The Five music things thing yet again for whatever it still might be worth. Five? There’s something rather compelling about five, cross-pollination? Five more? Five more while Death Pill hide in their basements and all we can really do is watch their social media feeds and hope they’re surviving over there in Kyiv

Do we need to do the editorial bit again? Is there another way? A cure for pulling cats out of hats? Is there a rhyme? Is there a reason? Was there ever? What do reasons make? Five more, same as last time (and the time before) five, and no, we never do and the proof of the pudding is in that proof reading. When we started this thing, oh never mind, it doesn’t matter and like we asked last time, does anyone bother reading the editorial? Does anyone ever actually look down the rabbit hole or is it all just method acting? We do listen to everything that comes in, we do it so you don’t have to, we are very (very) picky about what we actually post on these pages or play on the radio or hang in a gallery. Cut to the chase, never mind the editorial there’s loads of music further down the page, well five or so pieces of music that have come our way in the last few days and cut cut slash and cut to the damn chase, who needs an editorial? But, then as we said with the previous Five Music Thing feature a couple of days back, a page that also featured Death Pill (as did the five before that) that maybe this time we do need an editorial? I mean, Ukraine, just a land full of people making music, art, wanting to just live and go to gigs and hang out together and do the same thing most of us do, those of us who aren’t power crazed leaders…

Here’s your five pieces of music for today….

1: Jessica Ekomane is a French-born and Berlin-based electronic musician and sound artist. “Her practice unfolds around live performances and installations. Her quadraphonic performances, characterized by their physical affect, seek a cathartic effect through the interplay of psychoacoustics, the perception of rhythmic structures and the interchange of noise and melody. Her ever-changing and immersive sonic landscapes are grounded in questions such as the relationship between individual perception and collective dynamics or the investigation of listening expectations and their societal roots.

Jessica Ekomane is one the six composers chosen as collaborators by Natascha Süder Happelman for her installation at the German pavilion of the Venice Biennale 2019. She released her debut album, Multivocal, on Important Records in 2019. Her work has been presented in various institutions worldwide such as CTM festival (Berlin), Ars Electronica (Linz), Dommune (Tokyo) or Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts (Omaha)”.

We tell you this today because Jessica is playing London this coming Sunday April 3rd, Cafe Oto is the place

2: Crows are continuing to build up to their new album. ‘Garden of England’ is a track from ‘Beware Believers’, due out April 1st on Bad Vibrations Records. You can hear two or three tracks on their Bandcamp page right now, we imagine there will be more of their abrasiveness parked there in the form of more tracks once the album is out, to like that their anger in an energy here with their Garden of England, it would be idle to compare them with others, this new album is shaping up rather well and yes, they are equal parts ferocious and hedonistic

There’s nothing left in here, Crows are playing with the broken things, they’re shaping up like a band that matter now rather than just another of the crowd on the coattails of others

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3: Thousand Yard Stare – Who knew they were still around, and more importantly, unlike most bands who are still hanging around, making new music as fine as the music they made back there. A new single “Huzzah! Our new single “Measures” has now fledged, here it is in visual form, we hope you enjoy.. Measures is a three-part refractory and spirited tune of hopeful defiance, self actualisation and collective resistance. You can get Measures as a 3 track single exclusively on our Bandcamp page, and all them dreamy streamies”. Are Thousand Yard Stare sounding even better now then they did back there when they had their fifteen second turn at being the next big thing down the Camden Palace and over on the cover of the NME in the early 90’s?

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4: Horse Lords – another band who’ve figured on our pages and airwaves, have just annouched a gig at London’s Cafe Oto on May 30th, details here –

“Horse Lords make music for the liberation of mind and body. Propulsive in a way that inspires movement and that’s felt in the gut, the Baltimore quartet’s new album The Common Task points to a utopian, modernist ideal. The group’s use of algorithmic composition techniques, microtonal harmonies, and plentifully deployed polyrhythm aren’t secondary to the music’s danceability and rhapsodic swirl, but integral to the party itself.

The Common Task is both the most cohesive and farthest-reaching record Horse Lords has released. A mystifying density of ideas collide at each moment, recalling as diverse a cohort as The Ex and Glenn Branca to raucous Saharan guitar music, Albert Ayler, and James Tenney. It integrates experiments that gestated in the group’s cassette-only mixtape series, which saw the band stretching out on extended compositions and more expansive sonic parameters as well as presenting more explicitly political material, while retaining the immediacy of their long players. As evidenced by the album’s title, as well as songs like “Fanfare for Effective Freedom” and “People’s Park,” the band’s penchant for radical politics is especially accentuated on this release. Embedded in the exuberant interplay of guitar and sax, the persistent pulse of bass and drums, are notions of egalitarianism and the subversion of established norms”.

Support for that Horse Lords gig we just mentioned comes from the awkwardly good Historically Fucked…

5: Historically Fucked are “a four way entanglement made to create short, eruptive songs and then set about obliterating them from the inside, like improv the awkwardising a barrel to encase themselves in and then proceeding to lick their way out of it.It is about playing and laughing at playing, and it is about not doing either of those things sometimes. Sometimes it is to do with talking, howling or grunting, and sometimes it is to do with hitting and rubbing. It has to do with some of the four people who do it, who each share the same duties, and whose names in sequence are Otto Willberg, David Birchall, Greta Buitkuté and Alecs Pierce and who would like to be remembered by them, so that when they have finished doing this thing, their names carry on doing other things”.

The rather interestingly named band jsut released thier latest album “squid SQUID dog DOG sun SUN goy”, here it comes now, you can get it via Bandcamp, the deal is you pay what you want to, seems like a fair deal to us, it makes for interesting listennig while Prime Minister’s Question Time is on the radio at the same time, it makes more sense than Benny Hill does

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And there’s more, actually there’s lots more on their Bandcamp page

5: Fuzztones – Always had time for Fuzztones and their old sxhool garage fuzz, here they come again – “Who doesn’t love a good encore? The dramatic, exhilarating return to the stage after a brief respite. But, of course, as longtime veterans of both stage and studio The Fuzztones know, the best encores always announce themselves as such – no faux retirements or false farewells – just a short pause before offering up a little something extra to show appreciation to those fans who have stuck around for this long.

And so, The Fuzztones are proud to announce a new release called Encore, a collection of unreleased tracks packaged together as a way to say thank you to the Fuzztone faithful who have followed and supported the band through the years. The collection kicks off with an original track written by Fuzztones founder Rudi Protrudi, the groovy rocker “Barking Up The Wrong Tree.” With a fuzzed out guitar lick backed with vintage organ, the track is everything there is to love about The Fuzztones and is released today on all digital platforms.

The remainder of Encore consists of cover versions of obscure gems such as “Land Of Nod” by Rare Earth, “Plastic People” by late ’60s psych rockers The Wildwood, and others. It also features special guest appearances by Steve Mackay of The Stooges and Wally Waller of The Pretty Things. Encore will be released on all formats including CD and vinyl starting April 22″!

5: Tom Moody And The All New Greatest Hits Band – It was the Consultant that pointed out this one, don’t ask us, ““Look, it’s not that difficult, idiots, just make a decent rock album that everyone can enjoy. Don’t put any bad songs on it” Tom Moody. Who is Tom Moody? Does he know Mickey Moody? Where were we? Just outside Reading on the motorway when the rad bats swooped? There’s a couple of Perfectly Executed slices from the album and a recently released single that has you up there standing on the edge and taking care not to jump off and things. Featuring the king of all prawns Babar Luck as well, don’t be asking us though, it was the Consultant that made us do it… Here’s the Bandcamp thing for the new single

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And while we’re here…