The Quietus Albums Of The Year 2021

As modern music bleeds out in a hopelessly boring death spiral, one must regard the output on Youth Attack like an ancient sword with mystical powers forged out of a comet which makes it glow blue. While undiscerning music fans can be likened to the victims of a serial killer con-man, GOODBYE WORLD are the jaded detectives assigned to the case—and yet, they let the victims die as they deserve in order to protect the sword and deliver it to its rightful owner—you. On At Death's Door there is no time for negotiation; in only 12 minutes, legendary frontman Aaron Aspinwall comes out guns blazing and wreaks havoc over a hurricane of riffs and drum beats that hit like a ton of bricks and once the smoke clears the megaforce of Jeff Jelen, Mark McCoy, John Menchaca and James Trejo are standing in the rubble. This exciting debut LP features 15 hardcore songs laden with wild guitar solos and psychotic drum fills and lyrics about gore-soaked car crashes, being hacked to pieces, hanging out in graveyards and driving off of cliffs—all of which culminate in a sound that only YA can produce: say hello to GOODBYE WORLD.  YA 110

Friends x Fam :) 友 Mastering by Declared Sound Artwork by Björn Holzweg

This collection of music from autodidact composer Max Syedtollan (fka Horse Whisperer) sees him elaborating upon the chamber music approach of 2019’s ‘Planctae’, in collaboration with London/Brussels collective ‘Plus-Minus Ensemble’ - presenting three new pieces all written in the last year. Freewheeling narratives unravel to mutant, agile and often weirdly funny music - the everyday and the historical colliding in joyous ostranenie. Fractured string and woodwind arrangements vie with almost teenage-punk-bandy guitar ‘n’ drums, in an idiosyncratic yet irresistable explosion of virtuoso amateurism. Researches into esoteric archaeology leak into dissociative autobiography, the presence of ‘text’ flooding every corner of these strange and intricate musical microcosms. The album comes with a specially designed sleeve by artist Celina Eceiza along with a risograph printed essay by Neil Luck. It arrives as a limited edition cassette run of 150.

A gatefold double LP, bringing cult Scottish sound artist and composer Kay Logan's alchemic neo-classical project, Time Binding Ensemble, to vinyl for the first time. 'Nothing New Under the Sun' arrives in 24 parts of equal length, the collection cycling through each key of the musical scale before returning to its starting point, like a sundial etching sound from shadows cast throughout a day and night. Inspired by the crumbling brutalism of St. Peter's Roman Catholic seminary in her native Scotland, Logan employs traditional instruments (french horn, bassoon, clarinet, oboe, violin, viola, and cello) fed through otherworldly machines to imbue them with a heavy-lidded, sacred geometry. An Escherian stairwell of a record. www.youtube.com/watch?v=SsRAA0RUJDs&ab_channel=KitRecords ⛪ 'Stunning, perfectly zonked and secretive drone visions' - Boomkat 'an intimate, deep-listening experience that will utterly absorb you if you let it' - Bandcamp

Vinyl edition of 300 available from boomkat: boomkat.com/products/nonexistent Long-standing friends Astrud Steehouder and Alex Tucker planned to collaborate for many years, and in 2020 they finally found the time to start sharing files with the aim of making long form drone pieces. As the project progressed they enlisted Manchester producer Luke J Murray in to the fold. The tracks started to detour from their original intention towards a hybrid zone, built around Steehouder’s extended Prophet 8 improvisations, Tucker’s modular processed cello, voice and tapes and Luke J Murray’s sampled electronics. These components started to weave between a world of drones, cut-up electronics and damaged samples. Tucker says “we had this idea of discovering a hard-drive or device that was rusted and rotted but still functioning, the information within it containing corrupted or scrambled audio that had rearranged itself into new forms.” The trio - all residents of North East London - draw upon the combination of urban sprawl, reservoirs, woodlands, and industrial history that rubs up against each other in the area, exposing the layers of the past and present. This translates in the multi layered textures that make up NONEXISTENT’s self-titled debut, drawing upon the ancient, the modern and the spaces between. Recorded in their respective corners of Walthamstow and constructed and produced at Tucker’s Liquid Window studio.

sylvie courvoisier piano mary halvorson guitar Produced by David Breskin Recorded by Ron Saint Germain & Ryan Streber at Oktaven Audio, Mount Vernon, NY June 2 & 3, 2021 Mixed by Ron Saint Germain at Saint’s Place, July 27 & 28, 2021 Mastered by Scott Hull, Masterdisk, Peekskill, NY Album art: five gouaches by Dike Blair, courtesy the artist and Karma, New York City Mary’s songs: 1,3,6, 9, 11 – Meltframe Music (BMI) Sylvie’s songs: 2, 5, 7, 10 – Sylvie Courvoisier (SUISA, ASCAP) Shared songs: 4,8,12 Album design and layout: Spottswood Erving and July Creek for Janky Defense Thanks to Kris Davis at Pyroclastic, Kevin Reilly, Ryan Streber, Ron Saint Germain, Isabel and David Breskin, and to Dike Blair for the generous use of his gouaches. Sylvie Courvoisier / Mary Halvorson and Pyroclastic Records © ℗ 2021 Dike Blair © 1989, 1990, 2016 pyroclasticrecords.com

In Claire Rousay’s music, a field recording is never just a record of a place—it also represents a trace of a personal memory, perhaps even a portal to another world. The Texas experimental musician is constantly recording, translating the murmurs and footfalls of the world around her into dreamy abstractions. Unlike some of her records, where she has run personal correspondence through text-to-speech generators—rendering the most intimate details in surreal, robotic tones—language does not play a central role on *A Softer Focus*. Yet this short, enveloping album is among her most lyrical, emotionally direct works to date. It begins with clatter—fingers tapping on an iPhone, perhaps the rustle of dishes being cleared—but with “Discrete (The Market),” uncharacteristically harmonic sounds rise in the mix, suffusing everything with a warm glow. The reassuringly consonant piano, cello, and synthesizer constitute the record’s nostalgic through line, recalling post-classical composers like Sarah Davachi. But no matter how lulling Rousay’s melodies become, the line between music and sound remains provocatively fuzzy. In “Diluted Dreams,” sparkling drones are shot through with the sounds of passing traffic and kids playing on the street; “Stoned Gesture” flickers in the light of fireworks exploding overhead. Only Rousay knows the precise meaning of these sounds, but for the rest of us, they are suggestive triggers, as evocative as the scent of a freshly cut lawn or hot pavement after a summer rain.

The origins of Clairo (born Claire Cottrill) hold their own modern mythos: 2017’s lo-fi bedroom pop track “Pretty Girl” went viral, and a major-label record deal with Fader/Republic followed. Then came her debut LP, *Immunity*, and its sardonic indie pop punctuated by jazzy instrumentation, soft-rock harmonies, and diaristic revelations. On her sophomore album, *Sling*, produced by Jack Antonoff in a remote and rural part of upstate New York, Clairo has mined deeper into her well of self-possessed folk. The outdoors seems to have grounded her; even moments of ornate orchestration are stripped down to their emotional core, like in the fluttery horns and xylophone of “Wade,” the herd of violins on “Just for Today” and “Management,” or their psychic opposite—the heartbreaking piano ballad intro on “Harbor,” and the campfire stopper “Reaper.” Standout first single “Blouse” features backing vocals from Lorde, and borrows a familiarly devastating chord progression (think Big Star’s “Thirteen”). Everywhere you turn on *Sling*, there are careful, restrained, and wise observations on the human condition.

Embassy Nocturnes is the debut collaboration between Manchester-based Aging and Liverpool-based duo Land Trance. Aging, led by seasoned multi-instrumentalist and Tombed Visions label owner David McLean, utilises the traditional jazz quintet to evoke the iconography of film noir and hard-boiled detective fiction, creating a proudly specific genre music for night-time consumption. Specialising in spacious, nocturnal improvisation and ballad heavy melodies present on releases such as 'Suitable for Night', 'Troubles? I got a bartender' and 2020's beautifully arranged LP 'Sentenced To Love', the band continue to conjure a deeply cinematic trip through the shadowy metropolises and rain soaked streets of classic 20th century crime stories. Land Trance is the duo of Benjamin D. Duvall and Andrew PM Hunt, both active practitioners in the UK experimental music scene since the mid-2000s. The former as founder and creative director of prepared guitar ensemble Ex-Easter Island Head, the latter as leader of art pop group Outfit and more recently as a prolific composer and solo performer under his Dialect alias, with 2021's 'Under ~ Between' on RVNG Intl garnering significant critical acclaim for its idiosyncratic blending of electronic and acoustic textures. As Land Trance, the duo make an ecstatic, ecclesiastical form of psychedelic music rich in improvisation, instrumental colour and found sounds to create an elusive sense of place and memory. Their debut First Séance was voted 14th in The Quietus' best albums of 2020, with a vinyl reissue by Rocket recordings released in June 2021. Embassy Nocturnes was recorded in the expansive basement of Liverpool's former Brazilian embassy. The nine evocatively titled pieces that make up the album act as their own distinct scenes, suggesting the labyrinthine atmosphere of the empty ballroom, the secret compartment and the damaged-beyond-repair reel of 8mm film marked “1968” discovered therein. Throughout, synthesisers glow and arc like approaching lights in the driveway; piano chords hang like cut-glass chandeliers. Echoes of quartet recitals for long gone dignitaries permeate the brass and bowed strings, electric guitar and tenor saxophone wreathed in red velvet and cigar smoke. Elsewhere, pulsing machine rhythms and oscillating electronics evoke a passengers eye view of some neon expanse at cruising speed, with Joel C. Murray's agile and propulsive drum-work fluttering and hissing around the arrangements like steam valves opening and closing. Pealing, mournful trumpet bookends the album like a ghostly echo from the lower floors whilst other elements – dictaphone, bamboo marimba, plucked zither – weave through the pieces as enigmatic objects in an unknown narrative. Embassy Nocturnes is a bold first meeting of musical voices, united through their commitment to creating a distinctive sense of place within their work. With group improvisation being sculpted into adventurous forms through extensive post-production and instrumental arrangement, the music blurs the edges of each artists’ distinctive musical vocabularies to create a vivid, mysterious collection of instrumentals rendered with cinematic richness. --------- REVIEWS: "While 2020 was a defining year for the most obvious reasons, Manchester-based Aging and Liverpool’s Land Trance went beyond the natural concerns. Jazz collective, Aging, released Sentenced to Love, which saw the five-piece very much atop of their creative arc. Sentenced to Love contained the kind of noir-inspired muzak that wouldn’t look out of place in the bellows of a smoke-filled Berlin bar frequented by the local bourgeois; or, indeed, a swathe of characters from a Philip Kerr novel. Then there’s Land Trance. Consisting of Ex-Easter Island Head’s Benjamin D. Duvall and Andrew PM Hunt (the latter also of Dialect who released his latest LP earlier this year, Under~Between), 2020 saw the pair unleash the year’s finest record to emerge from Merseyside with their debut album, First Séance. An album that reached beyond the terrains of Ex-Easter Island Head’s prepared guitars and rigid percussion, First Séance was a fragmented multi-layered representation of sound design, oscillating between gentle acoustic-based drones and warped sonic arrangements. It was a record that provided the light through the murky tunnels that we found ourselves in during 2020. With arguably their finest recordings committed to tape yet, Aging’s multi-instrumentalist and Tombed Visions label owner, David McLean, combines with Duvall and Hunt for their debut collaboration cut, Embassy Nocturnes. Alongside the trio is Liverpool drummer, Joel C. Murray, who adds his feverish, sinewy rhythms from behind the drum kit. While there are guest appearances from fellow Ex-Easter Island Head member Benjamin Fair (piano, synthesiser), as well as Christen Hutchinson (double bass) and Nick Hunt (trumpet), Murray joins Duvall (sampler, shahi baaja, bamboo marimba, zither, drum machine), Hunt (piano, synthesiser, saxophone, drum machine), and McLean (saxophone, guitar, piano) as the quartet that do most of the heavy lifting for Embassy Nocturnes. Recorded in the basement of Liverpool’s former Brazilian embassy, Embassy Nocturnes unlocks the gates that lead to previously uninhabited enclaves. With opening composition, Shattered Rooms, and later with The Ornamented Lock we are subjected to misty atmospherics that sound like the forgotten offspring of Bohren and Der Club of Gore and Angelo Badalamenti. Caked with an extra layer of mystery beyond that Lynchian charm, it’s like being ushered by benevolent spirits to the basement of the Black Lodge. Away from that and Under Chandliers possesses echoes of the late ’90s/early ’00s improv’ balladry from The Necks prior to their full descent into the vortex of doom jazz. Creeping Moonlight dances on the fringes of Mi Media Naranja-era Labradford, while Findings I combines elements of all four of these experimental touchstones, but with a thrilling new vitality. With Lights In The Driveway capturing the pulsating allure of Ex-Easter Island Head, anchored by by Murrary’s sharp, urgent percussion, the swelling drones of Findings II feel like cracked sunlight through the trees. In short, it’s purely majestic. And that feeling doesn’t stop when we arrive at the closing composition, New Opiate; a subtle, fragmented opus containing the kind of emotional subtlety only carefully plotted brass arrangements can provide. It’s the kind of sound that reaches us from another universe, ending Embassy Nocturnes in a beautifully emphatic way. While referencing experimental purveyors of the past two decades, Aging and Land Trance add their own tints, shades, and tones to this vivid canvass. So much so that it’s one they could very well call their own. In a year that has seen many collaborations break through glass ceiling, undoubtedly, Embassy Nocturnes reaches even further beyond. Quite simply, it’s up there with the best of them, as Aging and Land Trance have provided a new cadence that sounds like nothing else in 2021." - Simon Kirk, Sun 13

⍋⍋⍋⍋⍋⍋⍋⍋ ⍋ Occult Vibes ⍋⍋⍋⍋⍋⍋⍋⍋⍋ ⍋ Broad Spectrum Synthesizers ⍋⍋⍋⍋⍋ ⍋ Horizontal Drums ⍋ Possessed Singing ⍋ ⍋⍋⍋⍋⍋⍋⍋⍋⍋⍋⍋⍋⍋⍋⍋⍋⍋⍋⍋⍋⍋⍋⍋⍋⍋ No one could have known if the band would have carried on after the loss of Jean-Marc, neither would have the remaining members, Anne, Mathias and Manuel. How can one overcome such an ordeal? As life was flowing on the edges of grief, and as the three of them were playing together, a conclusion slowly revealed : a burning lifeblood between them, irrigating the grooves of their previous records, which fascinated every audience attending their concerts or – dare one say – their happenings. Rien Virgule was still alive. Then came the urge to go back to work and make a third record. Unlike its title coming from a haiku (‘La Consolation des Violettes’, ie. ‘The Solace of Violets’), a radically short form of poetry, the album itself chooses to stretch its limbs, to free itself from the innate constraints of a simple LP, to spread its wings in order to attain an unprecedented stature. While one can recite a haiku within a breath, the music of Rien Virgule unleashes a myriad of them. It is crafted by the different journeys of each of its members, who staggered in the corridors of experimental music for a long time before delivering a very personal vision of pop music, as White Noise did in their time. One can understand the full extent of the band with the length of this record. Its perfectly blends, thanks to its almost scientific, precise sense of narration, some written pieces on wich one can swear to hear the melodic curls of Robert Wyatt, and totally spontaneous jams. Those latter are cut then glued back so much, likewise Teo Macero’s work for the records of Miles Davis, that they tend to form fairy tales from a lab written with magnetic tape. Jean-Marc, and his noisy DIY instrumentarium, gave its part of chaos to the other members of the band, who are keeping on making a clutter made of metal and broken glass resonate, as if they were sparks of life. ‘La Consolation des Violettes’ is a woven universe of travellings on the edge of ruin and poems drawn with a soldering iron, possessed with an impetus of visceral liberty, a vibrating and profoundly moving music.

'Flock’ is the record that Jane Weaver always wanted to make, the most genuine version of herself, complete with unpretentious Day-Glo pop sensibilities, wit, kindness, humour and glamour. A consciously positive vision for negative times, a brooding and ethereal creation. The album features an untested new fusion of seemingly unrelated compounds fused into an eco-friendly hum; pop music for post-new-normal times. Created from elements that should never date, its pop music reinvented. Still prevalent are the cosmic sounds, but ‘Flock’ is a natural rebellion to the recent releases which sees her decidedly move away from conceptual roots in favour of writing pop music. Produced on a complicated diet of bygone Lebanese torch songs, 1980's Russian Aerobics records and Australian Punk. Amongst this broadcast of glistening sounds is ‘The Revolution Of Super Visions’, an untelevised Mothership connection, with Prince floating by as he plays scratchy guitar; it also features a funky whack-a-mole bass line and synth worms. It underlines the discordant pop vibe that permeates ‘Flock’ and concludes on ‘Solarised’, a super-catchy, totally infectious apocalypse, a radio-friendly groove for last dance lovers clinging together in an effort to save themselves before the end of the night. The musician’s exposure to an abundance of lost records served as a reminder that you still feel like an outsider in this world and that by overcoming fears you can achieve artistic freedom. Jane Weaver continues to metamorphosise…

Bardo Pond guitarists, brothers John and Michael Gibbons revive their long-term sonic sparring side project Vapour Theories for a genre-shattering new release ‘Celestial Scuzz’. Six years after a split LP with Loren Connors, and 15 years after ‘Joint Chiefs’ the duo have assembled a brand new Vapour Theories album that sees their symbiotic union travel deeper, shaping and re-shaping itself as the harmonious power struggle unravels… Michael: “The balance of power definitely shifts. When the record is put together it is equal parts from me and my brother. The collaboration is complete and represents both sides of our taking the lead on material.” ‘Celestial Scuzz’ is a monumental sound piece created from hours of jam sessions and crafted into a cohesive mind-blowing trip. Featuring their take on Brian Eno’s ‘The Big Ship’ (‘Another Green World’, 1975), the album has a heavy ambience like Eno locked in a dark room with Sunn-O))))) rehearsing next door. “When we play together there’s a kind of connection to vibrations for us. When it happens, we become vehicles for some unknown forces that work through us to create the music. A kind of spiritual. Most of the time it leaves us stunned; the more stunned we are the better the jam.” While Bardo Pond’s trajectory takes them deep into rock music’s ever-imploding sound, the brothers Gibbons surf a more ethereal and eclectic plain; from a heady and consuming space, a “sanctuary; balm for the soul.” Released on limited edition gold vinyl, ‘Celestial Scuzz’ is available on 26th February on Fire Records.

With their seventh album, Swedish death metal masters At The Gates have delivered a finely crafted concept album about pessimism. “I guess I had an amateur view of pessimism, as most of us do,” vocalist and lyricist Tomas “Tompa” Lindberg tells Apple Music. “I thought it was just the ‘glass is half empty’ kind of thing.” Some initial research led him back to American author Thomas Ligotti, whose horror fiction Lindberg had read while working on his 2017 side project The Lurking Fear. Then At The Gates guitarist Martin Larsson recommended Ligotti’s nonfiction. “It’s basically an introduction to pessimism,” Lindberg says. “I got about halfway through and realized that this worldview is very death metal.” The result is *The Nightmare of Being*, a ripping and majestic death metal album influenced by the writings of Ligotti, Emil Cioran, Peter Zapffe, and contemporary philosopher Eugene Thacker, whose ideas surfaced in the first season of HBO’s *True Detective*. Below, Lindberg takes us through each track on *The Nightmare of Being*. **“Spectre of Extinction”** “Since \[1995’s\] *Slaughter of the Soul*, we’ve written almost every track to fit the sequence and flow of the record. So ‘Spectre of Extinction’ was really written as an opener with the classic metal intro thing—acoustic guitar, big Judas Priest chord swinging out, and then At The Gates after that. The middle part was written specifically for Andy LaRocque to play a solo. I call it the Death part because it really sounds like *Human* by Death. Lyrically, it’s basically the introduction to the idea that we’re the only species conscious of our own mortality.” **“The Paradox”** “This is the only one that was not written for this place in the sequence. It was written very early on in the songwriting process, and it turned out to be this weird death metal song, but it has a lot of the classic Mercyful Fate vibes to it—very melodic at certain points. We had it hidden later in the album, but then \[mixing engineer\] Jens Bogren said, ‘This is a monster. This has to be the second or third track, guys.’ And then Andy LaRocque and \[engineer\] Per Stålberg said the same thing, so we put it at number two. It’s a little bit of a rager in that sense.” **“The Nightmare of Being”** “I’ve done this on a few records now, where the title track is the whole concept of the album in one song, basically. This has a line about the ‘parasites of the subconscious’ which I really like—even if we are aware of our mortality, we’ve got to have a defense mechanism to keep us sane. Our subconscious is always tricking us because all this pain and suffering is too much to take in. So the ‘nightmare of being’ is basically the pain of existence. It’s a heavy, slow song with lots of acoustic parts, and the end is almost like a breakdown—we never wrote something that heavy before.” **“Garden of Cyrus”** “This is one of the curveballs of the record. I think the big challenge of this album for us was to build upon what we started on *At War With Reality* and *To Drink From the Night Itself*—the orchestration, different arrangements—just seeing how far we could take that without losing what is At The Gates. This one has the dreaded saxophone, so my hope is that someone listens and recognizes At The Gates, even if it sounds like a Goblin or King Crimson song in a way.” **“Touched by the White Hands of Death”** “Again, it’s about the instrumentation. This was really written to come after ‘Garden of Cyrus’ with a really slow build by a low flute. If you were to play that on electric guitar, it wouldn’t have the same emotional impact, because every instrument has its own voice and emotional tone. But then it turns into a classic At The Gates thrasher in a way. Lyrically, it connects to the opening track because it’s about the knowledge of mortality again, and this song is about those defense mechanisms being attacked.” **“The Fall Into Time”** “If you get the vinyl, this would be the start of side B. It’s really heavy, with a slow build and almost like a free-form prog part in the middle. It reminds me of the more epic songs we’ve had before, like ‘Neverwhere’ from the first album or ‘Primal Breath’—like a triumphant, majestic kind of piece. Lyrically, it connects to Cioran’s ideas about the fall into time, the whole Adam and Eve thing with the apple of knowledge, which connects with his pessimist philosophy.” **“Cult of Salvation”** “This one is based more directly on the defense mechanisms which I talked about before. The first person to talk about this was a Norwegian philosopher called Zapffe. He talks about religions, states, and worldviews as distractions, and about trying to live your life aware that you have these defense mechanisms. For example, we create music as an escape from the everyday struggle. But as long as I’m aware that I’m using it as a defense mechanism, then I can actually live my life a bit more fully and understand why I work the way I work. I love the middle part here—an homage almost to Goblin.” **“The Abstract Enthroned”** “I think this is the one that changed places with the ‘The Paradox,’ actually. It was a latecomer to the record, with a big orchestral part in the end and a great guitar solo. This one is a little bit more like pure death metal. You can almost hear the Morbid Angel in parts of the verses. It’s the only really aggressive song on the record. It deals with religion and how we enthrone the abstract, basically putting blinders on ourselves to be able to cope with life. I unintentionally put the word ‘virus’ in there somewhere. That’s the only pandemic reference there is.” **“Cosmic Pessimism”** “Musically, we really wanted to do something different here. We wanted a monotonous, almost oppressive musical landscape, similar to some of the krautrock bands like Neu! or Tangerine Dream. I had read three books by one of the current writers about pessimism, Eugene Thacker, and then I stumbled upon his personal email. I sent him a really long email explaining the concept of the record and dared to ask if he would want to participate in some way. He allowed me to use some passages from his book *Cosmic Pessimism* in the lyrics, which I did as a spoken-word part.” **“Eternal Winter of Reason”** “This was written specifically as a closer. I feel it’s the most emotional song on the record. \[Bassist\] Jonas \[Björler\] really wanted to try something else, too—if you notice, only the chorus riff returns. All the other riffs just build and build. I think there’s eight riffs or something, but they never come back. Lyrically, I tried to describe the emotional impact that this concept had on me as a person. There are some really strong, melancholic riffs, so I couldn’t do anything else but give in emotionally. So it’s like closure: What did I learn emotionally from this record?”

Ursula interviewed for The Wire Magazine: www.thewire.co.uk/in-writing/interviews/thinking-outside-the-box-milos-hroch-interviews-ursula-sereghy With a background in playing jazz and formative years of playing saxophone in a live band, Prague-based Ursula Sereghy stepped out of the hustle to focus, all while becoming a regular at the local Synth Library. A space where she found the support of the musically and politically like-minded and could nourish her newfound passion for experimenting with machines and exploring the limitless possibilities of sound design. An extensive period of voluntary detachment from everyday life during the pandemic gave rise to the stunningly confident debut album 'OK Box' fabricated by this dark horse of a producer. Opening 'OK Box' reveals a truly multifarious microcosm. On her very first musical output, besides manipulated field recordings and widely used granular synthesis, Ursula draws wisely from her past musical practice as acoustic or synthesized samples of jazz instruments become the furtive common denominator of the record's sonic narrative. Circulation of the breath among the instruments chambers substitutes the streams of city dwellers flowing through the cramped city environment. With Ursula's entangled compositions, she creates the representation of revealing and embracing the intuitive connections of the experiences and thoughts with their mental and physical surroundings, at times leading the listener to melancholic placements, followed by moments of mischievous clarity and rational sentiment. But essentially, the longplay is a friendly ride following unusual mental maps and broadening the borders of the very cartographical ones, all with inconspicuous sideroad peeks of cheeky little creatures, still surveillance by destiny-bending spirits, and oversaturation of out-there emotional associations. Hang in there, you little civilians and slimy slugs alike. To cut a long story short - 'OK Box' houses a lively collection of warm-hearted and witty jams honoring the nature of reasonable escapism.

Bloody Head Any interpretation of these two words, collectively, leads to a singular conclusion: Something has gone wrong. This is the essence of Bloody Head; the acceptance, reflection, celebration and battle against things (mind/body/spirit) going very wrong. It is the manifestation of things getting wonky and breaking, revelry in destruction and decay. Broken (brain/dick/mind) blues. Bleak party bangers as a soundtrack to our collective slow motion apocalypse. What does the future hold for Bloody Head? Fuck knows! Everything. Nothing. More/less of the same, whatever that is.... The Temple Pillars Disappear Into the Clouds The Temple Pillars Disappear Into the Clouds is the title of the new record from Bloody Head. Recorded mostly live at Stuck on a Name Studios by St. Ian Boult. Both wilder and more restrained than previous efforts. Punk? Noise rock? Psych? Sludge? All/none of the above, but the keen eared seeker of the weird may detect snippets of Les Rallizes Denudes, Kilslug, Brainbombs, Rudimentary Peni, Mainliner, Hawkwind, Donovan amongst the sonic morass. Lyrically it deals with big concepts, tumbling down. Dualism? Taoism? A beautiful garden or a broken jaw? Human endeavours losing track of themselves and getting lost in the clouds of their own creation. Ascend to Nirvana or fall into the Abyss. As above, so below....

Cassette still in stock at Rwdfwd: rwdfwd.com/products/leather-rats-no-live-til-leather-98/ Sweet rat infested tape gold rescued from the cosmic dust bin & handed to us without comment from Sir Revsalot (lead vox?), here's what our ears tell us: Leather Rats were seemingly a late 90s punkish psychobilly act blessed with a huge-sounding Japanese following. Their mix of Cramps-esque trash sensibilities, Munster Records kinda psychobilly disease and garage mod (with a hint of Creedance) might not be that unusual. But then the first track clocks into it's second half wooooooooosh someone flips the switch and the mixing desk takes a solo; blasting back out twisted versions of the band with steppas-grade bass distortions and spiralling drums right back at the audience. The crowd goes wild, really for all of it. Even the lyrical rat caricatures and tales of fast bikes and 'hydroponic rat food' injected knife fights. I can't even see that they ever entered a studio, they lived live in Leather and nowhere else besides. Retrobeat loving Osaka clearly had their band that night, so wild for this punk/rockabilly/extended live dub version fusion (we've not heard it many other places). How could Bokeh resist? And if anyone can put us onto more psychodubilly we'll start a dedicated outlet.

“I can only work by being really open,” Welsh electronic producer Lewis Roberts, aka Koreless, tells Apple Music. “If I don’t start a piece of music by being inquisitive and playful, I lose interest very quickly.” This inherent curiosity forms the basis of his shape-shifting releases. Coming to prominence with his post-dubstep-influenced debut EP, 2011’s *4D*, and then working with labelmate Sampha before releasing its synth-heavy follow-up, *Yugen*, in 2013, Koreless has spent the past six years without any solo releases. Instead, he collaborated with Sharon Eyal’s groundbreaking dance company L-E-V for 2019’s Bold Tendencies festival, produced for FKA twigs’ acclaimed album *MAGDALENE*, and endlessly refined his long-awaited debut album—the aptly titled *Agor*, which means “open” in Welsh. Throughout its rigorously edited 10 tracks, Koreless toys with notions of tension and release, building expectations through crescendos of intensity before thwarting the cathartic payout with an immediate cut to blissful spaciousness. “You can accelerate a rhythm so much that it stops being heard as rhythm and, instead, becomes a single tone,” he explains. “That’s what I’m doing with these arrangements—pushing you to a threshold point until you burst through the chaos into an entirely new feeling and experience.” Here, he dives deeper into each of *Agor*’s tracks. **“Yonder”** “‘Yonder’ is a prelude to the record, like the lights coming up for a moment before we begin. It feels like an empty stage where nothing is really happening yet; it’s just providing a general feel. It was important to start like this, because the rest of the record can be quite melody-heavy, so I wanted something to welcome the listener in first.” **“Black Rainbow”** “I wanted ‘Black Rainbow’ to be a digital folk song. It builds in intensity as I’m squeezing every drop out of it. But then we reach a threshold that we break through, and it just becomes very blissful. The song is like taking off and accelerating into total bliss rather than into chaos. That’s one of the aims behind the record—to enable these ruptures and then to accelerate into a peaceful state.” **“Primes”** “This track is my homage to someone like Oren Ambarchi, since it’s just made of sine waves, which are the perfect, irreducible sound. You can’t get any simpler than a sine wave; it’s what you’re left with when you strip everything else away. I really like working with sines because they’re very general and there’s something comforting about their generality. I used to work a lot more with them, and this is probably their only place on the record. It plays like shards of sine wave dust.” **“White Picket Fence”** “I like using vocals almost like instruments and capturing the material quality of them, rather than having an artist feature. I like an anonymous, slightly inhuman vocal, which is why these vocals are just played through a keyboard. There’s a comforting safety to a vocal that sounds like it’s been grown in a lab, and on this track, I’m trying to separate them from any personality as much as possible and just keep them as these angelic, general voices.” **“Act(S)”** “This was the same tune as ‘White Picket Fence,’ but I decided to chop it halfway. It felt like ‘White Picket Fence’ needed to finish there and that this ending had a certain sculptural difference to it. I love when albums have extra sections tagged on at the end of a song. They aren’t interludes but rather a moment to breathe.” **“Joy Squad”** “I like when you’re in a club and you hear a song that is a bit of a roller-coaster and that can take you on a wild and unexpected ride without ruining everyone’s night. I was trying to find a version of that with ‘Joy Squad.’ I think of it as being a giant in terms of visualizing the sonic scale, because it’s quite an empty soundworld, so everything fills up much bigger in that space—it doesn’t just feel like microtones.” **“Frozen”** “I was exploring how you can use a vocal to get it to sound like percussion. Both this and ‘Joy Squad’ are using vocals in that way to make very short, percussive sounds. This is about finding that moment of beauty before failure—like having blind faith just before everything falls apart—and that was the structure of the song. I wanted to create a digital, sugary sweetness and I was getting there through very heavy-handed vocal processing.” **“Shellshock”** “The themes of ‘Shellshock’ are similar to ‘Frozen’ in trying to tread this line between something super-sweet and sincere and then some kind of creeping fear underneath. All of this builds to create that same sense of rupture and disassembly we find in ‘Black Rainbow.’” **“Hance”** “This one’s a little machine—it feels like a Heath Robinson device, a bionic music box. This is a short track, but it might have been one of the ones that took the longest to make. With a lot of these shorter ideas, I didn’t want to make them into full songs—they are enough however long they are. It’s a nice palate cleanser before we end.” **“Strangers”** “This was the last track to be written for the record. It felt like a lot of the previous songs had been really labored over and almost strangled tight, whereas ‘Strangers’ came together really quickly. It feels less constrained and like there’s more life to it because of that. It was fun to make and it works really well to tie everything together as the final tune. It is a joyful ending.”

The intense process of making a debut album can have enduring effects on a band. Some are less expected than others. “It made my clothes smell for weeks afterwards,” Squid’s drummer/singer Ollie Judge tells Apple Music. During the British summer heatwave of 2020, the UK five-piece—Judge and multi-instrumentalists Louis Borlase, Arthur Leadbetter, Laurie Nankivell, and Anton Pearson—decamped to producer Dan Carey’s London studio for three weeks. There, Carey served them the Swiss melted-cheese dish raclette, hence the stench, and also helped the band expand the punk-funk foundations of their early singles into a capricious, questing set that draws on industrial, jazz, alt-rock, electronic, field recordings, and a Renaissance-era wind instrument called the rackett. The songs regularly reflect on disquieting aspects of modern life—“2010” alone examines greed, gentrification, and the mental-health effects of working in a slaughterhouse—but it’s also an album underpinned by the kindness of others. Before Carey hosted them in a COVID-safe environment at his home studio, the band navigated the restrictions of lockdown with the help of people living near Judge’s parents in Chippenham in south-west England. A next-door neighbor, who happens to be Foals’ guitar tech, lent them equipment, while a local pub owner opened up his barn as a writing and rehearsal space. “It was really nice, so many people helping each other out,“ says Borlase. “There’s maybe elements within the music, on a textural level, of how we wished that feel of human generosity was around a bit more in the long term.” Here, Borlase, Judge, and Pearson guide us through the record, track by track. **“Resolution Square”** Anton Pearson: “It’s a ring of guitar amps facing the ceiling, playing samples. On the ceiling was a microphone on a cord that swung around like a pendulum. So you get that dizzying effect of motion. It’s a bit like a red shift effect, the pitch changing as the microphone moves. We used samples of church bells and sounds from nature. It felt like a really nice thing to start with, kind of waking up.” Ollie Judge: “It sounds like cars whizzing by on the flyover, but it’s all made out of sounds from nature. So it’s playing to that push and pull between rural and urban spaces.” **“G.S.K.”** OJ: “I started writing the lyrics when I was on a Megabus from Bristol to London. I was reading *Concrete Island* by J. G. Ballard, and that is set underneath that same flyover that you go on from Bristol to London \[the Chiswick Flyover\]. I decided to explore the dystopic nature of Britain, I guess. It’s a real tone-setter, quite industrial and a bit unlike the sound world that we’ve explored before. Lots of clanging.” **“Narrator”** OJ: “It’s almost like a medley of everything we’ve done before: It’s got the punk-funk kind of stuff, and then newer industrial kind of sounds, and a foray into electronic sounds.” Louis Borlase: “It’s actually one of the freest ones when it comes to performing it. The big build-up that takes you through to the very end of the song is massively about texture in space, therefore it’s also massively about communication. That takes us back to the early days of playing in the Verdict \[jazz venue\] together, in Brighton, where we used to have very freeform music. It was very much about just establishing a tonality and a harmony and potentially a rhythm, and just kind of riding with it.” **“Boy Racers”** OJ: “It’s a song of two halves. The familiar, almost straightforward pop song, and then it ends in a medieval synth solo.” LB: “We had started working on it quite crudely, ready to start performing it on tour, in March 2020, just before lockdown. In lockdown, we started sending each other files and letting it develop via the internet. Just at the point where everything stops rhythmically and everything gets thrown up into the air—and enter said rackett solo—it’s the perfect depiction of when we were able to start seeing each other again. That whole rhythmic element stopped, and we left the focus to be what it means to have something that’s very free.” **“Paddling”** OJ: “The big, gooey pop centerpiece of the album. There’s a video of us playing it live from quite a few years ago, and it’s changed so much. We added quite a bit of nuance.” AP: “It was a combined effort between the three of us, lyrically. It started off about coming-of-age themes and how that related to readings about *The Wind in the Willows* and Mole—about things feeling scary when they’re new sometimes. That kind of naivety can trip you up. Then also about the whole theme of the book, about greed and consumerism, and learning to enjoy simple things. That book says such a beautiful thing about joy and how to get enjoyment out of life.” **“Documentary Filmmaker”** OJ: “It was quite Steve Reich-inspired, even to the point where when I played my girlfriend the album for the first time she said, ‘Oh, I thought that was Steve Reich. That was really nice.’” LB: “It started in a bedroom jam at Arthur’s family house. We had quite a lazy summer afternoon, no pressure in writing, and that’s preserved its way through to what it is on the album.” AP: “Sometimes we set out with ideas like that and they move into the more full-band setting. We felt was really important to keep this one in that kind of stripped-back nature.” **“2010”** OJ: “I think it’s a real shift towards future Squid music. It’s more like an alternative rock song than a post-punk band. It’s definitely a turning point: Our music has been known to be quite anecdotal and humorous in places, but this is quite mature. It doesn’t have a tongue-in-cheek moment.” LB: “Lyrically, it’s tackling some themes which are quite distressing and expose some of the problematic aspects of society. Trying to make that work, you’re owing a lot to the people involved, people that are affected by these issues, and you don’t want to make something that doesn’t feel truly thought about.” **“The Flyover”** AP: “It moulds really nicely into ‘Peel St.’ after it, which is quite fun—that slow morphing from something quite calm into something quite stressful. Arthur sent some questions out to friends of the band to answer, recorded on their phones. He multi-tracked them so there’s only ever like three people talking at one time. It’s just such a hypnotic and beautiful thing to listen to. Lots of different people talking about their lives and their perspectives.” **“Peel St.”** AP: “That’s the first thing we came up with when we met up in Chippenham, after having been separate for so long. It was this wave of excitement and joy. I don’t know why, when we’re all so happy, something like that comes out. That rhythmic pattern grew from those first few days, because it was really emotional.” LB: “It was joyful, but when we were all in that barn on the first day, I don’t think any of us were quite right. We called it ‘Aggro’ before we named it ‘Peel St.,’ because we would feel pretty unsettled playing it. It was a workout mentally and physically.” **“Global Groove”** OJ: “I got loads of inspiration from a retrospective on Nam June Paik—who’s like the godfather of TV art, or video installations—at the Tate. It’s a lot about growing up with the 24-hour news cycle and how unhealthy it is to be bombarded with mostly bad news—but then sometimes a nice story about an animal \[gets added\] on the end of the news broadcast. Growing up with various atrocities going on around you, and how the 24-hour news cycle must desensitize you to large-scale wars and death.” **“Pamphlets”** LB: “It’s probably the second oldest track on the album. The three of us were staying at Ollie’s parents’ house a couple of summers ago and it was the first time we bought a whiteboard. We now write music using a whiteboard, we draw stuff up, try and keep it visual. It also makes us feel quite efficient. ‘Pamphlets’ became an important part of our set, particularly finishing a set, because it’s quite a long blow-out ending. But when we brought it back to Chippenham last year, it had changed so much, because it had had so much time to have so many audiences responding to it in different ways. It’s very live music.”

Up All Night The LP you are about to hear contains musings about red traffic lights, empty streets dimly lit by neon signs, crickets singing in harmony to the echo of a distant siren, and the collective drone of nightclub sound pollution reverberating through the kitchen window. The recording sessions of this album were done in my studio in Tijuana, Mexico, between 2017 and 2019.Only a mere fifteen or twenty foot distance separated us from the militarized US-Mexico Border, which provided a backdrop of constant flood lights and sirens blaring through the nearby concrete Plaza as we worked through the night. It provided all we needed to work feverishly, almost manically, on a record that Brandon and I had sought to record together ever since the beginning of our friendship almost 15 years ago. At last, we had the means of working uninterrupted- without the obstacles of limited rehearsal times, money for studio time, or the objection of ears that couldn’t or wouldn’t participate in the ambitious musical endeavors we sought to fulfill. This is the culmination and expression of our dreams, nightmares, humor, fears, passion, and self-doubt. We penned these songs together under the musical partnership that was a vehicle for our friendship; one that has defined who I am today, and whatever else may come in the future. I hope you enjoy the collection of the first songs that we felt worthy of being on an album. The oddities, flavors, and precursors of things to come that are on this record are something that we dreamed of sharing with the world. Although Brandon ultimately would never see the fulfillment of this project, his biggest desire was to share our music with the world. In a moment of inexplicable sorrow and confusion, I would proudly like to present to you the music of Mirage. -Alfonso Azcaiturrieta In Memory of: Brandon Ángeles 12/31/1989 – 09/23/2020 Kiva Ivey 12/31/1994 – 05/05/2020 All words and music written and recorded by Brandon Ángeles and Alfonso Azcaiturrieta in Tijuana, B.C. Special thanks to Kiva Ivey and Ian Collins

My Bloody Sex Party 是一支山东临沂的摇滚乐队，目前的平均年龄应该刚过 16 岁。 他们组建于 2020 年的夏天。那时候是暑假，刚刚结束了中考，四位同学决定组建一支乐队。他们是刘（吉他，唱），尚（贝斯），庄（吉他），李（鼓）。在传统的摇滚乐器之外，他们也使用了大量的非常规乐器——从比较常见的提琴、二胡、三弦、琵琶，到非常罕见的西塔琴、维纳琴，或是匪夷所思的计算器。此外还有一些改装的乐器与加料演奏，比如装上了吉他弦的电贝斯，用弓拉琵琶，或是用笔在吉他上划过。 他们用一个多月的时间写歌，排练，在一位成员母亲的废弃的办公室里完成了录音。他们使用手机录音，然后用一台看上去有点旧的台式电脑混音，最后保存为 mp3 格式。 在正式升入高中之前，这张专辑完成了。四位成员后来分别去了不同的学校。鉴于曲目的时间太长（总长度超过 150 分钟），这套专辑将分作三辑在燥眠夜逐次发行。 母带：浦裕幸 设计：刘璐

MUS241 TAQBIR - Victory Belongs To Those Who Fight For A Right Cause 7” February 21st saw the digital release of TAQBIR’s first outing. Released via bandcamp and YouTube this enigmatic recording turned many heads and got many people speculating about this absolute rager of Moroccan origin. Four months later the physical version of this recording sees the light. Simply put, it was just too good to be a digital only endeavour. The four tracks of “Victory Belongs To Those Who Fight For A Right Cause” are four short vomits of anti-religious sentiment made music. Sang in Moroccan Arabic TAQBIR’s lyrics are irreverent, careless outburst of anger towards an extremely patriarchal oppressive place. Musically TAQBIR walks a thin line joining some of my favourite qualities in punk music. The aggression of fuckwave originators DISKOLOKOST, the nastiness of THE COMES vocalist’ Chitose and the raw reverb-drenched heavily-distorted non-production of THE SEXUAL or DESTINO FINAL. An amazing example of primative world Musik and hopefully part of a new wave of Taqwacore bands. The record comes with a double side A4 poster with lyrics and band’s graphic.

Recorded and mixed at E-Sound Studios (www.opnamestudio.net) by T. Cochrane & M. Koops, July 2020 Produced by Fluisteraars and T. Cochrane Mastered by Greg Chandler at Priory Recording Studios (www.prioryrecordingstudios.co.uk) NO KEYBOARDS WERE USED ON THIS RECORD!

In ‘gwneud a gwneud eto / do and do again’, Angharad Davies allows us to hear the violin almost from within, revealing the granular detail of what she describes as the instrument’s ‘endless wealth of possibilities’.

In his native country of Niger, singer-songwriter Mdou Moctar taught himself to play guitar by watching videos of Eddie Van Halen’s iconic shredding. When you hear his unique psych-rock hybrid—a mix of traditional Tuareg melodies with the kinds of buzzing strings and trilling fret runs that people often associate with the recently deceased guitar god—it makes sense. Moctar has honed that stylistic fingerprint over the course of five albums, after first being introduced to Western audiences via Sahel Sounds’ now cult classic compilation *Music From Saharan Cellphones, Vol. 1*, and in the process has been heartily embraced by indie rock fans based on his sound alone (he also plays on Bonnie \"Prince” Billy and Matt Sweeney’s *Superwolves* album). The songs that make up *Afrique Victime* alternate between jubilant, sometimes meandering and jammy (the opening “Chismiten”)—mirroring his band’s explosive live shows—and more tightly wound, raga-like and reflective (the trance-inducing “Ya Habibti”). But within the music, there’s a deeper, often political context: Recorded with his group in studios, apartments, hotel rooms, backstage, and outdoors, the album covers a range of themes: love, religion, women’s rights, inequality, and the exploitation of West Africa by colonial powers. “I felt like giving a voice to all those who suffer on my continent and who are ignored by the Western world,” Moctar tells Apple Music. Here he dissects each of the album’s tracks. **“Chismiten”** “The song talks about jealousy in a relationship, but more importantly about making sure that you’re not swept away too quickly by this emotion, which I think can be very harmful. Every individual, man or woman, has the right to have relationships outside marriage, be it with friends or family.” **“Taliat”** “It’s another song that addresses relationships, the suffering we go through when we’re deeply in love with someone who doesn’t return that love.” **“Ya Habibti”** “The title of this track, which I composed a long time ago, means ‘oh my love’ in Arabic. I reminisce about that evening in August when I met my wife and how I immediately thought she was so beautiful.” **“Tala Tannam”** “This is also a song I wrote for my wife when I was far away from her, on a trip. I tell her that wherever I may be, I’ll be thinking of her.” **“Asdikte Akal”** “It’s about my origins and the sense of nostalgia I feel when I think about the village where I grew up, about my country and all those I miss when I’m far away from them, like my mother and my brothers.” **“Layla”** “Layla is my wife. When she gave birth to our son, I wasn’t allowed to be by her side, because that’s just how it is for men in our country. I was on tour when she called me, very worried, to tell me that our son was about to be born. I felt really helpless, and as a way of offering comfort, I wrote this song for her.” **“Afrique Victime”** “Although my country gained its independence a long time ago, France had promised to help us, but we never received that support. Most of the people in Niger don’t have electricity or drinking water. That’s what I emphasize in this song.” **“Bismilahi Atagah”** “This one talks about the various possible dangers that await us, about everything that could make us turn our back on who we really are, such as the illusion of love and the lure of money.”

When Low started out in the early ’90s, you could’ve mistaken their slowness for lethargy, when in reality it was a mark of almost supernatural intensity. Like 2018’s *Double Negative*, *Hey What* explores new extremes in their sound, mixing Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker\'s naked harmonies with blocks of noise and distortion that hover in drumless space—tracks such as “Days Like These” and “More” sound more like 18th-century choral music than 21st-century indie rock. Their faith—they’ve been practicing Mormons most of their lives—has never been so evident, not in content so much as purity of conviction: Nearly 30 years after forming, they continue to chase the horizon with a fearlessness that could make anyone a believer.

Stunning debut of lilting bliss for guitar x synth by manc bosom buds Celestial, quietly resplendent in a classic vein of soft touch Balearic blues and kosmische hues that comes very highly recommended if you’re into anything from The Durutti Column to Vincent Gallo’s classic ‘When’, from Roméo Poirier's poolside washes to Move D’s lilting Conjoint productions, or even the instrumental splendour of HTRK at their most diaphanous. Bathed in moonlight, ’I Had Too Much To Dream Last Night’ is the gorgeous debut by childhood friends Celestial, arriving in the glistening wake of 2021 gems on the same label by Romance, Not Waving, Spivak, claire rousay & more eaze. Convecting a richly sanguine sound gleaned from a Sequential Circuits Sixtrak synth and Fender guitar with the results mottled to frail AGFA tape, it’s the modest and warm soul on display that speaks to a quieter side of the rainy city psyche, picking up a fine thread of etheric inspiration that leads back to The Durutti Column via Ry Cooder’s ‘Paris, Texas’ soundtrack and Iasos’ intoxicating new age, with a fragile, gauzy vision of instrumental songcraft ripe for getting lost in dappled fantasy. Practically synaesthetic in their spatial sensitivity, the six songs make a real virtue of reverb, echo and ferric hiss that swaddles their lyrical phrasing with a cottony texture. Favouring an analogue haze over digital clarity, their sound unspools with a kaleidoscopic, nostalgic quality surrendered in shimmering waves of bliss and a back-of-the-eyes swirl between the hash haze of ‘Endless’ and northern gothic tone of ‘Lonely Weekend.’ Tape hiss resembles drizzle outside in the lowlit langour of ‘Hat Full of Rain’, and we can practically taste the petrichor in ‘The Perfumed Garden’ - basically a smudged take on Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Albatross', leading to ASMR levels of synth tingles with an unmistakeable northern melancholy of ‘At The Rivers Edge’, especially in its gloaming coda. A reel low-key stunner.