Electronic Sound – Reviews (Issue 119)

(First published in Issue 119 of Electronic Sound magazine, November 2024)

MOON WIRING CLUB
Cat Location Conundrum
(Gecophonic Audio Systems)

So, there’s this lost cat. Following the story so far? Good, because that’s about as straightforward as things get. For five years, shadowy lunar electrician Ian Hodgson has pursued said AWOL feline across three bafflingly beautiful albums: 2019’s The Most Unusual Cat In The Village, 2020’s The Only Cat Left In Town and 2023’s Sepia Cat City.

Along the way, his disorientating sound collages have crashed through illusory antique shops and haunted underground markets alike, encountering occult-obsessed actresses, covetous vampires and… well, seemingly everything but the actual missing moggy that started the whole ridiculous shebang in the first place.

Perhaps Hodgson’s similarly elusive nature has left him slightly under-appreciated. Since 2007, he has created a magnificent mind palace, a fictional village – Clinkswell – seemingly forever doomed to slip back and forth across time, a mish-mash of Edwardian whimsy, psychedelic dreamstates and snippets of stiff BBC costume dramas. The musical scene-shifting that has become a Moon Wiring Club motif owes an equal debt to both Lewis Carroll and Hodgson’s beloved old ZX Spectrum games, effortlessly bridging the eleven decades between Jabberwocky and Jet Set Willy.

As with the three preceding instalments, all twelve tracks here are exactly ten minutes long. Hodgson claims they are largely unused experiments from these earlier albums, but they form an intoxicating whole. ‘Visitor From Another Medium’ boasts Radiophonic stabs and plummy-voiced warnings: “Don’t use the light!”. ‘Impersonation Party’ is like falling asleep while an untuned AM radio picks up stray transmissions from Talking Pictures TV and a spaceship lands in the garden outside.

Hodgson has hinted that his track titles may have narrative significance, so do the woozy swirls of ‘Several Other Worlds’ suggest said truanting tabby has now actually vanished into the cosmos itself? God knows, and it doesn’t really matter. Attempting to ascribe logic to the fragmented universe of any Moon Wiring Club album is as fruitless a quest as actually looking for that lesser-spotted greymalkin itself. As the soporific samples of ‘Cat Night Moon’ insist, “Time goes at a different pace in different places”.

Absolutely true. And two hours spent in the shifting streets of Clinkswell still leave us hoping to miss the last spectral train back home to the mundane.

Album available here:
https://moonwiringclub.bandcamp.com/album/cat-location-conundrum

PEFKIN
The Rescoring
(Nite Hive)

Who’s this, diligently pushing her way through the enchanted forest of life? It’s Gayle ‘Pefkin’ Brogan, ostensibly reliving her recent relocation from Glasgow to Sheffield. But Brogan – both as a solo artist and as half of folktronic duo Burd Ellen – is a dab hand at overlaying everyday emotion with magical resonance. “The dark absorbs the dark within,” she sings amid the ominous ambience of seventeen-minute opening track ‘You Within Its Branching Arms’. “Til dawn’s embrace / The light creeps in / And warms your face.” Clearly pining, Brogan begins her journey beneath a canopy of mournful violas.

‘Gossip In The Leaves’ feels more airy, combining woodland field recordings with reflective synths. Then tentative footsteps crunch their way into the closing title track, where Brogan’s crystalline vocals take flight. “After the winter storm / New day emerges from the dark.” Brogan has clearly – quite literally – been on an emotional journey, and this gently moving album is a touching evocation of life’s ever-shifting tribulations.

Album available here:
https://pefkin.bandcamp.com/album/the-rescoring

REPEATED VIEWING
Strip Their Flesh / The Artefact
(Spun Out Of Control)

Clearly a man who spent his formative years cradling battered VHS tapes while waiting for his parents to go to bed, Alan Sinclair continues to mine his obsession with the kind of gory video nasties that once had an exasperated Mary Whitehouse clutching her pearls. Strip Their Flesh is the supporting feature, an endearingly wobbly synth soundtrack to a blood-splattered jungle expedition, with the deceptively gentle textures of ‘Night Trek’ succumbing to the self-explanatory horrors of ‘Observe The Ritual – Bind Them’.

The Artefact, meanwhile, is (ahem) a 1985 feature from little-known director Burt Flagstaff. With some ancient tome or other is unearthed from the dusty cellars of Langsdown Museum, multiple deaths inevitably ensue. Sinclair is pitch-perfect here, with ‘Evil Never Dies’ welding church organs to reassuringly cheapo synths and ‘Destroy The Machine’ sounding like Harold Faltermeyer hepped up on Monster Munch from the all-night garage. A hugely enjoyable homage to a cinematic era when heavy-duty drills were rarely used for legitimate home improvement.

Album available here:
https://spunoutofcontrol.bandcamp.com/track/strip-their-flesh

THE GREEN CHILD
Look Familiar
(Upset The Rhythm)

“Over darkened floors / With a twisted hand, not to feel but see the blue nails,” sings Raven Mahon on ‘The Lawn’, a melodic highlight on this Melbourne band’s third album. It’s family history couched in psychedelic poetry, a tribute to Mahon’s grandmother and her relationship with a short-lived socialist desert commune. Expanding the band to a four-piece, Mahon and collaborator Mikey Young have created the perfect soundscape for these affectingly breathy allegories, a wash of electronic dream-pop that reaches a pinnacle with the chiming ‘A Long Beautiful Flowing Cape’.

Album available here:
https://upsettherhythm.bandcamp.com/album/look-familiar

BELL MONKS
Watching The Snow Fall
(Wayside & Woodland)

“Sleepy rock” is how Wisconsin duo Jeff Herriott and Eric Sheffield describe their collaboration as Bell Monks. On the evidence of this resolutely wintry record, it’s blissful slumber beneath a 15-tog duvet on a freezing December morning. “Another night has ended / Waking up confused,” sings Herriott in a bone-thawing baritone on opening track ‘Dim The Lights’, setting the tone for an album of slow delights. Floating in the clear white skies between Low and late period Talk Talk, it’s an album of exquisite sparseness, like morning rime on skeletal tree branches.

Album available here:
https://bellmonks.bandcamp.com/album/watching-the-snow-fall

PULSE: JOHN MOUSE

Who?

Arguably Cardiff’s most enigmatic purveyor of world-weary synthpop, John MOuse is the alter ego of John Davies, whose repeated attempts to kill off his creation – notably on 2014 album The Death Of John MOuse – have so far been doomed to failure. “He just keeps coming back,” says Davies. “He’s like a verruca.”

The capitalised ‘O’ is deliberate. “It started life because I didn’t release the caps button quickly enough,” he explains. “But it helps separate me from John Maus. And John Mouse from Roger Hargreaves’ children’s books. Oh, and the reggae artist John Mouse. All of whom I only discovered a long time after I started using the name.”

Why John MOuse?

His seventh album Back To The Clubhouse is terrific and sounds like Blancmange fronted by John Cooper Clarke. So are touching songs like ‘Headbutting The Llama Food Dispenser’ based on real life experiences? It’s a tale of childhood angst at Penscynor Wildlife Gardens, a once-proud tourist attraction that has lain derelict since 1998.

“Most of the lyrical content comes from real moments or memories,” sighs Davies. “I just abuse them until they do the job I want.”

Tell us more…

Davies credits on-off musical partner Phil Pearce for the synthpop trappings, although the relationship seems sadly off at the moment. “These songs were all rescued from sessions with Phil,” he says. “I know he’s into Thomas Dolby, Kraftwerk, The Normal and OMD.”

Meanwhile, the resulting album has been co-produced by fellow Cardiff scenester Stephen ‘Sweet Baboo’ Black. “We’ve been friends for 20 years,” Davies explains. “He owes me, because I manage the veterans’ football team we both play for. And now he gets to start all season.”

Back To The Clubhouse is available here:
https://johnmouse.bandcamp.com/album/back-to-the-clubhouse

Electronic Sound – “the house magazine for plugged in people everywhere” – is published monthly, and available here:
https://electronicsound.co.uk/