP, and if anything, a resounding triumph of the poet’s disgruntled take on the stench of the times and the decades previous (a contemporary chime with the AIDs epidemic of course, but also with long held musings on both relationships and religion, thrown in with corruption), it’s since become a totem; a go-to for wised-up film producers and directors on the hunt for that one song that so sums up the times.
But Devon doesn’t just write a long love letter to that iconic tune, nor just snatch its sound, but delves deeper into the catalogue to reprise that sort of Med Greek Island holidaying and retreated Cohen vibe too; a subtle breezy adoption of sun-kissed adult louche new wave, rock and troubadour vibes that called be described in some instances as yacht rock. Then again, inspired by his early adoption analog, mic and keyboard purchases during the Covid pandemic, Devon also adopts a shimmy chimmy sound of swimming and faux-Latin presets, a flange-y and phaser-ed embrace of Isaak and Lynchian noir and a subtle borrow of the Aussie sound that became synonymous with Crime And The City Solution, and some of the Bad Seeds work during the later 80s.
Despite hanging out with the Millennials, feeling their pains and carrying their withering gripes – as laid down by the Frankfurt School, Reductionist and Deconstruction theorists –, Devon’s tone seems more boomer, or even Generation X; his influences obviously for the music and activist poetics and polemics of the ageing Boomer class of Cohen, Scott Walker and even Dylan (really hearing some chimed evocations of his 80s works). But it’s actually executed with a smoothness and maturity that might be beyond Devon’s years. He certainly seems to thread if not make obvious connections across the generations and years like Dylan; his reference points and slogans in a lucid if sometimes vague coalesce that attempts to wrap up the last century and the slow collapse of humanity and society in the face of capitalism’s battle with feudal technocratic authoritarianism, globalism, the drag of neo-liberalism and both a crash that still hasn’t ever been resolved and a pandemic that pretty much destroyed everything we know and hold dear (form our jobs to relationships, most obviously our health mentally, and our suspicions about those who hold high office).
How this pans out can be summed up on the open ‘Back From The Grind’ salvo at the rich, the multinational companies, the online titans, and the unedifying prospects of having to earn one’s own living in very discouraging and bleak roles: well, earning your paltry, just living salary to feather the beds of those at the very top pf the chain – that old adage that money trickles down, which might have been true decades ago, doesn’t cut it in the 2020s. I say a salvo, but Devon has turned his (I quote) “The body is the engine of the economy” mantra into a cooly and sexy indolent and disarming Marxist despondent grudge at those who would force him to leave his lover’s embrace (and more) and his own bed to clock in. To a signature cool wave and the pad drums and pre-sets of his Korg Mini Pop analog drum machine (if we’re being specific for tech heads, a SR-120 wooded panelled edition of the Japanese’s companies early drum machine, brought out in 1976) and that Isaak noirish ‘Wicked Game’ borrow, one of Devon’s many guests pull up to offer sighed breathless harmonies and confessions.
In a similar mode, albeit recalling for me, vocally, Babybird and both voice wise and musically Aldo Struyf’s Belgian psycho-killer super project Creature With An Atom Brain, ‘Neon Genesis Fidel Castro’ and its Western-Gothic mood weaves the Communist’s muses and champions in with a loose connective spook of apportions and UFOs. Paying metaphorical gratitude’s and reparations to the Civil Rights heroine of the desegregation crisis of November 1960, ‘Ruby Bridges’ is tied together with further lyrical broadsides at capitalism’s failures, and the narcissist crisis of our online era; An American almanac that reaches from the start of one decade – starting off with Bridges place in history, bang in the middle of policy and racial changes as the first African American student to attend the previous “Whites-only” William Frantz Elementary School in Louisiana – to finish on the dying embers of a civil rights and generational uprising at the other – referencing the pied piper of alt-counter-culture malevolence and chemical fuelled Manchurian candidate bloody sacrifice, Charlie Manson. Musically it all sounds a bit like a lo fi Spector Girl Group in bed with Dylan at a Black Panthers benefit.
I could easily write about every single track on this album, such is the abundance of musical layering and topics to unpick, but will briefly just mention the cooed caressed feminine accompaniments on the Heyme recalled and shimmied diaphanous new age curtain call title-track – a reference maybe to Kent Monkman’s exhibition of the same name in that city, or just because it’s yet another rile against those pesky colonists that took the land from its indigenous folk -, and the definitely Yacht Rock vibes of the Mediterranean lovesick Cohen-esque ‘Jamie Joins The Priesthood’. The latter is a story of protagonists, and the disappointments and despondent fatalistic chasms of expectation – a kind of Millennial Catcher in the Rye perhaps? There’s one bit where the female voices seem to mimic a reimagining of the Stones’ ‘Paint It Black’, though with all the medicinal meds I’m taking these days to stay alive, I could be hallucinating this.
There’s a mention of the Durutti Column’s Vini Reilly in the press notes and briefing; his signature flange-y and dreamy guitar pining’s and playing style being compared to Devon’s. A good call, but I’d throw in Kevin Ayers perhaps too, a little of Crime And The City Solution and of course the new wave school.
Biblical propositions, fables and bad omens are grafted to a louche and languorous spectre and cerebral backing that Cohen would possibly smile at. It’s a deep listen on some levels, but tuneful and pleasant at every turn; less a whine really and more a sophisticated, mature (that voice both often gravelly and filled with life experiences of and wry knowing; not so much miserable as making sense of how society came to its current crisis) observation to these trying times and the cultural malaise.
Dragonflies ‘S-T’
(Dark Horse Records/BMG) 18th September 2026
Drawn together under the fluttered magical and dreamy wings of Dragonflies, foils Dhani Harrison and Nigel Godrich make hay as the dream collaboration.
Touching base at different points in their respective careers, Harrison originally reached out to Godrich for “guidance” on what would become his second solo album, Innerstanding. This was during the concentrated, time-on-their-hands, period of the Covid pandemic. Fast forward a few years and invited by Godrich to shape a collaboration together in his Brixton studio, Harrison channelled his inner light whilst his creative partner shaped the results in real time. All of which was augmented or accompanied by the sensitive swells and lower case scored strings of the famed Canadian composer and arranger David Campbell, and the added shaken and shimmered percussion of Godrich’s Ultraísta and Atoms for Peace bandmate Joey Waronker.
Just a cursory glance at the enviable CVs on paper is more than enough to whet the appetite and rally anticipation. Godrich with his producing and engineering prowess, working and guiding everything from Radiohead’s highly influential and experimental catalogue to records by Beck, R.E.M., Pavement, U2, Arcade Fire, and Paul McCartney. As a musician in his own right Godrich has helped instigate both the cross-Atlantic experimental rock trio of Ultraísta with Waronker and Laura Bettison, and the international supergroup Atoms For Peace with oft foil Thom Yorke, Flea, Waronker (again) and Mauro Refosco – God knows how the dairies and commitments align for that one.
Dhani….well, apart from the near obligatory mention of his late iconic father and former Beatle, George – perhaps also proving a pressure to bear on those slim shoulders; to live up to that legend would fuck with anyone’s confidence – , the musician, composer and singer-songwriter has carved out a solo career for himself, whilst also fronting his own thenewno2 band, and joining another supergroup lineup, the Fistful of Mercy, with Ben Harper, Joseph Arthur, Jim Keltner and Jessy Greene.
Lauded quite rightly by the industry, at this point in both their careers they could choose or dismiss whatever projects they want. So, it’s encouraging to see – wished on by fans alike – that they’ve pulled together their talents, their aspirations, as well as more bluesy plaintive woes and concerns for a fragilely and honestly projected psychedelic trip-hop experience: a balance of organic intuition and the synthesized that works rather well.
Their titular debut opens with the dreamily Floydian via Radiohead ‘Slower’, which also recalls a softer and more trippy‘Sätt att se’ by Dungen and both the suspended slow “tiss” sounded drums of Portishead and the vocal delivery style of their frontwoman Beth Gibbons (credited as one of the trip-hop inspirations for this album). At this point Harrison’s voice is in a psychedelic mode, but they can also sail close to the delivery, cadence, mood (and production wise, the electronic accompaniment too) of early 90s David Sylvain, especially on the more minimalist step-padded and ghostly Radiohead-esque piano drifted ‘Straight Line’: you could throw in an essence of Mark Hollis to that equation too. It’s an amalgamation of spiritual yin, plaint vulnerabilities, disarming polemics against the material world, and the feminine; interwoven with the instinctive, near organic if synthesized and electronic backing of Godrich.
I found the whole thing surprisingly soulful, with touches of modern R&B to be found permeating amongst the very on-trend 90s influences (UNKLE for sure, but as I already referenced Radiohead, and also Lamb and some of the early Mo Wax releases). Harrison’s sensitive soul gives it a unique direction and when needed a certain elevation above the wallowed dystopian lament of signature trip-hop: I’m aware it’s not always like that, but anything Portishead wise, or that features Thom Yorke, could be said to encourage such moody inspection and a certain sorrowful tone.
Anyway, as a collaborative project Dragonflies seems both confidently experimental but also bankable and appealing enough to crossover the generations and fractured scenery of the present leftfield genre. I’d call that a success and expect to hear more from both Godrich and Harrison in the future.
Leenalchi ‘Sugungga’
(Luka Bop) 2nd October 2026
K-pop’s saccharine and vacuous domination eclipses all, delivered through its TikTok friendly vessel. And it would seem, as we are led to believe in the West, that this is all South Korea has to offer creatively and culturally at present. But there are thankfully many alternatives, including the ensembled septet of Leenalchi (very important so as not to multilingually astute and respectful in the company of South Koreans or your international friends that you drop the “L” and pronounce the moniker as “EEE-nal-chi”) who transform the age-old traditional form of pansori with a taste of the eclectic and hot-wired wildness and funk of the contemporary. You could say it was a colourful alternative to the performative pop music of K-pop, which leaves many of its acts’ soulless throwaways, exhaustively worn out and replaced by the next shiny and ever younger next big thing.
Instigated or led by composer extraordinaire (incredibly successful career at the vanguard of South Korean cinema with scores for Train to Busan, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance and The Wailing) and indie scenester of repute (one such band, SsingSsing apparently “clocking up” nearly ten million views for their Tiny Desk Concert) Jang Young Gyu, the Seoul-based septet merge playfulness with the theatrical on their fantastical reinvention of storytelling, poetic yearning and surrealist posed tapestries of allegory and metaphor.
Jang (just to complicate matters further, its occasionally written as Youngkyu Jang) corrals the talents of singer, songwriter, and artist EJae on bass, Oh Hyung Suk on drums, and the quartet of Park Soo Bum, Ahn Yi Ho, Ra Seo Jin and Choi Su In on vocals. And together, this big sound can both bombastically or in more sophisticated strains inhabit both visceral worlds of influence; from stage acted folk, the unveiling plays of yesteryear, to the slicker finger-snapping funk and electronica R&B of a more contemporary climate.
Firstly, a little background on the band’s main focus and sound. Pansori’s etymology can be broken down thus: the “pan” part can be translated as an open space or a place where many can gather, whilst “sori” could be interpreted as singing, a sound, or song. The form itself dates back to the 17th century, with its settings, characters and situations rooted in Korea’s Joseon period (the longest and very last imperial dynasty in that region’s history, a period that ran from 1392 until 1910), set, at that time, in the capital of Hanyang (present day Seoul). It’s believed to have evolved from the expressions and narrative songs of the shaman; remaining for much of its existence as a purely oral tradition until the 19th century pansori acquired ever more sophisticated literary layers: A popular form by then with the urban elite. But through increasing rapid industrialisation and modernization in the next century and the explosion of Western influences on the musical culture this ancient storytelling tradition began to fade. However, there would be a revival in the 1960s with pansori securing its survival and posterity as a National Intangible Cultural Property.
Over the course of that history, pansori has retained, if evolved, its original performance set-up: stories are both sung or spoken by a single female or male performer called either a “gwangdae” or a “sorigun”, accompanied by a seated drummer (called a “gosu”). The spoken parts are called “aniri” and the sung parts, “chang”, and both are usually mixed into each performance, which can last anywhere up to eight hours in duration! The double-headed barrel shaped drum (a “buk”) can be said to emit a rattling sound, played as it is with a drumstick in one hand whilst the opposite hand maintains the rhythm.
With stylised speech, narrations and gesticulations both cyclical tales of love across class divides mix with more satirical and witty observances of the fantastical and surreal. Updated and thrust into a new millennium no less, Leenalchi home in on the anthropomorphism aspects; namely with the album’s leading single, ‘Crying Softshell Turtle’, the tale of the titular character’s quest to cure the dragon king. Through a thumped backbeat, synthy zaps, 90s indie vibes and tribal voices, a magical, if gory in places, fairytale unfolds: our protagonist turtle brings a sacrificial rabbit filled with medicinal greatness to the court with a beseeched implored promise and contract: “I beg you to open his belly, and I pray to God there is a liver there. But if there isn’t a liver, you can execute my whole family and tear me to pieces, and I won’t have any regrets.”
From the symbolism of courtly fairytales to the ridiculous, Sugungga opens with the silly mantra of ‘Mao Mao Mao’: more “mewl” “mewl” “miaow” than communist chairman propagandist. Sliding M People-esque soul-pop sidles up to guttural theatre and the paddled plastique. In a similar mode, yet far more disco and funkier, ‘Tiger Is Coming’ sounds simultaneously like kabuki and something from the Mongolian steppes. ‘A Fish Map’, with its funky duck bass lines, could be a toss-up between Bootsy Collins, Basement Jaxx and International Pony.
Touches of psych, a very removed vision of R&B, rock ‘n’ roll, electronica and pop match with a diverse register of vocals either agitated, dramatically acted, hysterical, throaty, bluesy, mulled and heavily accented. It’s different for sure. A harmonious funkified union that congruously revives an old tradition, still breathing and most importantly, still relevant in a technological divisive, anti-humanist world of AI and screen time indoctrination. It’s possibly even best experienced with friends and a dancefloor; its playful spirit whimsical yet showing depth without losing its energy and infectious call to shake that booty.
megiapa ‘Intentions’
(International Anthem) 25th September 2026
A match made in the heavens of soulful humanistic futurism and beat-making, the linguist, producer, visual artist and vocalist megiapa seemed destined to join Chicago’s renowned International Anthem label family. Making an album debut on that community hub’s platform, the Ohio-born soulstress gathers together material imbued, inspired and brought together on the Chicago underground beat scene; sounds forged and created through regular spots at the Push Beats, Open Beats and Fresh Roasted showcases, and from sharing the stage with such notable company as Sev Seveer, Radius ETC, Elijah Jamal Asani and DJ Moppy.
Leaving Chicago for L.A. in 2023, megiapa was soon embedded in that city’s “low end theory” imbued underground and leftfield hip-hop and jazz scenes; namely in the enviable company of such luminaries of the form as Madlib, Flying Lotus, Daedelus and Georgia Ann Muldrow – I can hear the latter’s signature to a degree laced throughout Intentions. And so, this becomes an album born of both cities, the finishing touches galvanised on the West Coast but starring a cast of contributions from across state lines, brought into the studio as both an additional band and chorus of voices and vocalists.
That relationship with International Anthem was originally inaugurated by the community leader, curator, radio broadcaster and DJ, King Hippo (the alias of Alejandro Ayala) who wove megiapa’s beat making soulful sounds into the label’s live presentations. There would be subsequent openings for the roster’s recording artists Makaya McCraven, Bottle Tree and Ben LaMar Gay.
From initially creating music in headphones at home and through the use of the popular audio editing and recording app Audacity, that sound has blossomed and expanded to now incorporate a full band of musicians (more or less) and host of networked foils. Step forward bassist (though a multi-instrumentalist too) and artist The Growth Eternal; Sudan Archives collaborator and pianist Ahmed Muhammad (aka Kafari); the cross-generational L.A. community institution, Pan Afrikan People’s Arkestra musical director and drummer Mekala Session; producer, composer and artist Telemakus; trumpeter, producer and composer Will Miller (who goes under the Resavoir project); and percussionist Allakoi “Mic Holden” Peete. Completing that gathered ensemble is the vocal pool of Aankha Neal (of the notable eclectic spiritual Voice of Creation choir), Blvck Spvde, 10.4 ROG and others.
Fluidly congruous with vocals both diaphanously porous and soulfully experimental, megiapa’s sound is floated and chicly layered up with melodious R&B, jazz, hip-hop, funk and celestial. From not so straight-shooting smooth soul of either a 90s or a further back 70s vibe to crystalised fantasies aboard sci-fi funkified UFOs and beat manipulations of the already mentioned Madlib but also Madegg and J Dilla kind, there’s an abundance of lyrical and musical ideas expressed and played with throughout the album’s fifteen-track running order (track number fifteen, a beautifully marooned pop-soul electronic love paean entitled ‘Together Forever’, in this case, and on the version I was sent, is marked down as a bonus).
That voice, which is at the centre of this whole enterprise, can change from soul diva to just the echoed reverberations of the non-worded, an essence in fact at times, or the multi-layered; sometimes reminding me of Khruangbin and Janelle Monáe, and at other times of NicoTheGodess and Martina Topley-Bird. In fact one voice or voices that came to mind was the Rotary Connection, who happen to be covered effortlessly well and dreamily on this album with a steel drums-like and willowed fluted oasis lush take on their most famous psychedelic-spiritual-soul tune ‘Black Gold of the Sun’ (for the pedantic, this gold-standard neo-soul classic originally featured on the 1971 LP Hey, Love; the inaugural airing of the group’s The New Rotary Connection change in moniker).
Cascades and the sprung are cross-patched with Prince and slick noodled funk, as perfectly floated bulb-shaped crystal notes from a jazzy electric piano, a distant hand drum rhythm reminiscent of Curtis Mayfield and Marvin Gaye, the sound of futurism, the laughter and sampled memories, recalls, healing balm and reassurance of friends, and both ends of the romantically alluded spectrum (from declarations of love to plaintive soul yearns of coping with and enduring bad relationships and the self-absorbed personalities of old lovers). Every single element, ingredient of which is all just so; placed to near perfection in its flow: and that’s despite the more staccato and not so much broken up but eloped and changing beats and rhythms that add a subtle friction or point towards more exotic and off-world planes.
In short: astral soul for the beats’ generation. A most satisfactory organic ear, attuned to the stars, the cerebral and the soul, and perfectly settled within the International Anthem family.
Stylianos Ou ‘Moodtoxicosis’
(Jollies Records) 10th September 2026
Nothing concentrates the mind or leads to anxious panics like a cancer diagnosis. But the Athens published author, article contributor, visual artist and trick sonic experimentalist Stelios Papagrigoriou has transduced his treatment (the ordeal of a thyroidectomy) for thyroid cancer into dadaist and fantasy arcade game symphonic spurt and cut-up of manipulation and discombobulation.
In no way wishing to make this about my own pains and travails, I can sympathise having been diagnosed at the start of the year (and spent much time in hospital) with an autoimmune disease that had attacked and damaged my kidneys, and then on release suffering a stroke. Just like Stelios completing and wishing to capture the exact moments of the worst and most hallucinogenic abstract pains of his illness on his laptop in hospital, hooked up to monitors, I was writing and trying to keep this site afloat and running whilst recovering from a biopsy, prodding, tests and various medicated experiments: unlike our Greek patient, my writings stayed within the lines of the barely coherent despite my cognitive issues and the constant exhaustion.
In an avant-garde mode, Moodtoxicosis processes and then releases the procedure and its effects like crazy sonic and vocalised microbes and cells bursting to escape and wreck mischief, havoc and tricksiness. With title references to adjacent or causal conditions (the ‘Hashimoto’ of ‘Hashimoto’s Cave’ namechecking a deliberating autoimmune disorder that attacks the thyroid gland) and medicines used to alleviate it (the ‘Levothyroxine’ of the ‘Levothyroxine Lament’ used to treat an underactive thyroid) fitted alongside various described metaphorical fortresses of the mind state and beastly phantoms, the tripping illusions and hallucinations of a time spent fighting off and repairing the inner and physical vessel that’s gone through hell are turned into a both near cartoon and Fluxus musical mania.
The Art of Noise meets Taito on a drug bender; the Aphex Twin’s own form of sound drukqs makes play time with Zappa; the haphazard sporadically bursts into song against a soundscape of scanners and distorted signals. Yes, this is both a crazy and fitting experiment in bubble gum game boy platforming, conceptual sound forms, floppy disc voices, the dreamy and tine plucked – coming unstuck or in a spindly condition of chirped and pinged chimes. And within that description there’s an abundance of unusual and transmogrified noises and tonsil gymnastics and hysterics.
Get well Stelios (that should be Stylianos Ou if we are to be true to the alias), and never lose that zest for experimental reinvention that’s served you so well.
Here’s the message bit we hate but crucially need to keep going:
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 able, then you can now show your appreciation by keeping the Monolith Cocktail afloat through the Ko-Fi donation site. You can buy us the equivalent currency of a simple coffee, or maybe more if you are inclined. Thank you.
The Digest for September 2026: New Music/The Social Playlist/Archives
September 2, 2026
The monthly Digest includes a clutch of accumulated short new music reviews, the social inter-generational/eclectic and anniversary albums celebrating playlist and an Archives Special.
___/NEW MUSIC REVIEWS___
(All entries in alphabetical order)
boycalledcrow ‘The Sprawl’
(Mortality Tables) 11th September 2026
Previous musical hallucinations have taken Carl M Knott (aka a boycalledcrow) through a Northern India roadmap, William Gibson’s dystopian sci-fi visions, and a strange manifestation of dream-realism that seems to be attached to, but very much removed from weird England. All of which has been woven into a sort of near avant-garde transported invocation of outsider art music.
Back with no less a “psychedelic” traverse of his obsessions – the ideas and questions that keep him up at night -, Knott turns long walks in search of UFOs (or as the recent senate hearings on the subject have now referred to them, UAP – that’s Unidentified Aerial Phenomena or Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena) and the search for aliens. Obsessed indeed with the whole conspiracist fantasy of government alien cover-ups, and the UAP phenomena – “show me the aliens!!” as Neil deGrasse Tyson would say -, the allure of declassifying files and perhaps finally exposing what so many hoped has been little more than a sensationalist anticlimax. It could in fact have been a government plot all along to encourage its citizens to watch the skies for them as documenters and early warning systems – as they can’t be everywhere – against enemy States infiltrating US airspace. Rod Dreher and JD Vance would have us perhaps believe that these alien entities were not from other galaxies but the Christian demons of our own nightmares.
Unexplained phenomena aren’t the only obsessions; whilst only alluding to it in the accompanying PR notes, Knott mind is also concentrated on the sorrowful pains of losing a “cherished loved one”. And often, there feels like a balance between the two worlds: the immaterial and the cosmic.
Taking a lead from such philosophical quandaries, Knott walks a mysterious and almost Freudian line between nightmares and dreams, lost as he is in the woods of his own imaginings, communing with the wildlife and familiars of a surrealist trippy kind to produce his most psychedelic walk-about yet.
It’s a musical landscape in which the pastoral English folk magik of the Green Man kind and the floral costumed mysterious figures of lore and traditional planes meet something far odder; a manifestation of strange visitations from both beyond the material and outer space.
Whilst previous releases have been built upon Knott’s reverberating loops of interlayered nylon-stringed acoustic guitar samples, this time around that instrument is not so prominent. It is of course there, hidden or far more medically dreamy; a few notes or a brief fairytale passage here and there arriving from the ether. The difference on The Sprawl is Knott’s use of live played drums to create slipped trip-hop and more like hip-hop instrumental beats, and his embrace of ambient and new age trance music to create a sort of familiar but unique radiated and mellotron-like rotor mysticism.
Boards of Canada at their best mutate into Pan-American, Black Dog, Casino Versus Japan and Susumu Yokoto across a spectrum of both near slow-released euphoric and moodier, near ominously alien and mournful hallucinations. ‘Mantis Man’ for some reason (and remember, I have had a stroke recently) reminded me at one point of a fairground Beatles during their Magical Mystery Tour period being warped and reversed through a portal and transformed into the Beta Band.
A cylindrical and gradually beamed presence of other worlds, of psychedelic sci-fi and entrancing electronica from a golden era in 90s Britain, and vapours all coalesce to build up a dream state that unveils more on each listen through. This really is an album that gets better with every play. I’d even suggest it’s one of the boycalledcrow project’s best yet.
Dollar Brand, Don Cherry & Carlos Ward ‘Third World – Underground’
(WEWANTSOUNDS) 11th September 2026
Quite rightly one of the most iconic collaborations in free/spiritual jazz circles; a cult and most treasured, revered LP on its release and ever since, the Third World Underground performance and LP unified the talents of the iconic jazz triumvirate of the South African pioneer Dollar Brand (the moniker used by Abdullah Ibrahim until the later 70s), American nomad Don Cherry and Panama-born, American bred Carlos Ward. Released in its original form over fifty years ago, recorded however live in 1972, that promising communion of luminaries and their roots expansive show is finally getting a proper international vinyl release (for the first time ever I believe) from the good folk at WEWANTSOUNDS.
A salivating proposition for jazz aficionados and anyone who rightly claims to love exploration and the pursuit of furthering the form, this iconic cult favourite (if you were both lucky enough to own a copy in its limited form or hear it by other means) was first released by the notable Japanese label Trio Records via their even rarer and revered Nadja imprint. Holding the license in that territory for the rightly iconic ECM, the roster included both pioneering and acclaimed experiments and influential LPs from not only the American scene but a smattering too of homegrown talent: Ryo Fukui and Kunihiko Sugano for example sharing space with the likes of Art Pepper and David Murray…though the list goes on.
It is then a very special release, especially in light of the recent passing of one of its chief architects, the foundation and cornerstone, and man responsible for the lion’s share of arrangements (its most constant rhythm of life, flow and timekeeper) Abdullah Ibrahim or Dollar Brand as he was known at the time before that religious conversion.
Rightly occupying the same lauded heights of veneration as his South African compatriot and good friend Hugh Masekela the sagacious adroit Ibrahim received nothing but respect and praise for his activism and musicianship; with even Nelson Mandela no less, anointing him as “South Africa’s Mozart”. Embodying the many travails of his homeland, giving voice to the townships with what many consider the unofficial national anthem of the anti-apartheid movement, ‘Manneberg’, he spent decades fighting the system through his music: mostly in the jazz form but the classical too. In a former epoch, when merely performing jazz in South Africa was seen as an act of resistance, the pianist-composer was mixing it up with his legendary counterparts across the Atlantic, playing with a staggeringly impressive cast of doyens including Duke Ellington, Max Roach, John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman. The Duke, alongside both Monk and Fats, is honoured on one of his earlier 70s LPs; the opening ‘Saleem Peace’ being one arrangement I can’t help but feel and hear being riffed on the opening performance of this LP: that and perhaps Ibrahim’s own ‘Ancient Africa’ tune.
Intersecting across timelines and through various set-ups, Ibrahim’s foil, the renowned Don Cherry, fell into his orbit on numerous occasion; both serving at various opportunities under or with Coleman: Cherry appearing in the pioneer’s groundbreaking Shape Of Jazz To Come quartet of ’59.
On his way to becoming the restless musical nomad of jazz lore, Cherry’s eventual self-exile to Sweden was set in motion by his mid-60s tours of Scandinavia, especially Denmark. The burgeoning trumpeter and cornet star played in the country’s capital of Copenhagen in ’63 with Archie Shepp, and in ’64 with Albert Ayler before returning in the pivotal year of ’65 to record a quartet of original and standard performances for Denmark’s national radio station. Though often dismissed by cats like Miles Davis for a lack of technical proficiency, Cherry’s constantly evolving visceral style had gained him an envious apprenticeship, partnering up as a foil to a litany of be-bop, hard-bop and free jazz doyens: from Sonny Rollins to Coltrane.
Famously and influentially, Cherry’s organic societal caravan trek and meander across porous borders expanded the cultural language of jazz; his collaborative spirit with a cross-generational and worldly network of artists and players covers everything from French no wave to the music of Turkey and of the Far East.
No less impressive a CV, alto-saxophonist and flutist Carlos Ward is perhaps best known as a jazz and funk sideman, though he would also go on to lead his own quartet in the 80s and release a quartet of LPs. Born in Ancón in Panama, but incubated in the USA, Ward’s formal training in music was via the Navy School of Music. Part of that military tour included a stint in Germany, where he met the bop, freeform, modal and jazz-rock infused trombonist of note Albert Mangelsdorff. But his first big break was with Coltrane’s octet of 65-66. At the same time Ward crossed paths with Cherry who was also playing with Ibrahim, who’d left his apartheid homeland five years beforehand. That association carried over, with a notable soloist spot on Cherry’s Relativity Suite being just one example, and an ever-developing collaboration with Ibrahim that lasted into the 90s.
Already well attuned to each other’s musical languages, the global influences and a growing connection to the roots’ basis of the jazz form and its African heritage, by the early 70s and date of this live recording all three foils were at their creative heights. There’s much made of the societal tumult of the era and the decolonization of Africa’s former European colonies during the 60s and 70s; said to be reflected in this live coalesce of talent and their free expressive lines of enquiry and amorphous third world regeneration. That title being an indicator of course of ownership, the trio have taken back a derisory if for a very long time, an academic term for countries seemingly underdeveloped and even backwards in comparison to the great Western powers of the 20th century; Africa’s many nations but as a whole falling under this sweeping statement, though South Africa was only third world in relation to its apartheid segregated mistreatment and heinous degradation of its indigenous Black population; one reason why Ibrahim left to pursue his art and activism abroad.
Recorded at the prestigious Jazzhaus Montmartre in Copenhagen – a venue on par, its boasted, with the Village Vanguard and Ronnie Scotts, and a familiar stage for Cherry from back in the mid 60s -, this union riffed on, around and in the fourth dimension added to Ibrahim’s arrangements and on the opening span of cascaded waters over the rapids via the imaginary bugle-like-calls and heralds of fort on the borders of Texas during another age, a Cherry credited number.
From the outset, Ibrahim keeps up a momentum of simultaneously troubled and ravine trickled waters on the piano as Cherry and Ward sound the call to meet on the parade ground and to shine, blaze with brightened horns of sentiment and mystery.
The second track is named I believe in honour of Cherry, and a version featured on Ibrahim’s Ancient Africa LP – let me know if I’m wrong on this score, especially linear notes writer of engaging and descriptive musically flourishing prose, Jaques Denis. Carry on that Victora Falls flow, there’s a shift towards Ibrahim’s joyful township gospel vibe. You can hear the enjoyment in the playing on this percussively scraped and spoons-like rattled warm melodious celebration; a nod perhaps to Cherry, but also the Pharaoh and Yusef Lateef.
In old money, side Two is a near seamless performance both of jazz’s African roots and further nomadic trail through the form’s cannon, its inceptions, mixed with a removed form of the classical.
It begins with a fusion of saloon and New Orleans bluesy jazz – think Oscar Peterson sharing the pianist bench with Toussaint and Cecil Taylor -, a riff on ‘The Moon’ and a trumpeted caravan trail over the sand dunes, before accenting the drama and peaks of the piano’s near off-kilter and simultaneous trembles and rhythmic waterfalls. ‘Jabulani-Easter Joy’ follows, keeping the signature piano sound and feel, but swaddled as it plays through an African marketplace to the tune of Hugh Masekela, a distant Mariachi band and the show bands of the 1920s.
There’s a communal township chorus of voices on the next part, a take on the traditional ‘Waya-Wa-Egoli’: already an album track of Ibrahim’s, paired up, as it is here with the accompanying ‘Swazi’. I believe all three foils are taking part, pleasingly humming and mouthing a hypnotic chant and mantra; a sing-along of the atavistic and spiritual; a connection to the continent. It ends on ‘Wayeah-Wayeah-O’, a final South African imbued calm of swimmingly hummed piano and fizzled-out saxophone.
At every turn the horn partnership proves as attentive as they do dynamic and free; mimicking each other at times, and at others in spirals of cyclonic honks and circus wails. Ibrahim enforces just how bloody good he was; the keys and notes pouring forth, flourishing and sweeping whilst at the same time repeating high noted repetitive tremors and spiky near out of key free hand accents and descriptive dances of the soul.
The word iconic is used too freely, but this revived and, finally, properly released LP, pressed onto vinyl, will do much to spread the word and accumulate new fans, new listeners to a magical trio at the height of their creative powers. Jazz royalty out on the fringes one minute, back into a melodious union of African soul and joy the next, Third World – Underground is a wonderous, dynamic and serenaded performance of the nomadic spirit; a return you could say to the roots, but also venture forth into the unknown or less charted.
Regina Collage ‘Horizont’
(Do You Have Peace?) Released 21st August 2026
Though the circumstances could have been better, the Ukrainian artist Regina Collage’s love of her newish Bristol home and its internationally influential and renowned music scene has opened new doors of introduction to a sound steeped in a kind of vapour and filter of dreamwave, coldwave, no wave, post punk synth pop and Goth electronica.
Forced to move away from her Kharkiv home on the Northeastern boundaries of Ukraine due to the relentless bombing campaigns by the Russian invaders since the outbreak of war over four years ago, Collage has found a strange kind of sanctuary in England; as the this latest album title alludes, the translated “Horizon” seems out of touch, never quite in sight or within reach; a metaphor for home and the detachment from events thousands of miles away in Eastern Europe’s most savagely and contested fought war.
Whilst events across the globe – from Israel’s ongoing war with Hamas and Iran’s proxies in the Middle East to the USA’s still very much active war with Iran itself – have pushed Ukraine’s defence against Russia off the newsfeeds, and as both attention spans have wearied or moved on and the divisive sides in the political ideological war of the West put each conflict in two regimented camps – usually the Ukraine falls into both the Right and Left’s conspiracist orbits, with, depending on which side, support and sympathy sometimes skewered for Russia and Putin -, this brutalist war continues unabated. Kharkiv’s importance strategically and geographically as the country’s second major city has made it one of the most important targets in Putin’s campaign; attacks from drones and missiles are almost a daily occurrence, with injuries and deaths registered every week, infrastructure and homes destroyed regularly: Already out of date at the time of writing, last month’s statistics roughly amounted to the total or partial destruction of 13,000 buildings and 9,000 apartments since the start of the war in 2022.
Changing hands over time, Kharkiv was once the capital of the Ukrainian S.S.R. until Kyiv took over in 1934. An epicentre of theatre, literature and the arts, home to the country’s Romantic writers’ revival, the city boosted an enviable cultural scene that revived and fed into a sense of independence. Although various periods of instability and the overbearing control from Tsarist Russia, then the Soviets and after the fall of the Berlin Wall, a post-Cold War Russia, have suppressed and worse, attempted to rewrite history, Ukraine maintains that same spirit of maintaining its own independence and destiny.
Collage’s parents remain in the city, which must be constant source of anguish and fear for Regina. These feelings, I would imagine, sung in a dreamy melange of echo, filters, vapes, industrial resonated moodiness and lament, are conveyed across the album’s thirteen differing tracks of influence and inspiration. It’s emphasised in the accompanying notes that the Liz Fraser meets lo fi minimal French chanteuse, Raincoats and Conny Frischauf-like vocals are all sung in a Ukrainian dialect. And it feels like the unearthing at times of some formerly hidden underground 80s synth-pop and Gothic release, revitalised with contemporary apparatus and the mood music of the times. You can add in a sort of Jah Wobble wavey and wobbly bass, some flange and phaser effects guitar playing (almost Banshees territory and the early Mute and 4AD Record labels roster) and atmospheric spells of Nocturnal Emissions, the Au Pairs and Coil.
Created between makeshift “bedroom recordings” and “borrowed studios” in and around Bristol, occupying thoughts and abstract expressions of the war and settling in a new home but not really knowing if it is temporary or for the long haul are transduced into a work of both weariness and endurance.
It all opens with the Eno/Harmonia and Thomas Dinger feel of ‘Tremelo’, which goes on to recall Stereolab, and strangely, Beach House, and works its way back and forth to the Cocteau Twins via factory reverberations, dissipated drum pad smacks and splays, and darker post-punk borrowings. New horizons are amorphously and moodily set beyond arrival on an album that conjures up diaspora disconnects and burnt-out maladies. Still, Bristol has opened up a music box of possibilities and foils with which to work out these desperate plights and exhaustive weathered thoughts of never quite reaching the acquired or ideal horizon.
Luce Mawdsley ‘Dream, Baby Butch’
(Pure O Records) 4th September 2026
What could be a daunting task, encapsulating and reflecting only the entire cannon of Western portraiture art and its idea of the feminine and queer gaze as realigned and recontextualised, reappropriated by the leading photography artist Catherine Opie, is handled with such sensibility by the former Mugstar guitarist and soloist composer of an as yet undiscovered but explored queer and non-binary vision of Americana, Luce Mawdsley.
After initially breaking free to pursue their own unique musical story with a number of abyss drawn sonnets informed by predatory slurred spoken-word mise-en-scenes and lurid, sleazy torturous self-harm, the Liverpool-based artist/musician began to pretty much mosey through an alternative version of this Western re-imaging: a sound I described at the time as a culminated merger of Morricone, Blood Meridian, Crime And The City Solution, El Topo and Hellenica.
Moving on still further with that developing soundscape and soundtrack-rich practice, Luce’s 2024 album, Northwest & Nebulous, created a continuous thread between that Western transformation and the traditional tones and echoes of both English pastoral and chamber music. Successfully integrated, the results now continue on this latest three-track soundtrack accompaniment to Becky Manson’s film, which presents Opie’s recent commission for the National Galleries of Scotland. Representing the devotional aspects of that same tradition, but through a mirage of new ideas on belonging and the art and curation of replacing old symbols and old representations with the stories and images of a LGBTQ+ community previously left out or removed from the gallery and museum space, Luce’s soundtrack reflects the three main themes, chapters in the journey from Opie’s formative crisis with identity and conformity in Cleveland to her experiments with gender at art school and the travails of motherhood as a lesbian. Marked by the retrospective span of Opie’s career, each project from that fifty-year career as a photographer, and I’d say installation, artist, is marked musically with moving adroit appeal; from the initial near angelic hymnal mirages and wavey subtle hints of Americana, but also (to my ears) the lilt of Hawaiian music of Luce’s main chosen pedal steel instrument on the opening title-track to the point in which that signature sound suddenly merges seamlessly with the near pipped gravitas and reverent devotional sound of the Cathedral – reminding me a lot of Jeff Bird of Cowboy Junkies note, but a soloist artist of similar influence.
Each musical passage proves just audible enough to not so much punctuate but to articulate the moment of each candid Opie declaration and explanation, as it sympathetically matches the juxtaposition of the artist’s own landmarks with those of other 500 years-worth of portraiture from the Western cannon. From both a decorative depiction of Mary and Child from the Renaissance epoch and a more modern rendering of motherhood by Picasso twinned with Opie’s own revelations and shared experiences of child-rearing, to what looks to be a family “collage” (as she describes it) from the English Civil War epoch countered by Opie’s own portraits series of domesticity in the lesbian community around America, each section is beautifully captivating musically. Luce doesn’t pull away from the focus but sets the tempo and suits the mulling over of what’s being described: serious but also dreamily ruminating and deeply felt. (Just to add, I personally love Opie’s portrait of a queer figure placed a few feet away from that of a painted Highland’s clan tartan clothed ruddy-faced Scotsman from the 17th century, when both should be at odds with each other they seem to strangely and brilliantly connect and make perfect sense at this time and in this place.)
The artwork is important of course (you or I could spend paragraphs and ages discussing all the various ideas, themes and relevancies of not only portraiture but art history; my thoughts just scratching the mere surface) but Luce’s score once isolated reveals ever more subtleties: just the merest hint of what sounds like metallic shimmers, a enervated softened and turned down low drum shuffle and textural brushes across the snare skin and off the rims, and a bassier undertone of real depth. If I was trying to find a reference, perhaps the work of Andrew Wasylyk and Daniel Vickers would be good, plus the already mentioned Jeff Bird. But what Luce seems to be doing is finding a new voice for the traditional steel pedal sound, which they describe as “surely the most nonbinary queer coded Western instrument”. Though I’m not so sure myself of that description, the instrument certainly seems to have more of a lilt, and I would say femineity to it when used as a balance against the more masculine stoicism and machismo of most traditional Americana and Country & Western music – just to take one example, the cosmic cowboy himself and former Monkee, Mike Nesmith always seemed to use it as a weeping melody or high aria-like plaint on his hangdog and hapless songs about regret and unrequited love. I expect you could probably get a grant these days to research and write a PhD paper on it, but it is something that Luce is pursuing; providing an alternative just like Opie’s own photographic works provide that alternative visual documentation of our progressively changing times, and a new sense of confronting the issues of belonging and erasure.
Euphoria is mentioned, even the Seraphim order of the highest of highest seated celestial angels, but a certain transcendence is reached on the pilgrimage to realisation and for finding a place in a world that has so far seemed hostile and cold to the LGBTQ+ identity within portraiture and this particular strand of musicality. As echoed in a most revealing film and project, Opie and Luce seem to prove a perfect collaboration.
You can visit Opie’s made visible themed To Be Seen retrospective come commission re-alignment of Scotland’s National portraiture collection in the Royal Scottish Academy building in Edinburgh until Sunday the 1st of November 2026. Taken from that show, Opie’s earliest self-portrait as a child posing like Charles Atlas in Cleveland adorns Luce’s EP, which is released via Luce’s own label, Pure O Records, with all proceeds going towards Liverpool’s oldest LGBTQ+ charity Sahir.
Shapeshifter ‘S-T’
(Lit Soc Records) 4th September 2026
The distinguished and loftier jazz critics through their industry outlets will home in on this trio’s technical abilities – which are top quality by the way -, but I’m drawn to performance, the feel and musicality; whether it’s experimental or an immersive experience that draws you in and makes you want, nee need, to hear more. And I’m pleased to announce that the rightly renowned but still burgeoning saxophonist and composer and now bandleader, Brittany Pitt has achieved it all on her inaugural Shapeshifter album.
Imbued and feeding off of the legacy – and very much still evolving – Toronto jazz scene, Brittany and her foils of fellow University of Toronto Faculty of Music alumni and guitarist/composer Dan Pitt, and drummer/composer/curator/educator Aidan McConnell manage to incorporate their previous projects and eclectic experiences on a live recorded performance that recalls moments and evocations of jazz-fusion, jazz-rock, the European school of contemporary jazz, and the freeform.
All three credited improvisers of that form bring something special and personal; drawing upon the jazz traditions of exploration and a forward momentum that simultaneously offers syncopation and the extemporised to breach and probe at the boundaries, yet still maintain something melodic, feelings and expressions of thought and rumination.
Cross-networks with CVs that contain an abundance of collaborations and studies with Canda’s new and established schools of jazz, it’s that scope of learning and sharing that now enfolds over nine tracks of both mirages and more active, busier pieces. The title-track jumps into life after an inviting tenor lead-in and Allen Holdsworth-like clever but attuned to the direction of travel guitar and spidery bouncing drums. As the track progresses from the floor of the “beloved” Toronto Sellers & Newel Second Hand Books store – doubling as a venue for such experimental and improvised showcases -, echoes of Europe’s ACT and We Jazz labels resonate with the American stirrings of Donny McCaslin and the intricate guitar work of Wes Montgomery before finally resting.
Harmonic pings and the bell of what sounds like a bicycle sound out across hi-hats chaffs and squeezed breaths over the tenor’s mouthpiece on the next track, ‘Union Street’. Every town or city has one it seems, but this busy bluesy sidewalk shuffle and snozzled accompanied piece builds in its momentum towards a strange alliance between Zappa and Beefheart strung-out and wiry guitar experiments and echoes of Black Conscious jazz from the 70s.
The shorter, near vignette ‘Prospect’ intro strangely evoked Jeff Buckley at a contemplating jazz retreat under the tutelage of Pat Metheny. This bleeds into a full-on and fully realised improvisation of bandy lunar guitar, dusted and shuffled busy drums and an air of spiritual jazz. ‘The Meaningful Conversation’ meanwhile reminded me of a downplayed borrow of Idris Ackamoor and Peter King, transported to the dry rasped planes of the desert. In other places the album draws comparisons (to my ears anyway) with Anteloper, the Jim Black Trio (minus the piano, which sounds odd I know), Bill Frisell and on the ‘Mentally Heavy’ Balearic-like and tuneful improv Lalo Schifrin via Coltrane – that same track has some wild fretboard strokes and noodling going on, plus soloist rock-jazz cries and whines.
Fulfilling its role, the inaugural Shapeshifter live showcase (recorded back in January of this year) does much to cement the reputation and draw of the Toronto jazz scene. One of the best examples of its kind in 2026, fusing the European with North America to balance out an idiosyncratic performance hard to repeat.
___/THE MONOLITH COCKTAIL SOCIAL PLAYLIST VOL. 110____
A little early this month, brought forward by the deaths of both country dame Dolly Parton and the never miscast or typecast actor and musical artist Tim Curry. I’ve added a smattering of tracks from the two on volume 110 of the long-running inter-generational/international/eclectic Monolith Cocktail Social Playlist – a kind of quasi radio show, or even a DJ set (yes, believe it or not I did used to gig as a DJ).
There’s more from both Curry and Parton in the Archive section below this; a sort of playlist of video moments and adjacent curated acts that seem close to or that orbit those two worlds.
If you’ve been following the site for some time, or just like the playlists I’ve been compiling, you will know that each month there’s a selection of tracks from anniversary celebrating LPs.
This month I’ve chosen tracks from The Remains’ self-titled debut of 1966, Funkadelic’s Tales of Kidd Funkadelic and Hardcore Jollies albums (both released in 1976). Another leap forward in the decades, and David Slyvian’s Gone To Earth is forty. I’ve also added a quartet of tunes from R.E.M.’s Adventures In Hi-Fi’, Suede’s Coming Up, Octopus’s From A To B (criminally overlooked), and The Cardigans’ First Band On the Moon, all of which celebrate their thirtieth birthdays this month.
The rest of the playlist is made up of the old and newish, with choice music from Mia Joy, The God Fahim and friends, Keiron Phelan & Peace Signs, 4 Mars, B Flatt, Sylvain Kassap, Don Peretz, Solso, Pipes You See Pipes You Don’t, Idioma Ideal, TESTPATTERN and Second Layer.
Volume 110’s Track List::::….
Dolly Parton ‘Help!’
4 Mars ‘Natesha (Conpassion)’
Octopus ‘Everyday Kiss’
Suede ‘Starcrazy’
Second Layer ‘Zero’
Funkadelic ‘Let’s Take It To The People’
The God Fahim Ft. NicoJP & Lil Supa ‘Lotus’
B Flatt ‘Crushed by Your Dreams’
The Remains ‘Lonely Weekend’
Pipes You See, Pipes You Don’t ‘Ten Thousand Years Old’
TESTPATTERN ‘Beach Girl’
Tim Curry ‘Hide This Face’
Vita Bergen ‘Disconnection’
Don Peretz ‘Epater Le Bourgeois’
David Sylvian ‘Gone To Earth’
R.E.M. ‘E-Bow The Letter’
Bix Medard ‘Are You Ready?’
Adelie ‘Sylvain Kassap’
Dolly Parton ‘You Gotta Be My Baby (Live)’
Keiron Phelan & Peace Signs ‘Robinson Crusoe’
Funkadelic ‘Soul Mate’
Kristoffer Bolander ‘I Forgive Nothing’
Porter Wagoner & Dolly Parton ‘The Pain of Loving You’
Mia Joy ‘See Us (Demo)’
Idioma Ideal ‘Puerta Secreta’
Solso ‘Lontana de me’
Opus Avantra ‘Il Pavone’
Dolly Parton ‘Purple Rain’
Bear Driver ‘Never Never’
The Cardigans ‘Choke’.
____/ARCHIVES_____
Something different this month, a hotchpotch smattering of favourite moments from Dolly and playlist of those who shared a similar trek or could feel indebted to that Tennessee gal’s travails and fortunes. Under the Sweethearts of the Rodeo & Log Cabin porch Divas heading, I’ve collected together a playlist to capture the musical joys, plaints and transcendence of Dolly and her peers, her scions and fans.
A Dolly Mixture of moments:
One: Dolly in a life-affirming duet with Kermit the Frog, riffing on Sly & The Family Stone’s ‘Everyday People’.
Two: And for balance, Dolly upstaged by Miss Piggy.
Three: Warming up for that eventual Trio album release many years later, Dolly nearly upstages the ridiculously sublime voices and presence of Emmylou Harris and Linda Ronstadt; covering one of a number of songs together, this time a song made famous by the legendary Carter Family, ‘Bury Me Under The Weeping Willow’.
Four: The odd couple. Dolly pays a visit to the lunacy and kooky childish playhouse of Pee Wee Herman. Excuse the quality of the video. Hang around until ‘Hey Good Lookin’, which is a hell of a lot more fun and brilliant than it ought to be.
Five: Let’s hear from dear ol’ Sis to see if it runs in the family.
Six: The technically adroit and informative Wings of Pegasus analyses the genius of Dolly Parton. No one should be in any doubt (and I’m pretty much sure that WoP is the only such analyst worth his salt on Youtube) of Dolly’s guitar prowess and performance after watching this – and remember kids…practice on that instrument.
Seven: A real teary-eyed tug on the heartstrings. The sorrowful lament would make angles cry. Dolly performs ‘Down From Dover’. The lyrics are incredible, the story tragic and bold for not only her times but anyone’s. Written originally when Dolly was just 18! I can’t believe anyone now at that age could be sagacious, already worn and hurt enough, nor lived enough life to come up with such a heart torn asunder malady. PS: I actually originally thought this was a cover; something from the Fairport and their ilk songbook…a traditional mourn brought up to date.
Eight: A no brainer, considering that rural upbringing and her own travails of poverty and Southern twang that Dolly would cover this. Elvis famously wished to record Dolly’s own ‘I Will Always Love You’, but as the Colonel’s 50% publishing ownership travesty of a deal threatened to run right over an aspiring songwriting Dolly, our Tennessee dame rightly decided a big fat no! Anyway, she does a service (just as gospely and spiritual) to the conscious, right-on Elvis and his Memphis social spun commentary.
Nine: Dolly with Oprah Winfrey sharing a joke that would probably never be dared aired or even considered now – more’s the pity. Dolly auditions for Porgy and Bess.
Ten: Taking it back down the country to the Southern Baptist, Dolly sings ‘Higher and Higher’ and the choking-back-tears, ‘Me and Little Andy’ on Carson Tonight – her inaugural appearance, which she even admits was probably the biggest moment in her career in terms of reaching that universal crossover audience.
“Give My Regards To (Off) Broadway”: Tim Curry Jukebox:
Tim Curry ‘We Went As Far As We Felt Like Going’
Tim Curry ‘Hide This Face’
Tim Curry And Eddie Murphy ‘Saturday Night Live Monologue’
Tim Curry ‘Paradise Garage’
Jobriath ‘Take Me I’m Yours’
Lou Reed ‘Andy’s Chest’
David Johansen ‘Here Comes The Night’
David Bowie ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll With Me’
Here’s the message bit we hate, but crucially need:
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 able, then you can now show your appreciation by keeping the Monolith Cocktail afloat through the Ko-Fi donation site.
The End of the Month Playlist For August 2026
August 31, 2026
Our Monthly Playlist selection of choice music from the last month. Curated by Dominic Valvona & Matt Oliver.
Choice music and sonics from the last month (or so) picked from our reviews, but also featuring the tunes we missed out on or didn’t get the room to feature at the time. Curated by Dominic Valvona with choice hip-hop cuts selected by Matt Oliver and some tunes lifted from reviews by Brian ‘Bordello’ Shea. Includes everything from galloping jazz and underground rap cuts to a lamentable anniversary tie-in with the disastrous withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan and all that’s rough and new in the gnarled guitar department.
Please note: The Monolith Cocktail has more or less given up its accounts on both Instagram and bluesky. You can find the blog on WordPress, in every search engine going, on Facebook, and still, on X. Or you can of course sign up to email notifications.
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 able, then you can now show your appreciation by keeping the Monolith Cocktail afloat through the Ko-Fi donation site.
August’s track list:
Gentles ‘My Fugue, My Greek, My Brahms’
Neon Crabs ‘Invisible’
Origami Horses ‘Vultures’
SPAER ‘The Express’
Nonturn ‘Indicate’
Kaja Draksler, Petter Eldh & Christian Lillinger ‘Granular Navigation’
Homeboy Sandman & Jack Splash ‘Gas’
Serengeti ‘Dennehy’
Lee Scott, Black Josh, B-Movie Millionaires & Sly Moon ‘HEX’
Apollo Brown ‘Stovepipe Stuffing’
Hadja & Nils Kacirek ‘Hasrat (Shnsucht)’
bu.re_ ‘ii – Heat shimmer’
Motohiro Nakashima Ft. Marucoporoporo ‘Sea of Thought’
King Kashmere, Confucius MC & Jazz T ‘Classic Style’
Doc Da Mindbenda & IAMGAWD ‘Double Nickle In The Garden’
Open Mike Eagle & Kenny Segal ‘Trying to Remember What I Aimed At’
Von Pea ‘The Goof’
Declaime & SaltChunkJerry ‘Breakend Legs Man’
Occult Character ‘Unrequited Vibrations’
Enofa ‘Retire on That’
The Breedling ‘Stalker’
Raymond Roussel ‘the other side of the other side’
Bity Booker ‘The Ballad of Lost Town’
Becca Bartlett ‘Cicadas’
John Howard ‘Abbey Road, April 1974’
Leah Neale ‘Slip Away’
Pozi ‘Hale-Bopp’
Stuart Turner & Rob Grigg ‘For God’s Sake Burn It Down’
Beans ‘Remember’
Resavoir & Gregory Uhlmann ‘4th Cloud’
Enofa ‘Life Flower Town’
The monthly Digest includes a clutch of accumulated short new music reviews, the social inter-generational/eclectic and anniversary albums celebrating playlist and a piece from the Archives.
Before you read on, and if by the end of reading this column you’ve enjoyed this selection/the writing, or been led down a rabbit hole into new musical terrains of aural pleasure, please consider donating to the Monolith Cocktail blog’s Ko-Fi donation account. We are pretty much a one-man show with no sponsors or affiliations, and have sworn to never use or platform AI artists or use this tool in our own writing or research. Curated in a manner, each post and column is entirely self-motivated and beholden to no one. Please enjoy this month’s Digest column from MC founder Dominic Valvona.
___/NEW MUSIC REVIEWS SELECTION___
(All entries in alphabetical order)
bu.re_ ‘seasons in migration’
(AKP Recordings) 21st August 2026
Lower-case absorbed observations and measures of the seasons, as distilled through a both softened and gently piqued dappled lens, the latest traversed set of recordings from the L.A. born producer and multi-instrumentalist bu.re_ builds upon a process, a foundation and methodology to produce near weightless evocations of a familiar and yet almost abstract visceral capture of the seasonal changes.
If we want to get technical and precise, the quartet of tracks on this latest release from AKP Recordings is actually built upon a 12-chord progression, divided into four groups of chords; each of one of which lines up with and reflects a particular phase in the yearly cycle of the said seasons.
Ambience, the new age and Japanese environmental music prove complimentary in capturing the unfurling buds of Spring to the arrival of light poured rains and the lasting, expansive and near nothingness of a “tundra” environment recording that shifts its subtleties over the course of a whole long form suite: starting with a sort of thrashing and sieving sound before developing into Suzanne Ciani and Fairlight CMI-like waves, snuggled and mizzle and airy saxophone purrs, expansive horizon gazing synthesized vistas, and the floated specks of crystallised pollen.
Marking perhaps deeper meaningful episodes in the artist’s life, a reification of feelings invoked by watching such phenomenon, each beautifully conveyed piece is brilliant in its mood music encapsulation of sweltering mirages, roll out of an environment waking from its winter stupor and sleep and the blowy breaths of the wind arriving from a cooler North.
Impressions of Ariel Kalma, my old pal John Lane (going under his A Journey of Giraffes guise I’m reminded of his own homage of a kind to Susumu Yokoto on the Kono album), David Casper, Park Jiha’s summery vibraphone twinkles, and on the static slow released and languidly sax-pipped ‘heat simmer’, Matthewdavid and a restrained, Pharoah Sanders. For across the synthesised and the bulb shaped notes that materialise and float from the electric piano, and over the amorphous soundings of the tubular and bamboo, bu.re_ also adapts both the sax and flute to swan, breathe, waft, flutter its feathery wings and near hallucinate.
Gathered samples from over the last six years are transduced and made evocatively touching, contemplative and inviting when combined with an apparatus of electronic and wind instruments, processes and effects. A most diaphanously touched and sincere mused form of the four seasons, bu.re_ manifests so much more than just the weather and the measuring of the Calander months as they leave their mark upon milestones and concerns of a deeper nature.
Enfo ‘Small Modernist House In Woodland Setting’
(Subexotic Records) 14th August 2026
Despite the personality, the life stories, travails and hopefully more joyful and escapist episodes embedded within this opus-like scale journey from Enofa, I’ve pretty much ignored the research and notes to let the sounds, sonics, tape manipulations and melodic sweeps and soars of this generous eighteen-track album to speak and unravel their sensibilities and captured moods and experiences to me. I’m sure every suite and action has an explanation or series of prompted connections to the artist’s growth, anxieties and meditations, but to embrace without any prior judgement Small Modernist House In Woodland Setting is a both mysterious hauntology and surprising concepted work of ambience, field recorded and snatched sampled collage, disturbances in the soundscape fabric, environmental music and the exotic.
A fourth world vision in many ways that takes in timelines and evocations of periods from across history; from the near courtly and banquet music of the Medieval age and a weird folkloric England to vague chants and ceremonies from what could be Africa, South America and the Far East and Java. More Robert Musci and Glove of Bones than Hassell, but with the amorphous signatures of porous border leakages and influences of bamboo music, the tribal, the jug poured waters of an exotic garden retreat, the bowl reverberations of Lhasa you could be simultaneously and subtly taking in the worldly and off worldly.
It begins with the lushly Japanese-esque ritual karmas and spindled dulcimer-like tones of ‘The Wormery’ (reminded me of both Walter Smetek and a trumpet-free Don Cherry), and then both flows and disjoints with either surface noises or the unruly into passages of shaken dried beans or rice and ghostly waves of wooden tubular pole building on the speaking insect foliage chorus of ‘The Whispering Forest’ and the peculiar Staraya Derevnya and Lotus Eater’s plucked and twanged folkloric guitar mystical ‘Earthfasts’.
The album (or rather double LP) has its own recurring themes and signatures yet constantly expands and takes in an abundance of sources and influences; everything from an astral Mosquito Coast of reverberating hollas and pipped rituals (‘Interstitial’, which reminded me in part of both Elve and Amorphous Androgynous) to starry ecological trance and space mulch (‘Life Flower Totem’) and a more childlike discombobulation of toy instruments and radio tunning (‘Siobhan And Roisin Dance A Ceilidh’).
Metallic pins rain down whilst a Boyd Rice-like voice intones a gothic post-punk esoteric poignancy; motors judder and voices, interactions, aggro and choral voices lie in the undergrowth or the tape ether. Zen meditations overlap with the supernatural; cloud surfing beauty breaks away from the ominous soundscapes of Ramleh. A balance is kept throughout, as Enofa pulls the listener into an extraordinary travelogue and diary of memories, abstracted feelings and life changes. Anything but indulgent, it’s still a lot to take in, and the ambience of it may surprise when it turns corners and undulates with an eclectic spread of sound, the atonal, the discourse and the mysterious.
Nonturn ‘Repeating Town’
(Audiobulb Records) 22nd August 2026
Underlying this often pleasant and understated rhythm of the concrete is the idea of “how the city can be made to function as music”. Beats and loops created from the environment and resonance of Tokyo’s famous “bohemian” neighbourhood of Koenji are repeated, layered and placed on a 96 BPM grid and used as the basis of sampled material, with the results being a most ambient and minimal soundtrack of kinetics, soft industrials, reverberations and the tubular.
The alias of Kanazawa-born and Tokyo-based electronic composer Nozom Yoneda, the Nonturn project utilizes everything from the tools of construction to the traffic and architecture of a well-known musical underground (especially punk rock it’s said) and retail district in the Western regions of that metropolis. And all of it without the use of instruments, nor the obvious or familiar sounds of a buzzing city; transformed from their sources into a low rhythm and groove and set of looped or sampled sonics and ambience.
Every track is interesting in its style and mode of rhythm; from cupping sounds to the ringing of metallic reverberations, swept motions, scaffold and the warbled oscillations and vibrations and the pneumatic drills of machines. With some exceptions it makes for a softened post club absorption of Boards of Canada, Kriedler, Japanese Environmental music, and the early Warp label.
Those exceptions however, can be found in the form of the camera-like shutter snaps hollowed-out tubed captures of ‘Fathom’, and on the psychogeography of the industrial and more supernatural sounding ‘Disrupt’ – I’m convinced that the spirits of the district’s original temples, of which it is named after, are invoked through the mystical and spirit sounds that prick the metallurgy of the slab concreted exteriors; something seeping through from the back alleys in which the old has been hidden and rebuilt. The peeling of layers, of the daily actions and converse of a city district come alive through attentive and subtle uses of sampling and the transduced to create a most immersive sound world that grooves and rhythmically finds a connection with the concrete.
Sly & The Family Drone ‘With Love’
28th August 2026
Are they taking the piss? That discombobulation of provocative, riled up, multi-limbed distortions and dynamics, Sly & The Family Drone have only gone soppy on us? Well, at least with the title and the artwork of their latest instigated power play of no wave jazz and space rock transmogrification it seems their originally framed Valentine’s Day project is packaged in Barbara Cartland pink lace, satin and velvet; a single gloved hand laying a singular rose on a love heart shaped box of unknown delights. So, to all intents and purposes a romantic gesture; a sentimental wheeze.
A love letter to their fans perhaps, there’s a limited edition of twenty individually cut 12”s up for grabs, (if you’re asking, cut no less “in real time” by Michael Lawrence at Bladed Flier!) and a less limited version on pink and grey vinyl to devour. But I for one am not buying this Barbiefication for one minute, and once on the turntable it’s a whole different matter or meta of sonic infusions.
On this particular occasion, in this particular zone, the troupe corralled the talents of mainstay trick noise maker of various hazardous and dissonance electronic effects, voice and percussionist Matt Cargill, drummer and electronics dial turner Kaz Buckland, another electronic instigator Ed Dudley (also credited here as voice), fellow trick noise conjuror and drummer Will Glaser, and tenor saxophonist James Allsopp. Attentive certainly to the forces in the room, this diverse cast of players and artists – their lives and projects criss-crossing with each other over the years, and too numerous and extensive to list here -, they group both send out feelers to the universal forces and concentrate their psychic antenna on the cosmic.
Not so dissimilar to their lunar evocations and Fortean dialled-up peregrinations and activities on Moon Is Doom Backwards, but somehow even more alien, and this time around seemingly evoking both Irmin Schmidt’s Alpha 77 switchboard and Gunther Wüsthoff’s box of tricks alongside Amon Düül II very own Yogi talks to the Interstellar Drive circular oscillations of acid-space take offs.
Yes, this is an intergalactic trip of varying fusions, with a constant prevailing presence of space zeppelin propellors (another nice ADII vibe), constant rattling rim and tribal forward momentum drums (think Battles and Art Blakey meets Jacki Liebezeit – especially his Cyclopean team up), transmitted crackles and electricity, and a blurting and skonking, far out use of saxophone (Donny McCaslin lands with the Pharoah in the backyard of Jon Hassell’s Fourth World).
Moonwalks in zero gravity and the wafted trippy Floydian synched up with the Wizard of OZ airs of ‘Somewhere Over The Rainbow’ drift across the fabric of space to bring the mood into an untethered slowdown of song Byrd impressions and astral traverses. But the action is mostly navigated towards portal tunnelled and magnetic spherical space rock jazz jams that escape out through one star gate and appear in another dimension.
Like Hawkwind and Agitation Free riding aboard the Chariots of the Gods whilst crashing Chris Corsano’s stage, With Love is a space sonic drama; the band projected to some alien craft heading through a psychedelic wormhole towards a rendezvous with the illustrated worlds of Chris Foss and Angus McKie.
Centrifugal forces are ripped and then slowly forced out into a space field of acid, no wave and cosmic cried jazz on this voyager around the solar system and beyond: even the inner space of the mind…albeit one cooked and fried on various red and blue pills. Now as for the love, well, there’s definitely some fun going on with a release of voices left to wail and echo in glee and silly mooning. A love-in with the astrophysics and the pursuit of cosmic uncertainty and beauty, all rolled into one incredibly organic-fed performance.
Marvin Tate ‘Controlled Burn’
(Amalgam Music) 29th August 2026
Not so much parred down or enervated as intimate, the maverick (idiosyncratic would be a good description) poet, author, performer, artist, radio host and songwriter polymath Marvin Tate lets loose and agitates a conscious and wise accumulated stream to the sonics and guitar sculptured fuzz and scuzz of the former Wilco multi-instrumentalist LeRoy Bach.
With a number of previous bigger ensemble collaborations under his belt, Tate now finds a more minimal, but no less atmospheric and evocative, sound board with his fellow Chicago foil. Although the close-tied combo is expanded to include both a cameo from the Chicago hot housed and international Anthem stalwart Ben Lamar Gay on synth flute – you can hear it on the purred tweet-y sounded fluted and organ bedded ‘Best Side’. An invitation is also made to another of the contemporary Chicago gumbo scene’s notable players, the drummer, composer and improviser Quinn Kirchner. Opening out the sound and dynamics a touch with his drums, Kirchner can be heard, just about, on the Eugene McDaniels flange and wavey keys unrequited split-up short ‘Love Bass (I Was Hoping)’; the drum pad slavishly lo fi and cymbal crashed electronic cLOUDDEAD meets TV on the Radio ‘Mosh Pit’ – the lyrics either a continuation or repeat of the metaphor used by Tate’s on Mike Reed’s 2023 The Separatist Party album -; and a scrunched near heavy rock-prog Sabbath via Iron Butterfly and hard jazz roll and thrash on the rock-out punky Bukowski ‘First You Hear’.
Tate’s inimitable loose phrasing, observations, deciphers, enigmas, questioning and street staged episodes of life in this hood or that comes across like a combination of Malcom Mooney, Amiri Baraka, Thomas Albert Fabio and a less naïve and goofy David Liebe Hart. Without the lecturing tone, nor on the attack, politics and social comments are delivered candidly with a visual description unlike any other. No one quite encapsulates a whole woeful episode from the life of hard knocks quite like him, whether its recalls back to his older brother with both a fondness but brutal ghetto honesty, or the travails and inherited traumas that continue to plague the mind set and daily interactions. And then there’s a lot of references, remarks, poetic beats about a love lost, a love pornified and a love that stills worthy long after it’s died on the vine of reminisce.
There’s actions and annunciations driven just as much by agitation and immediacy as by attentiveness and inquiry. From a Chicago set vision of Cain and Able to proving that he was listening all along, highlights includes amorphous crossovers into Southern country-spirituals on the near plaintive, resigned ‘Robin’; the “streets made him” and numerous great lines from the brotherly affection ‘Baller’; the near Krautrock electronic pulsed octave, signal fluctuating ‘Went For A Run’; and the Sunn O))) meets Craig Ward and Hendrix on a bad trip scuzzed and riled ‘ Darren’.
Can meets Bad Brains; a post-punk transference of blues-rock and Fluxus; the sonic and sound world that underlays each poetic entry is kept lo fi and stripped-back so as not to overpower or take anything away from Tate’s startling and descriptive prose and near hectors of both low and high art.
Vivid throughout, there’s no doubt as to the drive and creative spontaneity that arises and flows from Tate’s poetry book of realities and cultural flotsam; of the eternal struggles and implicit dramas and the colourful ensemble that make up the poet’s life.
___/THE MONOLITH COCKTAIL SOCIAL PLAYLIST VOL. 109____
Yes, the same introductory paragraph and moan from this month. Despite Spotify’s many attempts to piss me off and burry my numerus playlists, I’m still persevering with the platform: more fool me. You may or may not have noticed holes and a smattering of said playlists suddenly disappearing. I’m pruning. And to be honest, after compiling over 300 of them since 2012 I’ve slowed down and fucked up my account to the point in which it has become tiresome to use. So, I’ve trimmed out those less popular playlists, and the ones with holes in them – various copyrights being either removed or now out of date, labels and those responsible for said artists and tracks either leaving the site or for some other reason taking down individual tracks from their catalogue without any explanation; luckily I’ve never, and I hope way too good at what I do to have ever included anything AI in my playlists over the years or recently, so that doesn’t hold as a reason.
In case you were wondering, or haven’t seen it on Reddit, social media posts or on notice boards, Spotify has at least decided to act by clamping down on AI created music, with some hilarious results as arbitrator of what constitutes the artificial and what doesn’t. There’s a methodology I’m told, which has unfortunately caught some true boba fide artists in the net. However, it was Spotify in the first place that was inventing and predominantly lifting up AI artists in their own playlists and on the platform as a whole.
By the way, if you are having trouble finding me on Spotify, I’m there under my name: DominicValvona.
And so, we come to this month’s Social, and the same old template of new and old tunes, cult and anniversary celebrating album tunes alongside some more recent ones that didn’t make the site’s Monthly playlist.
This month we pay our respects to Liverpool drummer and Teardrop Explodes totem Gary Dwyer, who’s death was announced by his former band mate David Balfe on the 10th August. The co-founding mainstay of the legendary post-punk-art band went on to also play on Julian Cope’s solo debut LP and serve as an integral part of the Liverpool scene. Dwyer has a couple of writing credits on the early singles and Kilimanjaro tracks ‘Laughing Gas’ and ‘Bouncing Babies’, and the later ‘In-Psychlopaedia’. I’ve gone with the first of those tracks, and one of my all-time favourites: I was obsessed for years, including in untold DJ mixes and shows.
Moving on to this month’s (or thereabouts) LP anniversaries, there’s select tracks from The Beatles’ Revolver (60 this month), with covers of ‘And Your Bird Can Sing’ by Guadalcanal Diary and an all-out showtime version of ‘Got To Get You Into My Life’ by Jackie Trent. Sharing that sixtieth accolade, The Walker Brothers’ Portrait, and Larry Young’s Unity. Two decades on and Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds’ transmogrified covers/homage, Kicking Against The Pricks, is unbelievably forty years old this month. Moving forward another decade, and making me feel all my years, The Sneaker Pimps’ Becoming X is now thirty years old. A new century and The Dears’ criminally underrated Gang Of Losers and equally passed-over Arts And Crafts album by Black Neon are both twenty this month. Closer to home, from 2016, I’ve decided to mark David West’s Peace And Love (featured below in the Archive section) and Ian Brennan’s in-situ recordings from Cambodia – Khmer Rouge Survivors: They Will Kill You, If You Cry.
The remainder of this month’s playlist includes cross-generational treasures and craziness and sublimity and headcases from across the globe and genres, including Connie Kim, The Exkursions, Royal Servants, Greg Foat, Pam Amsterdam, Yeah Yeah Noh, YAZ-KAZ, Thee American Revolution and many, many more…
The Complete Track List Is As Follows:
The Teardrop Explodes ‘Sleeping Gas’
The Walker Brothers ‘Saturday’s Child’
Royal Servants ‘Someone to Be with Me’
Jackie Trent ‘Got to Get You into My Life’
Sophie Baker ‘Paradise Lost’
Connie Kim ‘Doan Nguoi Lu Thu’
The Exkursions ‘Third Eye’
Thee American Revolution ‘Electric Flame’
Guadalcanal Diary ‘And Your Bird Can Sing’
Sneaker Pimps ‘Walking Zero’
Larry Young ‘Zoltan’
David West ‘Dream on Dreamer’
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds ‘Sleeping Annaleah’
Battre Lyss ‘Vidsel-Sthlm, Enkel’
Frutos Del Pais ‘Todo Se Termina’
Soun San ‘Pjanch Meah (Defeat the Giant)’
Alice ‘Les fleurs’
The Black Neon ‘TX81Z’
The Dears ‘Ballad of Humankindness’
Yeah Yeah Noh ‘Cottage Industry’
Vasco De Mento ‘Nightmares’
YAS-KAZ ‘Bone Knife’
Piero Umiliani ‘Rivoluzionari’
Neuro…No Neuro ‘Spare One For Another’
Greg Foat ‘Blob #4’
Alarmist ‘CGI Sky’
Band of Holy Joy ‘I Got This Job On the Brutalism E’
Pan Amsterdam, Spice Programmers ‘Cutlery’
Kobalt 60 ‘Kaos from Order’
Baby Berserk ‘Entertainment’.
____/ARCHIVES_____
Plucked from the exhaustive archives’ sections of the site, released more or less a decade ago and reviewed on the site, David West’s languidly dreamy bedroom album, Peace Or Love.
David West ‘Peace Or Love’
Released by Tough Love, 5th August 2016
Languidly transducing his free and easy scraps of bedroom recordings into something resembling an album, the Pacific crossing maverick David West (based both in Australia and the USA) ties-down enough material to fashion eleven tracks for posterity on his latest release.
The follow-up to the Drop Out Of Collage cassette tape, Peace Or Love is a cornucopia of ideas, some fleeting others ambitious, delivered in the dreamiest gauze-y obscured way. Using a collage of samples, jams and more thought-out song suggestions, West sometimes meanders into somnolence, yet also stumbles into more fertile pastures.
His soft bulletins evoke a post-disco feel and groove on the funky keytar dance track, ‘Happiest Man In The Room’, and breezier, 99 Records meets Postcard ‘Au Contraire’. Somewhere between baggy indie and New Order, a synth pop 80s New York vibe is flittered with on the ‘heaven can’t wait’ poetic lilting ‘Dream On Dreamer’.
Purposely creating a lo-fi mood, West still hints at the bigger ideas. Strings (sampled I presume) can often be heard stirring throughout, lending either a plaintive note of mooning resignation or certain grandeur to proceedings. Vignettes such as ‘At Peace’ use them for a mixed emotional response: the title might suggest the comfort of death, and this bears out on the instrumental which is itself a mournful and ambient noise collage that features strange scrambled flickers of something from beyond the earthly realm.
Shifting genres, ‘Do You Miss Me Around’, with its overloaded noise gate distortions, sounds like a stab at No Age, and the first of a three-act suite, ‘Darkness In My Heart’ has an air of Wolf Parade. Touches, no matter how slight, of Tim Goldsworthy, ESG, Archie Bronson Outfit ‘Chunk’ period, Young Marble Giants and even Cabaret Voltaire all seem to make an appearance. And with contributions from an axis of San Fran/LA/Perth friends and West’s various stints with the Red Columns, Liberation and Rank/Xerox to expand and inspire the musical horizons, Peace Or Love is filled with some interesting hybrids and possibilities.
Perusal #82: Becca Bartlett, Hui, Spaer, Free From Society…
August 3, 2026
In review: a world of sonic discoveries. Dominic Valvona
Becca Bartlett ‘Me, Myself And A Mirror’
Released 24th July 2026
The burgeoning Newfoundland singer-songwriter Becca Bartlett is wise beyond her years both creatively and emotionally, pulling on the heart strings but not in any kind of overblown sense, but subtly and with enough atmosphere and musical skill to serve up age old themes of self-identity and how to hold on to it.
Losing something of herself to appeal and seek validation, Becca seems to have already turned the page by the sounds of the sophisticated, but easily pulling on the emotions, set of songs: the current Berklee College of Music student’s debut EP no less.
Whilst finding a way in the world, and despite the yearns, lament and often plaintive subject matters and lyrics, Becca’s musicianship and vocals seem confident and at last, comfortable. Piquing my interest anyway, especially with the opening tree bug ‘Cicadas’ malady come beautifully heart aching cathartic release, her music is fresh introspection of atmospherics, country, the American 90s indie singer-songwriter scene, and folk-pop.
It begins with that already mentioned opening country-twang voiced – like the Cowboy Junkies meets Junita Stein; and even a touch of Tim Buckley – encouragement of finding one’s own place in the world despite the views and actions, the cold shoulder or discouragement of others – friends, or so-called friends, peers and romantic attachments. But with a range that is suffused with a hurting and yet enduring voice, sympathetic soft guitar and piano, and an attentive, comforting use of drums (just a few subtle uses of splashes and shimmering crescendos to stir the troubled waters), Becca can wisely rise through the scales and find the odd surprising note or two to turn even the most familiar sounding of ballads and releases of the spirit into something very interesting and deeply felt. Joni Mitchell is mentioned in the references, and it’s not immediately obvious but ‘Cicadas’ does have the air about it of a Joni song in its choice of these arcs and rises.
The title-track itself draws on the emotional wellspring that motivates and charges each of the EP’s six songs. Anecdotal wise, and it’s easy to imagine when you hear it, Becca has been overcome when performing ‘Me, Myself And A Mirror’. Written as a response to rejection (specifically mentioned, a rejection letter from her dream music school during a particular period of turmoil, when “nothing she accomplished felt like enough.”), this song is one of endurance, of overcoming the turbulence to finally see in that allegorical, metaphorical and all too real mirror a person worthy of acceptance and self-worth. Once more tugging at the proverbial in a dreamy hunger of dusted drums and country-folk-soul.
The rest of this generous EP’s songbook reminded me in part of a less esoteric Gillian Stone (the fellow Canadian artist who was once a writer on this site), of Neko Case and Jenny Lewis of Rilo Kiely fame. The ecologically distressed Cassandra laments of ‘Tears Of Gaia’ feature a lovely watery tumult of piano and performance not too dissimilar to Tori Amos, whilst ‘The Static’ has an air of Celtic-country to its longed ache for a mended and entwined heart.
Even the most jaded will reconcile with their tear ducts upon hearing this brilliant songbook: A captivating if heart aching debut from an artist with much to share.
Free Form Society ‘Jam Session #1’
(Free Form Society) Released 22nd July 2026
New beginnings this month, or at least the burgeoning anticipation of a team-up from the Argentine pairing of filmmaker, composer and sound artist Melisa Aller and Rob Conlazo of maverick favourites The Reynols.
A fresh enterprise, the Free Form Society is an umbrella for new musical improvisations and label activities, and a platform for experimenting further with “expanded cinema”.
Not so much a manifesto, the rules of this platform are scant (“no repetition”, “no rehearsals” and “no corrections” being the main ones), but include the abandonment of most restrictions in creating immersive improvised experiences of image, cinema and sonics.
Step forward the multi-talented Aller, who’s oeuvre includes experiments with Super 8 film (its apparatus and processes), the notable debut feature film Las Decisiones Formales and the Oberhausen International selected Caida triptych. Since 2013 Aller has been composing the soundtracks to her own films, whilst also releasing a couple of studio albums (2024’s Plastiques and 2026’s Destruktion), and taking part on various musical experiments with CS8 and EPM.
With a haywire provenance dating back decades, Conlazo’s day job sonically with The Reynols has so far produced at least 120 albums since 1993. A list of their collaborators and foils over those years will tell you all you need to know about the direction of sonic travel: Pauline Oliveros, Lee Ranaldo, The Nihilist Spasm Band, Damo Suzuki, Paul Dutton, John Oswald, Michael Snow, Alan Licht, Birchville Cat Motel and the Acid Mothers Temple. Alongside this outsider unit Conlazo has maintained an independent visual and conceptual art practice.
Brought together in this open-ended configuration, the pair now cruise, pummel, speed and also float through a both sleazy leather Vega and more Japandorf and Dinger motored extemporised cosmic vacuum on the project’s inaugural jam session.
One solid aural operation of sonic propulsion and vortex giddy, zero gravity noise oscillations, this twenty-three plus minutes session, recorded live in Buenos Aires, keeps up multiple passages of rhythm and momentum as it first lays into a psychobilly space rock tunnelled beat at the start: this arriving after what sounds like the astral chinking glassy wind chimes and the steam engine chug of the last train to Lhasa.
From skying to the Spacemen 3 and Acid Mothers, then beamed through the cylindrical reverberations of the space time continuum, there’s reference points to CAN, Johhny Marr, Hawkwind and industrial gothic rock. But the action moves on organically into a surreal lunar soup and the whirly uncertain space of the off world with distortions, metallic alien vessel architecture, a garbled use of tribal South American voices from Castaneda’s dreams, and Moorcock adventure. All the while a guitar, both in tremolo and reverb mode, strings out and wrangles suitably galactic hymns, contours, unrestrained scores and undulations whilst the filters and effects loosely circle and hover overhead.
A suitably imaginary inner and outer space is invoked through this spectrum of experiences, influences and the spirit of improvisation to set in motion a free form idea of collaboration without perimeters: a unique funnelling of multimedia disciplines into something uncharted.
Hui ‘Zerbricht Fels’
(Jollies) 6th August 2026
An inner and outer space menagerie of organic and synthetic biospheres and growth await the listener on this latest enterprise and union from Johannes Schebler and Sven Fritz; both electronic artists creating electronic eco-systems and fun, bobbled, bubbly and mysterious mutations under their respective Baldruin and Ervin Omsk alias.
Though connecting via label overlaps, the two had previously never met in person; not realising until recently that they both resided in the old German spa town of Wiesbaden, located in the Southern western state of Hess. Incongruous perhaps to that town’s famous old worldly German Kingdom vibe, the result of that creative partnership showcases each individual’s signatures of digital micro and macrobiotic life synthesis, and surprising sonic outcomes derived from fever dreams and surrealist juxtapositions of sci-fi, nature and a candy crush arcade machine giddy transmogrification of funny and more woeful, worried voices.
In the German vernacular that album title translates as “Breaks rocks”, whilst the track titles remain partly vague and partly inquisitive prompts; gateways you could say to a discombobulation, a twist and Dadaist/Fluxus sound off-world of alternative futurism and the view from both below and above the microscope of lunar playfulness.
And for your admittance into this attractive and absorbing fantasy, you can expect to her the very sounds of crystallised growth; the pitter patter and fanning of not quite rhythms and beats but something like it; the yip and zip, the mewl of furballs and high-pitched transformed voices; and a sort of dulcimer spindle of possibilities using hollowed out pipes and tines to play out a tune across a cavernous hideaway of stalactites.
If reference points terms – the old “you listened to this, so check out these curious companions” manner of finding similar bedfellows -, this exotic and galactic field work reminded me in part of Carmen Jacci, Mir Calix, the Italian Atretetra label’s output, Sakamoto’s floppy disc experiments and even, probably wide off the mark, Walter Smetek.
Adventurous in one way, the partnership lubes up their mechanicals, metallic filaments and percussion, and alien oddities for a promising collaboration of hyper-vivid and more nonsensical experimental and living, breathing, existing biomorphic play.
Motohiro Nakashima ‘Sea Of Thought’
(FLAU) 12th August 2026
Beautiful deterioration and the art of salvaging something meaningful, contemplative and worth holding on to from the events that seem set to overpower or engulf us; these are the considered subtly relented and forgiving musical evocations that emerge from both the diaphanous and the near shapeless perspectives of Motohiro Nakashima’s guitar renderings and electronic effects apparatus.
The Fukuyama (Hiroshima Prefecture) born, and Nara based guitarist uses delicate and floated picking skills, the worn cassette loops method of Frippertronics, self-built instruments and his collaborating guests’ own enervated forms of accentuation and near amorphous formed renderings to formulate and address the “contradictions and quiet helplessness embedded in contemporary life”. A fragility that is represented by the enervations of textures, of surface atmospherics and a technique of layering pioneered by Fripp (especially on the No Pussyfooting) and Eno (Discreet Music) that is laid down like a wash or bed for fellow label mates and fellow Japanese artists ARAKI Shin, marucoporoporo and Kumi Takahara to dreamily or introspectively add their amorphous ideas of observational expression and traversing feels.
Shin, whose participated in recordings, live performances, and compositions/arrangements for artists such as Aimyon, Sonoko Ito, Exile, Chemistry, Miu Sakamoto, Sawako, Shingo Sekiguchi, and the Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra, contributes a form of near Fourth World and dry raspy suffused blows of saxophone to a number of tracks: sometimes almost sounding like the fuzz or fizzle of static, a mysterious substance and vapour, and at other times more like a wafted and near airy clarinet or oboe sound.
Singer and songwriter marucoporoporo can be heard vocally on the whispery, near breathless ‘Sea Of Thought’. Her voice could be described as ghost-folk, with a touch of the ethereal, as it emerges from the trembled minimalist washes and soft airs of consciousness over the waters.
Bringing a touch of Alison Cotton, of evocative chamber pastoral music and an abstract veneer of nature to these interconnective suites and emotional erasures, the Tokyo-based multi-instrumentalist and composer Takahara offers some sublime and gentle peaks of yearning, mulling, sentiment and drama: at one point building towards a more minimalist version of Sigur Ros, and at other times more like Simon McCorry.
Nakashima’s guitar picks, loops and permeations themselves reminded me in part of Junkboy, Steve Gunn, Myles Cochran and Peter Broderick. Taken altogether with the cyclonic effects of celluloid and taped memories; the near venerated and spiritual passages out in the pastures and fields, anointed by a sense that a great weight and miasma has been lifted; and the very subtle use of drums (see the Tortoise-like post-rock-jazz pining ‘Cycle’), this reminded me of a more washed out version of Robert Musci’s ‘Blue’ union with Massimo Mariani and Giovanni Venosta. But it feels very much a part of the whole FLAU family and its ascetic too; another understated album of meditations, reflections shaped from more sombre themes yet made somehow more introspectively pleasing and lightened.
Neon Crabs ‘A Big Dumb Racket’
(Metal Postcard Records) Released 28th July 2026
Here we go again, round the Pere U-bend with a Unabomber MC 900ft Jesus and Eastern European blade runner dominatrix in tow; another “dumb racket” from the misanthropic transatlantic dust-up of Andy Goz and his Neon Kittens foils Nina K and Hope and their Dallas Internet pen pal Matt Nauseous of Occult Character and Legless Crabs infamy.
No longer a burgeoning venture or sideline collaboration, the Neon Crabs project is at least four or five releases in (probably more, as the label and all the participants seem to release tracks every other month without fanfare or through a very tight number of controlled outlets; unfortunately, the MC not being deemed worthy enough to get the memos). And it’s obvious, despite the rile, nausea and petulant aphorisms of derision at the state of the world, they’re having a laugh pulling together and distilling their respective musical influences and distain into a fusion of new and no wave, post-punk (both of the spikey and the danceable kind) and the industrial.
Made in the collaborative long-distance mode – a necessity of the Covid pandemic age -, Andy and his Fall-like femme fatales in York match or discombobulate and harness the energy and despondency of their Texan counterpart across four tracks of varying disturbed speaking and scuzz.
The buzz hallucinogenic turn sinister grab of the 70s and 80s, ‘Altered States’, could be a Fripp’s turn on ‘It’s No Game’ via Disco Inferno; a lyrical smash up of Coupland, Easton Ellis and Lanier, whilst ‘Invisible’ is roughed up Iggy and the kind of “your pretty face is going to hell” jolted dance and street jive evocation of The Stooges breaking bread with Biting Tongues: an ode to the ignored that takes on a near stalker and ominous tone.
Nina K is on duty like a chatroom AI version of Michi Hirota on the second half of this EP (I’m it calling that, but I’m not really sure if it’s an extended single or a short EP). Kas Product in a technocratic feudal and online broadcast of removed entertainment wars and Internet addicted and addled porn runs in a kind of automated style on ‘Prison Of Imagination’, and has a blast with the Poison Girls, Black Randy and PiL on the just as pornified and sleazy dissection of branded ownership dystopia, ‘Letter To Dog’.
Prolific to a fault, with a track and project, a new album or EP every other day, it’s hard to keep up, but Andy, Nina and Hope’s maverick disgruntled and fun times cynical match up with the idiosyncratic Matt has both the legs and promise.
Raymond Roussel ‘No One Asked Us Yet’
(Halocline Trance) 21st August 2026
The second of two releases on the Halocline Trance label this month from the idiosyncratic musician, band leader and cultural theorist Eldritch Priest, the French polymath imbued Raymond Roussel trio alias sees Priest once again acquainting himself with those jazz roots after various curious chamber experiments.
Not so much an accompaniment or moiety, but from the same hand, Priest’s other release this month, Too, So Like Nothing, sees three of his piano compositions performed by the notable Roger Admiral, whilst No One Asked Us Yet has the Canadian polymath back on guitar, leading his trio into ever wilder, more avant-garde spaces and dreamt-up spells of somnolent phenomenon and untethered conceptual freeform expression.
With visionary aplomb and a deft style of conjuring up a fusion of ideas and angles, Priest is aided in his ideas, transferences and wanderings by fellow Canadian foils James Meger (on bass) and Brady Cranfield (on drums and electronic effects manipulations and filters).
For the record, Meger is described online and in the PR notes as ‘an active bassist and composer working primarily in the fields of jazz, free improvisation and rock music.’ And has worked with both local and international talent, including such noted company as Wayne Horvitz, Lori Freedman, Ig Henneman and Kris Davis, whilst also playing in Ron Samworth’s Dogs Do Dream, Peggy Lee’s Echo Painting, Sick Boss, The Alicia Hansen band, The Bruno Hubert Trio, Ten Thousand Wolves, The Now Orchestra, Cow Trance and others.
Cranfield meanwhile is ‘a Vancouver-based sound and visual artist, musician, and writer.’ He’s a holder of both a MA in Communications and an MFA from Simon Fraser University. ‘He’s also the founder and co-organizer (in collaboration with the artist Kathy Slade) of the ongoing public art project The Music Appreciation Society, and frequently collaborates with artist Jamie Hilder. He is currently also a member of the improv/electronic/jazz trio Alfred Jarry and the duo Vomit Fraud with Kay Higgins.’
Priest meanwhile has been working as a composer and improvisor for twenty-five years. His compositions include explorations in the chamber vernacular as well as solo works, some of which have been performed in ‘North American and Europe by interpreters such as the Arditti Quartet, Quatuor Bozzini, Philip Thomas, Continuum, and Arraymusic’. This practice is described on his bio as being characterized by an ‘ob/excessive approach to melody, not in a systematic or meaningful sense, but in the sense that they don’t stop and tend towards the absurd.’ ‘His improvisational work is like this too but improvised. Along with John Mark Sherlock, he co-founded the Toronto-based experimental music collective Neither/Nor, which in the early noughties commissioned and performed works by an international array of musician-composers.’
At present he’s a billed as an ‘active member of Vancouver’s improvisation and experimental jazz community’ as one half of Alfred Jarry, a duo that takes its name from the inventor of ’pataphysics – “the science of imaginary solutions that symbolically attributes the properties of objects, described by their virtuality, to their lineaments.”
‘Alongside his musical practice, Priest has pursued a career in academia as a cultural theorist, where he writes on sonic culture, experimental aesthetics, and the philosophy of experience from a ’pataphysical perspective. His writing has appeared in several journals and books including Theory, Culture and Society, Postmodern Culture, and AM: Journal of Art and Media Studies. Additionally, Priest has published two manuscripts—Boring Formless Nonsense: Experimental Music and the Aesthetics of Failure (Bloomsbury 2013), and Earworm and Event: Music, Daydreams and Other Imaginary Refrains (Duke University Press 2022). With members of the experimental theory group The Occculture, he co-wrote Ludic Dreaming: How to Listen Away from Contemporary Technoculture.’
The exhaustive list of credits continues, is fattened even more, but before this becomes just a Wiki entry let’s move on to his trio’s latest soundboard and art-rock-jazz imbued album of the inquisitive, the mysterious, the abstracted and the freeform.
Taking at least a page out of the book of the infamous and conceptually renowned French poet, novelist, playwright, musician and let’s not leave out, chess enthusiast Roussel, Priest and his foils riff not only on their own improvisational sounding arrangements but both on a lamentable lovelorn tradition and one of Bill Evan’s more pleasant swing numbers.
Roussel, beloved of the surrealists, exonerated by such leading conceptualists as Duchamp and revitalized by the Oulipo and Nouveau Roman thinkers, was famously ignored or heavily criticised whilst he lived; his homonymic puns, his coded layers dismissed by his peers, although in later years, his genius became a springboard, his books (including possibly two of his most well-known, Impressions d’Afrique and Locus Solus) a catalyst for his scions and the generations that followed – a big influence no less on Duchamp’s symbolic large glass, early installation work, The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even. Somehow as the umbrella over Priest’s trio, their investigations and mirages, his legacy and processes seem to have been absorbed into a musical language that seems at first wildly loose and challenging to measure or make sense of. Here we see hints and peaks of what we know as the most out there and infused of jazz styles, an embrace of far out rock and post-rock, the electronic manipulations and dial twiddles of Squarepusher and Warp, and the more lunar and floated and drifted atmospheres of space.
There’s certainly prompts title-wise, from sleepwalking to venturing out beyond the great beyond on the album’s finale of mirage-feeling surrealism and musing moody rolls across an amorphous border between reality and the ether. More obvious, and as briefly alluded to a paragraph ago, there’s a languid come Zappa take on Bill Evans’ ‘Five’ – actually a combination of Wes Montgomery, Steve Vai and Allen Holdsworth finding common ground in the strung-out machinations of space. There’s also a dreamy fusion of the marooned and the reverberatingly cosmic on the trio’s interpretation of the old traditional ‘Black Is The Colour’ folk song; long since adapted and remoulded over the decades and centuries; it’s original writer long since forgotten I’m sure, with among its most famous takes being that of Christy Moore in the Celtic mode.
Elsewhere the action is both surprisingly attentive if avant-garde, with of course passages and whole tracks that seem serial and to follow no linear progression as such. It reminded me in places of everyone from Pat Methany, Jeff Parker, Last Exit, Bill Frisell, Wolfgang Muthspiel’s work with Brian Blade, Tonbucket and some of the guitar centric releases on the European ACT label. But a big surprise, though it may only be me hearing it, ‘Luster’ convinced me that I was hearing Radiohead for a minute; the electronics, an understated Aphex Twin. At one point on the drumsticks scattered, click-clack rolling and oscillated ‘Derelict Lounge’ Priest’s guitar takes on the sound of a violin.
Bent out of shape and then take on various flights of inquiry and the distorted, each performance seems to exist in its own space and time; dialled into its own special language and intelligence. A most remarkable and abstracted record.
Spaer ‘Lessons And Nonsense’
(VHS Records) 20th August 2026
An amorphous electic songbook of accumulated lessons learned and quirkier nonsense picked up across a decade or so, the solo project of Psymon Spine co-founder Peter Spears is an idiosyncratic package of observed oddities, curiosities and the more poignantly disenfranchised and disenchanted.
With disarming psychedelia, a pop naivety and embrace of the Beach Boys sublime harmonies and their whimsies (the album that really wasn’t, bundled together mostly out of scraps from the abandoned SMiLE sessions, Smiley Smile is referenced in the Spears PR notes, but even Wild Honey, Sunflower and Surf’s Up could be cuddled into that love-in) via the Animal Collective (Panda Bear especially, but also the Geologist’s solo projects too), Cloud and Terror Pigeon, the Spaer version of Spears is a strange bedfellow of the Psymon Spine group sound and ideas. Each song is from the same artist’s palette, but mixed differently, with the opening wistful cartoonish Aesop’s tale come universal observation of friendship through futility, ‘The Salamander And The Snail’. After witnessing the titular characters sharing a flip flop (I’m sure there’s point to be made here about manmade plastics and rubbers ending up thrown away or lost in the natural environment; here used as a handy makeshift boat or float, but usually a blight and hindrance and poison on the landscape) whilst attempting to navigate the cyclonic current of a river in Vermont, Spears has turned his musical sketch into a swimmingly concertinaed and bellowed wave of all those already mentioned Beach Boys influences.
And yet, there’s also a pastoral washed drawing board of references and experiments that wander off into their own world of influence and observation; including dalliances with the indie dance music of the early 2000s, Todd Rundgren, 70s solo artists of a certain pop-rock bent, prog-lite, Duncan C’s Fairlight and smoke machine years, Sam Flex, Bright Eyes, The Shins and The Unicorns. There’s what I would term a Balearic-like sound to the acoustic guitar at times on the Bergmann meets Wes Anderson nostalgic kick, whistled and cooed, ‘Indie Movie’, and even a campfire Fleet Foxes vibe meets Pixies moodiness to the “earnest” meant Autumnal love ode ‘The Woodstove’.
By the time we reach the finale of ‘These Bugs’, where the well-intentioned smacks straight into reality, Spears has corralled both his former bandmate Jon Becker in on Mick Ronson-style rock-out guitar and former collaborator, the singer, performer, bandleader and composer Kate Mertucci on vocals. With a touch of both the country twang (almost in jest), some hint of The Dears, Telenova and Blonde Redhead, Mertucci says sorry in a both touching and almost tongue-in-cheek dramatics as she deals with an infestation of ants: a true story ramped up to a sort of indie-dance rock opera, inspired by Spears’ own Vegan girlfriend and her principles suddenly overrun by marauding ants in their thousands.
Alluding to enquires about his own characterisation, a philosophical whimsy of a thread runs throughout this mini album (or extended EP if you will); all real concerns, woes, worries, anxieties and the more pleasing aspects of the daily grind are washed over by an amorphous feel for melody, feel and the quirky twists and turns of a mind set loose to wander and ruminate life’s foibles, set to a most pleasing soundboard of ideas.
Here’s the message bit we hate, but crucially need:
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The End of the Month Playlist For July 2026
July 30, 2026
Our Monthly Playlist selection of choice music from the last month. Curated by Dominic Valvona & Matt Oliver.
Choice music and sonics from the last month (or so) picked from our reviews, but also featuring the tunes we missed out on or didn’t get the room to feature at the time. Curated by Dominic Valvona with choice hip-hop cuts selected by Matt Oliver.
The Track List:
THAO & The Get Down Stay Down w/ Tune-Yards ‘Sick of the Times’
A Certain Ratio ‘Knife Slits Water (EM) 12” Version’
foamboy ‘FAR AWAY’
Homeboy Sandman & Jack Splash & CeeLo Green ‘World On Fire’
ECID ‘Break Up Insurance’
Space Afrika & Tony Njoku ‘MLN’
Skyzoo ‘Short Money’
Peter Evans ‘Genesis/Schismogenesis – Stage 4’
A-F-R-O & MotionPlus ‘Labor of Fruit’
Brian Ennals & Blockhead & Defcee & Mikie Mayo ‘Yellow School Buses’
King Kashmere & Genesis Elijah & Killa P & Dabbla ‘Big[Bad]’
Chuck Strangers ‘L2LL2C’
Post Elvis ‘Luna (Evil’s Ballad)’
Simon Klein ‘Don’t Leave Me Alone’
Robyn Hitchcock ‘My Dead Astronaut’
Babe Rainbow ‘Acid and Honey’
John Howard ‘Abbey Road, April 1974’
Skyjack ‘Shozi’
Richard Spaven & Wildchild ‘Finders’
The God Fahim ‘GFY’
Distant Fires Burning & Autistici ‘Scalar (Reverend Basstorius Remix)’
hackedepicciotto ‘Zeitwende’
Aisha Vaughan ‘Frozen’
August Cooke ‘On The Line’
Biita Houdei ‘The Ground Here’
Tristan Da Cunha ‘Preludio’
Feverdreamt ‘Shadow Catching Up’
Sir Richard Bishop ‘They Shall Take Up Serpents’
Park Jiha ‘Summer Illusion’
Los Orientales de Paramonga ‘Viajando Con Un Loco’
EYE WITH AN EYE (Bloom de Wilde & Nick Trepka) ‘flow.’
Tōth ‘Easy – Live With the Brooklyn Choir Project’
The monthly Digest includes a clutch of accumulated short new music reviews, the social inter-generational/eclectic and anniversary albums celebrating playlist and a piece from the Archives.
Photo Credit: Marilena Umuhoza Delli
___/NEW MUSIC REVIEWS SELECTION___
al niente ‘al niente’
(Discreet Archive) Released 10th July 2026
Drawing upon a diverse range of experiences, experiments and study, the Italian quartet of notable players known as al niente form a bond and untethered atonal, mostly non-musical and avant-garde language together to produce this atmospheric performance of the improvised and text-based compositions. The latter of which includes an interpretation of the composer and cellist Stefan Thut’s ‘Some, 1 – 4’, which finds a suitable spot amongst the near-quiet of nothingness and stirrings of resonated, shaved and hinging brass, the dry rasps and the steam-like released whistles of the flute. A double-bass thumbs or plucks a one note prompt (or reaction) as the silence acts not so much as a pause but a repeated use of space and abstract tone in itself: an important, integral part of the whole response to the initial sounds that set each performance in motion.
You can find it on the Bandcamp description yourself, but Thut describes this rendering and process of his template thus:
“What remains here of traditional notation is the succession of two elements and the vertical arrangement as in a four-voice setting. At first glance the columnar image receives a liquefaction as it expands through the action of making sound. But the repeated actions of the four performers also bring it back to the static of the image yielding an impression.”
The reference to voices is interesting, and easy to imagine replacing the instruments and resonation on not just this track but the others: a removed form of vocals I’d admit, more, and chiming with the quartet’s signature, atonal in execution.
Comprising of Beatrice Miniaci on both flute and bass flute, Cosimo Fiaschi on soprano saxophone, Gabriele Pagliano on double-bass and Luca Venitucci on the accordion and what’s termed “objects”, the quartet work in a kind of avant-garde, non-musical mode that evokes the most minimalist fields of jazz and the avant-garde; sieving, shifting and stretching the possibilities of the elements of breath and instrumental textured experiment.
Within that expanse of light and shaded microtonal and held suffused progressions and dialogues there’s light refractions and various pitches interacting with the industrial sounds of the workbench, of mechanics and tools, or with near esoteric leanings and released steam. Mysterious and almost esoteric in places, recorded somewhere in the city of Rome where the quartet are based, they conjure up as much atmosphere as they evoke a certain skill of untethered musicianship and reaction. Windows are opened – literally sounding at times like the hinges being activated – on this abstract horizon swell and permeation of Anthony Braxton and his peers, the tradition of innovative atonal experimentation and the avant-garde in Europe, and Ariel Kalma.
The Breedling ‘A Straunge And Terrible Wunder’
(Wrong Speed Records) 4th August 2026
Sticking close to home with a horror show score of electronic dark arts and Satanic conjuring, Chris Spalton (under The Breedling guise) soundtracks the supernatural and folkloric psychogeography of his county by reviving the hell hound legend of the bedevilled Black Shuck.
To borrow from Rev. Abraham Fleming’s August of 1577 dated account of the infamous beast – as repeated orally and with just a sensational touch of exaggeration for publishing purposes -, the most dramatic legendary description, passed down through the generations, and obviously unsubstantiated, of the East Anglian miscreant is as follows:
“This black dog, or the divel in such a likenesse (God hee knoweth al who worketh all,) running all along down the body of the church with great swiftnesse, and incredible haste, among the people, in a visible fourm and shape, passed between two persons, as they were kneeling uppon their knees, and occupied in prayer as it seemed, wrung the necks of them bothe at one instant clene backward, in somuch that even at a momet where they kneeled, they stragely dyed.”
Or better still and heading the title of this latest album from the Norfolk-based artist, Fleming summarised this beast and its most notorious episode as a “Strange and terrible wunder”.
Sightings and accounts continue, and just like UFO sightings, each period in history is reflective of its own hangups, fears and cultural obsessions. But in this mode and time, recalling the late Tudor era’s own distresses and religious fervours and religious wars, the bestial hound is no dressed-up Baskerville masquerade but a symbol of the daemonic sent to rip out the throats of the metaphorical flock of Christianity, or at the very least to frighten the congregation into towing the right pathway. Then again, there’s not much defence when such sharp-clawed and blood thirsty imaginings are about to pounce on the unsuspecting.
Inhabiting a world not unlike that of Robert Eggers nightmares, with a dash of quintessential English rural occultism and weirdlore, a chill of spine-tingling Gallo Italian horror and an apparatus best described as industrial foreboding and sinister. And yet there’s a darkly rooted use of ambience too, and incipient quietened passages in which the wind, the atmosphere is held off just long enough to escape the doom-laden electronica, the NIN-esque squalls, steely guitar resonance and hammered, nail-gunned (like a brutal version of modern diy workshop crucifixion) and beaten drumbeats.
Entwinned with the bracken density and shadows of the English woodlands, oscillations and prowls are exchanged for the creaking floors of an old mill struck out in isolation in the wilds or the sound of tormented individuals being tortured and ripped limb from limb. And yet, you can detect a suffusion or perhaps just a passing influence of Haxan Cloak, Umberto, Ital Tek and Lucrecia Dalt amongst the hell’s gateway of snared, growling, almost gaggled and howling, biting hounds and dark bewitched invocations. There is however some gleam of relief in the dying embers of the finale, a sudden navigation of the rotated and circled esoteric environment turns up in the clearing to the sound of bird song and a reminder that none of this has been real: or has it?
Spalton delivers an immersive, ominous soundtrack of real quality; a dungeon doom and folkloric rural electrified reading of a timely legend that demands attention. |It would be good to see some director pick this up for a movie, but until then, let the sonic distress and mystery invoke its own images and story.
Himba Hymn Collective ‘Ghosts Of Namibia’s Skeleton Coast’
(Sublime Frequencies) Released 8th May 2026
Possibly the most featured producer and in-situ instigator of inspiring, exceptional and jaw-dropping recordings on the Monolith Cocktail since its inception, Ian Brennan’s highly prolific output (not just musically, he’s also an incredibly expressive and candid writer too, as demonstrated by his accompanying descriptive linear notes) most recent release completely slipped my notice: an unheralded release it seems by Sublime Frequencies.
Joined on each of his global expeditions, as always, by his partner and foil the Italian-Rwandan photographer, author and filmmaker Marilena Umuhoza Delli, Ghosts Of Namibia’s Skeleton Coast finds the acclaimed producer, musician, writer and violence prevention advocate practising what he preaches in recording the unheard voices and performances of some of the world’s most isolated, ignored, disadvantaged, and marginalized.
Described by Ian as the ‘Most disproportionate travel to recording time ratio we’d ever risked.’ With ‘Four days flight, four days driving (two entirely off-road) to record for a few hours’ Ian and Marilena travelled to the world’s driest and oldest desert (not atavistic but even older, back to prehistoric times) in Namibia, on the southwestern coastline of Africa to capture the unique voices of the age-old Himba people; perhaps one of the most objectified and photographed tribes in the world, yet until now rarely given the space or platform to perform vocally and musically. The muse of National Geographic and untold covers for their famous red-hued moisturised and decorated skin – a second skin and mix of animal fat and ochre powder, it is both used as a sort of sunscreen that protects them from the harsh and unforgiving sun and cosmetically – and eroticized state of undress – the women usually going about their daily lives and routines topless -, the females, but men too, celebrate beauty.
With their near unbroken ancestral traditions, the Himba live a still largely pastoral existence, eking out a living through their most prized possession: cattle. Sharing much with their fellow Namibian’s, the Herero (both originally migrating from elsewhere in Africa to settle in the most sparsely populated large country on the continent, the two groups also share a Bantu ancestry), every hamlet features a central ‘Kraal’ where the cattle and goats are herded for safety each night.
The Himba are smattered in and around the Namibia desert, which despite its arid and dry reputation lies along the cool coastal exterior of the country, with the ocean to its side. Stretching for 1200 miles and reaching up to 100 miles inland, this vast challenging landscape is famous for its trade routes and important movement of both minerals and fish. Relatively stable these days – in fact, one of the safest places in Africa – that same desert and the country as a whole has suffered from some very dark, tumultuous and violent periods; including what has been called the first genocide of the 20th century, when the Colonialist rulers of what was then German South West Africa carried out a heinous and ruthless execution of the Herero and the Namaqua peoples after a rebellion by Chief Samuel Maharero – started after decades of slavery, persecution, the confiscation of cattle and starvation. The Germans originally colonised the region in 1884; an act of occupation, a stemming or barrier to the British Empire who were expanding westwards. Anywhere from 50,000 to 65,000 people were killed during the bloody years between 1904 and 1907, but the Dutch originated settlers the Boars were also known to have had their conflicts and subjugations of the same people too. War has followed, both civil and from across the borders, but Namibia is a much changed and settled country, a favourite to backpackers and tourists alike.
But with a near unbroken tradition, the Himba continue to draw attention to their idiosyncratic way of life and exotic (if I’m allowed to dare use that word) look. But the focus here is on their songs and performances, with a requested amassed cluster of both women and men captured for posterity on tape by Ian and shared to an international audience. With a rudimental or striped down travel kit of apparatus, recordings are usually raw, caught in the very moment when something is about to happen; a spontaneity; a one-off for the conditions and environment in which it has been sealed.
Ian’s own descriptions make my job easier, and I could literally just copy and paste his insights, his descriptions and directness. He really manages to evoke the scene, the ardent journey to the middle of a most unforgiving desert location, conjuring up the smells, the atmosphere, the cast of various performers brilliantly. My personal favourite is when Ian manages to reference the reduced life expectancy figure for the region as sixty with a request that he’d made earlier for the Himba villagers to specifically put forward their elders for the recordings. When Ian and Marilena finally make it, they are met with a group of men who aren’t so much as elderly as near the same age as Ian himself (hardly queuing up just yet to get his pension), and so proving just how reduced that life expectancy really is in these harsh conditions.
Ian just as brilliantly describes what you are about to hear: a psychedelic vocal tapestry, esoteric even in parts. The use of what’s called the Cattle Gun (a rarefied found these days we’re told, expensive and coveted, this lengthy horn, taken from the Oryx antelope, is coated in mud, and can be described as kind of strange jazz horn come breathed rattle) and the way in which the Himba cup their hands to cover their mouths in order to create the effect of chorusing and flanging is extremely helpful in understanding what you are about to experience.
Let’s take the psychedelic description first. You can hear it permeating nearly every track as a strange effect of hallucination and mirage. But when you get to the stringy strummed ‘Friend’s Who’ve Passed’ its entwinned with a rootsy vision of Beefheart and the blues. The vocal (I believe attributed to lead vocalist Tjamburu) is near garbled and active in its elegiac act of remembrance.
Esoterically there’s the opening introduction to the tribe’s reenactment of lion attack upon its prized cattle. Summoning up the heaving chest exhales and sweat, the growling threat and devouring jaws and clawed menace of a predator, the group effort of interactions and overlayered voices is near supernatural and bestial in invoking such a carnage.
As with so many of Ian’s previous truly international recordings there’s so much to pick up, so many crossovers or reverberations with traditions and music from other regions. You could be mistaken for thinking the pleaded ‘Please Help Me’ was an ancient recall from the Mississippi voice of spiritual gospel to the motherland – there’s an odd, near unmusical, languid if indolent enervated accompaniment (if you can call it that) of metal or tin being occasionally scrapped and shaved in the background, which only makes the whole thing more happenstance and surreal. ‘Don’t Cry (Your Father & Grandfather Are Good)’ reminded me a little of the harmonious unions of voices heard across the border in South Africa, albeit in the hallucinogenic mode, and the trilling, rolled tongue echoes – accompanied by what sounds like a klaxon going off – and laughing gas inhaled-like octave change of voice into the realms of the childish and silly ‘Be Brave In The Face Of Death’ reminded me of a far-off recollection of dub crossed with King Ayisoba.
Vocally otherworldly and yet also drawing on physicality, justifiable grievances, the confrontational, there’s a balance of the soulful, the earthy and the impassioned; using breathing and various mouth pulled and loose lipped trills to express both the painful and the ritualistic; indignation and communication.
Not so much worthy as essential listening to everyone who really wishes to get clued up and experience the sounds, the joy, the spontaneity and passions of music and performance from outside the mediocre TikTok trending dominated scope of the West and its global markets. Uncluttered and truthful, catalogued not as a Lomax-esque curiosity, and uncoupled from that whole World Music cloying presumption of posterity and study – even though these recordings will reserve and keep account of the Himba and their performances -, these expressions are very much still alive and just as important as the songs sung by the ancestors.
Nicola Miller’s Living Things ‘SPIT!’
(Watch The Ends The Night) 7th August 2026
Bouncing through a lively Latin and French Quarters whilst throwing up reminiscent city jazz skylines of the 50s and 60s and chasing the dramas of Noir and feeding off the spirit of the Big Easy, renowned Canadian saxophonist and composer (also, as you will hear, a deft hand on the flute too) Nicola Miller and her quartet troupe send out lively and excitable free form vibes on their latest album together, SPIT!
Spit in its various forms, from the driest reedy evocations to the most spittle and flappy lipped experiments of actionist jazz and its avant-garde cousin, this extraordinary display of loose and dynamic performances swings on the jungle vine whilst promenading and heralding down the New Orleans streets, thumping along the San Fran pavements of Lalo Schifrin and scoring the chaos and bustle of the boardwalks.
And then again, such as through the three-part ‘Telecommunications’ suite, you get the brass resonating, woodpecker woody block percussive and rasped reedy sucked valve work, the bristling and brushed abstracts of such icons as Anthony Braxton and Rosco Mitchell, Mats Gustafason and Ivo Perelman. Throw in the blues, and the puddle duck, pastoral chamber classical familiars of Prokofiev and the whole deal gets even more interesting, expanded and ambitious.
Imbued by her Nova Scotia base (subtle hints on the smog bound shipping horns of Doug Tielli’s trombone, and a general feel of the maritime can be heard suffused throughout the album), and already collecting an enviable haul of plaudits for her craft following the release of the Living Things’ 2024 debut (released on fellow Canadian label Cacophonous Revival), Miller now amps up the “extrovert” in her and “fires” up the band to produce a both experimental and untethered album of first class jazz performance and musicianship.
With reference points to a whole history of such jazz explorations and freedoms, Satchmo meets Sam Rivers, Eric Dolphy and Peter Brotzmann on the opening city lights, blasted and blared, brassy and swung opener; Miller’s alto sax going through various phases of the winding, the strangled and vibrated whilst Tielli’s sliding and elephant trunk raising trombone recalls a mix of Phil Ranelin and Theon Cross.
The already mentioned ‘Telecommunications’ triptych passes through just as many phases, from the flapped and dried-up breaths and cuckoo-like knocks and steamed resonance of Part I to the 50s jazz sonnet, greenery and wounded cornet-like strange harks of Part II and the busier film score excitements and confusions of Part III.
‘Where’ The Line’ settles into a strange duck-clarinet (that will be clarinettist and second saxophone player Frank Gratkowski, a former mentor to Miller whilst she was studying for her Masters) described bluesy and dreamy lost world of the misty and mysterious; obscure renderings of foggy ship horns again, with a walking stealthy bass line courtesy of Nicolas D’Amato, plunge us subtly into a primal swamp or an old coastline, with obscure recalls of Gershwin and Bix Beiderbecke.
Though not wholly dedicated to the troupe’s versatile drummer Nick Fraser, the finale, as its ‘Drummers Are Bad’ title may indicate, neither scolds nor lets the sticks man hog the entire track. Fraser does get to scuttle, skittle and feel his way in the avant-garde vogue around his kit in the name of unrestrained quickened and fired up improvisation; his foils equally building towards the wild, and a duck-billed excitement of brass and cartoonish chases along a pastoral pathway left overgrown and blanketed by the mists.
An incredible album from a burgeoning project of gifted, experienced and still inventive players surrounding the main instigations and prompts of their leader Miller. One of the best jazz albums so far in 2026, and that’s about as good a recommendation as you can get from me.
Tristan da Cunha ‘Maris Stella’
(Boring Machines) Released 10th July 2026
Touched by the afflatus the Italian trio of Francesco Vara (using the guitar to imitate the strings), Luca Scotti (on drums), and Nicolò Vara (on viola) make neo-classical and ambient oblations to the titular “star of the sea”, the ancient allegorical and metaphorical Latin name given to the Virgin Mary.
A reification of faith and guidance perhaps, or the act of being saved from the troupe’s overriding theme and concept of “isolation”, Maris Stella is deep adagio, often elegiac and mystical, suffusion of subtle atonal and more melodic and dramatic suites and vignettes – the latter labelled “interludio” like moments of reflection and pause; the first being an ambient corridor of rough textual tension on the bow, and the second, more like a verset of hallowed evensong and pipped liturgy.
Pitched somewhere between Reich and Alison Cotton with the imbued influences of Arvo Pärt,Godspeed You! Black Emperor and Stars of the Lid in tow, the score, the minor opus and longer form suites encompass post-rock, chamber music, soundtracks/scores, and obviously the religious – hear the gentle genuflections of the viola and its companions, or the sanctified choral voices that appear from a Mediterranean chapel on the mysterious ‘The Veil’.
Sometimes burnished, often shimmery cymbals and the deadened hit of the drum conjure up images of stirred-up waves splashing against the hull of the trio’s boat; an invitation to navigate both slowly and supernaturally amongst the recondite tides of the serious and classy, the careful and subtly monumental. Searching woes follow melodious escapes, venerability and the venerated but make, apart from the title, no obvious references other than musically to the church, but Mary stands as the abstract lighthouse, a sanctuary and point of lifting transcendence in the silence of loneliness and detachment of the modern era.
Whatever the intentions, the island borrowed Tristan da Cunha named trio combine reverence, the blessed age old iconography of the Christian church, and the matriarchy with an experimentally skilful use of ambience and various classical ideas; changing the traditional setup of a chamber ensemble by replacing the strings (except the viola, which is used almost like a lead instrument here) with the guitar and drums to evoke a number of expansive musical concepts and ideas that lead into other disciplines.
A complete work of art and a beacon with which to draw upon in this moment of crisis and isolation.
___/THE MONOLITH COCKTAIL SOCIAL PLAYLIST VOL. 108____
Despite Spotify’s many attempts to piss me off and burry my numerus playlists, I’m still persevering. You may or may not have noticed holes and a smattering of said playlists suddenly disappearing. I’m pruning. And to be honest, after compiling over 300 of them since 2012 I’ve slowed down and fucked up my account to the point in which it has become tiresome to use. So, I’ve trimmed out those less popular playlists, and the ones with holes in them – various copyrights being either removed or now out of date, labels and those responsible for said artists and tracks either leaving the site or for some other reason taking down individual tracks from their catalogue without any explanation; luckily I’ve never, and I hope way too good at what I do to have ever included anything AI in my playlists over the years or recently, so that doesn’t hold as a reason.
In case you were wondering, or haven’t seen it on Reddit, social media posts or on notice boards, Spotify has at least decided to act by clamping down on AI created music, with some hilarious results as arbitrator of what constitutes the artificial and what doesn’t. There’s a methodology I’m told, which has unfortunately caught some true boba fide artists in the net. However, it was Spotify in the first place that was inventing and predominantly lifting up AI artists in their own playlists and on the platform as a whole.
By the way, if you are having trouble finding me on Spotify, I’m there under my name: Dominic Valvona.
I’m going to try and keep everything from the covid years onwards, but you may now see gaps in the back catalogue as I move forward. And so, we come to this month’s Social, and the same old template of new and old tunes, cult and anniversary celebrating album tunes alongside some more recent ones that didn’t make the site’s Monthly playlist.
Sadly, and inevitably, I also mark the passing of those we’ve lost. In this case, and just a week or so ago, the British jazz-rock-prog-fusion community lost keyboardist and composer Dave Greenslade. An incredible CV, wealth of experiences, Dave’s journey took him from the burgeoning bluesy/R&B scene of London to Casablanca, a stint with the Ram Jam R&B/soul revue troupe motivated and led by Geno Washington and the virtuoso boasting Colosseum, before forming the just as legendary doubled-up keys instigated Greenslade – as every obituary almost in disbelief repeats, a group that dared to dispose of the role of lead guitar: the audacity!
On the Anniversary LPs front, there’s one big Sixtieth birthday to The Byrd’s Fifth Dimension and a fiftieth nod to The Beach Boys’ 15 Big Ones. Another decade closer and its fortieth salutations to Doug E. Fresh’s Oh My God, 2 Live Crew’s The 2 Live Crew Is What We Are, R.E.M.’s Life’s Rich Pageant and the Spacemen 3’s Sound Of Confusion. Leaping through the decades, I’m also marking the twentieth anniversaries of TV on the Radio’s Return To Cookie Mountain and Thom Yorke’s Eraser. And as featured in this month’s archives below, a tenth nudge to Ed Scissor & Lamplighter’s Tell Them It’s Winter.
The rest of this list is made up of intergenerational reaching tracks from Alcatraz, Lapera, Bal Pare, Sophie Nzayisenga, Double Happys, Evil Weiner, plus more recentish tunes from Clementine March and J Sciende. Lots more of course, to make up the thirty tracks in the July social revue.
Track list in full:::
The Beach Boys ‘Susie Cincinnati’
TV On The Radio ‘A Method’
Clementine March ‘Upheaval (First Version)’
The Byrds ‘Captain Soul’
Colosseum ‘Three Score And Ten, Amen’
Okay Temiz & Johnny Dyani ‘I’m A Green Lamp – Yesil Fener’
Angry Angels ‘Apparent-Transparent’
Greenslade ‘Time To Dream’
Hopkins-Bradley ‘Funny, But The Way I Feel’
Evil Wiener ‘Koo Koo’
R.E.M. ‘Fall On Me’
Double Happys ‘Some Fantasy’
Colosseum ‘The Machine Demands A Sacrifice’
J Sciende & Opio ‘Krush Groove Kangol’
Doug E. Fresh ‘The Show – Oh My God! Remix’
2 Live Crew ‘2 Live Is what We Are…(Word)’
Himba Hymn ‘Who Is going to Welcome The White People?’
Sophie Nzayisenga ‘Story of Nyangezi’
heka & GG Skips ‘High Tide’
Spacemen 3 ‘Rollercoaster (Live)’
Bal Pare ‘Die Idioten’
Naomie Klaus ‘Can You Tell Me What Is Micronet?’
Thom Yorke ‘The Clock’
Thick Pigeon ‘Sudan’
Human Greed ‘Freeview’
Ed Scissor & Lamplighter ‘TTIW’
Lapera ‘Catarsi’
Alcatraz ‘Where The Wild Things Are’
Walter Daniels/Oblivians/Monsieur Jeffery Evans ‘It Don’t Take Too Much’
Greenslade ‘Siam Seesaw’.
___/ARCHIVES___
Ed Scissor & Lamplighter ‘Tell Them It’s Winter’
Released by High Focus Records, July 15th 2016
Emerging damaged and deeply troubled from the miasma underbelly of modern life, the congruous leftfield hip-hop partnership of wordsmith Ed Scissor and Glasgow-based producer Lamplighter convey a sad poetic beauty in their dystopian visions.
Much has been made of the duo’s caustic, and at times nihilistic, articulations and augurs. And their latest remote collaboration – the duo rarely share the same room as each other during the writing/recording process – Tell Them It’s Winter does explore familiar morbid curiosities, both musically and lyrically.
Yet, despite the travails, despite the gloom and all too real drudgery of an algorithm-driven society, Ed and his Lamplighter foil offer glimmers of light. Reminding us constantly of the universal infinite, Ed describes forces beyond the mundane. References to astrology, metaphysics and science flow like relentless streams of consciousness from Ed’s lips in a delivery style that shifts between rap, spoken word and, even, grime. Abstract elements of hip-hop and trip-hop mix seamlessly with the Shakespearean and biblical to produce the poetry, whilst tetchy minimal electronica and slow methodical beats layered over cLOUDDEAD expansive atmospheres and traces of neo-classical strings and looped recordings of old scratchy records create the backdrop to Ed’s winter of discontent.
Each track is free of demarcation and often floats off on different pathways before returning to focus once again on the central mood. There’s no room for prowess and flexing, Ed’s verses constructing a framework of unflinching honesty. Cormac McCarthy and Winterfell metaphors aside (the critics consensus analogies and reference points it seems for this album), the impending Machiavellian horsemen of doom bolted a long time ago. Tell Them It’s Winter is, if anything, a reminder that nothing has changed and that the central tenets of human suffrage carry on unabated in the 21st century.
Here’s the message bit we hate, but crucially need if we are to continue:
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 able, then you can now show your appreciation by keeping the Monolith Cocktail afloat through the Ko-Fi donation site.
A world of sonic/musical discoveries reviewed by Dominic Valvona. All entries in alphabetical order.
Photo Credit: Mara von Kumme
AD Ozium ‘In The Style Of Dead Sparrows’
(Saccharine Underground) Released 9th June 2026
Through a storm, a blizzard, and heavy reverberation the Washington D.C. based musician Jeremy Moore (of Zabus, Zero Swann and Bell Barrow note) creates both a mirage and world of paranormal and hallucinatory built-up environments; that and evocations prompted by the various deciphered titles that allude to mysterious enquires into faith and death.
A unique world of transmogrified guitar drifts and twangs and tape manipulations, In The Style Of Dead Sparrows is as esoteric as it is dreamy, with sounds that could only be described as a mutated helicopter-like chop of insects or Captain Beefheart guitars meets a stained-glass-polygon-window version of the Aphex Twin with one foot in dissonance and another in a blanched-out desert. From fear to distortions and white noise you can feel the presence of the unearthly, or at least transformed and made more worrying; unidentified propellers and rotors, the tunnelling scrolls of blanketing winds and the clawed and scratched offer something alien, an inter-dimensional being, or the abstract but sonorous weight of heavy meta.
A coarse atmosphere fizzles and hisses all the while as both enervated and more amped up guitar distortions, pliable twinges and twangs, resonance, and untuned improvs drift in and out of the Fortean surfaces of the spooked and ominous. It parts it reminded me of both of Blake Edward Conley’s Droneroom project and of Steve Gunn – the guitar often sounding like some very removed but evocative indolent glimpse of Hawaiian and a nightmarish Ry Coder -, but then this almost industrial and clanged punctuated blast through imaginative distortions of Death Valley and references to the Nazarene, the throne and terminal, is unique. Projected somewhere between the crumbled and the surreal, the supernatural and engineered, everything is engulfed in a production of magnified magnetics, tape malarky and derangement.
Once in, you become fully absorbed and caught up in the halcyon redial, the layered mechanics and more lo fi experimentation.
Audio Obscura ‘Dream States’
Released 12th June 2028
Drifting between dreamy somnolence and jet-lagged like misperceptions of space and time, Neil Stringfellow’s explorative Audio Obscura project finds a liminal plane of the half-remembered, half-reminisced and a track list of prompting mementos.
Creeping downstairs to unlock the imagination, to freely take to the piano, after restless nights spent fighting off the insomnia of a heatwave, Neil found solace and both inspiration from Duke Ellington’s perceptive and visceral line that “No this is not piano, this is dreaming” – the original extract, along with a little more expansion on dreams, is used on the opening piece, and appears again later, mouthed this time by what sounds like a manipulated and Orb-like child’s voice.
Running untethered from experience, study and the like, this central Ellington description is used like a soft mantra to create various mirages, surrealist dream states, contemplations, thought processes, balladry and the more mysterious. But unconnected to jazz, Neil seems to weave together two different musical or sonic ideas at once; for example, there’s neo-classical fragments of piano that suddenly get overridden by μ-Ziq and Aphex Twin-like dashes of electronica or d ‘n’ b (actually this album did remind me in part of the drukqs album).
Throughout the trickles, tinkles, the diaphanous flows and more plinky-plonky gated reactions of piano you can perhaps be reminded of Keith Jarrett, Cage, of La Monte Young, Sabine Liebner, Margaret Leng Tan and the prepared piano work of Nam June Paik, but compromised or jolted by break beats, ambient passages, satellite beeps, fizzles and phasers and vapours. Those electronic effects, the beats and overrides brought up echoes of Tomat, Apparat and Roni Size.
Surrealist pillows float on heavenly clouds, caressed by the harp, and metallic reverberations chime against a soundscape of breaths, soft choral voices and slow hallucinations to somehow clutch at the abstract; to sound a particular experience, a date and day of great empirical importance. If a piano could in fact dream, then this album does much to convince us of its sentinel being, separated from its author, as if playing and recollecting passages, phrases and ideas itself.
Distant Fires Burning & Autistici ‘Scalar’
(Audiobulb Records) 18th July 2026
The experimental electronic label and hardware hub is known for its unconventional approaches to remix projects. Those familiar with this site may recall one such release by the latter of this team up, the Sheffield-based electronic composer Autistici, whoreleased acollaborative chain of such repurposed, resourced explorations through the Familiarity series. In that series fellow peers and label mates went to work on transducing or expanding upon the original material: or sounds and code adjacent to it anyway. Sharing the spotlight this time around with Belgium bass-player and “knob twiddler” Gert De Meester and his Distant Fires Burning alias (a moniker that leans towards the bass guitar), their Scaler track is given free reign and transported via various electronical fields of inquiry and exploration by a clutch of similar artists.
Opening with an “E-xtended Mix”, the foundation is hollowed tubular bounce and fizzle bed of static-charged kinetic techno track. Partly organic in its makeup but a synthesis of padded beats, squiggles, broadcast interferences and a transformed trebly bass guitar track, it reminded me of Kriedler, Orbital and Cabaret Voltaire. Meester does his own homework later on under the Reverend Basstorius alias, keeping (like most of the crew involved on this seven-track remix special) the static charges, the crispiness but adding a cosmic soundscape of Banco de Giai and early Warp label trance.
UK “sound experimenter” Kingbastard (as he known) continues to play with the crackled atoms of the original, but goes for an electrical charge of techno and filtered passes and switchery zips, whilst the Hungarian producer, sound-designer and instrumentalist Ficture (the solo project appellation of Gábor Tokár) deepens the bass, adds a circulating spin of cyber wind and a Land Observations-style set of guitar loops to the vaporized mood – there’s what can only be described as a sort of Indian-trance-jig at the very end.
Erik Schoster, appearing under the active alias of He Can Jog, seems to be heading towards a similar current as the Bureau B label in Germany; some echoes of Harmonious Thelonious amongst the zippy and farty bass lines, the wizzes and generally slowed down playfulness. Appearing on the site a few times before, northern Connecticut countryside dweller Jeff Düngfelder (who uses the Ümlaut guise) brings the mystique, plus a spring woody ruler-like repeated sound and wispy cosmic dust to the kinetic original.
The final remix is by the rather anonymous Pulse Mandala, who settles the source material into a signature relaxation (though pining and almost electronically bluesy) of space-bound reflection, breaths and drifted neo-classical piano spells.
Combined, this is an interesting, entrancing and kinetic bouncing metallic EP or mini-album or extended 12” release of both subtle and cerebral techno music and genre offshoots; the quality is obvious and the ideas not just intelligent but visceral too.
Hackedepicciotto ‘Lichtung’
(Mute) 10th July 2026
From the metallic synthesised undulations and suffusions of the German hinterlands, the coupling of Alexander Hacke and Danielle de Picciotto once more entwine themselves as they conjure up yet another Gothic romanticism of surrealism, the near theatrical, the magical, and the elegiac.
Proving the most prolific of duos over the last five or six years, with a number of enigmatic and powerful symbiotic albums of the sulfuric and dreamy, they once more draw upon an enviable experience of projects as they return to the wilds and nature of their now rooted German home on the rural outskirts of Berlin. For the nomadic lifestyle and creative process of most of their work (for example, the album Menetekel was recorded in a medieval church in Krems on the Danube, whilst The Current was recorded in Blackpool and Keepsakes was recorded at the famous Auditorium Novecento in Naples) has found a home amongst the “clearings”, the fields, and fauna of that inspired home; one that is just distant enough from the urban pull of the city, but close enough for creative engagements.
Both partners in this marriage share a singular vision to evoke and somehow put into their own language and sonic soundscape their fears, loves, longing appeals, and processes of rumination and more essentially, escapism.
As Covid proved a “weird euphoria” of inspiration for the duo, the alarming discourse and divisive political and societal climate providers suitable fodder, with Alexander and Danielle returning to the land and environments that offer solace and reflection without the noise and rage of the Tiktok generation’s confrontational activism.
Almost looping all the way back to his formative years as a teenager in Germany, experimenting at a young age with electronica, and his membership just a little while later of the iconic and most influential Einstürzende Neubauten, Alexander once more sets to the controls of this synthesized and electro biomorphic concocted pastoral soundtrack – a combination actually of Teutonic kosmische music, a light touch of techno, and smattering of Kreidler, Der Plan, NIN and Thomas Dinger. His wife and musical foil Danielle (a co-founder of Berlin’s most famous techno Mardi Gras, the Love Parade, and collaborator in a number of projects, but also an oft member of Crime & The City Solution) is American, but found herself drawn to Berlin For the first time ever I believe, she has chosen to wholly adopt the German language of romanticism, fantasy and poetry for this latest album Lichtung.
Duetting at every turn, the cadence, syntax and accent is as German as you can get; from the harsher fully announced and pronounced to the softer joys of embodying a life well lived and enjoyed amongst the greenery of their retreat, away from the madness. It’s almost like a return or full embrace of a Germanic culture rescued from nationalism and put to better use amongst the cosmic tubular auras and peaceable longing intentions of their sonic soul partners. For it shares more in common with the land sound artistic experiments and innovations and feels of Cluster, Ariel Kalma and Syrinx, but thrust forward into the 1980s, and augmented by passages of drama, seriousness and elegy: there’s a moment on the haunting funeral procession closer, ‘Der Marschall’ (which isn’t difficult to translate as “the marshal”) when the bell that tolls could equally be taken from the ominous elegiac scene of a Western as it could be from Joachim Patnir’s Charon Crossing The Styx painting.
There’s even more of this Western hint on the warping Gothic and hard German accented ‘Vogelfrei’ (“outlawed”), which reminded me both of Mick Harvey’s more broody bass lines and of Crime & The City Solution. A maverick swell and spindled yarn of tin star weight that evokes something altogether beautifully enigmatic and sombre.
Organic whilst absorbed in a metal and kinetic electro field, machines, drum pads and transmission bleeps and blips interact with weeping and sorrowful lamented strings: often recalling the work of neo-classicism and the score work of Nicolas Britell. Enchantment follows the substance of emotional plaint and recall, as the music takes on a near Kraftwerkian vibe on the most kosmische and German electronic springy bounced plastique and tube-paddled magnetic ‘Zeitenwende’ (“turning point”). And yet strangely, sounding melodically and vocally familiar, it feels like one of those near timeless tributes to the landscape, not so much joyful in abundance but romantically finding a gleam of light in the density of these most troubled times amongst the pastures and wilds of the countryside.
I hope this coupling always continue to make music. They’ve brought a seriousness but also near Dadaist and Surrealist legacy, plus a kind of industrial fairy tale sound, to soundscaping and capturing a most uniquely artful encapsulation of their woes, worries, loves and dreams. Back home, happy – even if this album is filled with an elegiac theme – in their skins and surroundings, rather than draw away into isolation and a cooling balm of therapeutic deliverance from the hostility of the age they’ve continued to explore and magic up a magnetic and beautifully delivered, charismatic soundtrack. Long may it continue.
Skjack ‘Let The Sky Open Under Your Feet’
(Kujua) Released 3rd July 2026
Hardly a recent turn in fortunes or a resurgence of exposure for the melodiously, politically and consciously aware South African jazz scene, the country can however boast of such noughties talents as Nduduzo Makhathini (recording for and anointed no less than by Blue Note), Thandi Ntuli and the alto-saxophonist Mthunzi Mvubu. Those are just a smattering of a worthy and exciting pool of players and artists in a celebrated scene that’s broken internationally. You can also throw in the mixed Swiss and South African, Cape Town formed, quintet of Skyjack to that burgeoning list.
Skyjack are imbued by a most incredible landscape (despite the painful history, the Apartheid system and its barriers to the Black African majority’s access to it; shunted and enclosed into the shanty towns that grew up around the diamond and coal mines) and an equally incredible musical legacy that includes the likes of both Abdullah Ibrahim and his Dollar Bill alias, Hugh Masekela, the Jazz Epistles, Bheki Mseleku, and the Blue Notes. You can hear the influence of those luminaries on the latest, and fourth, album by the quintet of pianist Kyle Shephard, bassist Shane Cooper, drummer Jonno Sweetman, and the dual horns section of trombonist Andreas Tschopp and saxophonist Marc Stucki. And although it’s very much an equally shared recording, you can’t help but be drawn to Shephard’s prowess and, should I dare to suggest, leadership on the piano; one part Ibrahim, another part Oscar Peterson and Thelonious Monk, a mixture of the neo-classical concert hall, the township, the South African vista and a timeless vibe of America’s pioneering and counter experimental leaders of the 50s and 60s. Beautifully melodic with notes and phrases and runs that sometimes softy jar or rise up toward the plateaus and heights, his piano expertise (the CV is indeed wide, with projects that include scores) and ability to cross hands is exemplary and always interesting without losing a sense of touch, feeling and melody. During the course of one track the style can take in the stage, the lounge, the serenaded, and the improvised.
Before drawing in the rest of the group and that inspirational geography, the references that spring to mind whilst taking in this album include Archie Shepp’s union with Jason Moran, Billy Higgins’ Quartet (“Soweto”) and Idris Mohammad’s “Sudan”, but also the very European jazz label ACT and its enviable catalogue of collaborative albums.
Back to that stunning (as you can tell, I’m still going with the superlatives to describe that landscape) topography and the Western Cape province town of Stellenbosch, renowned for its abundance of oak trees, its sheltered valley and hilly terrain, and of course beauty. An eternal reminder of its Dutch settlers founding, Stellenbosch is, I believe, one of the earliest such towns to be imposed on the South African landscape by Europeans. Having never been, the pictures online testify to its outstanding surroundings. In a studio, I presume, within that idyllic spot, Skyjack inspired by that oft quoted 13th century Persian poet, Rumi (a line of which is used as the album title), turn on a deeply interconnective performance of descriptive peregrinations and moods, of the near romantic and philosophical, and a sound that recalls the almost joyful union and resistance of township jazz, and of the tribal – coming off like Ndikho Xabu when escaping dreamily into the bush or conjuring up a dialogue with the ancestors.
Each player has a lot to offer both in the semi soloist encounters and when all playing together at once across a panorama and near flowing abundance of solid great jazz tunes and expressions. Shane Cooper gets to flex, but never so bended or pulled as to lose shape; there’s a solo vignette with his instrument’s name on it, a break, but short spotlight on his spring grooves and bobbled and reverberated improvisations. Meanwhile, Jonno Sweetman changes with the mood music, offering sympathy and the cuddled with passages of splashing and shimmy shimmering cymbals, dynamic swells and upturns in action and rolls. Andreas Tschopp does a cracking job on trombone (a touch of Phil Ranelin perhaps), making that instrument cover a diverse range of tunes, more wild spirals and heralds and blasting when the occasion calls. Keeping on the horns, Marc Stucki’s saxophone parts can be as soulful and serenading as they can be more in keeping with the untethered work of the Pharoah, Wayne Shorter and Grachan Moncur III – there’s a nice fluttery, near buzzed, Cage-like free form expressive study on the moth that lets the sax hog the spotlight nicely against strange ethereal arias.
Creating their very own expansive universe, but somehow describing and paying some kind of homage to the environment itself, Skyjack make a thoroughly impressive melodious album of contemporary and past South African jazz themes. A befitting tribute but also an album to get lost in poetically, spiritually and imaginatively.
Aisha Vaughan ‘Water World’
(Leaving Records) 17th July 2026
Through the studio window and out until the glades, the lush valleys and hills, the meadows and fields and pastures of remote Wales, diaphanous expressions are left to freely roam and hang in the air.
Sharing much with another Celtic siren of the form, Celestial North (the Scottish artist lives over the border these days in the Lake District), Aisha Vaughan embraces a similar New Age vibe of fusing nature with a subtle use of electronica to conjure up misty voiced myths, fantasies and cosmic transcendence. But whilst softly veiled in a both atavistic stripped time – before humans had made their mark or converted the land to the new religions – and something more attuned to the 80s and 90s eras of Trance and the already mentioned New Age musical genre, Vaughan demonstrates the processes and acts of overcoming past traumas and restrictions under the replenishing rains and waters of the Welsh landscape, or under the moon beams of the lunar cycle.
And yet, you could be mistaken in part, especially when the fluty panpipes reveal themselves, for wandering amorphously from the ancient shepherded Bannau Brycheiniog to Breton or the Andes. Such is the near seamless drift and suffusion of ethereal qualities and near wordless beautifully longed and channelled vocals that the Wales backdrop is not so obviously reflected musically You could perhaps find it referenced through the wooded canopies and riverbanks of bird song, the allure and draw of Celtic invoked mysticism from another age and the entrancing undulations of this appropriately entitled Water World.
Electronically placing arpeggiators both beneath and over ambient breaths and a bed of lush if gauzy melodious waves of fairytale, the celestial and twinkled, each piece on this mini album invites you into a carefully constructed cascade of healing and therapeutic deliverance.
Julee Cruise meets Clannad and Amethystium as Moroder and Vangelis build up their synthesis of early electronica; or the Chromatics visit the Celtic psychogeography, invited by Alison Goldfrapp. These are just two descriptions that spring to mind whilst absorbing and laying back in my study of this dreamy, sometimes haunting (but not really in a paranormal or especially supernatural way) shrouded soundscape and vocally expressive peregrination and inviting magical plane.
Colin Webster/ Balázs Pándi/ Matt Cargill ‘Chewed Up And Spat Out’
(Raw Tonk Records) Released 15th May 2026
In sporadic bursts, popping up from time to time over the years on the Monolith Cocktail, agitator sonic noise diviner and hazardous dissonance unloader Matt Cargill is back this early summer with two releases: firstly, as a collaborator on this tumultuous union, and once more with the oft-day-job of Sly & The Family Drone (see this month’s review).
Rolling into London town for a few days, Hungarian drummer extraordinaire Balázs Pándi decided to call upon The Spasm Band, Sex Swing and Dead Neanderthals saxophonist Colin Webster, who in turn pulled Cargill into a death match/death roll of free form jazzcore, noiseniks, doom, alien and hysterical experimentation. Our Hungarian drumming friend has a CV that takes in everything from the Venetian Snares to various collaborative formations with Merzbow, To Live And Shave In L.A., The Kilimanjaro Darkjazz Ensemble and Zu. And that’s keeping it brief by the way.
We can only imagine the scene and set up, but the sound that was produced was both squawked and screwy, frightening and primal; a crazed distressing free jam of the strained (no more so than with the one long strained dump that’s squeezed out in alarming pain and hysterics on the ‘The Money Shitter’), the bestial, and the strangulated (like squeezing the last pips out of a dry reed, or standing on the Webster’s intestines).
Whilst there’s splashes and rolls, breaks on the drums to latch onto, the free spirited if caustic concentrations of interplay are in the avant-garde meets fucked-jazz zone. It reminded me in places of Andy Haas and his various projects, but also of John Zorn, Roscoe Mitchell, a little of such jazzcore noise and histrionics as UIUIUI, and the AEOC. Between and underneath the lattice work of percussion, the rollicking and bashed, beaten, sieved and sifted and spidery drums and the saxophone howls, distress, konks, doom spirals and rasps, Cargill keeps up a communication and undulation/oscillation of rippled effects, ariel-tunings, squiggles, and radio menace. It makes for a strange, sometimes captivating, but always challenging reading of the present confusion of the world; a spontaneous outpouring of aggressions, frequencies, vibrations, expressions and invocations from three always interesting and inventive musicians.
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 able, then you can now show your appreciation by keeping the Monolith Cocktail afloat through the Ko-Fi donation site.
