Monolith Cocktail Blog

The monthly Digest includes a clutch of accumulated short new music reviews and the social inter-generational/eclectic and anniversary albums celebrating playlist.

Kaloja ‘A Body Of Water’
(Artetetra) Released 19^th April 2026

A new team-up on the kooky and experimental label of repute, Artetetra, with Paul Wilson aka F. Ampism collaborating with Jan Anderzén of Tomutonttu, Kemialliset Ystävät and Tarzana note to create an aquatic and liquid plopped and plonked world of molecule dances and the birthing of odd giddy, tweeting and high pitched lifeforms.

Wilson under his sonic disguise has form in this sphere having released the speaking, communicating, singing, gargling and mewling atoms and floated microscopic forms soundtrack The Vertical Luminous on Hive Minds last December. Now with a new foil, those explorations once more spring into action across a lush blossoming and air-bubbled immersion of a maverick biomorphic world populated by alien creatures, more familiar hints of nature and the shapeshifting.

A bubbly lava. A computerised floppy disc cut and shutter. An oriental dulcimer like glisten and slide of spindled microbiology. All this and the whistled high pitches and the uncurling of life on an adventurous roving and shifting sonic world of blips, the courtly, the dubby, the rhythmic, the lunar and most importantly, watery. A short review, but I’ve more or less summed up this blooming oasis of quirks and quarks, nature and the aquatic. Another recommendation if you are looking for something different in the electronic field of biospheric inventiveness.  

Carol Maia & Jeremy Gustin ‘It’s Nice To See A Lake In Your Eyes’
(Hive Mind Records) Released 27^th March 2026

Last heard on these pages adding her soothed vocal evocations to Wolfgang Pérez’s Só Ouço album last year (another quality release on the Hive Mind label), the Rio guitarist and singer-songwriter Carol Maia now brings that ethereal to woozily dreamy voice to the collaborative imaginings of the Brooklyn homed drummer, percussionist, songwriter and producer Jeremy Gustin.

Created long distance, between each artist’s respected studio bases in North and South America and pulling in a number of equally visionary players from those two scenes, this partnership effortlessly merges ideas and inspirations to create a dreamy realism. For It’s Nice To See A Lake In Your Eyes transports the listener to peaceable if sometimes haunted descriptive realms that amorphously dip into the new wave, the vaporous, pop, the psychedelic, the Fairlight era of the 80s, the drifting and most importantly untethered. And amongst those perimeters there’s mirages aplenty, the hallucinatory and poetic: at least in part, the album is influenced by Maia’s readings of Marcelo Ariel’s poetry collection, A água veio do sol, disse o breu.  It offers up something both magical and cosmically fatalistic; here’s a sample, included both in the PR notes and on the bandcamp page:

The light of being is like water
it also came from the Sun
where all the planets want to enter

Within the Sun
Being is immobile
like the gratuitousness of an ecstasy
similar to breathing

Outside the Sun
Being is mobile
Time eternal
and chronological time

If still unfamiliar with both the orchestraters of this blissed and equally saddened affair, Gustin’s notable contributions include tours and recordings with such luminaries as Joan As A Policewoman, David Byrne, Marc Ribot, Norah Jones and fellow Hive Mind artist Ricardo Dias Gomes (who incidentally offers up a certain saddened Franco-esque vocal on the mid 90s Radiohead-like ‘Vou Ficar’), whilst Maia has been building up a reputation for herself on the contemporary experimental Rio scene. It’s from this same scene that Maia has enlisted the notable players and artists Frederico Heliodoro, Paulo Emmery and already mentioned Dias Gomes. From Gustin’s neck of the woods you’ll hear both the contributions of Will Graefe and Ryan Dugre. Altogether it makes for a promising if subtle partnership of dreams and visions; one minute almost in the Chanteuse mode, the other, evoking Flora Purim and Tom Ze or lost in an 80s pop haze and more chaotic jazz: Strangely, ‘Lake Of Meaning’ reminded me in places of 70s balladry Beach Boys checking into a miraged version of 70s Brazil.

From hollowed tubular trips into nature, to soft synth soundtracks conjuring up various horizons and scenes of personal and heartfelt escapism, love and loss, the acoustic and synthesized merge to complete a poetically mesmerising and soulful work of art. Ramon Farran & Robert Graves Olive Treemeets Arto Lindsey in a supple, chimed, tubular and tinkled spellbound experiment. A fantastic album in short, worthy of your support and better still, money!

The Music Liberation Front Sweden ‘Lost Hope Society’
(Subexotic) 24^th April 2026

Emerging this month from out of the Subexotic portal, a refreshing call for compassion; a shout out for all the “nice people” missing from the high anxiety era of individualism, community and social detachment. Content at their lot, with no fear of missing out on the next TikTok generated bullshit, or envious of their neighbour’s lifestyle, the Portsmouth artist Michael Evill cranks up the generators, oscillators and apparatus and plugs in various instruments under The Music Liberation Front Sweden guise to venture forth into an occult musical world of vaguely familiar evoked inspirations and influence from the 70s, 80s, 90s and the now.

The Lost Hope Society isn’t quite as resigned as it sounds, lingering amongst a soundtrack of library music, Kosmische, electrio-pop, the Gothic and sci-fi, and finding as it does composed passages of thought and resilience in the face of social media and technological-driven fear, discourse and selfishness. As vocalised throughout, both through female and male voices (sometimes the borrowed and collaged), there’s a constrained contempt and anger held against the forces of such division and upset whilst extending a near despondent hand to those that could make it all so much better.

In this sphere the quintessential queer, supernatural and esoteric sounds of Sapphire & Steel meet Mike Oldfield, Electrelane, Stereolab, Tomat, Belbury Poly and New Order. A cosmic toybox is opened up of the accelerated, motorised, dialled, crystalised, glassy and fizzing. Machines, synthetic operators and kit sit alongside guitar fx, interferences, spacy rays and the wilderness on an album that makes offers up both wishful thinking and daydreams of a more aspiring society of common decency and well, niceness. 

Rave At Your Fictional Borders ‘Analogue Nomadism’
(Meakusma Records) Released 3^rd April 2026

Despite the liberal ideals of a borderless world, the realities can be far messier and pressured, a strain even, when put into practice. But though politically a much more difficult promise to make, this multicultural paradise, it’s already been put into practice musically: for ages in fact.

Step forward in-demand drummer and bassist Dave De Rose and fellow trick noise maker and guitarist Marius Mathiszik of Rave At Your Fictional Borders, a troupe of sonic and musical nomads; a newly instigated and rearranged trio that now includes the drummer and vocalist Salim Akki. It’s a sort of new formation, brought together for the group’s debut album proper. In keeping with the concept, ideas of leadership and instigation are amorphous, with no one in charge and ideas freely shared between whoever happens to be in the room at the time of the recording.

For the debut album, Rose and Mathiszik in pursuit of that same nomadic freewheeling spirit of musical adventure, were invited by Akki to take up a short residency at Essouri Jamal‘s newly built L’Bridge recording studio in the famous Moroccan city of Kenitra (for geographical fans of the site, that’s 40km north of Rabat). Tapping into that rich city’s atmosphere, its amalgamation of Roman, Phoenician, Portuguese and Spanish colonialism and its eventual Moulay Ismail liberated 17^th century architecture, history and culture, the trio embarked on a spontaneous experiment of porous and mystical rhythm making. As with previous broadcasts from the troupe, the signature of these rhythms is varied; once more like a drum kit engine slipping and spluttering in a ricochet, stilted, skipped and wobbled staccato fashion, taking time to find traction and a groove amongst the alien, mysterious sounds and beds of the fx, loops and manipulations.

Provenance-wise we are dealing with a shadowy mirage bleed of Moroccan mysticism, various African rituals and alchemy, post-rock, post-punk, dub and darkened progressive-jazz. A hybrid world in which Idris Ackamoor and Sly & Robbie share room with Battles, Jah Wobble, BLK JKS and Tortoise. Or one in which you can hear a transformed vision of a chinking and glass raising Afro-party following on after a subterranean hallucination of Gnawa music and Ifriqiya Electrique. Akki’s voice is just as amorphous and bound to fluctuate between references to his own Arabian culture as to hoot and shout expressively in a language all of his own making over the beats, the deep vaporising and throbbed basslines.

With an avian menagerie of titles as the only guide (from long billed and long-limbed wading birds to warblers, ducks and hummingbirds), reflecting the diverse range of references, or cultures in the blend, but also their migratory nature, the listener is transported to vaguely familiar and yet often exotic shadowy worlds. Curiosity and improvisation culminate in a very modern sounding fusion of mystique and global inspirations; a fourth world of possibilities.

Morita Vargas ‘III’
(Hidden Harmony) Released 17^th April 2026

Aligned with Hidden Harmony from the very start, the Argentinian producer and singer Morita Vargas now unfurls a generous offering of recordings created between 2014 and 2025 for that same label. A concept of futurizing almost familiar Latin sounds, rhythms, the sound of a signature Spanish guitar and ancestry with Argentina’s minimalistic club scene, electronic “avant-pop” and a transformative vision of aria opera is extended further to cover multiple experiences, soundscapes, suites of contemplation in the stillness of a South American desert range and ideas of sensory hallucination.  

Both on a vaporous near lost in the ether and cinematic scale, Vargas uses allurement and the beckoning in synchronicity with the haunting. Simultaneously as diaphanous and cloaked in the vaporous, subtle industrial and metallic electronic drum padded sounds of the alien, the listener must beware that these tracks are as esoteric as they are dreamily birthed in touching and melodic synthesized beauty.

Permeating with often the most succinct of lyrics, Vargas’s voice is transformed, filtered, modified, taken down pitches and doubled-up to sound like either an apparition or a cosmic aria. Though there’s also passage in which Vargas near raps in a feverish modern pop manner or like a both kooky and disturbing child. That voice, constantly in a flux between effects and performance, is married to shuttered and shunting beats, subtle concertinaed dub, the manufactured sound of steaming valves, an anvil being struck, electro tremolo guitar reverberations, the dance of a puppeteer, coldwave and various percussive elements that recall ancient and very much alive pre-Hispanic colonised South America.

Zola Jesus, Grimes, Celestial North are the names that came into my head when listening and reviewing this minimalistic work of vocal, sound and rhythmic work. But with the Latin influences, the call and immersion of the Argentine scene, it becomes something far more unique and distinct.   

Von Pool ‘Special Purpose Vehicle’
Released 15^th April 2026

Everybody who follows the Monolith Cocktail should by now be familiar with the expletory, freely untethered and often squeezed until the pips fall out saxophone playing and accompanying electronic manipulations of the prolific Andy Haas: an artist whose career began as a Muffin in Martha’s new wave outfit of the late 70s to his work with Meg Remy’s ever expanding U.S. Girls troupe and his myriad of solo and collaborative offerings born out of the New York scene. Appearing this month as part of just one of those many projects, the Von Pool troupe are back with another “unburdened” near freeform and untethered improvised album that stretches the boundaries of live music further.

Whilst the lineup seems reasonably fixed, joining Andy on the quartet’s latest album Special Purpose Vehicle (a reference or poke at the legal term created by a parent company or individual for a specific, restricted business purpose, such as holding property assets, project financing, or risk isolation) are the guitarists Omer Leibovitz and Kirk Schoenherr, and the drummer Layton Weedeman. As a fifth wheel, and so far, featured on at least the last two releases, is bassist Ari Folman-Cohen.

Together, they conjure up a kind of live-feel fusion of post-rock, rock-jazz, grooves, the playfulness, prog, freeform and almost psychedelic across five performances of varying moods, speeds, and feels. Not so much workouts, but the rhythms are there as the band strike up passages of climatic breaks, splashes and the funky. Haas varies his input from the melodic to the vibrato, and from the squeaking to the near mizmar-like, recalling everyone great and cool from Ivo Perelman to Evan Parker and Anthony Braxton. Both Leibovitz and Schoenherr combine elements of Zappa with Fred Firth and Bill Frisell, whilst Weedman sends out shimmered waves of cymbal, bounces seamlessly around the kit and provides the grooves in partnership with Folman-Cohen’s placed and flexing bass lines and noodles.

There’s a mix of action and the more hallucinatory: the sunny disposition of ‘Sunset Clause’ seesthem play around on the sunspots cast on the boardwalk; a dream imaginary release on ECM by tortoise perhaps. ‘Off Balance’ almost starts like a Floydian meets Pat Metheny mirage, whilst the opener ‘Limited Exposure’ has a real kick of late 60s West Coast rock meets jazz-fusion.

Both bent out and in shape, the band strike up a grooving and soulful exploration of ideas and spontaneous interactions. Von Pool will be well worth catching live in the flesh, which apparently is happening in June after a delayed set of circumstances prompted by Covid. Anyway, the album is available via their Bandcamp page, which I recommend you seek out.

___/The Monolith Cocktail Social Playlist Vol. 105___

The Social Playlist is an accumulation of music I love and want to share, with tracks from my various DJ sets and residencies over the years and both selected cuts from those artists and luminaries we’ve lost on the way and from those albums celebrating anniversaries each month.

In the latter camp we have the following anniversaries to mark:

Stax R&B super power duo Sam & Dave’s Hold On, I’m Comin’ LP is 60 this month.

Garage progenitors, the Nuggets kings of mid-sixties scuzz sike, The Seeds self-titled LP is also 60 this month and still sounding every bit as fucking powerful, freaked and fuzzed-up.

SPOTLIGHT: The Rolling Stones’ Aftermath is another 60^th special this month, whilst Black And Blue is 50.

As a light-hearted chide at their rivals, The Rolling Stones, who’d just released Aftermath, when the Beatles were themselves stumped for an album title Ringo Starr chimed in with “After Geography”.

On a roll, literally, the Stones fourth studio album was a major artistic breakthrough. Wholly consisting of original material, the 14-song suite convinced the world of the band’s talent.

What’s not to like! Strutting punk number rock hits, Under My Thumb, sit side-by-side with the enchanting Elizabethan lamented, Lady Jane, whilst the epic rousing Out Of Time (covered brilliantly by Chris Farlowe) and ode to Nembutal-popping housewives, Mothers Little Helper, are two of the best songs the Stones ever put on wax. This is the Stones really breaking the mould and upping the ante as they strive to compete and go head-to-head with their Mersey rivals.

Rather than head back out onto the open road to promote It’s Only Rock ‘n Roll, our effete troubadours continued to record whilst the going was good; much, as it turned out, to the exasperation of Mick Taylor who decided to call it a day.

The leading single from their back-to-back Musicland studios recorded album, Black And Blue – an LP remembered more for its initial S&M bruised and battered female model fronted campaign, than for the music -, ‘Fool To Cry’ has all the traits of a Philly soul balled, as reworked by Bowie on Young Americans.

Both this oozing sentimental number and the album had a gestation period before being released in 1976; tour commitments and the release of a compilation prolonged the wait.

During recording sessions, the band auditioned a wealth of guitar talent that included Harvey Mandel (Canned Heat for a while, and John Mayall) and Wayne Perkins (Alabama session man from the Muscle Shoals stable), as Taylor finally quit. Both made it onto various songs with Mandel playing on the final cut of Fool To Cry. Ronnie Wood, the former Faces lead guitarist and occasional stand-in for the Stones, eventually slipped into the permanent role; his baptism of fire being on the super group’s 1975 “Americas” tour (one that was fuelled “purely” by Merck’s pharmaceutical “grade A” cocaine, or so Richards claims).

Rumours run wild of course, but Steve Marriott and Peter Frampton were, at least, muted as possible replacements for Taylor, though a lack of collaborating evidence and scant details can only consider these choices as wishful thinking.

Easily the best track from the, largely berated LP (or as Lester Bangs surmised, “This is the first meaningless Stones album, and thank God!”), Fool To Cry is a more confident and mature record, which seemed ill at odds with their quasi-funky and lumbering black-rhythmic postulations and posing.

The Penguin Café Orchestra’s highly influential LP Music From…. is 50 this month.

And finally this month, Tokyo Police Club’s rambunctious millennial indie LP A Lesson In Crime is 20.

Obituaries wise this month, the multi-instrumentalist, Traffic co-founder, session man extraordinaire David Mason passed away in the last week. The CV is impressive to put it lightly: George Harrison, the Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, Paul McCartney and Wings, Michael Jackson, David Crosby, Graham Nash, Steve Winwood, Fleetwood Mac, Delaney & Bonnie, Leon Russell, and Cass Elliot. Read it and weep! He also fitted in a solo career, backed on his debut single’s B-side no less than by the visionary Family – Mason produced (yes, another string to the widest bow in music history) the much-forgotten band’s Music In A Doll’s House. Just the credits could fill this month’s post. But I’ve chosen a popular Traffic tune and one from his 1973 solo LP It’s Like You Never Left.

As the old trope and saying goes, you can’t libel the dead. I’m not willing to test that theory, but Afrika Bambaataa’s legacy is obviously and quite rightly now overshadowed by the numerous allegations of sexually molestation during his career as one of the leading or most famous icons and progenitors of Hip-Hop culture. Whether it was really one of hip-hop’s dirty secrets, numerous rappers and victims came forward a decade or more ago, and in recent times, with at least one case making it to the civil courts (a case Bambaata lost after failing to appear).

The former street gang tough turn Zulu Nation syndicated pioneer’s mark on the scene is undeniable; firstly, by convincing former gang members and adversaries to exchange aggression and territorial wars with the burgeoning loose culture of breakdancing, graffiti, rapping and DJing during the first golden age of the 70s; and secondly, by marrying the German precision of Kraftwerk futurism with that of Afro-futurism and New York’s emerging street trends to create Electro – although many on the West Coast would disagree, claiming they invented it years earlier. His presence and influence spread through a united message, leading to collaborations with as unlikely bedfellows as John Lydon and James Brown. Planet Rocking, his stamp on the generation X culture is undeniable; even with such dark heinous shadows cast.

Len Deighton died a while back, and this is the first opportunity I’ve had to mark his passing. In my estimates a far better writer than many of his spy, clandestine enterprise rich peers, and prolific with it. Read not only his Harry Palmer series but all his singular wartime riches too: Bomber, XPD, Goodbye, Micky Mouse and MAMista. Phenomenal loss to the world of publishing. But I leave you with John Barry‘s cerebral, spindled score to one of Deighton’s most influential and successful books and films, the Ipcress File.

The rest of this’s month’s playlist is handed over to an ever-eclectic, inter-generational number of tunes from the Flavour Crystals, Maitreya Kali and Craig Smith, Krumbsnatcha, If, Mike Hurst, The Frost, Pharoah Sanders, Eye Q, Bibi Ahmed and more….

That track list in full::::

The Seeds ‘Mr. Farmer’
Tokyo Police Club ‘Cut Cut Paste’
The Golden Palominos ‘Clean Plate’
Baby Cool ‘Everything’
Eye Q ‘Making Life Out Of Music’
Sam & Dave ‘Ease Me’
Krumsnatcha ‘Remarkable’
Afrika Bambaata & The Soulsonic Force ‘Renegades Of Funk (The Latin Rascals Remix)’
If ‘What Can A Friend Say’
The Rolling Stones ‘I Am Waiting’
Maitreya Kali & Craig Smith ‘Color Fantasy’
Traffic ‘Hole In My Shoe’
The Rolling Stones ‘Fool To Cry’
Penguin Café Orchestra ‘Zopf: From The Colonies’
Flavour Crystals ‘He Screamed as He Fell to the Soil’
Bibi Ahmed ‘Sef-Afrikia’
Steve Gunn ‘Shape of a Wave’
John Barry ‘The Ipcress File’
Pharoah Sanders ‘Little Rock Blues (Live Montreal ’84)’
Mike Hurst ‘Place In The Country’
The Beach Boys ‘Holy Man (with Carl Wilson Vocals)’
Floating Action ‘Diamond Store’
Dave Mason ‘Misty Morning Stranger’
The Frost ‘Black As Night’
Terreno Baldio ‘Despertar’
Peter Michael Hamel & Alexander String Quarter ‘String Quartet No. 3: II. Mu-ak’
Neon Kittens ‘Cocaine Lawyer’
Novelistme ‘Huh Huh Huh’
King Kashmere & BVA ‘I Smoke’
Time Zone (Bambaata and John Lydon) ‘World Destruction’