Monolith Cocktail Blog

A World of Sonic/Musical Discoveries Reviewed by Dominic Valvona

Photo Credit: The Young Mothers shot by Malwina Witkowska

The Young Mothers ‘Better If You Let It’
(Sonic Transmissions) 21^st February 2025

Those (Young) Mothers of reinvention transform crate digging reminisces and nostalgic hummed melodies from the age of the Great American Songbook on their new album, Better If You Let It.

Whilst maintaining the freeform principles and eclectic range that has come to define them; cut loose from obligation, any burden, and so free to roam and extend their scope of influences as they please, The Young Mothers return after an interregnum of setbacks, relocation and both forced and unforced breaks: some of that time can be blamed on the global inconvenience of Covid and the resulting lockdowns.

Corralling such a loose configuration of able and notable musicians and artists together is no mean feat; especially with the diversity of schedules, with every willing collaborator and band member in such high demand or leading their own projects. But all six players managed to commune in 2022; coming together to record the group’s third album in Oslo, the capital of TYM’s founding instigator and electric/acoustic bassist Ingebrigt Håker Flaten. The group was actually first conceived when Flaten moved in the opposite direction from Norway – after sojourns with such noted groups as the Norwegian Ornette Coleman imbued trio Neon – to Austin, Texas, back in 2009. Not wasting much time, Flaten’s rich Nordic legacy of contemporary jazz met head-on with the arid Southern state’s burgeoning scene of experimental and leftfield polygenesis collaboration. But after a decade or more of improvising both live and in the studio, Flaten decided to move back home: hence the location of this new album.

But there is a secondary connection to the Nordic scene and homeland through the sextet’s vibraphonist, drummer, percussionist and voice Stefan González, who’s late father, the revered Texan jazz trumpeter Dennis González, recorded an album in Oslo together with some of Norway’s most notable musicians in the early 90s: By the way, that González musical legacy also includes bassist brother Aaron; both siblings play together in various setups, most notably as Akkolyte. Stefan and the group pay tribute to Dennis’s memory, that time and location, on the sombre and mysteriously whispery track, ‘Song For A Poet’. Taking a near esoteric, near Sufi mystical and wild turn with the use of collaborating voices from Klara Weiss and Malwina Witkowska, the mood is at first chthonian, shadowy and near foreboding until the tints and bulb-like vibraphone notes of Milt Jackson and the Modern Jazz Quartet tinkle and hover, and digeridoo-like blows merge with bristled reed breaths in an amorphous dimension of feeling-it-out-jazz and exploration of abstract commemoration and recall.

I must at this point mention the rest of TYM’s lineup, which includes a name Monolith Cocktail regulars will hopefully be familiar with, Frank Rosaly. The attuned, experimental drummer extraordinaire appeared alongside his foil the multimedia performer and singer Ibelisse Guardia Ferragutti on last year’s enriching MESTIZX album – one of my favourite and choice albums of 2024. Sharing the drums with González, but also switching to electronic programming,he’s joined by the Shape of Broad Minds polymath Jawwaad Taylor on trumpet, rhymes and electronic programming, accomplished player Jason Jackson on both tenor and baritone saxophone, and Plutonium Farmer and Flaten regular sparring partner Jonathan F. Horne on guitar.    

Between them, they cover everything from post-rock to freeform jazz, hardcore, hip-hop and death metal – I presume its González’s daemonic black metal-esque growling on the album finale ‘Scarlet Woman Lodge’, as he is credited in the liner notes with “voice” duties alongside drumming, percussion and vibraphone.

I think I’m right in saying that this is the first album in which all the participants share writing duties. The inspiration and source, a “whimsical” ballad, behind the opening title-track for instance, was first brought to the band by Jackson as a sort of tribute to the Great American Songbook. In turn inspired by rifling through old records from another age, this original idea, the melody, was transformed, deconstructed, reinvented and fused with the rap style rhyming of the Freestyle Fellowship, The Roots, Death Grips and Talib Kweli, the fuzz scuzz guitar of Monster Movie period Michael Karoli, the soulfulness and vibraphonic twinkle of Isiah Collier and the already referenced Modern Jazz Quartet, and the feels of old time Art Pepper, but all performed by Madlib remixing in real time Isotope 217 and Zu.

There’s a whiff still of nostalgia on the next track, ‘Hymn’, which recalls the Savoy label, the sound of Gillespie, but reconfigured by the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra. As that title suggests, this is a spiritual of a kind that twangs and stirs until reaching a climatic passage of buzzing, croaking, straining saxophone pleads. ‘Lijm’ glues together elements of Q-Tip, clipping., Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Trenchmouth and Sault, with the pulse and current this time being more tuned towards the electronic: flips, mechanical devices and data sit with and underneath the action and the activist coaching.

Engaging and embracing past influences and inspirations, the eclectic ensemble pushes further in stretching the boundaries. And despite the range and scope, the many musical threads, it all comes together quite congruously to produce the perfect rounded album of nostalgic and free jazz, hip-hop, no wave, hardcore and acid rock, and electronica. A definite choice album for March and 2025.

Inturist ‘Tourism’
(Incompetence Records) 14^th March 2025

Engaging at the best of times with a wealth of regional cultural/musical/sonic influences and passions, the producer, musician, former Glintshaker instigator and multidisciplinary artist Evgeny Gorbunov continues to transform his various exiled travails and more pleasing creative pilgrimages into magical, playful and odd adventures under the Soviet era borrowed Inturist guise: itself a reference to the sole Soviet era tour operator and travel agency for foreign visitors to the country before the fall of the Berlin Wall.   

Sparked by an interest for Southwest Asia and North Africa, Gorbunov’s latest travelogue is a curiosity of mirages, bendy sun-bleached guitar, elastic and rubbery pliable plastic and tubular rhythms, morphed Salyut space programme soundboards, library music oddities and psychedelic primitivism. More attuned to the abstract and both vapoured and hallucinatory transformations of his travels beyond the Russian homeland to the Balkans and Israel than the geopolitical crisis of our times, the worldly sonic traveller finds a balance between the strange and bejewelled. An entire voyage of aural discovery awaits like an escape from the destructive carnage unfolding in real time, with Gorbunov caught between both the Russian invasion of Ukraine and Israel’s fight with Hamas.     

Originally in forced exile, having left Russia as it menaced and then set in motion one of the most cruelling and horrifying conflicts of the age, Gorbunov moved to Belgrade, the capital of Serbia – a country fraught with its own history of war and the cracking down in recent times of civil liberties and a free media. However, there would be journeys made further afield, including the city of Tel Aviv (Trump take note, there is already a Middle Eastern Rivera of a kind, and this is it), where he recorded and produced some of the tracks on this fifteen-track travel guide. Luckily not on the frontline of the murderous Hamas insurgency that led to an ever-widening revenge of score-settling by Israel (they’ve been very busy, clearing up a lot of the mess for the West in the process; fighting on at least four different fronts; weakening Iran’s grip and influence; and eradicating much of that empire’s proxies in the bargain), the very last Tel Aviv studio session in 2023 took place on the fatalistic date of October 7^th . But this is an album of intriguing, idiosyncratic peculiarities; of sound invention and engagement with a landscape both imagined and real.

Moving seamlessly across that map, influences from the avant-garde, kosmische, psychedelic, ethnic, new age, trance, otherworldly, tropical and no wave cross paths to form a novel retro-futuristic and transmogrified vision of exotic and folkloric ethnography and etymology. As part of that cosmopolitan project, there’s references to the Russian dance and driving-horses harness of “Troika” to the French dialect phrase for “winter landscape” “Paysage d’Hiver”. The former, and opener, is said to include a dance that mimics the prancing of horses puled by a sled or carriage. Musically there’s little to reference this, as the bandy ripping effects of lightly torn felt, the lunar effects of a Soviet era sci-fi movie and padded rhythms amorphous conjure up a movement and direction of a kind. The latter sure has some vague dull sun sparkle of light sharply hitting the wintery scape as a loose spring and twangy Charlie Megira guitar flicks over another cosmonaut lunar spell of retro-space sounds.

The Soviet underground meets Überfällig era Gunther Schickert and Finis Africae on the huffed and mewing voiced, valve opening effects twiddling ‘Special Offer’; and there’s something Malaysian, albeit very removed, sounding on the fluted, piped and tubular blown ‘Reminder’. But if you were looking to get a hold on the overall sound, which changes constantly as it vaguely picks up percussive and rhythmic, folksy and traditional hints of Afro-Brazil, the Balkans and Asia, then imagine Populäre Mechanik booking a surreal tour of those regions with Ramuntcho Matta, Gene Sikora, Sun City Girls, Ganesh Anandan, Moebius & Plank and Aksak Maboul in tow.

A great approach to sound collage and the transference of special held scenes, memories – especially those that offer nostalgia for the cold war period optimism of Soviet technology and the space programme – and trippy dreams, the Tourism album envisions oscillated, melting, animated and cult flights of fantasy that repurpose the terrain and topography. In short: one of my favourite albums of 2025.

Gregory Uhlmann, Josh Johnson, Sam Wilkes ‘Uhlmann Johnson Wilkes’
(International Anthem) 14^th March 2025

Hot-housed in various creative incubators both in Chicago and L.A., the triumvirate gathering of guitarist, composer and producer Gregory Uhlmann, saxophonist, composer, multi-instrumentalist and award-winning producer Josh Johnson and bassist, arranger, composer and producer Sam Wilkes can all draw upon a wealth of experience and influences from the jazz world and beyond.

Crossing paths on numerous occasions – only last October both Uhlmann and Johnson appeared on fellow International Anthem artist Anna Butterss’ Mighty Vertebrate album –, all three exceptional musicians and artists congruously join together for an extraordinary attuned, sensitive and improvisational project that fuses the electroacoustic with a removed vision of chamber jazz, Americana and the experimental. 

As a most tantalising prospect, this trio was conceived and set in motion by a couple of live shows – you’ll hear the polite but encouraging audience on the first two tracks – and a session at Uhlmann’s pad in L.A. And from that, a near organic growth of both attentive and stirring moods and ideas prompted an evocative language of harmonics, carefully placed twitches and plucks, sustained serenity, moving melodious hallucinations, strained misty breathes, subtle ambient and trance-y beds and wisps, vapours of synthesized effects, and plastique and pad pattered tubular rhythms. 

With references to a brand of especially creamy and luxuriously textural toothpaste, the Armenian name for “sunshine” and a Mexican turnip, an international and abstract world of motivations is transduced into a mood music of the dreamy, introspective, soulful, ebbing and amorphous. From landscape gazing with Daniel Vickers, Myles Cochran and 90s David Sylvian (‘Unsure’) to floating in a warbling dreamy alien mirage (‘Shwa’), the performances, interactions effortlessly convey images, emotions as they both daintily and like a vapour of steam seem to drift or chirp along in an almost shapeless form.

In keeping with a theme of introspection, of the loner seeking a moment away from the onslaught of noise and distraction, the trio have chosen to loosely cover McCartney’s wistful break away from the idiosyncratic surreal, music hall and madcap rambunctiousness of the Magical Mystery Tour coach trip, ‘The Fool On The Hill’. It’s a lovely gesture; an indulgent mizzle and long exhaled alto sax breath of hazy and watery trickling finery that blends echoes of healing balm Alice Coltrane and Kamasi Washington with an ambient tremulous and beautiful haze. They’ve pretty much kept the signature melody but stretched it out and dispensed with the whistled flute and felt capped folksy magic for something more in the spiritual mode. A lovely finish to a sympathetically attentive and masterfully felt album that balances the unhurried with the prompted, playful and abstract.  

A Journey Of Giraffes ‘Emperor Deco’
(Somewherecold Records) 7^th March 2025

I’m taking it personal now. For after years and years of trying to sell the adroit, visionary ambient, neoclassical, electronic works of John Lane, and showcasing the American’s prolific catalogue of explorative opuses, he remains largely ignored: cast out on the fringes. Not that I give a shit about validation, but it would be nice if bandcamp at least wrote a feature, or that his work was played across the airwaves internationally and more regularly. 

I’ve championed the unassuming composer since the very start, going back to the very inception of this blog fifteen years ago. From the early days of experimentation and the beachcomber bedroom transformations of Pet Sounds under the Expo guise to his various projects under the A Journey Of Giraffes moniker, I’ve pretty much covered everything John has ever transmitted. And after all this time, I find it bewildering that his music hasn’t managed to cut through.

Arguably John’s most enduring partnership in recent years has been with the North American label Somewherecold Records, who’ve released around eight of his albums, including this concomitant partner to 2023’s Empress Nouveau. There’s been other releases in between, but planned at the time, and now seeing fruition, is his masculine answer to that feminine album’s subtle and decorative qualities, Emperor Deco.   

A change musically as he balances the tactile and the refined crafted filigree of that previous conceptual work, the curves and softer lines of Art Nouveau are now replaced by the geometric crystals, the harder light catching shapes and lines of Art Deco – there’s even a reference, title-wise, to famous the Bohemia makers/manufacturers of crystal Art Deco-styled glassware “Karl Palda”. Playing with those era defining art movements, in a literal and metaphorical sense but symbolically too, John now emphasis the noirish and bluesy, the brooding and remunerative.

For Nouveau, arriving during the Belle Epoque of a golden age that soon crumbled during the onset of World War I, its applied softened ideals and art is identified by John as feminine. Whilst Deco is synonymous with the roaring 20s: the feelgood period that despite everything was soon caught up in the Great Depression and then the rise of European Fascism. And this art form, from the design of products to architecture, is defined as masculine by John. Both now converge to form a whole.

Still very much in the ambient field of exploration. And still showing signs of the subtle craft and influence of John’s musical guru Susumu Yokoto. The mood music now embraces a soft layer of smoky, wafted, cuddled, strained, blown, accentuated saxophone and carefully placed synthesized drumbeats and rhythms: of a kind. For John has essentially created a removed version of a jazz album; something more akin to Alfa Mist or Jacek Doroszenko transforming the essence of Pharoah Sanders, Sam Gendel (both are referenced in the accompanying notes), Petter Eldh and Archie Shepp.

You could suggest there was also a “spiritual jazz” vogue to the sound, especially with the shake of trinkets, the amorphous echoes of bells and percussion that could be from the Far East, Tibet and North Africa, and of course the spindled sounds that could have been caressed and woven by Alice Coltrane or Laraaji. And that’s without mentioning the jazzy bulb-like electric piano notes and, what could be, the vibraphone, which has more than an echo of the Modern Jazz Quartet about it.

Add to this noirish, spiritual jazzy feel another subtle layer of Jon Hassell fourth world musics and a resonance of Nyman, Glass, Finis Africae and Sylvain and the perimeters are further expanded, his range growing ever more expansive. We can also hear the odd memory recall from those seashells collecting Brian Wilson-like Expo experiments of old, which when mixed with the jazz elements makes for a winning combination.  

John inhabits this space at times like a mizzle, a gauze, effortlessly absorbing references, sounds and moods as he languidly and beautifully captures his concerns, moods and offerings of escapism from the full-on assault of the daily grind. There’s depth, a touch of sadness, but for the most part this is like a mirage or dream that repurposes the sound of jazz.

After last year’s long form Retro Porter (one of my choice albums of 2024) John’s deco-imbued, romantic and smoky album returns to the shorter track format with a generous offering of twenty-two musical pieces, experiences and evocations that never drag, seem indulgent or test the patience: You could say John has found the perfect length of time in which to express himself on an album in which each track is perfectly realised and executed; existing both as a singular moment, passage of time, and yet also forming part of a one whole experience of repeating signatures. This could (should) be the album that finally cements John’s reputation as one of the most imaginative and prolific artists working in this, or these, fields of compositional experimentation.

Nour Symon ‘I am calm and angry • e’
(Magnetic Ambiances) 7^th March 2025

Nour Symon’s orchestrated and instigated reification of angst, rage and activism speaks just as much about the present decade’s movement against authoritarianism, the State commodification of education and health, and the erosion of civil rights as it does about this work’s main inspiration, the “Printemps érable” protests of 2012.

You could say that the expressions, the sonic and orchestral devices, the use of voices and poetry, of manifesto and barricade rattling are all just as prescient in the aftermath of the pandemic as they were thirteen years ago when a groundswell of support grew up around demonstrations against the proposed doubling of tuition fees in the province: increasingly expanding the remit, widening the disgruntlement, everyone from labour unions to environmentalists, leftists and marginalised groups ended up supporting a growing resentment, the ranks of which numbered around 250,000 at its peak.

Despite various setbacks – the lockdowns had a knock-on effect for this project, forcing an abandonment of the original plan to work with the Montérégie Youth Symphony Orchestra – the Egyptian-Quebec composer transforms the energy and directs an abstract despair into an avant-garde electroacoustic and experimental voiced theatre of the absurd, dramatic, expressionist and pained. In many ways a cross-generational grief and pull of despair, political activism and action, this album’s notable contemporary poet collaborator Roxanne Desjardin draws upon the 1980s and 1990s countercultural writings of the iconic Quebec poets Denis Vanier and Josée Yvon.    

Ambitious and covering a multitude of disciplines from visual and text art (a graphic score was conceived to communicate the concept) to performance, orchestral transmogrification, opera and video, I am calm and angry • e uses a host of renowned, prize nominated poets, soloist musicians and ensembles; far too many to mention in detail here, but all integral to conveying the very real emotional maelstrom and rage of protest. Across six tracks, divided liberally into the Supermusique Ensemble and Collective Ad Lib groupings, mewling, contorting, accented, untethered, enunciated and experimental theatre-like voices circle and ride the contours, rises and quirks of a fusion between the classical avant-garde, experimental arts, Musique concrète, and, of all things, a removed version of freeform jazz.  

Recognisable instruments from the wind, strings and brass sections join together with artistic impressionistic symbolism, percussion and electronic elements to evoke forebode, the unearthly, dramatic, mooning, unbalanced and abstract. Reference points within that overlapping sphere of influences and musical threads/connections includes (to these ears anyway) Charlie Morrow, Stockhausen, Cage, György Ligeti, Xenakis, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Don Cherry and on the heralded, whip-cracked and concertinaed collective agonised ‘I will die in a closed room’, a strange fusion of Alex North and The Drift era Scott Walker.  

Unbalanced with the ground constantly shifting below, the tumultuous and agitated are invoked and revoked in a musical experiment of plummets, falls and rises. A mix of French, amorphous and descriptive languages is adopted in a successful attempt to merge the poetic arts with protest, manifesto and performance, whilst physically stimulating the emotions and trauma of such protest.  

Nickolas Mohanna ‘Speakers Rotations’
(AKP Recordings) 7^th March 2025

A study in time, of impermanence, this uninterrupted continuous work from the New York based artist/composer emits miraged rippling vibrations across amorphous futurist Americana panoramas; stirs up the presence of alien craft overhead; and cloaks mysterious voices and sounds in an ever-changing sonic reverberation and feedback of instrument transmogrification and effected loops and field recordings.

As each track merges into the next, this adroit and evocative survey of a concept both atonally and rhythmically conjures new worlds of fourth world music, the kosmische and shadowy. Mohanna breaths futuristic sci-fi propeller-like zip-lines and long drawn air into the trombone, evokes the guitar drones and hanging astral mind-scaping and astral mysticism of Ash Ra Tempel, and plucks and pulls subtly in a resonating echo the tines of some hidden stringy apparatus. Grand gestures of a kind are made as the visionary scope of fogged and gauzy inner and outer space manifestations sits on a liminal border between the Cosmic Jokers, Daniel Lanois, Faust, Chuck Johnson, the Droneroom and Bill Orcutt.

I’ve now sat through this album over three times, and fully appreciate its skills in evoking not just the hypnotic but the near ominous, and for the way it seems to seamlessly keep changing the mood and the stay intriguing.

Ships of many kinds prowl the metallic fissures and beds of guitar sustain, and the doomish rumbles of the leviathan elements resemble the Lynchian and Bernard Szajner’s alternative score for Dune. And as one sound, one wave dissipates into the ether, or is left behind a weather front, something even more curious, sometimes beautiful, emerges: the brassy saloon bar-like chiming, trembling and spindled piano that starts to take hold in the last part of ‘Hollow In The Rock’ and continues into the finale, ‘Past Light Cone’, reminded me of the heavenly Laraaji.

This is AKP Recordings inaugural release of 2025, and it is of the highest quality. An improvisational soundtrack that vaguely shapes imaginative terrains and textures via the art of speaker rotation, manipulation and the use of the electronic and tactile, this album merges the interplanetary looming hovers of UFOs and sound generators with the cerebral and mystical: the voices, if that is indeed what they are, equally evoking throat-singers and something more hermitic and paranormal. I’d happily recommend this album to anyone wishing to immerse themselves for three quarters of an hour and will be highlighting it as one of my choice picks from the month.   

he didnt ‘Distraction Threshold’
(drone alone productions) 14^th March 2025

After a sideways venture under the newly conceived guise of i4M2 last year, the mysteriously kept secret Oxfordshire-based electronic musician, guitarist and producer returns under his main he didnt moniker; a project he’s honed over the last few years and across several albums of granular gradients, frazzled fissures, currents and thick set walls of drones.

Creating a certain gravitas that demands more from the listener, his latest album of concreted contours, ripples, movements and metallurgical sonics opens with a fifteen-minute statement of noisy concentrated filaments and machine-made purrs and propellers. Not so much industrial as a longform immersion of drones and cryptic soundscaping, there’s elements of hallowed organ from the church of the Tangerine Dream and early Kluster meeting with the sustained guitar waves of The Spacemen 3 and The Telescopes.

An ominous rippling effect of sci-fi conjures up a frozen tundra ghost world on the album’s title-track. Carrying over that troubling set of propellers from an overhead alien presence or supernatural dimension, the mood is chilling. ‘I Realise Now How It Is Connected To My Youth’ is even darker and menacing; like Jóhann Jóhannsson’s soundtrack for Mandy sharing room on the ghost ship’s bow with Coil and Svartsin. Harrowing images of supernatural psychogeography are dredged up from the recall of the artist’s past on a troubled doom mission.

A little different sonic wise, ‘Luminescent Medium’ brings in a slow deadened drum and a semblance of repurposed dreamy synth-pop. A singular reverberated and echoed hit is all that is needed to change the mood here, as the Cocteau Twins meet the BoC, Cities Aviv and the Aphex Twin in a fizzled arena of helicopter-like rotor blades, Matthewdavid-like real and unreal transmogrified field recordings and broadcasts, and a most out-of-place gallop of horses. It is as hallucinogenic as it is churningly moody and serious.

Distraction Threshold is very much slow music for the masses hooked up to their devices, unable to concentrate for more than a nanosecond let alone make any sort of deep connection or form a relationship with the sounds emanating from their tinny speakers. The aural equivalent of finding profound prophecy and divination from entrails or seaweed, this heavy meta gloomed and movable pull of uncertainty, trauma and metal machine chills focuses the mind with answers and questions to our present and past disturbed natures, as it builds or prompts deeply felt and evoked images and moods. he didnt continues to mine for drone-inspired gold on yet another successful atmospheric work of both the abstract and vivid.  

Sporaterra ‘Seven Dances To Embrace The Hollow’
(Präsens Editionen / La Becque Editions) 14^th March 2025

Multimedia spheres of sound and performance art, of theatre, of sonics and various forms of music merge on this latest fully realised album from the Italian-Polish duo Sporaterra. Convening under this guise since 2019, artists Magda Drozd and Nicola Genovese roam the catacombs, the psychogeography, the halls and lands of a reimagined Europe and beyond to conceptualise a dream realism of mystery, invocation and intelligent aural archaeology. They uncover and then transform their curiosities and inquiry into something both hermetic and disturbing; old ghosts retrieved from across time, going back as far as the primal, through to ancient Rome, the Renaissance and Baroque époques.

The time-travelling Seven Dances To Embrace The Hollow album unveils itself over seven suites of Mummers parades, Dante imbued evocations, hauntings, mystical disturbing bestial gargles and snarls, and fairytale. Under that Sporaterra entitled partnership – a name that translates as “above the ground” –, the two artists inhabit some strange timelines as they dance to both the heralded and otherworldly manifestations of frame drummed and foggy sonorous cornu accompanied procession and arcane ritual (think Dub Chieftain and Sharron Kraus), the crystal cut dulcimer and glassy bulbs twinkled evocations of Southeast Asia (Park Jiha), the suffused and swaddled atmospheric sax tones of Colin Stetson and Donny McCaslin, and the stirrings of These New Puritans, Italian prog and Sproatly Smith.

Whether it’s the fate of the scaffold, reverberations from the coliseum, Medieval merriment, monastic choral drama, and vocal mewling and mooning, there’s signs of some esoteric presence to be felt throughout. Old lives and movements, actions conjured from beneath are brought to the surface, with the recognisable made anew and slightly estranged. In short: an electroacoustic sonic archaeological dig into the phantom layers of the conceptual, intuitive and imaginative.     

Hi, my name is Dominic Valvona and I’m the Founder of the music/culture blog monolithcocktail.com For the last ten years I’ve featured and supported music, musicians and labels we love across genres from around the world that we think you’ll want to know about. No content on the site is paid for or sponsored and we only feature artists we have genuine respect for /love. If you enjoy our reviews (and we often write long, thoughtful ones), found a new artist you admire or if we have featured you or artists you represent and would like to buy us a coffee at https://ko-fi.com/monolithcocktail  to say cheers for spreading the word, then that would be much appreciated.