Monolith Cocktail Blog

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

Image of Wayku courtesy of Jesús Flores

Matt Bachmann ‘Compost Karaoke’
(Orindal Records) 12^th September 2025

Imbued and driven by a creatively successful obsession with film scores and incidental musical pieces, Matt Bachmann draws away from the earthy for something far more dreamy, escapist and calming. As if to illustrate, the artist, bassist, keys and various assorted instrumentalist soulfully, and low key, yearns “I don’t want to talk about the news” on the smooched and duck-billed saxophone accompanied dreamy if bluesy ‘Long Road’. And yet tied in part to reality, the dread and anxieties of our times, there’s an attempt to break new ground with music for a movie of life that doesn’t yet exist.

Leitmotifs and a recurring intimate ensemble appear throughout this latest near untethered cinematic-leaning album, but each composition, vignette of a kind, and song can be heard in isolation and apart from the rest. For the majority of the time, on an album mostly made up of instrumentals, with just a couple of tracks featuring Bachmann’s near meandered, contour ascending and descending peaceable vocals, there’s a trio core of longtime foils and ‘confidents’: Derek Baron (of Reading Group Records note) both on drums and a little woodwind; Jeff Tobias (Modern Nature, Sunwatchers) on alto saxophone and bass clarinet; and James Krichenia (Big Thief) ‘gumming’ up the groove (as it’s put) on hand drums and percussion. There’re further contributions from Roberta Michel on flute, Cory Bracken on vibraphone and percussion, and Kyle Boston on guitar. Sometimes altogether, or separately, this ensemble is subtle and attentive but moving freely and near lucid when alongside Bachmann’s carefully placed piano, synth, chime manipulations and bass parts and leads.

Emotions swim or cast adrift in a beautifully conveyed movement of suite-like arrangements, the near minimalist, field recordings, and bursts of music – the opening grasp, tangible hold of ‘Summer’s Last Grab’, is a short burst of spontaneous-like bounding seasonal change; almost like a freeform crescendo, with instruments pulled in from various points and angles. Much ground is covered musically and influence wise, and yet there’s no specific or easy to recognise reference or evocation of filmic composers, expect for Sakamoto, who’s 80s contemporary classical reinventions and scores, his synthesized and real Bamboo music clogs and shutters and tubular chimes can be heard suffused throughout the album’s ten tracks. You can also hear subtle hints of Sakamoto’s oft UK collaborative icon David Sylvain; touches of Japan’s former frontman turned prolific foil’s Rain Tree Crow and Nine Horses.

Japan, the country that is, seems a key inspiration. Amongst the vague Shinto temple bells, rung on a cold crisp day on ‘Autumnal Cycle’, are recalls of Yasuaki Shimizu, Ichiko Aoba, and the piano work of Masakatu Takagi and Akira Kosemura; the latter’s own craft set in motion as a therapy.

Added to that set of reference points, the music and sounds, with ease, amorphously shift and reshape using a palette of chamber music, the classical, jazz, Hassell’s fourth world peregrinations, Afro-Latin and the spiritual. For instance, the Star Trek catch phrase inspired ‘TIAGDTD’ (paired won by Bachmann into an acronym, after the famous Klingon defiant and fated line, “Today is a good day to die”), is a dance, a ceremony almost of Afro and clacked, snuzzled, waddled and mizzled saxophone, fourth world music and Finis Africae influences. The title track could be a horizon gazing and shifting communion of later Alice Coltrane, Keith Jarrett and Nicole Mitchell.

There’s much to admire about this album, from its near choir boy venerable holies, its vibraphone bulb notes meditations, its escape from the clutches of despair, its untethered melodious adaptions of diverse musical inspirations, and its filmic evocations of languid endurance and prevail. A lifeline as Bachmann puts it, this project has allowed for a new freedom of creativity and something more collective, more diaphanous, elusive and mysterious, at a key stage in a life of big changes (career wise, becoming a certified social worker and therapist in NYC); a healthy compost analogy mix of “both greens (food scraps) and browns (dead leaves, cardboard, etc.)”. As intimate as it is full of builds, a little drama and bombast, Compost Karaoke is a shared experience, an open project; the very opposite of Bachmann’s more isolated conceived and produced expressions.

The Good Ones ‘Rwanda Sings With Strings’
(Glitterbeat Records) 29^th August 2025

The recording location this time around may have changed, but once more in spirit returning to the rural farmlands of a genocide scarred Rwanda, producer polymath Ian Brennan presses the record button on another in-situ, free-of-artifice and superficial production. The fifth such album of unimaginable stirred grief, heartache, and reconciliation from the country’s nearest relation to American Bluegrass, The Good Ones embrace, for the first time ever, the sound of strings. Accompanied, without any prior meeting, by the musicians Gordon Withers on cello, and Matvei Sigalov on violin, a sense of Americana, country and the beautified, ethereal sounds of Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks, of early Leonard Cohen and Nick Drake are brought to the Rwandan duo of Adrien Kazigira and Janvier Havugimana’s unique style of truthful roots music.  

This could arguably be called The Good One’s American album: their American adventure. A result of travelling to the USA to appear, in part, on NPR’s notable Tiny Desk showcase, the duo were snapped on the same iconic Greenwich Village block that sports the cover of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan LP from 1963 – though Brennan informs me that this wasn’t in any way intentional, as the duo hadn’t even heard of Dylan before being photographed for their own album cover, with a casually draped arm across the shoulder, a tambourine in the other, standing and observing the leafy surroundings of one of New York’s most legendary folkloric talented hothouse neighbourhoods. In a hotel room, with Brennan and their new foils, they created a bridge between their own Rwandan backyard dirt music and that of a countrified, bluesy, traditional and folksy America.

The American theme continues of course with both the addition of Withers and Sigalov, two noted players with extensive CVs, making a name for themselves on the American East Coast. New Yorker Withers, as both a rock cellist and guitarist, has played with the J Robbins’ band, New Freedom Band and Betwixt, and the Russian-born, Washington D.C. based guitarist, violinist, producer and arranger Sigalov has a wide range of experience either playing or recording with Les Paul, Patti LaBelle, Issac Hayes, Ben Monder and Vinnie Colaiuta, amongst others. “The With Strings” part of the title is an intentional reference to records of the same name and of a certain vintage by such icons as Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra, Chet Baker and Charlie Parker. 

I feel at this point that it would be beneficial to the reader, to have some context; a little background; a brief history if you like of the duo’s (parred down in recent times from a trio) direction, of the catalyst that set them on the path of making music.

Triggered, its argued even to this day, by a history of tribal warfare, insurrection, civil war, foreign interventions (rival European powers vying for influence in the region backed, trained or armed one side or the other, but failed to intervene once the bloodshed started) and the assassination of the then president Juvénal Habyarimana, the events of that three month period in 1994 saw a sudden death cull, ethnic cleansing of Rwanda’s Tutsi minority at the hands of the majority Hutus: though even moderate Hutus, along with Rwanda’s third main tribe the Twa were also far from safe, with many caught-up, trapped in the ensuing bloodbath.

Barbaric beyond any semblance to humanity, victims were brutalized, raped, cut to ribbons or herded together in buildings, churches, and schools and burnt alive. Unlike so many previous genocides however, most of those victims were murdered by hand with machetes, rudimental tools, weapons and gallons of Kerosene.

No family was left untouched, with both The Good Ones dual earthy vocalist set-up of Kazigira and Havugimana both losing loved ones, siblings and relatives in the horrific purge.

On the remote hilltop farm where he was born and still continues to work, but record too, Kazigira managed to hide and survive. But Havugimana lost his older brother; a loss felt considerably by the duo who looked up to him as an early musical mentor. Though not appearing this time around, oft third member Javan Mahoro and his foils, all represent one of Rwanda’s main three tribes: Hutus, Tutsi and Twa. And so, bring each culture together in an act of union, therapy and as a voice with which to reconcile the past. 

Instantly drawn to the band during a research trip in 2009, Ian recorded their debut international album and the subsequent trio of records that followed: 2015’s Rwanda Is My Home, 2019’s Rwanda, You Should Be Loved, and 2022’s Rwanda…You See Ghosts, I See Sky. Ian’s wife and longtime partner on both this sixteen-year recording relationship and countless other worldly projects, the filmmaker, photographer, activist, writer Marilena Umuhoza Delli, was the one to instigate this Rwanda field trip: Marilena’s mother herself ended up immigrating for refuge to Italy, her entire family wiped out during the genocidal massacres.

In between numerous productions in dangerous and traumatized spots (from Mali to Cambodia and Kosovo) the partners recorded the fourth volume of Glitterbeat Records Hidden Musics series in Rwanda (back in 2017); bringing the incredible stirring songs, performances of the country’s Twa people (or pygmy as they’re unfortunately known; bullied and treated with a certain suspicion by others) to a wider audience.

The focal point, the inspired spot so to speak, throughout is Kazigira’s farm and haven, and the valley in which it is located; from which, a vantage point looks out to all the known world, or at least, the world that has importance, the surroundings that impact with the lives of the duo on a daily basis. It is here that they produce such incredible music and poetry; a sound and vocalised delivery that’s separated from all external influences.

Already receiving accolades aplenty in the West, working with an enviable array of admirers, from Wilco to TV On The Radio, Fugazi, Sleater-Kinney and MBV, it’s extraordinary to think that these earthy harmonic songs were produced in an environment without electricity; music that’s made from the most rudimental of borrowed farm tools, and from the detritus that blows in or litters the landscape.

On various occasions I’ve called this the true spirit of diy, of unfiltered raw emotion. The Good Ones speak of both love and the everyday concerns facing a population stunned and dealing with the effects of not only that genocide but cultural customs and the ongoing struggle to survive economically. Although in recent times, Rwanda has made the headlines as an alternative holding ground, a third-party processing centre for deported migrants from Europe. Whilst still in office, the Conservative government in the UK, after much criticism and protest, decided to fly those migrants denied a right of stay in the country to Rwanda. Only a few volunteers ever boarded such plane rides – and were paid for it too – before the Conservatives were voted out of office, replaced by the Labour party who reversed the policy almost immediately. Copping much international outcry, it soon turned out that other countries had already used Rwanda to dump their own migrant overspills, and that even Germany were seriously considering it.

Existing almost in its own musical category, its own world, The Good Ones play a real raw but also melodic, rhythmic roots music that sways, resonates with vague threads of folk, bluegrass, rock, punk and even a touch of the Baroque. Brennan, a man with an enviable catalogue of productions behind him, from every region of the globe, considers Kazigira ‘one of the greatest living roots writers in the world, in any language’. That’s some praise; one I’m willing to believe and repeat. It’s one hell of a voice, made even better and emotive, near spiritual or stirring when accompanied by percussionist and harmonising foil Havugimana.

On their fifth album, recorded 100% live in a hotel room without overdubs, in single takes, and without much preparation (if any), The Good Ones’ beautifully and plaintively redress various hardships and loss, whilst also evoking the landscape of Rwanda; all now lifted and stirred further by the sound of attuned, sensitive, yearned, tremored, mourned, plucked and touching cello and violin – which also on occasion sounds like a rural American folk fiddle, alongside a guitar, which on occasions similarly evokes a rustic, traditional essence of country and bluegrass banjo. Toil is made almost seamlessly ethereal and near sweet, with songs that despite their titles, often embody a sense of levitation: of hope too. At every atmospheric turn the sound of the Americana campfire, of folklore, the East Village, the sound of a stripped back Band, of Cohen, Drake and especially Van Morrison are entwined with the sweeter touching balladeers of Congo, of Mali and, especially when near a cappella, South Africa – it really reminded me in places of Amadou Diagne too, especially the ‘Freedom’ song.

Hardly rudimental, although The Good Ones duo is only really bringing the most basic of instruments – a springy resonating guitar, the rhythmical sound of finger clicks, an empty paper cup, plastic wrapping, a bucket, a couch cushion and pair of old boots – the sound is impressively alive, and full of feeling. Not so much an exciting, dynamic feeling, but a sensitive one attuned to sorrow, eulogy, pain, experiment and life; the horrors witnessed; the love lost; the ambitions still dreamt; Rwandan customs (doweries, marriage proposals); the theft of land; and the observance of village life.

Rwanda Sings With Strings is yet another incredible songbook, free of over production, and just left to develop. It was indeed an inspiring idea to add a subtle use of strings; one that doesn’t lose any of that homely rural bluesy signature and earthly soul but if anything, further emphasises the unintentional but obvious links to the sound and music brought across to America through African slavery an age ago. Two sets of musicians find true commonality and instantly synch to create something very special. Perhaps one of their best efforts yet; a definite addition to our choice albums of 2025 list.

John Johanna ‘New Moon Pangs’
(Faith & Industry) 12^th September 2025

Revivalist songs from across a wide timespan that say as much about present societal woes as they did about the injustice, ruinations and toil of England in the 16^th, 17^th, 18^th and the 19^th centuries, are food for John Johanna’s latest, and returning, songbook. Not by name, except in the accompanying track-by-track notes, Johanna (actually the nom de guerre of one of Norfolk nature’s sons, Ben MacDiarmid) is drawn politically and societally towards the ideas of Distributism; a more achievable and perhaps practical philosophical compromise between carefree, devil-may-care Capitalism and hardline Socialism, and the idea that the world’s productive assets should be widely owned rather than concentrated. Favouring small independent craftsman and producers, or co-ops, member-owned and mutual organizations over state or big business monopiles, one its most famous cheerleaders was the famous G.K. Chesterton. It’s Chesterton’s works and their evocations of a particular poetically stirring England of both shambolic spiritualism and everyday mysticism that are tied together with a psychogeography through the age’s style road trip along an atavistic road well-travelled, that makes for a Dylan-esque harmonica-backed and skiffle-like ring of the past, on the album’s ‘The Rolling English Road’ meander. An inebriated greased old England of sextons, squires, drunken road workers, off-the-beaten-track detours of famous landmarks, battlefields and towns, and a history littered with references of the Romans and Bonaparte, is recalled from the folk tradition and given a new impetus.  

Finding a middle road, Johanna now turns away (in part, but not totally forgotten) from his previous gospel-blues-raga-meets-Radio-Clash Testament references for the sound of poetic acoustic folk-rock. The tinged with painful emotions New Moon Pangs is Johanna’s ‘first fully fledged studio album’ in this mode; recorded with Faith & Industry label foils James Howard on electric bass, Ursula Russell on drums and Kristian Craig Robinson as both the ‘chancer on silver spoons’ and a more substantial role as producer. Recorded over two days at London’s Total Refreshment Centre, but finished at Johanna’s more rustic Norfolk home studio, IMZIM, the new album is both a breath of fresh air, and a bridge between his electrified spiritual Gambian EP collaboration with Sefo Kanuteh and his scriptures and Torah trip Seven Metal Mountains album (which made our choice albums of the year in 2019). Carrying over that afflatus, that divine providence, there’s still a big influence of hymns and psalms: even a mention of the Israelites -, as Johanna both recites near verbatim from that 18^th century English Baptist minister and hymn-writer Samuel Medley (the opening reference to that antiquarian city of the Seleucid Empire, Antioch, is harmonised, double-tracked with Georgian England and adulation, praise for the redeemer) and reworks the same language of faith, of the spiritual into songs about grand days out in the Scottish landscape (Johanna and his family’s 2021 escape from the pandemic back to awe inspired nature and the Outer Hebridean geography of the Isle of Lewis and across from its Gallan Head mountain top the Seven Hunters islands, otherwise known as the Flannan Isles), seeking a creative rebirth, and the realisation that the rural life is where he belongs (inspired by the first half of the 20^th century poet laureate John Masefield and his famous ‘London Town’, the original words ring true even now, but led Johanna to a concur, that after spending a decade in the capital himself, he really wasn’t a city lad).

Despite this being a thoroughly English tapestry, the influence stretche to the Southern Spirituals, and foundation myths of enterprise, industrialization in an expanding burgeoning America of the 19^th century and early 20^th., and to Chile and one of its most famous and celebrated composers, singer-songwriters, folklorists, ethnomusicologists and visual artists Violeta Parra. The hell’s ‘Fire’ blaze against avarice tycoons and ‘world dominators’ is another sermon made Dylan-esque (between Blood On The Tracks and Desire) and urgent, and was inspired in part by Johanna’s read-up on William

‘Devil Bill’ Rockefeller Sr., the patriarchal seed of the Rockefeller dynasty, father to Standard Oil’s founders. Variously described as a huckster, con man, ruthless capitalist, and accused of rape (ring any bells with our present shower of leaders and industrialists), Rockefeller was a man of his times, taking whatever he could get away with to eventually build one of America’s wealthiest dynasties. ‘A Dream of Violeta Parra’ meanwhile, is a tribute to the progenitor of Nueva canción Chilena (Chilian New Song); a record of who’s Johanna picked up twenty years ago in Berwick Street, its cover art drawing him in to the world of social-political traditional revivalist Latin America. As a tribute, Johanna weaves Parra’s notable poetics and language (the blossom mingled with mud; the dirt and ethereal) into another of those Dylan-esque whistle-blowed harmonica storyteller’s odes.

The rest of the album is inspired by such ethnomusicologist delights as the Norfolk farmhand come singer of traditional English song (‘Adieu to Old England’), Harry Box and a prison ballad from the days when gruel really was punishing; the drive home from a Chubby and the Gang gig in a blizzard, and the resulting songwriting workshop with pal and artist Harry Malt (‘Justine’); and an anonymous Jacobian/Stuart period broadsheet that despite its historical language could have been written for the sorry state of inequality that plagues us all now (‘The Poor Man Pays For All’).

Musically lilting, melodious there’s a real warmth and lovely feel to this album’s production as it vaguely echoes the sentiments of Terry Bush, the folk-rock of Pentangle, Fairfield Parlour and Steeleye Span, 1970s Fleetwood Mac, child of the Jago meets Thackery Mekons, Cat Stevens, XTC, The Strawbs and more contemporary artists like Paul Winslow and Valentino DeMartini.

The old is rejuvenated, and found relevant, stitched together in a loose Norfolk tableau. The rural lad does good once more, with nothing less than one of the best albums of 2025.

Isambard Khroustaliov & Ben Carey ‘Field Recordings From Other Constellations’
(Not Applicable) 12^th September 2025

The award winning, and far too qualified, electronic and sound composer, software developer and researcher Sam Britton is at it again, fusing the generative and interconnective with the human and machine; this time around, pairing up with Australian foil, the equally qualified composer, improviser and educator, Ben Carey.

A serial offender in this department with the notable Long Division and Fake Fish Distribution experiments and through collaborations with such lauded operators as the Aphex Twin (via the Remote Orchestra project) and Matthew Herbert (New Radiophonic Workshop), and has a co-founder of the very platform this latest release is being facilitated by, the artist collective Not Applicable, Britton, under the Ismabard Khroustaliov nom de guerre, hooked up an impressive apparatus of ARP 2600, Buchla 200e, Destiny Plus 16 Psyche, Make Noise Strega & Morphagene, Moog ONE, Oberheim OB-X8 and Sequential Prophet 12 enabler equipment to venture beyond dimensions and space with his willing sonic partner. Carey, who is one half of the voice and electronic duo Sumn Conduit and has collaborated with such notable company as the JACK Quartet, Sydney Chamber Opera, ELISION Ensemble, Joshua Hyde, Chris Abrahams and Marin Ng, seems a fitting cosmonaut volunteer on this untethered and unbound trip, which has been edited down from a much longer, expanded live performance at Coda to Coda in London on the 3^rd of July 2023.

Influential Eastern European science fiction and philosophical enquiry meet on this four-track visitation of alien organic matter, metallics, strange leviathans, machines and codes. Inspired by that genius titan of 20^th century sci-fi and future prophecy, the Lviv born Polish writer Stanislaw Lem, and one of his most beloved (so it’s said) works, The Cyberiad, two prolific trick noise makers and manipulators of oscillations, wave forms and patches construct an atmospheric soundscape and journey into both satirical, ominous and mysterious space.

The book, or collection of short stories, follows two ingenious constructers (or robots of a kind) travels through a strange Medieval universe, where they encounter such oddities as a machine that is capable of creating anything, as long as it starts with the letter N, kings who oppress their people with parlour games and PhD pirates. Ahead of his time in so many ways, and in in so many different fields (nots just sci-fi), Lem wrote another famous work, the Summa Technologiac, in 1964, about the moral, ethical and philosophical consequences of various futuristic technology: predicting virtual reality (called “phantomatics” in the book), search engines, AI and singularity. Intellectual as it all might be, much of his actual fictional work is quite humorous in tone. 

Here, it is transmogrified and transduced into a constantly developing scan and probe across synthetic and alien technology and off world destinations. A soundtrack in a manner, for a film yet to be made (as far as I’m aware of all of Lem’s cannon, it is only the most famous work, Solaris, that has ever been adapted for the big screen), it feels like a navigation at times, a mapping of extraterrestrial technology. But also, a twisting of reality itself and the fabric of the universe.

This is the near classical meets analogue sci-fi, the non-musical and techno minimalism, with centrifugal movements, fizzles, the sound of switches and mechanisms, electrical currents and static, calculus, pattered and padded rhythms, shocks, UFOs, elevators and accelerations. There are certain hints of the recognisable amongst the squirmed and scrawled alien liquids, especially when the sheet metal punch bag timpani pounds in on the Soviet era mirage ‘Discovering Alonta’. And the opener, ‘The Computerised Bullfrog’, recreates the title’s amphibian through said computerised effects: an artificial reality, the living mimicked through tech. But for the most part this is an ambiguous use of sounds and instruments. 

If I was going to use any reference points, perhaps orbiting a similar universe as Tangerine Dream, Moebius, Cabaret Voltaire (also Richard H. Kirk’s uncoupled work), Basic Channel and East European experimental sci-fi.

A very atmospheric performance, bringing Lem’s space oddity philosophical quandaries and explorations to life, Field Recordings From Other Constellations builds a real imaginative as well as foreboding and uncertain world from codes, textures and soundboards.  

Johnny Richards & Dave King ‘The New Awkward’
(False Door Records) 5^th September 2025

Setting new challenges for artists, the restrictions imposed during the various Covid lockdowns, four or five years ago, meant many were forced to work in isolation or apart. And so, collaborations were largely created by participants working remotely and at a distance (sometimes considerable) from each other; sharing and sending results mainly over the Internet. This made for some intriguing, exciting and inventive results. I understand many musicians would rather work in the same room as their foils and partners, but personally, despite the distances, none of projects made during those trying times seemed to really suffer in quality or creativity. In fact, it made for some challenging surprises.

One such exchange of ideas, a sort of transatlantic partnership between the notable and acclaimed UK pianist and composer Johhny Richards and US-based drummer of equal note Dave King, ended up as untethered and genre-defying experiment in ‘impossible music’: or that which is near impossible to recreate, at least live; a response to certain conditions, certain prompts produced during a particular process that involved a bit of toing and froing between the two musicians. It’s Richards’ prompts that come first in this experiment. His piano, whether treated or untreated, adapted with various materials and objects (from screws to Blu-tack and a knife), and his transformance of the very workings, the guts, the hammers, pins and the action, were sent to King, who recorded his reactions, before once more travelling back to Richards to receive further overlayed parts.  

The skilful anarchic (yet never too wild and unchained as to run away with itself, to get lost in chaos or totally lose the plot) style of piano which has served Shatner’s Bassoon so well, is once more unleashed. Unburdened by restrictions, sent out into the serialism ether, and without any preconceived ideas of how his drumming partner would respond, the connection and intuitive nature of this collaboration proved as frenzied as it did dramatic. It’s as if they both unknowingly created a score at times, and at other times, a simultaneously mischievous, playful, and avant-garde merger of off-kilter, kooky jazz, electronica, performance art, transmogrified classical music, the Duchampian, La Monte Young, cartoons, math rock equations, fusion and gamelan. It sounds also like a largely acoustic recreation of Warp Records (as mentioned in the briefing, Warp is cited as an influence and direction of travel) output; an experimental electronic record made without much in the way of the electronic.

Muscle memory from King’s impressive haul of instigated groups and ensembles (from The Bad Plus to Happy Apple) can’t help but turn up. But this album of variously paced and cryptic tracks, brilliantly matches random passings of Herbie Hancock, Tim Berne, Bach, Zappa, Mr. Bungle, Radiohead, Matthew Shipp and Cecil Taylor (I’m thinking of the recently released Taylor and Tony Oxley piano-drums combo experiment Flashing Spirits). It makes for a tumultuous balance between re-wired jazz-fusion, the near leapfrogging and frenzied, and the more serious atmospherically framed offerings – ‘False Doors’ with its heavy piano rumbles of a weather and thunder, and distant strike of a buoy out at sea, obscured by a prevailing fog, really sets a moody scene; almost esoteric in part before developing into a jazz-breaks, splashing of ride and crash cymbals and a near thriller or mystery piano dotting of notes-like soundtrack.

From being pulled through the fantastical mirror backwards to the unsettled and skewwhiff, much ground is covered. Starting from nothing, an incipient partnership of effected, pulled, chimed, chopped and string-like plucked piano workings and both dampened bass-y and more recognisable, if near unmanageable, notes seem to run independently of the drums. And yet the shuffles, breaks, spidery skirts and rattles around the kit, and drills, its free from movements, somehow stick to produce a remotely made piece of dynamic art, playfulness and moody observance. A very successful partnership.

Ujif_notfound ‘Postulate’
(I Shall Sing Until My Country Is Free) 9^th September 2025

With no end in sight, and yet another deadline from Trump crossed, Putin’s barbaric invasion of the Ukraine depressingly drags on. Three and half years in – although the real flashpoint came in 2014 and the annexation of the Crimea – and Russia continues to pound away at an already devastated ruinous landscape. Casualties may have reached the million mark, as whole generations fill the mass grave sites on a scale rarely seen outside the scenarios of both World Wars.

In these horrific times it falls upon labels such as the electronic artists Dmyto Fedorenko and Kateryna Zavoloka’s I Shall Sing Until My Land Is Free to spread the sound of the sonic resistance. A soft power, a cultural emissary of that country’s experimental scene, the profits from its roster of artists, which includes both its founders, are donated to several self-defence and humanitarian foundations and local volunteer activists.

The latest release on that platform sees the noted Ukrainian multi-disciplinary electronic sonic, media and visual artist Georgy Potopalsky channel the apocalyptic horror, the destroyed and twisted concrete and steel scarred geography of his homeland to create a pulverised industrial and force field electrified work of conflict and brutalism. Under the Ujif_notfound alias, and with the artist’s usual themes that draw upon the volatility and dynamics between man and the machine, between user and interface, there’s now a focus towards, what the PR description describes as, ‘blasted soundscapes, frenetic breaks and bristling guitar noise’.

In practice this amounts to heavy meta(l) meets the electrifying bounce and fractures of techno and the gears and torqued industrial granular effects of machines (both the coded and the weaponized). Fizzling and warping, with ring outs of both contorting grindcore and repetitive guitar, the coarse and corrosive, an ominous presence is always near at hand; an alienness almost, and yet sense of war and its physical effects permeate the scorched earth. And yet, as pads are drilled with tight delay, or spiked, rotations spiral out the influence of Basic Channel, acid techno and breakbeat, there’s a danceable aspect, a dynamism of alive circuitry that gives some of the tracks a buzz.

The grains of acid rain, of filaments and detritus of weapons, missiles, rockets and drones appear like sonic drizzle though. But at the very end, a peaceful coda is reached; something approaching the ambient and Eno-esque, channelled once more through tubular metallic effects.

At any one time I’m hearing hints of Alberich, Cabaret Voltaire, Cosy Fanni Tutti, Atsushi Izumi, Brian Reitzell’s American Gods score, Autchere and Einstürzende Neubauten collectively pulled into a heavy set of the magnetic, pulsating, grinding, crushing, and shuttered. As sonically shocking as it is bouncing and charged, a full immersion that conjures up a full multimedia experience from one of Ukraine’s most prolific and creatively stimulating artists.  

Visible Light ‘Songs For Eventide’
(Permaculture Media) 19^th September 2025

Marking in a visceral, beatific, and sometimes plaintive manner, both seasonal changes and our relationship to the environment, the Visible Light musical partnership between experimentalist cellist and improvisor Amy McNally and multi-disciplinary artist and composer Matthew Hiram is deep in ecological study, philosophy and reflection.

Described as a “chamber-ambient” project, imbued and led by the environment and elements that surround them, the Visible Light vehicle has a both serious and meditative purpose. Hiram, as a “certified Minnesota Water Steward” and active contributor to nature conservation (and public art) initiatives and his foil create a quintet of suites from an atavistic but living and breathing nature. Their debut long-form release, Songs For Eventide, is not only released on the sustainable ecosystem themed Permaculture Media platform, but released in time for the Autumn Equinox this September.

The whole cycle of the seasons, from the awakening blooms of summer to the darkened, colder and more uninviting, even sad, drawing in of winter, are articulated graciously, purposefully, imaginatively and magically through the effected and processed sounds of the cello, flute, drones, vapours and a sustained mysterious bedding of electronic produced atmospheres. From blossoming wildflower carpets to the frozen elegy of the Boreal age – a reference, in technical terms, to the North or most Northern, but also the first climatic phase of the Blytt-Sernander sequence of northern Europe, during the Holocene epoch; its climate characteristics being long winters and short, cool to mild summers), long drawn strokes and bows, the occasional spaced out short pluck of cello, the willow and evergreen flute, sounds of tubular rings, and both ambient and new age electronic elements conjure up evocations of each studied season alongside classical American folk and rustic traditions, the classical, the pastoral, the Oriental (the cello on the opening ‘Bloom To Bloom’ sounds almost like a Southeast Asian dulcimer or something of that nature) and Celtic: both Irish and Scottish.

Each suite is an incredible observation of patterns, of language and a spectrum of natural light. Recorded beneath the canopy of nature, you can hear the soft downpour of rain pelting the tarpaulin that covers those musical observers – or so it sounds like on the chamber-trance and environment captured ‘Boreal Shift’.

The duo mention Sarah Davachi and Harold Budd, amongst others, as reference points. Both good calls, but I’d perhaps add Jeff Bird, Anne Muller, Alison Cotton and Simon McCorry to that loose sphere of influences. In all though, a thoroughly impressive adroit, stirring and near stained glass anointed eco system soundtrack of the reflective and magical.   

Wayku ‘Selva Selva’
(Buh) 18^th September 2025

Astral mirages, shamanistic dream ceremonies, and festive dances await the listener on this new album from the Peruvian guitarist, researcher and ethnomusicologist Percy A. Flores Navarro. Some of the ideas, the conceptions of these tracks may go back years, but this jungle menagerie and musical map of the abstract atmospheres, the psychogeography, the ancestral traditions of the Peruvian Amazon is a new venture under the adopted Wayku moniker. More or less flying solo, uncoupled from his Motilones de Trarpoto band, it’s the guitar that does most of the talking; channelled through various effects, adopting various meters, Peruvian and greater indigenous and Latin American styles whilst also evoking traces of rock ‘n’ roll, the more frantic and adroit displays of rock guitar soloing, jazz, and surf music.

A really skilful, attuned and expressive guitarist, Percy’s craft is given room and space to perform the articulate, joyful, mysterious and supernatural, bolstered or underlined by the use of synths, the bass and drums. At its heart, rejuvenated and refashioned, is an electrified version of the popular festival genre Pandilla; a more uplifting and celebratory community style that emerged from the Peruvian Amazon. Alongside a diverse range of rhythms, of traditions and more contemporary disciplines, it makes for a rich album of the nimble, playful, mystical, cosmic, otherworldly and infectious: you’ll be dancing along to at least a third of these mostly instrumental affairs.

Steeped in local colloquies, with references to ceremonies, to places and spirits named by the Quechua and even further back, there’s a story behind every track. Originally from the famous Amazon cloud forest city of Tarapoto (sitting in a valley between two rivers, located in the San Martín region of northern Peru, this large epicentre is often referred to as the “city of palms” for its abundance of the plant), which is itself full of myth and magic, Percy encapsulates the unseen forces and the feel of those lands that lay beneath the rich canopy of jungle, and live off and by the sides of the Amazon river in Peru. This porously spills over into bordering Brazil at times, picking up some of the Amazonas (the largest in all of South America) state’s indigenous sounds en route. There’s also, as I mentioned earlier, a certain tremolo-like turnpike wave and twang of coastal South American surf music, ala Dick Dale, to be added to the mix. Perhaps the sound of such Peruvian pioneers as Los Ranger’s de Tingo Maria, Los Zheros and Fresa Juvenil De Tarapoto via Mexico and Brazil propelled into a cosmology of supernatural, mythological and historical gravitas.

Educational in spirit and full of references to the prevailing economic and political disconnections that have separated the city from the interior and its various indigenous societies, Selva Selva is teeming with relevant messages and ethnographical context. The album came with plenty of notes, and plenty of relevant personal connective anecdotes and stories by the artist. Every track has a purpose, is well-thought out and planned. And, depending on how much the listener wishes to expand their understanding of the subject, can go as deep as they like into the interior of Percy’s studied forms.

From the sprinkling of magic and the amazon’s natural medicine cabinet – the wisdom of the ancients – to the short-lived autonomous jungle states and their founders (nods to Guillermo Cervantes’ proclaimed Third Federal State of Loreto in the 1920s, and Emilio Vizcarra’s Selva Nation in the late 19^th century), a whole world of panther-like deities and ugly squatted spirit guardians, festival celebrations and fieldwork await as Percy reclaims his home’s legacy with verve and deft musicianship. An outstanding album from an outstanding guitarist.  

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