I guess we just pick up like we nearly did last time and where we left off and who needs who? Still no time for editorials, repeat, replete, reheat, let the actual music do the actual walking and the actual talking. Exact same thing as last time once again, another five (or so) slices of music that have passed our way recently, five slices of music cherry picked for your delight and however you like to slice it and of course it was the price of bird seed and yes we did say all this last time (surely no one reads the intro when the music is waiting down there)
Five? There’s something rather compelling about five. Cross-pollination? Five more? Is there another way? A better way? A cure for pulling flying swordfish out of the clouds? Is there a rhyme? Is there a reason? What do reasons make? Five more? Cake oil? Snake oil? Bake the oil, everything must go somewhere and no, we never do and the proof of the pudding is in that proof reading and who reads editorials?
When we started this thing, oh never mind, it doesn’t matter why we started this damn thing, we never should have done and like we asked last time, who are the cake? We do really try to listen to everything that comes in, 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 music further down the page, five or so pieces of music that have come our way in the last few days and what’s Wordsworth? On these Five Pieces of Music pages you just the basic facts and links and those sounds (and visuals), that’s surely all you need from us on these Five pages we reguarly post?
Here we go, five more slices of music that have recently come our way, this time we start somewhere here in London…
1: Heckle Chamber – Heckle Chamber, so they say themselves, “play visceral, noisy and complex rock music”, we have mentioned the relatively new London band before, a new band full of names you might already know. Heckle Chamber are Jem Doulton, Roberto Sassi and Alex Ward. The trio came into being immediately following the dissolution of Doulton and Ward’s long standing (and rather excellent) duo Dead Days Beyond Help: “the members’ collective resumé includes Abstract Concrete, Pere Ubu, Thurston Moore Group, Snorkel, This Is Not This Heat, Au Pairs, Forebrace and quite few other bands we’ve celebrated around here over the past few years. Heckle Chamber have a very imaginatively titled EP on the way in early November, yep, November releases are landing now, there’s Christmas food in Sainsbury’s now (next to the hippy wigs), time and tide is flowing way too quickly and Heckle Chamber have a very imaginatively titled EP called Heckle Chamber EP on the way, you can hear an excellently awkward rather chewy rather spiky rather ajar first track from their debut EP right now on their Bandcamp page, it is as good as you’d expected from a band featuring Jem Doulton, Roberto Sassi and Alex Ward to be…
2: Sheherazaad will release her long-awaited debut full-length album Khudgarzi on November 20th via Erased Tapes, here’s a first rather delicious taste of things to come, you could, should you wish to, say “it’s a Bolly-goth pop hymn, following a vilified lover who ushers in cosmic darkness, transmuting heartbreak into something vast, mythical and the deepest pigment of darkness…” but then who needs words when you can listen to hers?
“Today, Sheherazaad announces her long-awaited debut full-length album Khudgarzi, due for release on November 20 with Erased Tapes. She also shares its haunting, anthemic first single, Andhera, which is accompanied by an intimate acapella version of the song, captured by French filmmaker Vincent Moon in his renowned La Blogothèque-fashion in Victoria Park, London.
Khudgarzi (English: Selfishness), is the anticipated follow-up to the American songstress-producer-theatre artist’s highly praised 2024 EP Qasr. The record encompasses a woman’s forensic deep dive into the space between duty and autonomy; sacrifice and survival. While composing, Sheherazaad became consumed by the figure of the so-called Khudgarz Aurat – the “Selfish Woman” – a label she had heard since childhood, levelled at women whose desire for agency was often met with suspicion or exile.
“Selfishness became a kind of silent prayer,” Sheherazaad recalls. “A portal into a haunted universe of anxieties and desires. I was made to fear a ‘selfish’ kind of woman – embracing her felt like stepping into a forbidden forest I’d been running away from.”
Written in the aftermath of a broken engagement, Khudgarzi carries the emotional debris of rage, guilt and grief, while imagining an alternative mythology populated by women who shapeshift between storytellers, courtesans, historians, survivors and witnesses. Across ten theatrical pieces, Sheherazaad refuses neat resolutions, instead creating an oral archive where feminine survival is neither sanctified nor condemned, but revealed as an ongoing ritual of performance, strategy and insurgency.
Today she shares Andhera (Darkness), an album centrepiece. The song emerges from the same shadowy universe first conjured by last year’s single Gulukara. It’s a Bolly-goth pop hymn, following a vilified lover who ushers in cosmic darkness, transmuting heartbreak into something vast, mythical and the deepest pigment of darkness.
Sheherazaad elaborates: “I wrote Andhera (Darkness) after I’d met the love of my life, where for some reason, romantic gloom and obscurity was still bleeding out of me. The song was largely composed in an ex’s coat closet as I tried to keep my volume down lest I interrupted what I felt was his “real” work outside. So I’d sing at the rock bottom of my vocal range, praising feminine darkness and the ancient murky cosmos. It became a frilly goth anthem, with eyeliner running down its cheeks, where the beloved is essentially just the colour black.”
3: Ida The Young – “Hello, I’d like to introduce you to Ida The Young, one of the most acclaimed emerging bands from the Czech Republic…” reads the press release, we don’t need an introduction though, we rather enjoyed their last album Tell Me When You Pass The Sun – Albums, albums, albums – Ida The Young, I’m Being Good, Sunflowers, Sterbus, Alto Aria, Kylver and…
“….the band will embark on an eight-date UK tour from 30th September to 9th October, with shows in London, Hereford, Bristol, Sheffield, Kingston upon Hull, Manchester, Cleethorpes and Derby (another so called UK tour that in reality is an English tour, we’ve covered that before). The tour comes alongside the release of Dragon Head, the first single and video from Ida The Young’s upcoming album Seeing In Reverse, due out on 28th October 2026 via label Day After Records. Moving between electronic textures, alternative rock and hypnotic repetition, the track offers the first glimpse of a new, more experimental direction for the band….”
The new Ida The Young track doesn’t really sound and more experimental that the anything of the previous album but then the previous album was rather beautiful, this is indeed an intriguing first taste of the next chapter. Find details of the new album via Bandcamp or here’s a Linktree thing.
4: Bunnies have just shared a rather fine live version of the Mazzy Star classic Fade Into You, Bunnies are always worth checking out, find a link to previous coverage and their most recent album under the video…
5: Finn Loxbo – Prior to the release of his new album, Lummernikt, Finn Loxbo shares a video to opening track Tumlare….
Finn: “Tumla means to tumble, so a tumbler is something/someone that is tumbling. Tumlare is also the Swedish name for porpoise, a small dolphin like whale….” More via Bandcamp…
“Lummer is the Swedish name for the now protected family of vascular plants (Clubmoss/Lycopodiaceae). Lummer grows slowly and the spores with which it reproduces can take 12—20 years to develop. These spores, known as Nikt in Swedish, were once ground into an extremely flammable light yellow “old woman’s gunpowder” that was used for early theatrical pyrotechnics. Volatile and explosive, Lummernikt requires careful handling.
There is something of the small scale dangerous in Finn Loxbo’s Lummernikt, too. A not-at-all-risk-free traversal at the limits of technique: building, blowing up and working through a band’s worth of harmonic scaffolding. Eight songs on a stage. Dramatic, breath-taking. At the same time the wild, flickering rush of tones spins up a centrifugal force that suspends a certain calm or sitting still at the music’s core….”
5 and a bit: Temple Ov Subsonic Youth – Something timeless from December 17th, 2024… Here’s the Bandcamp thing, do enjoy it…
And while we’re here some classic Grand Prix…
THE ORGAN 