(First published in Issue 118 of Electronic Sound magazine, October 2024)
BIRDS IN THE BRICKWORK
Three Years
(Wayside & Woodland)
Guarding the woods of Wheaton Aston like a robed sentinel, label boss Ben Holton marks the passing years with mystical missives from this sleepy corner of rural Staffordshire. In a nutshell, an annual calendar with a free album download. This superlative box set collects the 36 tracks Holton has composed to soundtrack each month of the past three years, together with a smattering of previously unreleased material salvaged from beneath the tangled undergrowth.
Holton is a master at capturing the ever-evolving charms of the English countryside. So while frosty fingers pluck at the sparkling guitar lines of ‘January (Over Frozen Farmland)’, the languid synths of ‘July (Watching Clouds)’ slip into shallow half-sleep beneath empty, azure skies. Meanwhile, in Year Two, the brooding ambience of ‘September (Schools)’ reeks of cranky central heating and neglected geography homework. A peerless collection from a label steeped in bucolic beauty.
Album available here:
https://waysideandwoodlandrecordings.bandcamp.com/album/three-years
KAYLA PAINTER
Fractures
(KPR)
On 10th October, NASA are launching a probe intended to conduct detailed fly-pasts of Jupiter’s moon, Europa. The following day, Kayla Painter is launching her debut album, Fractures. These two seemingly disparate projects are, in fact, not unconnected. Bristol-based Painter has crafted a stout-hearted tribute to the voyage of the Europa Clipper and an alien landscape she envisages being “suspended somewhere between scientific knowledge and imagination”.
She’s clearly more concerned with the excitement of interplanetary exploration than any lonely, cosmic emptiness. ‘Fractured In Space’ combines anthemic synths with intrepid beats, and ‘Clipper’ is similarly buoyant. Only on Europa’s surface does weirdness begin to pervade, with ‘Ice Shells’ weaving fractured rhythms around shards of electronic noise. Then ‘Micro Chaos’ builds throbbing minimalism to a stark crescendo, before the crackly communique of ‘Transmission Isa Lei’ – incorporating Painter’s mum, grandmother, and a Fijian farewell song – provides a beautifully bittersweet conclusion to a successful and stirring mission.
Album available here:
https://kaylapainter.bandcamp.com/album/fractures-2
MORDANT MUSIC
KPMM: 20 Signs You Have A Thyroid Problem
(Castles In Space)
The enigmatic Baron Mordant pulled a seemingly final curtain across his twenty-year Mordant Music project in 2019, but this unexpected new collection provides a welcome peek from beyond the veil. Originally intended as genuine library music, it’s an album riddled with sardonic charm. So while ‘Mordant Has The Right To Children’ is a woozy homage to Boards of Canada, the pulsing beats of ‘Every Shit Advert At Once’ absolutely conjure images of some appallingly pungent perfume being applied by a woman eating expensive choc ices while driving a Range Rover up a quarry wall.
Album available here:
https://mm-cis.bandcamp.com/album/kpmm-20-signs-you-have-a-thyroid-problem
SHEFFIELD PARANORMAL RESEARCH GROUP
Other Voices
(Bandcamp)
“Ghosts and spectres, witches and UFOs, sentient flora and timeslips”? Blimey, it’s all kicking off in Brincliffe and Eccleshall. Chief investigator Mike ‘Spongeboy’ Sumpter claims to have assembled these heady collages from otherworldly recordings made by this clandestine South Yorkshire collective, and the eleven-minute ‘A Spectre At The Feast’ is the album’s cornerstone. A hypnotic combination of sepulchral whispers and industrial rhythms, it was presumably recorded in one of Sheffield’s last remaining ectoplasm factories.
Album available here:
https://spongeboy.bandcamp.com/album/other-voices
Electronic Sound – “the house magazine for plugged in people everywhere” – is published monthly, and available here:
https://electronicsound.co.uk/
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