Monolith Cocktail Blog

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

Magda Drozd ‘Divided By Dusk’
(Präsens Editionen) 13^th February 2026

Coupling a renewed interest in Polish folklore, its history and roots with time spent in Japan, the composer, violinist and sound artist Magda Drozd inhabits an often alien, mysterious and experimentally intensity of field recordings, atmospheres, the neo-classical, avant-garde, serial and most hauntingly ethereal.

It’s as much an apparitional-ambient and dream-like album as it is dramatic and full of a certain otherworldly drama. And for some of that time it draws not only from the two countries that inspired it, but also from natural phenomenon: an eclipse to the album’s dusk divided title. For in-between worlds, the Warsaw born, but living between Zurich and London artist Drozd inhabits a sonic and vocally invocative landscape that is one part Theatre Of Eternal Music and another part Noémi Büchi.

Working in part with Japanese foils Rai Tateishi and Koshiro Hino – both of the Osaka rock minimalist troupe goat – Drozd absorbs the sound of the high-pitched Japanese shinobue bamboo flute and the NE Thailand and Laos khaen bamboo mouth organ into a partly neo-classical and abstracted drama of aria-like voices, the slightly industrial, willowy, ghostly and folkloric. 

Folk songs transformed, stirred up and given a new impetus meet with klezmer and the courtly (especially on the near fairytale and whistled-pitched ‘Piosenka Ludowa’; a free-form transported interpretation of the folkloric folk song), or come up against heart of darkness style guitar, vocal callings, electronic filaments, ghostly reverberations, and the incantations of crickets and insects. The mood and soundscape are enhanced and given a secondary geographical feel by the use of various instruments and electronic/effects apparatus, including the Lyra-8 – described as an organismic analogue synth, its eight varied generators are referred to as voices that resemble the tones of an old electric organ. And with the addition of both wordless and lyrically sung spells, siren songs and cantos of an abstract kind, the whole album hovers and strains between the esoteric symphonic and the strangely folkloric; between Japanese traditions and environmental music, the harrowed depths and pulls of East European and something not quite of this world. Nightmares and dreams, realities and folklore meet in a new space and time.

Howling Bells ‘Strange Life’
(Nude Records) 13^th February 2026

An unforced return and obligation, with enough time (just over twelve years) and distance to make a mature judgement, the Howling Bells are back with a new, and crucially, pretty damn fine album of grown-up indie-rock, indie-pop and the psychedelic.

It must be said however, that in the crazy divisive decade since the band’s initial break-up many of the issues that perhaps led to the split are still to be resolved. Bossing it with a flurry of more stripped-down solo albums, one half of the sibling team that instigated the band, the vocalist and guitarist Juanita Stein has spent the intervening years writing and producing music that erases everything but the most vital, emotionally receptive and connective elements of the Howling Bells sound to produce confident (despite the fragility and vulnerability in places) songbooks of personal memories and identity. Even though Juanita’s brother Joel is just as much an integral wellspring of ideas, motivation and creativity, and despite a number of lineup changes during the band’s career trajectory, the focal point, the spotlight, has always shone brightest on their front woman. That light can also burn, and Juanita’s time spent out at the front hasn’t exactly been a positive one – as referenced on her solo work, especially on 2024’s The Weightless Hour; one of my choice picks of that year. Whilst the bane of music press cliché, the allure of the front woman is nevertheless a phenomenon, a selling point throughout an industry previously dominated by males. It’s felt and seems to perhaps be referenced on this album’s own winding indie and spiky ‘Heavy Lifting’, that relationship and in the press, Juanita was carrying around a lot of weighted expectation on those slim shoulders of hers. Perhaps, now, in more recent years, from the viewpoint of motherhood, Juanita wishes to set things straight, to pass on her knowledge and resolutions from sagacious advantage point, having come out the other side, still persevering and still standing strong.

After originally leaving their Australian home to pursue a music career abroad, Howling Bells moved to London where they quickly stood out amongst the dying embers of the MySpace era and its concentration of raggedly male indie bands and post-post-Britpop wannabes. After being championed to a point by such rags as the NME, they soon hurtled up the ranks and earned a spot supporting one of the biggest, if most boring, bands of the era, Coldplay on a stadium tour. This acceleration would have its drawbacks. But with singles like ‘Setting Suns’ (I would say one of the best, certainly among my favourites, from the early noughties) they managed to be both relatively popular and yet highly credibly creative wise. That time hasn’t been forgotten, and after the first split, made after the band’s 2014 album Heartstrings, there seems to have always been a desire or need to gather back around the Howling Bells catalyst. 

But Strange Life is much more than that, it’s also a statement of dreams, plaints and diaphanous psychedelic rock carousal rides on the subjects of nostalgia, ideas of home and resilience. On this theme we can pick out the Echobelly and Mazzy Star-esque ‘Melbourne’, a song with a sad cooed tone that speaks of the letdown in finding that despite returning to the bosom of home and its attractions, the reality is quite different: friends, and those you grew up with more or less all moving on and away. Better to perhaps move forward than back and dwell on the past. Meanwhile, ‘Halfway Home’ seem to catch them cut adrift and homeless yet finding a reassuring candour of belonging.‘Unbroken’ is a great opener, a single if not already in the making, and ‘Angel’ seems to be a real departure for the band towards circus Britpop.

As I’ve already described, there is a new sense of confidence about these songs; the scope of influences and range subtly expanded, helped in many ways by Juanita’s solo pathway, which emphasis the “light” touch over the heavy and raging. Vocally speaking, that voice is just as diaphanous, but able also able to turn on the Grace Slick switch, or to escape down the rabbit hole into metaphorical and allegorical dreaminess. Both Joel and drummer Glenn Moule lay down a solid backbeat that switches between echoes of Jet, the Cocteau Twins, Britpop and Juliana Hatfield. Everything is just so; energetic when needed, subtle and sympathetic at other times, and even psychedelic. As reunions go, it’s a very successful one. The vulnerability shorn, the dreaminess ramped up, and the songs speaking with a more mature strength. I for one am glad to see them back anyway.

Ira Dot ‘In Blue Time’
27^th February 2025

In development for the last five years, the debut album of disarming indie-blues melancholy from the Ira Dot collaborative partnership of Eddy Wang and Ryan Akler-Bishop seeks comfort and reassurance in these most disconsolate and plaintive of times. Drawing on a wealth of lament, or yearned expression, and a sense of detachment from not just race but the universe, both foils in this project exude a cosmic, fairytale, whimsy and Chinese-operatic patchwork of early noughties influences in their hour of neediness and slacker-like indolent sadness.

Powered as much by such melancholic dreamers, observers and unfortunates as Virginia Woolf and Marcel Proust as by the writings of the cultural theorist and American literary scholar Anne Anlin Cheng, In Blue Time is essentially rooted, or unrooted as it were, in both the psychological and all too real problems of racial identity. With the musician, filmmaker, Pennsylvania PhD alumni and Toronto Experimental Translation Collective member Wang left a little wanton and dejected over his Chinese heritage and identity, the album’s lyrics – mostly enchantingly downcast or twee – often reference ideas of belonging and detachment. Cheng interestingly, has written much about this, especially from the Chinese and Southeast Asian viewpoint (Cheng is herself of Taiwan heritage); an identity that seems to slip down the virtuous order of importance on the race meter, with Cheng voicing her own criticisms when Asian women are left out of the debate, the picture, and out of the protest movements for social justice despite facing hostility, racism and various forms of abuse. As one of the oldest communities in America if not anywhere, the Chinese are embedded in the fabric of our landscape and culture. However, this relationship has relied mainly on exploitation of one kind or another. But as is often the case, and through the negative effects of the authoritarian rule of the Chinese communist party, the country and its people have been subjected to scrutiny and racial abuse. There’s so much to unpack, and I haven’t the room. But suffice to say Wang’s cultural separation from those roots, growing up in the West, have left a void that needs addressing.

This main thrust is answered by lyrical displays of the longing, wanton and dismayed, put to the production and music of the multi-disciplinary artist, filmmaker and co-editor of the Big Toe magazine Akler-Bishop. With sympathetic pianos, some light but emotionally effective strings, Casio-like shimmies, tropical and celestial atmospheres, various frequencies and interference, the tunning into one sampled or captured narration or metaphor, the accompanying delightful female shadowed vocals, and reverberations the album traverses a whole spectrum of moody blue shades. And within that palette there’s hints of The Unicorns, Jonathan Richman, The Books, Olivia Tremor Control, Frog, Mercury Rev, The Terror Pigeon Dance Revolt!, Broken Social Scene, early Eno, Chinese opera, the Muppet show musical parts and the exotic.

Despite the title it never feels like a malady, nor does it come across as anything but a most lovely indie album of sentiment and belonging. It just gets better on every play, like a musical comfort blanket.

The Odes ‘Déjeuner Sous L’Herbe’
(Not Applicable) 6^th February 2026

A union of the untamed, Blurt’s legendary frontman and wild squawking, stonking saxophonist Ted Milton teams up with the electric trick noise maker, sound artist, software developer and composer Sam Britton for a double-album feature of both sonic assemblages backed free-improv/free association vocalisation and shorter poetic vignettes.

Already pretty much a cult progenitor of a sound that could only be riotously described as post-punk-no-wave-protestation-mutant-jazz, Milton’s testaments amd rages transformed the group he founded in 1979 with his sibling and former English prog-psych outfit Quintessence band member Jake and guitarist Peter Greese. And although that group mutated constantly over the following decades, the revolving set-up near enough always featured Ted as chief instigator/performer. Whilst it would be disingenuous to those artists on the vanguard of the 80s scene that took over the downtown scene of NYC and Europe, Ted could be singled out as one of the earliest originators of no wave and its various offshoots. Joined now in 2026 by Britton, who channels much of his idiosyncratic Isambard Khroustaliov alias and work with such troupes as Scarla O’Horror, both Ted’s wild saxophone skonks, squeals, squeezes and drifts and partly Dadaist, partly beat, partly avant-garde and partly snide, sneery and pitying digs at nationalism and the state of society are transmogrified or laced with warping, crunching, enveloping claps of thunderous electronica; punched, slapped and singularly whacked synthetic drum pads; 8-bit and binary distortions; and Populäre Mechaniks.

Forty-five tracks in all, divided into two parts; the first section, the surrealist impressionistic and situationist imbued Déjeuner Sous L’Herbe (which I believe translates as “Lunch Under The Grass”) draws both foils together in a post-punk, fucked-up jazz and leftfield dance music collaboration, whilst the second part, Anti Climb Paint, feature Tim unaccompanied performing over thirty short (some lasting only the time it takes to read out the title) poems of the absurd, politically charged, pitying, silly, observational and comedic: sung at times but mostly spoken, Tim invokes a fusion of Lydon, Ken Livingstone, music hall, a bastardised and updated wrathful version of the WWI poets and Jon Sinclair.  The latter section features everything from “stringing up” the Westminster front bench to loud shirts (“Braille for the sighted”), corporate office jobs on the Moon, Captain Tom’s charity walk during Covid (“he kept a walking, flapping his gongs”), and his uneasy relationship, so it seems, with “dad” (a theme that stretches across a number of readings).

The more musical, rhythmic but highly experimental former section could be described as a meeting between the sax of Archie Shepp, Andy Haas, Colin Stetson, Biting Tongues, James Chance and Konk and the off script improvised tubular scaffold effects, wraps and reverberated noise of Britton’s various hidden sources and apparatus: often sounding particular Germanic.

A generous offering of words and sound, anointed under the more lyrically and near disarming (certainly giving zero indication of the nature and to the sound of this duo) The Odes union, Déjeuner Sous L’Herbe and its second act cement reputations, encapsulates the current messy, fucked-up state of the society and politics, and offers up a performance of equals working out on the peripherals of the music world.

Pefkin ‘Unfurling’
(Morc) 30^th January 2026

Both drawing from and fascinated by the landscape, the history of Western Scotland and the many islands that sit between itself and Ireland, Gayle Brogan (under the Pefkin alias) once more embodies a both abstracted and devotional near otherworldly vision of that old home. The first album since moving across the Scottish border to the North of England and Sheffield, Unfurling, as its title would suggest, does just that as it unfurls a simultaneously beatific, sober, haunted, mysterious and misty soundtrack to the seasons and the Irish saints sent in their Gaelic etymologically named small lightweight coracles across the sea to pagan Scotland. It’s the mystique, the hermit’s life and the early rituals, the conversion that intrigues.

Emoting a both haunting and hymnal-like atmosphere throughout, Brogan invokes the abstract feels of the environment in a cycle that traverse’s winter and spring. This is done through the use of either apparitional-like or transformative folk choral voices, the use of the viola and violin (erring towards John Cale, and a touch of Jed Kurzel), various drones and purrs, throbs and the sound of the landscape itself: the lapping tides of either the sea or the waters that wash up on Scotland’s dramatic loch topography.  

I was reminded in part of Delphine Dora, Susan Alcorn and Simon McCorry. But this album is mostly unique in capturing a mysterious essence and the feel of each season’s embrace or shroud: winter really does seem quite sober, ghostly but also beatific; I can see the heat rising off the damp and melting moss on the opening ‘Green Bound In Ice And Snow’. At other times it feels like a transformative vision of the Gaelic; old songs and geography transcribed beyond the parchment and recordings of scrolls on to the air and into the ether.

An extraordinary work of both the short and long form, Unfurling emotionally and intimately soundtracks a feeling of time and place, of history, and of religious myth.  

Yoshiko Sai ‘Mikkou’
(Wewantsounds) 13^th February 2026

The famous silk road, from Europe and Persia to China, formed the backdrop or mood for the ethereal and clean-cut siren Yoshiko Sai’s second studio album Mikkou, released back in 1976. Tying the atavistic with the contemporary, picturing in words and music that fabled trade route and the lands it crossed – the Takalamakan desert and such – Sai longingly, seductively and achingly transports the listener to magical, dreamy and mirage-like realms. And yet, despite the fantasy, the relaxed near show-like and almost cabaret funk, the bluesy influences and brassy resonance of such peers as The Far East Family Band and worldly prog, the album is anchored with references and plaints to femineity, freedom and the “passage of generations”.  

The singer-songwriter and artist (for it is her fantastical/mythological painted cats and nudist sprites, nymphs, muses that don the various album covers) released a flurry of albums between the mid and late 70s, before talking a considerable respite, and picking up again in 2001. In fact, this latest album to be released from Wewantsounds’ series of Sai vinyl reissues (many receiving a proper international release for the first time) features a new interview with the Japanese cult star. But for those yet to experience her most evocative crystal voiced metamorphosis and vision of folksy-blues and balladry, and know little about her, Sai was born in the old Japanese capital (during the 8^th century) seat of Nara, located on Honshu in the 1950s. Surrounded by shrines, temples, architecture and a landscape of great cultural importance, Sai absorbed herself in myth, the dream-realism, the dark and the bizarre literature of such notable Japanese authors as Mushitarō Oguri, Yumeno Kyūsaku and others. It was whilst recovering from a kidney disease and putting on hold her law study at Doshisha University that she began to paint and write poetry and songs. After competing in a number of competitions and submitting songs, she was invited to perform as the opening act for Rabi Nakayam – anointed the female Japanese Bob Dylan. Proving a successful leg on the ladder, Sai was swiftly signed to the Teichiku label, with her inaugural album being released on that label’s subsidiary Black in 1975; produced by the notable Japanese jazz muso Yuji Ohno no less.

Revisited in 2026, accompanied by Hashim Kotaro Bharoocha’s informative liner notes and interview, the Mikkou LP entwines faraway dreamt lands and islands with a most beautifully envisioned songbook of the weepy, sublime and drifted. Creating the right atmosphere of Turkic, Samarkand and Persian allure is the spindly-lattice and springy reverberating sounds of the dulcimer and what sounds like tablas – produced and arranged by the noted Isamu Haruna. But making his mark throughout is the famous Japanese guitar hero Masayoshi Takanaka, who channels his most bluesy credentials with folk, psych, Latin America and country on the silk road of travails and magic.

Soulfully and softly fluctuating between flourishes of old Persia, the Caucuses and China, but also seemingly embracing touches of the Iberian, of the Caribbean lilt, of funk, and the Laurel Canyon, Sai effortlessly oozes fantasy, love and lamented aches. Almost filmic, ambitious yet very much contained and sentimental, Sai’s second LP is a silkscreen of yearning escapism.

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