Monolith Cocktail Blog

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

.at/on ‘ANTI-RAVE’
(Adventurous Music) Released 5^th March 2026

The first of two experimental sonic releases from the Adventurous Music platform this month (see Lauré Lussier’s symphonic album featured further down the page), the mysteriously coded artist behind the .at/on guise has chosen to limit themselves, apparatus wise, with their newest release.

Building a sci-fi, alien sound world out of modified and abstracted component parts, steel works machinery, accelerated oscillations and bounced sheet metal Techno beats, .at/onmanages to create a whole universe out of the anti-rave named noise box/drum machine of the title. This free patching, fully modular synth in a compact form piece of kit is then sampled, re-sampled and processed until the desired effect is made: a sort of space-bound drifted vision of Bernard Szajner and Basic Channel.

The title by the way, and emphasised in the available scant info, in no reflects any political or musical stance on rave music; merely, as I’ve shared already, the name of the box of tricks used to produce this factory of the galvanized, the sometimes unsettling, and the magnetic.

From such minimal equipment a sonic universe is created, which often veers into stripped-down techno and even d ‘n’ b. From a prolific label and hub, another intriguing and cool experiment in the basics of electronic sound crafting.   

Golden Samphire Band ‘Dream Is the Driver’
(Wayside & Woodland Recordings) 17^th April 2026

For many years the brothers Hanscomb (that’s Mik and Rich) of Junkboy fame have idealised a triangular spread of counties, from Essex down to both East and West Sussex through their signature trade of harmonic poetic and descriptive lyrical forms of instrumentation. This soundtrack is embedded within a magical zen-like quality and an appreciation of English psych-rock, folk and the more exotic allure of Tropicália. The brother’s main creative vehicle has been augmented by the odd vocalised appreciation or encapsulation of these Southern English surroundings; that’s the pier dotted coastline of Brighton and its porous neighbours, the chalk figure decorated hillsides and valleys left behind by the Victorians and our more atavistic neolithic ancestors, and the mythologized woods and forests.

As an idyllic portal, or a form of escapism from the sorry state of the world, the mundane and divisive noise, the brothers weave more from that musical timeless palette with a new project. The Golden Samphire Band ordained trio ropes in former Junkboy foil Hannah Lewis, who’s soaring vocal range of folk-like arias and romanticized pleadings, and longed highs was last heard on the rightly applauded and well-received Littoral States album, back in 2023. Lewis’s range is allowed to a free reign and to wander on the trio’s debut songbook, with the ethereal, the pastoral, the near reverent (amplified by the undulations and foundations of stained class anointed organ and near venerated harmonies) and the sentimental. 

Reflecting the wild coastal flower of the title, precariously clinging in full tufted bloom and beauty attached to sea cliffs or springing forth from salty marshes, the band wax both lyrical and in a sometimes more sombre mood about their various interactions with the landscape; from the sun-blessed pursuit of gardening to embracing the Japanese mindfulness art of Shinrin-yoka (in essence and translated into our own vocabulary as “forest bathing”; to take in the atmosphere as it were on a spiritual level). But the niggles and pains of the long commute, forced to live miles away from the job and places you grew up in because of affordability in one of the UK’s most expensive stripes of coastline, are drawn upon too; a disarming descriptive and beautifully conveyed point is made about this on the willowed and fluted, almost 90s-female-led indie hinted and Latin-soul lilted ‘(We Wunt) Travel Further’. Less a celebration of the age of steam and the electrified railways of an idealised England, and more a discontented poetic discourse on the commuter’s woes, plagued by a never-ending cycle of cancellations, engineering works and increased ticket prices. With more than a recurring use of shakers and such, the rhythm of the train is itself integral to the journey being made back and forth across the scenic borders. But if you want something truly sombre and inevitable, the album’s sympathetically and disarmingly handled eulogy to growing old and spending your last days in the care home system, ‘Bid Farewell’, brings a certain dignity, resplendent with some light strings and a Spanish flourish, to the crisis in caring for the elderly.  

Elsewhere, aside from echoes of Hampshire & Foat, Tudor Lodge, Fortherringay, Pentangle, Judy Collins, Shelagh McDonald and Jerry Yester, songs like the opener ‘Chalk Space’, evoke eighties Athens, Georgia meets the pastoral backdrop of English folk-rock and Baroque-psych – imagine Peter Buck’s mandolin spells of Green, but also his hints of his jangle on earlier R.E.M. LPs from the mid 80s. There’s also a loose sense of early 90s-indie, and just a passing fancy of folk-inspired SFA to be detected.

But what really makes the album, lifts it, is Lewis’s rising scales, personification of each subject and ability to modulate her incredible range over the versants, the lines of woodland trees, the coastal pathways and lapping waves.

A truly dreamy combination that makes for a finely woven and articulated tapestry of South Coast mirages, soulful ruminations, self-help and natural bathing, the Golden Samphire Band excels on a debut stepped in topographical allurement, magic and sensibility. In my book, a resounding collaborative success story.    

Whitney Johnson, Lia Kohl & Macie Stewart ‘Body Sound’
(International Anthem) Released 20^th March 2026

A promising collaborative trio of experienced and multifaceted explorative players, pulled together under the International Anthem label banner, the potential of a Whitney Johnson, Lia Kohl and Macie Stewart project is always going to be one worth investigating and savouring. Between them more or less covering every nuance and expansion of the experimental and the avant-garde neo-classical scenes, the electro-acoustic and beyond, all three inspired players, composers and, in some cases, teachers pull together their talents and resources for a debut project.

But first, a run through of each participant’s CV.

Perhaps one of the most prolific collaborators of recent years, across several mediums, the multi-instrumentalist, composer, songwriter and artist Macie Stewart has come to represent a flourishing, explorative contemporary music scene with multitudes of connections and threads. Apart from projects with choreographer Robyn Mineko, Sima Cunningham, and the Pacific Northwest Ballet, Stewart has become a stalwart of the International Anthem family, contributing and helping steering releases by Rob Mazurek, Bex Birch, Damon Locks, Makaya McCraven and Alabaster DePlume. On top of this, Stewart has also collaborated in a duo project with Lia Kohl. Kohl proves a symbiotic foil in this latest project, having experimented within the spheres of sound art, sound installation and the extemporised through the use of the cello and an apparatus that incorporates synths, field recordings, toy instruments and radio. Projects are extensive and lengthy, with various works and performances at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, The Renaissance Society, Union Station Chicago, Eckhart Park Pool, and Big Ears Festival. And she has also created sound installations for Experimental Sound Studios’ Audible Gallery and Roman Susan Art Foundation. The credits roll on and on.

Finalising the ranks of this trio is the equally prolific musical collaborator and music professor (currently assistant prof of Art and Technology/Sound Practices at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago) Whitney Johnson. Another Kohl collaborator on the Chicago scene, Johnson also goes under the pseudonym of Matchess, releasing music on the Drag City label. A violist equally adept at composing and performing on an apparatus of hardware, Johnson produces sound and music in the psychoacoustic idiom and beyond. The label website has the full CV, but it includes ‘recent performance-installations FIAT (2025, Indexical, Roulette Intermedium and 2023, Forecast Platform Berlin), The Tuning of the Elements (2023, Renaissance Society of the University of Chicago), Death in Trafo (or, The Crater) (2023, Logan Center for the Arts), Huizkol (2020, Lampo), and Fundamental 256 Hz (2019–2022, worldwide) which considers the possibility of brainwave entrainment, an alternative healing technique using binaural beats to induce relaxed or energized mental states.’ 

A multi-diverse lineup of possibilities awaits the listener, prompted by the shared couplet descriptive titles of the album; a language waiting to be deciphered across eleven strings-related deeply evocative suites: some sombre, others near esoteric and others lived. The impressions of these elemental titles and often droned or plucked interactions recall the neo-classical, the avant-garde, the descriptive, the near abstract but also melodious. An album of simultaneously thoughtful and mysterious meditations enquires and ruminations, the trio use both their signature stringed instruments and their voices to elicit abstract moods, descriptions, song and a rectification of the various moods they attempt to stir up.

Theatre, near veiled arias and sombre tones fill the space with ceremony, touches of the blues, the sublime and near folkloric ritualistic. For amongst the most beautiful qualities of these emotive, evocative pieces there’s passages or moments of the uneasy and fabric textural torn. 

Reference points could well include the Velvet Underground, Cage, some Krautrock even, but also La Monte Young, Harry Patch, Morton Feldman, Fran & Flora and Alison Cotton. And yet, this is a unique draw of resources, experiences and articulation of mirages, feels, subjects and descriptions that is this entirely of the trio’s own making. A chamber set suites for our times. Every play uncovers more magic, more depth, more interactive intuition and playfulness. But essentially this trio have successfully aligned, making good on their inquisitiveness nature and abilities to score the most abstract.

Lauré Lussier ‘The Orphana Symphony’
(Adventurous Music) Released 26^th March 2026

The strap line being the “Orphana Symphony does not plead: she moves forward”, Lauré Lussier’s middle section vision (part of an eventual finished triptych of such experimental suites) progresses (in a fashion) across a mysterious series of mythologised and alien ruins and misty veiled atmospheric mirages. 

The second of two Adventurous Music releases to make my roundup this month – from an extensive list of explorations and avant-garde studies facilitated by the label hub -, merges the electroacoustic with both older echoes of the classics and the contemporary, but also makes stopovers within the fields of analogue, the Kosmische, the new age, the avant-garde, the scuzzed, the theatrical, and the operatic. High drama and suspense also play a part on the Quebec author and composer’s symphonic work of evocative and more still movements.

As I already said, this is the middle section of a triptych framed vision; although each album exists, it seems, in its own right: not a moiety but rather a close sibling. Eighty minutes in length, and split into two, these lengthy pieces are shaped over the course by various continuous sonic and more melodic changes; from the rolling thunderous timpani, the ziplines and cold winds that blow across tundra’s, the fogged ship’s horn, to moments of transformed Bach and Beethoven and the early synth work of Michael Hoenig, Peter Baumann and Suzanne Ciani, right through to more modern composers as Noémi Büchi and Brian Reitzwell. And yet that’s not nearly enough names to drop, or references to describe this incredible set of suites. For this would make an amazing film or operatic piece, perhaps even a ballet, with the foundations and repeated refrains of orchestra striking up from out of those mists to score moments of suspense. There are also sheet music dances aplenty, the concrete sounds mixed with elongated and tubular metals, hidden sourced instrumental scales and the more familiar sorrowed or esoteric sounds of Eastern European classical music, the Greco and more wild climatic drumming sprees of action and chaos.

Inspired I’m sure from myth, from some ancient source, and from the classical (those who know more about it than me will detect echoes of everything from avant-garde of the last century to the Baroque and Prokofiev I’m sure). As playful as it is mysterious and courtly, The Orphana Symphony is almost undefinable, and a score without a performance: Arcadia in turmoil. I look forward to hearing the as yet tbc third and final album in the series.

Irmin Schmidt ‘Requiem’
(Mute/Future Days Music (Spoon)) 24^th April 2026

Hot housed in both the Stockhausen and Ligeti systems and the more starched schools of classical composition, the future titan of German innovation and experimentation Irmin Schmidt chose, early on, to lose himself in the burgeoning reverberations of the late 60s American counterculture. Whilst taking part in a compositional competition in New York, Schmidt took a detour via the Chelsea Hotel: seduced in a manner by a city that hosted a rich and seedy underworld of pop art and the Neo-dadaist high jinks conceptualism of Fluxus; the musical score supplied by the burgeoning Velvet Underground, Steve Reich, Terry Riley and John Cage (all of whom were introduced to Schmidt during his sojourn in the city).

Tuned-in to the generational divide that saw Schmidt and his compatriots reject Germany’s past horrors and fanaticism, he returned from the States with a new outlook and mission. Initially influenced more by The Jimi Hendrix Experience than the avant-garde, Schmidt helped form, what was essentially, the acid rock band Can. Their debut album proper, Monster Movie, was a feverish rolling totem: part psychedelic west coast part Velvet Underground east coast, those exploratory jams were held and concentrated around the strange beat poetic vocals of the American – ‘lost in a foreign land’ – sculptor, Malcolm Mooney. Not until Tago Mago would Can really venture into their own worlds; shaking off the shackles of music history, creating as they did a unique esoteric sound, totally adrift and bereft of any obvious influence from outside their own deranged and genius minds. An integral part of that experience – and all the Cologne-based group’s releases – would be their talisman organ, keyboards, effects magnet and composer Schmidt, whose databank of tricks and dials pumped out creatively warped textures and fluctuating soundscapes of otherworldly and mystical magnificence and horror.

Much more than just an acclaimed and respected Krautrock band, Can were and remain perhaps one of the most reverential landmark groups of gifted players in the music annals. But it is Schmidt’s solo work, away from that supergroup, which is being spotlighted by Mute and Future Days Music (Spoon), released now in his, unbelievably, eighty-ninth year – Roedelius perhaps the only other titan of that period, now tiptoeing into his nineties, still creating new music.

Schmidt’s CV is just as extensive and influential when spilt away from the band that first made his name. His collaborations are lengthy and legendary; either through the various scores and compositions he created for such luminaries of German film as Wim Wenders, his multiple projects with Jono Podmore aka Kumo, and his celebrated suite for Mervyn Peak‘s fantasy trilogy turned opera, Gormenghast.

Many of these works were gathered together thirteen years ago by Mute for the Villa Wunderbar compilation.Taking a sporadic journey through Schmidt’s back catalogue on the first CD of that collection, the label chose a mix of benchmark compositions and more neglected pieces, including the languorous drifting, jazzy Can-tastic, title track (from his 1987 LP, Musk At Dusk); esoteric Bavarian fairground of the damned, tongue-in-cheek castanet and wild strangled guitar ‘Le Weekend’ (a 1991 single); and the Miles Davis accompanied by a drum machine siesta, turn darker warped David Arnold Bond theme, ‘Kick On The Floods’ (from the 2008 Schmidt and Kumo collaboration project, Axolotl Eyes, album).

Popol Vuh had Werner Herzog, Can and to some degree in their incubator state, Amon Düül II, all had their own film auteur in the guise of Wim Wenders. A relationship which saw Schmidt score many of his film projects over the decades. Wenders curated and wrote the sleeve notes for that collection, picking another rich tapestry of Schmidt suites and extracts on CD number 2.

Following in its wake were 2018’s 5 Klavierstücke (a piano work using prepared and unprepared piano) and 2020’s Nocturne albums (a live album documenting his performance at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival).

Years later, and when not still gathering what’s left of the Can archives and overseeing the release of a chosen curated schedule of live albums, or indeed being interviewed for various books on the subject, Schmidt spends his time reflecting on the garden space, and the natural surroundings of his home in Southern France.

A Requiem no less: but not in the grand sense of operatic scale; no grand dramatic choruses here, just the use of both prepared and unprepared piano plus the environmental recordings of nature, which seems to revolve a lot around a pond-like set of croaked-stretched and billing frogs, bird song and communication, and a distant (or what sounds like to me) baaing of lambs.    

Separated into two lengthy suites or pieces, each recording embraces the elements: building up a sort of non-linear evocation, or settling up a meditative distraction, and at times even conjuring up Zen-like scenes of ritual and replenishment. There’s a sense of loss to that permeats certain passages of piano play and can sound near haunting as the act of reembrace and absence is conveyed through the merest of touches and tinkles. Whilst sometimes played or performed in the moment, a spontaneous reaction or even a lead, the piano parts have been further edited and helped along by Schmidt’s long-time foil René Tinner.Those parts increasingly become avant-garde in certain sections, with the sound of perhaps objects wedged into or hanging off the piano’s inner workings and stringed guts. You can hear all kinds of reverberations and resonated surprises from this experiment, including what sounds like a nodding or seesawing metal object being tipped up and down by the near continuous waters that either flow downstream or fall from the sky in sheets of rain. You could forgive yourself for being transported to either a Japanese garden of well-being, or to Java and even Tibet. Though the final minutes of the Part 2 sound like a trip through the dream portal into hallucinated mirages of a garden landscape left very far behind. Schmidt creates some both subtle and more deliberate, near struck sounds and abstracted dredges and plucks of transformed nature brilliantly and with a real curiosity; tying such observations, embraces and absorptions of the environment with contemporary ideas of classical experimentation, the avant-garde, the sounds of Walter Smetak, his old teachers in the movement and the imaginative. Not that I want to remind him, but in his eight-ninth year Schmidt continues to surprise and explore the very ideas and philosophical quandaries of nature’s soundtrack and its effects on the soul, body and mind. 

The Three Seas ‘Antaḥkaraṇa’
(Earshift Music) Released 20^th February 2026

In a fabled exchange of metaphorical, lyrical, poetic and geographical sea routes, and across various trails and caravan routes on land, the fusion ensemble that is The Three Seas interweaves various global creative references with their roots on what has been billed as their most “expansive” and “spiritual” album yet. 

Formed around seventeen years ago in the Bolpur neighbourhood of Shantinketan in West Bengal by the Australian saxophonist Matt Keegan and locals Deo Ashis Mothey, Gaurab “Gaboo” Chatterjee and Raju Das Baul, the troupe’s fortunes have followed the times, especially during the Covid years. But revigorated by a residency at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2022, the group managed to write and put together their newest album; a call and yearn for transglobal embraces fused with the poetry and mysticism of the Baul.

As a foundation, the age old Baul tradition of minstrels and troubadour shared Sufism and Hindu Vaishnava Sahajiya (a tantric focused on the Radha Krishna workshop, specifically developed in Bengal. The verses of the Baul are both spontaneous and mystical, stepped in lore and spiritualism.  

With all this in mind, there’s a transformation of what sounds like Baul spirituals, their yearns, their calls of prayer and desire to seek, mixed with Baul-jazz, a form invented, or so I’ve read, by one of The Three Seas band member’s fathers. Gaurab Chatterjee’s polymath musician father Gautam Chattopadhyay not only instigated that Baul-jazz form but was also a pioneering force in Indian fusion, founding the prog rock group Moheener Ghoraguli in the process. Track four on this new album, ‘Prithibi’, was written by the highly influential singer-songwriter and guitarist and refers to one of the Sanskrit words for the Earth goddess: responsible for many things, but essentially fertility, stability and grounding in Hindu mythology. Updated perhaps for the contemporary ear with fx sounds and what sounds like the synthesized, this paean of a kind takes its religious origins into the realms of fusion and along the Iberian coastline, the vocals a near call and response of the most soulful and yearned.    

Reflecting their transglobal embrace of musical and cultural references, classical Indian religious symbols fuse with a cross-pollination of both Hindu and Sufi themes and motifs that sonically and lyrically encompass the longed and the religious with jazz, sonic effects, Bedouin rock, prog, Latin grooves and on the album’s finale, ‘Real World’, a Fela Kuti vibe – Matt Keegan’s sax actually reminded a little of Shango era Peter King.  

Recorded at Peter Gabriel’s world-famous Real World studio, and with a unifying framework of the devotional and mystical, Antahkarana conjures up an eclectic magic of the spiritual and the electric, with moments when the action seems to recall bands like Amon Düül II and Embryo, and at other times, Dirtmusic and Genesis.

Shamanistic, venerable, worldly and full of grooves and various musical fusions, Antaḥkaraṇa is a yearn, a yin and spirited unification of musical ideas, cultures, devotions and questions that gels seamlessly together for a both mystical and danceable experience.

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