Shall we write a new editorial? Oh the endless demand and who needs a damn editorial? Let the actual music do the actual walking and the actual talking. Exact same thing again, another five (or so) slices of musical things that have passed our way recently and however you like to slice it and of course it was the price of lemons and here comes the intro, Don’t be flippant she said, how could it ever be flippant? I can’t remember why she said that now, in one ear, out the other, we have a bad attitude here apparently, no respect for those who work in the music industry, well no poop Sherlock, have you only just worked that one out? We’ve been showing (and getting) zero respect since the last century, zero flips given…
Five? There’s something rather compelling about five. Cross-pollination? Five more? Is there another way? A better way? A cure for pulling flying rabbits out of the clouds? Is there a rhyme? Is there a reason? Was there ever a reason? What do reasons make? Five more? Snake oil? Everything must go 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 why we started this damn thing 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 really try to listen to everything that comes in, we do it so you don’t have to, we are very (very) very very picky about what we actually post on these fractured pages or about what gets played on the radio or indeed what we hang in a gallery. Cut to the chase, never mind the editorial, skip this bit, 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 what’s Wordsworth? Just the basic facts and links and those sounds (and visuals), that’s surely all you need from us?
Here we go, five more slices of music that have recently come our way, this time we start somewhere The Hague or maybe Athens or maybe both places at the same time…
1: Able Noise – Taken from the album, High Tide, out 1st November via World of Echo. The cross-continent duo based between The Hague (NL) and Athens (GR), built around the experimental baritone guitar and drum playing of George and Alex – have just shared a new track…
The title of this rather piece of music is explained by the duo thus “’Ceaseless Sun’ comes from a book by Margarita Karapanou, in which she describes the sun rising over the island on which the events of the book have been taking place. Only after an entire day do the residents realise that the sun did not set when it should have and their terror increases day by day as the sun remains up, never setting. We were really attracted to the juxtaposition of something so beautiful entailing something so apocalyptic.”
“After a few formative attempts at collaboration, George and Alex officially came together as the Able Noise we see now in 2017, uniting over shared thoughts on art and performance encountered while studying at The Royal Academy of Arts in The Hague. Their first recorded work, a seamless 30 minutes of glistening post-rock anti-formalism, emerged in low-key fashion in 2020 as a cassette through Glasgow’s famed GLARC label. Later, ‘To Appease’ featured on World of Echo’s Thorn Valley compilation. Numerous European wide tours and left-of-centre festival appearances led the pair back to the studio for the recording of debut LP, High Tide.
True to this approach, the pair have embarked upon the recording of their debut album with a similar exploratory impetus. In a studio without a physical audience to confront, the questions are suddenly quite different: how does one create a definitive recorded music initially rooted in improvisation, how is that recording then listened to and understood, and, without the spectacle of performance, how is it possible to work with the sense of hearing alone. Unsurprisingly, the music of High Tide is significantly different to that of an Able Noise live set. Minimalism has been traded for a detail-oriented approach, the limitations of two sets of hands suddenly lifted by the possibilities of multi-tracked thinking, post-production and various processing techniques. Real-time gives way to fragmentation, distortion and dilation, and the shift is notable – High Tide is a woozy and often disorientating listen that plays quick and easy with conventional notions of structure, at once both centreless and impressionistic, yet somehow guided by an imagined formless space.
Reliant much less on their own capabilities – and limitations! – as musicians, George and Alex heartily invited the contributions of friends from both their local Athenian music community and those made while playing the UK, with the important disclaimer given that anything played during the recording session will not sound the same once on record [Alex McKenzie (clarinet) and Magdalena McLean (violin) guest on the new track]. The result is duos, trios, quartets and sextets playing in different experiences of time, and on dynamic scales vastly different from one another, brought to equal footing.
Critically, the wholesomeness of their creative communion belies the darker theme of inertia that the pair acknowledge runs throughout the album, a sense of bodies of very different weights and momentums existing alongside each other, either adapting to or clashing with one another. In short, the outside world can’t help but seep in, even as you create within your own hermetic universe – the feeling of hopelessness amidst endless political and social strife, obsolescence in the face of technological development, time’s inexorable march. These are things we’ve all felt, and while High Tide, like much before it, doesn’t provide any definitive resolution for these challenges, it does present its own set of unique possibilities written in the shared language of its creators”.
Here’s the Bandcamp thing where you can currently hear another couple of pieces from the new album (other links if you are that way inclined) The due play a gig on 16th November at London’s EartH with Tara Clerkin Trio and then tour in 2025.
2: Leila Abdul-Rauf – Now this is good, a rather impressive taste of an album named Calls From A Seething Edge that’s out in a couple of weeks that’s we’re about to explore properly once this page is posted, more infomation under the video…
“Multi-instrumentalist Leila Abdul-Rauf, acclaimed for her evocative and boundary-pushing soundscapes, presents her fifth, most ambitious solo album to date, Calls From A Seething Edge.
Leila Abdul-Rauf has been a key member in dozens of musical entities since the 1990s, including Vastum, Ionophore, Cardinal Wyrm, Fyrhtu, and more in recent years, preceded by time spent in Amber Asylum, Hammers Of Misfortune, Bastard Noise, Saros, and more. Over the past decade she’s showcased her talents as a composer, multi-instrumentalist and vocalist through four varied solo efforts, each one more challenging than the last and venturing into new territory of sound and reaching new heights of creativity.
Since her Phantasiai LP in 2021, Leila Abdul-Rauf has navigated a world transformed by pandemic emergence, ongoing global conflicts, the resurgence of widespread fascism, and ecological destruction. The new album Calls From A Seething Edge is a powerful, conceptual reflection of these immense global and personal upheavals, an album which questions whether an alternative to our destructive ways of operating is possible on a mass level or if they are an inescapable part of the human condition. Moving away from the ambient dreamscapes of her previous works, this album embraces a more epic and rhythmic approach, introducing elements of folk and industrial music. Each note is intentional, articulate, and exposed, creating a sonic journey that is both vast and intimate.
Calls From A Seething Edge sees Leila Abdul-Rauf handling all vocals, trumpet, synth, and a variety of programmed beats, drum tracks, choirs, and string quartets, self-recording and producing the album with assistance from Sammy Fielding (Ancient Owl Audio), who also masterfully mixed the album, ensuring each layer of synth, horn, drum, choir, and string quartet could be fully realized. The enigmatic photography gracing the album’s cover is by psychoanalyst, artist, and poet Terrance McLarnan, and the mastering was handled by Frederic Arbour at Cyclic Law Mastering.
Additionally, this ambitious project features contributions from several talented musicians, including Gregory C. Hagan (ex-Common Eider, King Eider, ex-Thomas Carnacki) who provides viola solos that backbone and bookend the album, acoustic guitar from Derrick Vella (Tomb Mold, Dream Unending), hand percussion and additional drum sampling by Sam Foster (ex-Saros, ex-Weakling), violin from Ryan Honaker (Ionophore, Betterthief), electric cello and upright bass from Vincent van Veen (Kali Ra), and acoustic upright bass by Ed Lloyd Grey.
The world is on edge. Embrace the void as Leila Abdul-Rauf’s Calls From A Seething Edge takes you to the seething edge of existence. This album teaches us to breathe without breath and live where there is no life. Wartime never began… never did it end.
Calls From A Seething Edge will be released on October 11th, on all digital platforms, on vinyl through Cyclic Law [100 copies on Marbled Black And White, 200 copies on Black, in a gatefold LP sleeve], and on tape via Syrup Moose [limited to 50 with a UV printed cassette], with both labels co-releasing the album on CD in a 6-panel digisleeve with matte lamination. Find preorders for all formats here“
And here’s some more….
3: Frankie and the Witch Fingers have just released their first material since that album that hit hard back there. Pn first listen Bonehead sounds like more of that locked on garaged flavoured new wave space rock the Los Angeles band deal in, that almost robotic menace laced with some righteous guitar that evolces into one of their trademark Stooges on a acid freekout things (and yes they have a trademark sound, you know it has t obe them as soon as you hear it and you dont want to be part of that herd, you know you want it. It sounds like they do live, there are a seriously seriously good live band – ORGAN THING: L.A’s Frankie And The Witch Fingers hit Hackney and Mid Summer with some seriously proper locked-on psyched-up garage rock and roll…
Bandcamp is where you find the new track
“Frankie and the Witch Fingers have marked their triumphant return with Bonehead, their first new offering since last year’s landmark LP Data Doom. The thundering, fuzzy rocker begins with a formidable opening groove that quickly drops into a distorted, double-time cacophony of harmonizing guitars and blistering drums.
“Bonehead is a primitive, buzzy thumper, raw and stripped down,” the band say. “In a world where it’s easy to add more, we had a blast cooking out the junk and keeping it potent and pure. We wanted to capture the chaotic energy of those unfiltered live moments. Recorded the basics in one take, warts and all.
Thrashing around with a crowd of free spirits reminds us we can push back against the parasitic noise trying to keep us controlled—this is a little slice of that in recorded form”
Bonehead is just the first taste of the band’s new work to be shared this year. Look out for more news on upcoming music, and catch the band live at their headline tour dates and festivals this fall.
4: Chat Pile – Awkwardly good slightly frantic Oklahoma City noise makers Chat Pile will follow their excellent 2022 full-length debut God’s Country with a new album Cool World this October, this is of course a good thing. Here’s a taste, one day you will thank us for all this, maybe not today but one day you will. Here’s their Bandcamp page and just beneath it some rather tasty footage from a show in London earlier this year (via Riff Underground)
5: Thurston Moore – I think I saw your shadow in the hall way, hey, Thurston has a new album, it came out last week, we should offer a nod in his direction, this is the daylight of our own time afterall and time is everything…
And while we’re here, some Hawkwind/hawklords footage and Robert Calvert fronting them while he as at his very best and there were very few better….
“This is the Brunel University, Uxbridge concert (24 November)1978 and it was professionally filmed by Charisma Records,but until 2023 only snippets have been aired on UK television. Then in 2023 there was the release of the 10 Disc Box set of ”Days Of The Underground (The Studio & Live Recordings 1977-1979)” whereby the video of these 2 tracks was also released on Blu Ray as part of the package. As the sound quality of this concert is far superior to this on Dics 8 (where this whole concert is found in far higher quality audio ) , all we need now is for someone with the tech ability to sync the audio from Disc 8 , audio tracks 1 (Automation) , 2 (25 Years) and 9 (Psi Power) to the above video footage, and upload it , and we’ll all enjoy the filmed footage even more”
And while we’re still here and talking of performance, the heavies from the big city, let’s do it please, Sha Na Na…
THE ORGAN 