Going belly up, guess it’s always a possibility.

Following the release of their latest acclaimed record 'You Never End' (Pitchfork, The Quietus, RA) Moin follow up with their latest EP - 'Belly Up'.

TRACK LISTING

1. SEE
2. I’M REALLY FLAGGING (OR I TRUSTED U)
3. YOU LEAVE ME BREATHLESS
4. X.U.Y.
5. I DON’T KNOW WHERE TO LOOK
6. THE DAY

'The Rising Wave' marks the debut collaboration between singer-songwriter Marlene Ribeiro (of psychedelic band GNOD) and electronic producer Shackleton under the name Light Space Modulator.

Ribeiro’s ethereal voice—part singing, part incantation—feels both distant and intimate, humming just behind the horizon. Her experimental soundscapes flow like a streamlined river, intertwining seamlessly with Shackleton’s deep, textural production and intricate percussion. Shackleton’s percussive production ebbs and swells, conjuring a hypnotic, trippedout atmosphere. At 'The Rising Wave’s core lies a sense of intention, a cleansing ritual designed to shift perception and inspire transformation.

TRACK LISTING

1. SECRETS KEPT
2. BURNING WITHIN
3. HER NAME
4. I DREAMED OF A LOVER
5. ONDA / DO YOU BELIEVE?
6. THESE THINGS
7. THE LONG BURIED HOPE
8. THE LAST TIME

For their second album 'The Foel Tower', Quade holed up in an old stone barn in the cradle of a Welsh mountain valley. The valley was a stark and windswept backdrop with little daylight, as the band would huddle around crackling fires each evening. “There was very much a feeling of being on the complete fringes of society,” the band says. “The last vestiges of settlement before the unrelenting barren moors that loomed over us.” It was an environment that would shape the band – a Bristol four-piece made up of Barney Matthews, Leo Fini, Matt Griffiths and Tom Connolly – and the record they have made. It’s an album that is as dreamy as it is melancholic, and as quiet and tender as it is forceful and potent – gliding across genres like winds blowing over those wide-spanning Welsh hills – to arrive at something the band half-jokingly, yet somewhat accurately, describe as “doomer sad boy, ambientdub, folk, experimental post-rock.” Quade is a band but it’s also a very close-knit group of friends since childhood who use this musical vehicle for interpersonal explorations and connections. “We’ve individually experienced a lot of difficulty over the last several years and Quade has represented a space to shelter from these,” the band says. “This means we often communicate extensively with each other about the issues affecting us individually and collectively. These conversations and concerns are central to The Foel Tower.”

In many ways, the making of this record – or any Quade record – goes way deeper than the simple writing, construction and recording of music. It is a profoundly deep and meaningful experience. “A key theme of the album relates to why we connect with specific places in the way that we do,” the group says. “We often remove ourselves to isolated valleys, sheltered from some of the painful personal struggles that we have experienced as a band. These become spaces in which we collectively purge ourselves of some of these difficulties, hoping to make Quade a physical and emotional place of solace. This album celebrates these places that we’ve been able to retreat to and recuperate.” It is a deep, dense record that is stuffed with musical, cinematic and literary influences – from Ursula La Guin and Cormac MacCarthy through to RS Thomas and Yeats – but despite the heavy, introspective and anxious nature of some of the material, it is also a record that is remarkably deft, agile and considered. Made with producer Jack Ogborne and mixer Larry ‘Bruce’ McCarthy, there is a pleasing duality to the final sound of the record. One that feels fragile and intimate but also powerful and forceful, as introspective as it is expansive, and a record that is as detailed and textured as it is wide open and spacious.

The album title also pays homage to the place that shaped it so greatly. Within this remote Welsh valley stands the Foel Tower, a stone structure filled with valves and cylinders that can raise and lower the level of the reservoir to draw off water. Which it can then send as far as 70 miles to Birmingham. However, in the late 1800s this land was occupied by local farmers and families in the hundreds until the British Government acquired the land, cleared the valleys, and promptly displaced them in order to begin serving the vastly expanding industrial English city. The band dug into the history and politics of this and wove it into the themes they were already thinking about, using what the Foel Tower stands for as something of a contemporary metaphor. “This tension was something that we wanted to explore without the haughty judgement of our more metropolitan lifestyles,” they say. “And to explore how this specifically relates to ourselves: how can we envisage a genuinely ecological future for ourselves – one that is accessible, affordable and in harmony with endangered rural practices.”

What makes 'The Foel Tower' such an incredible record is that it feels born of a time, place and situation that only existed in that very moment. It’s a snapshot of those 10 days spent in rural Wales and all the feelings and anxieties the band were experiencing at that specific time, magically caught on tape. “The album very much feels tied to this valley for us and the conversations and experiences we shared there,” they say. “It brings up a great deal of poignancy for us, an emblem of some fleeting respite from the strains we all have to experience. But there’s also deep sadness knowing how transient these moments are – in fact, there’s just a great deal of sadness in this album. But it’s also a record that while personal, resigned, and emotionally burdened, is ultimately hopeful.”

TRACK LISTING

1. BECKETT
2. SEE UNIT
3. BYLAW 7.1
4. NANNERTH GANOL
5. CANADA GEESE
6. BLACK KITES

Formed in Bristol, 4-piece LICE have become one of UK experimental rock’s most inventive and ambitious outliers. Their second album ‘Third Time At The Beach’ – a three-part epic exploring our struggle to better understand the world around us – arrives via AD 93. Darting between minimalism, rock, techno and more, it sends us hurtling us through time and space: featuring a cast of astronauts, cavemen and dinosaurs.

This follows LICE’s internationally acclaimed debut album ‘WASTELAND: What Ails Our People Is Clear’ (2021). Praised as “exciting, alive, packed with musical ideas” by Financial Times and “a welcome lease of life for British avant-rock that plays with expectation at every turn” by CRACK, it also gained radio support across BBC 6Music, BBC Radio 1 and KEXP. The album led LICE to perform at major festivals including Reading & Leeds, Green Man and End Of The Road, embark on an extensive EU tour supporting Sleaford Mods, and tour across the UK & EU.

‘Third Time At The Beach’’s concept is expressed through three movements. The first (‘Unscrewed’, ‘White Tubes’, ‘Red Fibres’) presents the child being introduced to the world, hammered into shape through prevailing culture, and realising they have reached adulthood with a blinkered understanding of the world. The second (‘To The Basket’, ‘Wrapped In A Sheet’, ‘Scenes From The Desert’, ‘Mown In Circles’) is a disorientating, alien sequence: reevaluating fundamental concepts including money, time, nationhood and language. In the third (‘Fatigued, Confused’, ‘Third Time At The Beach’, ‘The Dance’), the individual embraces these new ideas – granting them a changed understanding of the world, and more agency in the path they take through it.

Everything is always changing in ‘Third Time At The Beach’. The album shifts from lush piano balladry to crushing industrial, and from swampy avant-garde compositions to triumphant rock freakouts. Employing vocal manipulation and field recordings, as well as cutting together studio recordings and home demos, the band produces a spatially elastic, collage-like effect. The album, like the ideas being reached within it, presents a work-in-progress. Lyrically, the record employs a scattershot style to present the experience of learning (or ‘unlearning’). The listener visits ancient civilisations, the Industrial Revolution, outer space and the land of the dinosaurs: encountering mediaeval farmers, silver miners, cavemen, Napoleon and Satan.

Speaking on the record, the band say: “This album’s about trying to understand the world and everything in it: history, science and the way we explain it all to each other. It’s a celebration of feeling confused or intimidated by the processes that shape our lives.”

Of the album’s muscular, agitated lead single ‘Red Fibres’, LICE explain: “This song is about realising you’ve reached adulthood with a blinkered understanding of the world, and feeling confused and frustrated. After visiting some key moments in the history of language, science and the human eye, we arrive at a campsite: where two shipwreck survivors are about to have a fight.”

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: The UK has a bit of a burgeoning avant-rock scene at the moment, and Lice are (for me) the most immediately appealing of the whole bunch. We get the weird noises and syncopated industrial scree of Black Midi or the hardcore thump of Fat Dog, but with a keen sense of melody and most importantly, songs that flow beautifully, weirdness or no.

TRACK LISTING

Side A:
A1. Unscrewed
A2. White Tubes
A3. Red Fibres
A4. To The Basket
A5. Wrapped In A Sheet

Side B:
B1. Scenes From The Desert
B2. Mown In Circles
B3. Fatigued, Confused
B4. Third Time At The Beach
B5. The Dance

‘You Never End’ is the third album from Moin, a London trio made up of Joe Andrews and Tom Halstead (Raime / Blackest Ever Black) as well as long time collaborator and percussionist visionary Valentina Magaletti. Its title alone expresses the teetering and shifting nature of both the album and band. This record marks the Moin’s shift into a new phase with vocal collaborations across the album from Olan Monk, james K, Coby Sey and Sophia Al-Maria.

The album’s collaborators all have voices that are alluring in their own right whilst hard to pin down: from james K’s ethereal, reverb drenched vocals, Coby Sey’s words that bounce and echo across London’s concrete streets and Olan Monk’s emotive songwriting, while artist Sophie Al-Maria’s voice and thoughts are known to stretch across her multidisciplinary practice as an artist, filmmaker and writer. The unique mystique of each collaborator is maintained throughout the record while simultaneously opening Moin up to new possibilities, in a gentle shifting alchemy.

Continuing their enigmatic re-configuring of the traditional band, Moin use a mix of conventional and unique production and compositional techniques. Subtly re-framing the current conversation about what band in 2024 needs to be, Moin walk the line between what's reassuringly familiar and what's unsettling and inquisitive. ‘You Never End’ is a more sensitive record in sentiment, it re-contextualises grunge, shoegaze and indie rock with a weirdly comforting melancholy while still sounding direct and alive.

Showing Moin at their most accessible, the vocal collaborations bring the most articulate moments and lucid emotion while still remaining uniquely within Moin's established world. Alongside this, the record fine tunes the elements of electronic production that have always been a feature of the band's unique sound in a deeply subtle way. Elements are simpler and more direct, offering robust functional support as well as textural and emotional resonance. Together they show the potential for both practices to intertwine.

‘You Never End’ is both produced and mixed by Tom and Joe, demonstrating the extended range of control the pair have over the band's sound, and their ability to truly hold together Moin’s intricate world.

STAFF COMMENTS

Liam says: This new one from Moin is an absolute must! Bursting with proper interesting mathy and angular textures, the atmosphere on this thing is mega! For fans of Slint, Sonic Youth or anything slowcore/no-wavey, you need to get all over this!

TRACK LISTING

Side A
A1. Guess It's Wrecked Feat. Olan Monk
A2. Cubby
A3. Family Way Feat. Sophia Al-Maria
A4. What If You Didn't Need A Reason Feat. James K
A5. Lift You Feat. Sophia Al-Maria
A6. It's Messy Coping

Side B
B1. We Know What Gives Feat. Coby Sey
B2. C’Mon Dive
B3. Anything But Sopo
B4. Happy In The Wrong Way
B5. Just Married

‘Paste’ is the second album by Moin, released on the October 2022 via AD 93.

The follow up to their well-received debut album ‘Moot!’, the record draws influences from alternative guitar music in its many forms, using electronic manipulations and sampling techniques to redefine it's context, not settling on any one style but moving through them in search of new connections.

By exploring these relationships, Moin delivers another collage of the known and unknown, punctuated by words that are just out of reach.

TRACK LISTING

A1. Foot Wrong
A2. Melon
A3. Yep Yep
A4. Forgetting Is Like Syrup
A5. In A Tizzy
B1. Knuckle
B2. Hung Up
B3. Life Choices
B4. Sink - Moin

Moin is a three-piece group consisting of Joe Andrews and Tom Halstead of Raime alongside longtime collaborator Valentina Magaletti of Tomaga, Shit & Shine & CZN. Released on AD93, Moot marks a creative left turn for the label and a pared-down studio approach for the artists involved. According to Moin, “the record was made as an experiment really, it felt like the right time to play on the fringes of this kind of music. The priority was to be direct at first and then change the edges perhaps. Make something to experience rather than something as a spectacle.”

Made using traditional live recording techniques with some sparingly applied sampling and post-processing in the studio afterwards, it’s a heady interpretation of the mist between post-punk, hardcore and down-tuned US stoner rock. There’s flashes of Slint in the hollow locked in percussion and ominous bass interludes, there's elements of the various influential projects of Justin Broadrick, Steve Albini or even Kevin Shields with the warm distortion across tracks like 'It's Never Goodbye' and the rhythmic complexity in the tightly wound, menacing time signatures.

A no-frills rediscovery of the music which informed their youth, Moot! is the culmination of 3 visionaries stripping things back to the essential elements. A visceral and timeless experience that's highly recommended.

TRACK LISTING

A1. No To Gods, No To Sunsets
A2. Crappy Dreams Count
A3. Don'T Make Me Wait
A4. Right Is Alright, Wrong Is To Belong
B1. Lungs
B2. I Can'T Help But Melt
B3. An Utter Stink
B4. It'S Never Goodbye