(First published in Issue 121 of Electronic Sound magazine, January 2025)

VARIOUS ARTISTS
Coastal Electronauts Volume 1
(Bandcamp)

There are many reasons to love Whitstable. The annual Oyster Festival, for a start. And the largest village green in England. Horror behemoth Peter Cushing lived there too, enjoying a daily repast in the Tudor Tea Rooms. To the boundless charms of this sleepy outpost on the north Kent coastline, perhaps we should now add Coastal Electronauts, a collective of experimental sound enthusiasts meeting monthly in the town’s Waterfront Club.

From its humble beginnings as a lockdown radio show, this heartwarming project has since matured from genial gatherings in the local Labour Club to live performances streamed to a global following. Every month, around a dozen short live sets are performed, and eleven of them are gathered on this hugely enjoyable collection.

Viola player Sophie Sirota sets the pace with opening track ‘Slow’, an elegant requiem for looped strings that swells like the incoming tide. The title is entirely apposite: the whole album is a symposium of the steadfastly unhurried, even if the dark drones of Peter ‘Shape Navigator’ Coyte soon take us into considerably more ominous territory. The spine-chilling ‘Aramaic Hymn’ might even have had Peter Cushing spluttering on his scones.

Let’s reserve a special mention for Graham ‘Dids’ Dowdall. This admirably restless polymath provided avant-garde percussion and soundscapes for Nico and Pere Ubu before adopting the Gagarin persona that, across nine albums, allowed him to explore the shimmering portals between the worlds of ambient, classical and industrial. The mischievous rhythms and earworm synths of ‘Cingulum’, recorded only four months before his death in June 2024, are a touching testament to Dowdall’s passion for the playful.

Elsewhere, the throbbing ambience of John Gallen’s ‘UY Scuti’ – named after a red supergiant star in the constellation of Scutum – feels appropriately cosmic, and ‘SIX’ is a suitably haunted modular workout from Robin ‘Ghostyhed’ Konieczny. The 22-minute ‘Croissant Encryption’, meanwhile, is an improvised collaboration between Sebtic Smile, OSVoS and Head Gardeners. A stunning mish-mash of upright piano, clattering beats and thunderous metal guitars, it feels like a rumbling dinnertime argument between rival bands in the school music room.

All told, it’s an uplifting testament to the power of the collective and the importance of open-eared and welcoming grass roots music scenes. Everybody down to the Tudor Tea Rooms for chip butties all round.

Album available here:
https://coastalelectronauts.bandcamp.com/album/vol-1

DILETTANTE
Life Of The Party
(Launchpad/EMI North)

“I’m not having any fun / No I’m not / I’m not having any fun”.  

The song – no surprise – is called ‘Fun’. And as opening statements go, it’s fairly unequivocal. Francesca Pidgeon has reached the startling conclusion that often accompanies the arrival of the dreaded 30th birthday: the party is over. You might be defiantly opening that third bottle of Malbec, but your sensible friends are all calling taxis at midnight. “Shouldn’t you have known when I showed up three hours late / That I’ve always been a slave to temptation?” she sings, and you can almost hear the tutting in the kitchen. The chorus, she claims, was inspired by her disillusionment with playing for a Manchester roller derby team, but the disaffection clearly runs deeper.

The twist here? This stark, early-life crisis is set to music that is upbeat pop perfection. Despite choosing her dabblesome nom-de-pop as a self-effacing disclaimer, Pidgeon is a multi-instrumentalist maelstrom who fills the album with funk guitars, swirling synths and a whole school cupboard’s worth of woodwind and brassy flourishes.

Like Sparks and Kate Bush before her, she crams complex emotions into deceptive three-minute nuggets. “I get feather-light and tongue-tied / Trying to find your bad side,” she sings amid the Beatles chords of ‘In The Taxi’, but any hints of doe-eyed devotion are swiftly dispelled by the self-critical barbs of ‘Cake’. “I’ve always been so cruel to whoever shows me weakness,” she admits, sounding alarmingly like Harry Nilsson squeezing into Russell Mael’s hotpants while Ron gives the ‘Top Of The Pops’ cameras the side-eye.

As with 2022 debut album ‘Tantrum’, Pidgeon doesn’t just wear her heart on her sleeve, she has it embroidered onto the front of her favourite party frock. ‘I’m In Love With Falling In Love’ is a paean to non-commitment, a torch song she admits she is unable to sing without bursting into tears. But the secret that all reformed revellers will tell you? Once the turmoil of youthful excess fades, the pressure is off and life can become genuinely interesting. And – yes – fun again. The closing line of this terrific album says it perfectly: “Pour it all in and see me open skies for you”. Here’s to parting clouds and brighter futures. We can all drink to that. 

Album available here:
https://dilettantesongs.bandcamp.com/album/life-of-the-party

BELLPROVER
Bag Of Daggers
(Bandcamp)
 
“These freakish visions / Of dancing fish in Turkish prisons / Where cannon balls and shopping malls / Eat people’s feet as they sleep”. If ‘Bag Of Daggers’ has a dreamlike quality, they’re the kind of dreams that only result from eating a pound of ripe stilton twenty minutes before bedtime. Setting aside his customary guitar, poet Douglas E Powell has retooled eight previously acoustic numbers for synth and drum machine, added two new tracks, and concocted a splendid mish-mash of the influences he clearly holds dearest: Ivor Cutler, John Cooper Clarke and The Fall.

Fellow suburban surrealist Keith Seatman adds psychedelic textures to album highlight ‘Turn Your Head (Toward The Sun)’. “On the darkest night the brightest glow / And I love it when your colours show / That you are still true to thee,” intones Powell as distant church bells echo, a blissed-out William Blake in a lysergic parish garden. And eight-minute closing track ‘Vibrations-On-Sea’ – from whence those aforementioned “freakish visions” come – is the perfect descent into hallucinogenic sleep.

Album available here:
https://bellprover.bandcamp.com/album/bag-of-daggers

THE WINTER JOURNEY
Graceful Consolations
(Turning Circle)  

Some artists download plug-ins for their retro effects of choice, others record their comeback single on a 19th century phonograph and sound like the ghosts of a Victorian church service. ‘Little Consolation’ is like nothing else on this long-awaited second album by Anthony Braithwaite and Suzy Mangion, but its sense of pastoral melancholy pervades. “There is a brighter garden where not a frost has been”? The thaw starts here. Drones throb, guitars jangle, harmonies swoon and standout number ‘The Way That You Are’ sounds like The Kinks being covered by the Mike Sammes Singers. Exquisite.

Album available here:
https://thewinterjourney.bandcamp.com/album/graceful-consolations

C DUNCAN
It’s Only A Love Song
(Bella Union)

Had Chris Duncan been around 50 years ago, even Gilbert O’Sullivan might have shuffled home in defeat, such is the splendour of these sumptuous romantic missives. “Here am I / In a state of paradise,” sings Duncan on ‘Lucky Today’, with strings played to perfection by his retired musician parents. It’s a sentiment that will have any lovelorn fan of old school orchestral pop nodding in agreement. If this was 1973, and we were all 14, the whispered title track alone would have us putting posters of him on our bedroom walls and fainting into our Tizer.  

Album available here:
https://cduncan.bandcamp.com/album/its-only-a-love-song

SOPHIE JAMIESON
I Still Want To Share
(Bella Union)   

“I don’t want to push you away / But distance speaks in volumes / And I’m only just OK”. The opening lines of lead single ‘I Don’t Know What To Save’ epitomise the message of Sophie Jamieson’s second album: love is complex. It’s an age-old lesson to learn, but these elegant songs feel freshly-minted, with Jamieson’s crystalline vocals embraced by chiming guitars and omnichord twinkles. “When am I going to break your heart?” she sings, on the string-drenched ‘Your Love Is A Mirror’. The answer? Several times over on this delightful, graceful sigh of a record.

Album available here:
https://sophiejamieson.bandcamp.com/album/i-still-want-to-share

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

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