Shall we write a new editorial? Oh the endless demand and who needs a damn editorial? No time for editorials, 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, let me circle around one more time and give you the heads up on that one..

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 in London with Gina…

1: Gina Birch – Not sure we’re ready for snow or Christmas lights and the rest of it yet but this is Gina Birch and she is singing a Yoko Ono song and well, find it on Bandcamp. And she’s used her rather powerful Yoko painting seen in her recent solo art exhibition for the cover artwork, well her show from this time last year – ORGAN THING: Gina Birch’s No One’s Little Girl at Gallery 46, Whitechapel, East London, a show of paintings that’s just so positively more of everything, just more…

2: Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs – Says here on this bit of electronic paper in the the inbox that Pigs, Pigs, Pigs, Pigs, Pigs, Pigs, Pigs “are back with the first taste of new material since February 2023’s Land of Sleeper album release. The band bludgeon back with the single, Detroit – a huge slab of striking noise rock about a hideous man with even worse behaviours”.

Singer, Matt Baty says of the track “Detroit reflects on the worst manifestations of male jealousy and resentment, and the ways in which a lack of accountability can lead to deflecting responsibility in exchange for blaming external forces like fate or God for perceived injustice”.

Proceeds generated by this track will be donated by the band to domestic abuse charities ahead of the tour, find the track here or here on Bandcamp. Tour dates under the video

The UK tour will take in some of the finest venues including Bristol’s SWX, Leeds’ Brudenell Social Club, Manchester’s New Century Hall and KOKO in Camden. There are European dates in May

UK 2025 Tour Dates:
3 April – Brighton, CHALK
4 April – London, KOKO
5 April –  Bristol, SWX
7 April – Nottingham, Rescue Rooms
8 April – Birmingham, The Castle & Falcon
9 April – Birkenhead, Future Yard
11 Apr – Manchester, New Century Hall
12 April – Leeds, Brudenell Social Club
15 April – Edinburgh, La Belle Angèle
16 April – Glasgow, St Luke’s

3: Decius – Birth Of A Smirk is taken from Decius’ second album, Decius Vol. II (Splendour & Obedience). The album is to be released via the Leaf Label on 31st January 2025 and we wouldn’t have shared it here if we didn’t think it to be rather good, another good video as well, which we shall take as another excuse or a cue to share the excellent video for a previous taste of the new album Walking in The Heat again. before that, here’s the hype and press release words, we haen’t got time to write our own today, there’s art to be made

“It’s time for another taste of Decius Vol. II (Splendour & Obedience). ‘Birth Of A Smirk’ is the second track taken from the second full-length Decius album, following on from ‘Walking In The Heat’. If you’re into ballet, and there’s every chance you are if Decius are your thing, it’s well worth checking out the video.

“There’s usually a moment of rupture in life, where we fall short of even our lowest standards in lieu of some desperate pleasure – a rubicon of sensuality beyond which lies nothing but endless, bitter reckoning. This song is about such moments of personal fracture… HAIL.” Meat Divine aka L. Saoudi

Their show at Peckham Audio on November 23^rd is long sold out, but Decius have just announced a headline show at Fabric on February 20^th.

“My mate Rob says he can no longer make love without first sticking Vol. I on the stereo. A lot of the lads down Berghain have been complaining of a similar problem since we played there. Once you’ve had Vol. I, you need Vol. II. With Vol. II, we hope to further inspire and extend this kind of desperate dependence in our acolytes.”  Meat Divine aka L. Saoudi

A supergroup of sorts – Fat White Family’s Lias Saoudi, Trashmouth Records’ Luke and Liam May, and Quinn Whalley of Paranoid London and Warmduscher – Decius have travelled the earth liberating people from banality since the release of Decius Vol. I. They’ve revealed to all those they’ve encountered just what was missing in their lives: pump without borders, pump without reason – absolute pump.

Decius live sets at Berghain’s 19th birthday celebrations, Block 9’s NYC Downlow at Glastonbury and Opium Club in Vilnius have set pulses racing, and they count the likes of Dixon, 2manydjs, Honey Dijon, Mochakk, Or:La, Iggy Pop and Depeche Mode as fans.

Now they offer up Decius Vol. II (Splendour & Obedience). It throbs with an almost impossible sense of potential, and expands on the lexicon of molten desire. The sound has moved into new territories, with tastes of house, disco and techno, all with an underlying base note of acid on tracks such as the slippery night cruise intensity of ‘Birth of A Smirk’, where Colonel Abrams gets his nipples tortured. ‘Queen of 14th St’ is all watersports and Cybotron force from Detroit via Deptford. First single ‘Walking In The Heat’ struts like a sunburnt and horny Kraftwerk, while ‘Ghent’ is purest uncut ’88 acid. Vol. II is the art of seduction in damp rooms painted black. Keep hydrated from whatever source is available. Be your own pleasure centre. Vol. II is veritable selection box of booty bumps and illegal highs made at night for the night and beyond. This is music that takes pride in its walk of shame.

New believers queue up to take part in the bacchanal disco revelation. Some who recalled what it was like to lose their mind, body and soul to a music that tugged away at them in the shadows half a lifetime ago, alongside a host of younger fauns, drawn into a web of joyous degradation, of enchantment via erotic dissonance. A post-Covid set that want connection come what may, with Saoudi acting as both Pied Piper and willing self-sacrifice, guiding them through the temptations they’d previously been sheltered from.     

“There have been moments on stage when the division between all things ceases,” Lias explains. “When the only element binding anything together is pure, unadulterated, fanatical passion. It’s at moments like these you need to reach for your butterfly net to try and harvest the magic for later.”

Decius Vol. II has them, as Liam puts it, “Further entrenched in delusions of conquest and grandeur.” Fittingly for a turn named after a Roman emperor, the last days of that empire filled with lust, excess and a farewell to order and normality, Decius’ gladiatorial efforts are the 21st century’s equivalent. Literally fiddling with their knobs while the Earth burns and slides into dystopia.  

For those acolytes, then, good news – adventure and vinegar strokes await. And for all those still yet to stick their tongue out and taste Decius, Vol. II glows menacingly and enticingly, haunting their dreams and ready to engulf.

Decius Vol. II is the magick and passion of an electronic body music with unexplained rashes and sore orifices. It’s all there for the taking. Ultimately Decius love you. They know what you want. And you know that you want it too.

“You ever see that show Civilisation with Kenneth Clarke? It details the arc of western civilisation from the ancient world onwards, up until the ‘60s when the show was made. For me, this has been the principal source of inspiration. The fine grain of suffering that lurks behind every civilised thing. Hence the album’s subtitle Splendour & Obedience.” Meat Divine on Decius Vol. II”

4: Kathryn Mohr – the Oakland-based artist has just released a rather refreshing (and dedicatedly DIY) first taste of her new album. “Her ruminative work, the result of many hours of walking, intricate song writing and field recording, confronts the dissonant impulses of humanity towards violence and tenderness” or so we’re told 

Her new album Waiting Room– out January 24 on The Flenser– was written and self-recorded over the course of a month in eastern Iceland, within the walls of a disused fish factory surrounded by remote nature. Mohr spent hours immersed in the writing and recording of this album in a windowless concrete room lit with a string of multicolored light bulbs (which made their way into the album art), taking breaks to wander the factory or disappear up the shoreline—field recorder in hand. What came out of those recording hours are songs inspired by horror as extravagant as limb amputation by a faulty elevator and lyrics as maze-like and misguided as the torturous love and fears they depict.

Mohr comments, “Music takes me out of my body, immerses me in another world the way a film does. I begin and end in very different emotional states, doors open where there were no doors before– that is what I experienced making this record. If this inner movement is contagious, spreads to those who listen, then this was a record worth creating.”

Today, the album’s first single Driven has been shared, here it is. More here

5: Divorce – There’s something very charming about Divorce, we probably have a press release telling us why someone has sent us this this week, I can’t find it right now, they probably have something new on the way, just enjoy the music, we’ll tell you more later when we find it…

6: Yachts first ever promo video, just 43 years after the band split up. A promo for A Fool Like You (demo version, 1980), using band and memorabilia pics from way-back-when, mostly from the lofts of band members Henry Priestman and Martin Watson. Taken from the 2024 Yachts album Missing in Action – The Lost Tapes 1980/81. There’s something rather inviting, soemthing rather good about this raw honest demo…

7: Peter Hammill – Yes, it is a little naughty to share audience-filmed bootleg material but just how beautiful are these pieces from this week and Peter Hammill’s current Italian tour, just how gracefully beautiful. If you don’t know who Peter is, then we have featured him on these pages many times. as well as probably the finest band ever, his songs could never be out of date, out of stock, out of use, here’s a bit about his most recent release… – ORGAN THING: Peter Hammill’s remixed reissued Incoherence explored. It is classic Hammill both lyrically and musically, I want to say typical but has he ever done anything like a ‘typical’ album? Probably not…

If you really don’t know who Peter Hammill is then this is as good a place to start as anywhere, but then may Mr X would have you start somewhere else? There is so so much….

Here’s more Peter…