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High Vis

Guided Tour

    Since first forming in 2016, London’s High Vis have steadily polished their palette of progressive hardcore with shades of post-punk, Brit pop, neo-psychedelia, and even Madchester groove, mapping a middle ground between hooks and fury, melodies and mosh pits. Singer Graham Sayle describes their third album 'Guided Tour' as an axis of competing forces: “It’s trying to be a hopeful record, while also being incensed.” Rounded out by drummer Edward 'Ski' Harper, bassist Jack Muncaster, and guitarists Martin MacNamara and Rob Hammaren, the band’s deep roots in the UK and Irish DIY hardcore scenes have kept them grounded but growing, inspired equally  by restlessness and righteous anger. As Sayle puts it, "Everyone’s scratching, everyone’s working all the time, and their idea of relaxing is just getting fucked and avoiding reality. This album is an escape from that."

    From its opening seconds of a cab door slamming, a car revving away, and a baggy rhythm swinging to life, 'Guided Tour' sounds like a band reaching for new heights, bristling with energy. Recorded across a few weeks at Holy Mountain Studios in London with producer Jonah Falco and engineer Stanley Gravett, the results feel dynamic and dialed-in, like anthems burned into sense memory through sweat and repetition. Harper cuts to the chase: "We had a clear idea going in, every moment got used. Maybe when we’re 60 we can sit around and get a drum sound right, but for now it’s about getting things done."

    The album’s 11 songs span the spectrum of contemporary guitar music, sharpened by experience, camaraderie, and societal frustrations. From swaggering street punk ('Drop Me Out', 'Mob DLA') to jangling indie sneer ('Worth The Wait', 'Deserve It') to heavy alt ('Feeling Bless', 'Fill The Gap') to shoegazey spoken word ('Untethered'), the group’s chemistry transmutes any style to their unique intensity. Sayle champions this evolving fusion: "For years coming from hardcore, we had pretty clear boundaries – other scenes were separate worlds. Now things are getting more blended, drawing from different places."

    Nowhere is this sentiment flexed more boldly than on 'Mind’s A Lie', a dance-punk anthem inspired by Harper’s love of house, garage, and pirate radio. Stabs of sampled female vocals (by celebrated South London singer and DJ Ell Murphy) build into a razor wire rhythm of low-slung bass, tense drums, and sparkling guitar before Sayle’s staunch voice starts barking harsh truths ("Face to face with all I’ve known / I can’t call these thoughts my own"). After a sudden breakdown, the track regroups and takes off, cruising into the horizon in a haze of chiming guitars and Murphy’s ascendant voice, from the streets to somewhere beyond.


    STAFF COMMENTS

    Barry says: A skilful dance through psychedelic indie, shoegaze and garage rock that is as exciting as it is raucous. Brimming with moments of hands-in-the-air melodicism and unfathomably gigantic choruses, driven and most of all, a riveting listen.

    TRACK LISTING

    1. Guided Tour
    2. Drop Me Out
    3. Worth The Wait
    4. Feeling Bless
    5. Fill The Gap
    6. Farringdon
    7. Mob DLA
    8. Untethered
    9. Deserve It
    10. Mind's A Lie
    11. Gone Forever

    Kite

    Losing / Glassy Eyes

      Swedish synth-pop phenomenon Kite’s second 7 inch since signing with Dais in 2023 finds the duo of Nicklas Stenemo and Christian Hutchinson Berg swinging for new heights of romantic desolation and baroque grandeur. They describe the A Side, “Losing,” as a “six-minute empty call for emotional response.” Stately piano and anguished voice reverberate in a vaulted hall, before gradually building into a widescreen anthem of synths, drums, and soaring vocals decrying the steady deadening of life and love: “It’s deadly quiet in your old heart / Are you there? / I see dark skies on the rise / And daylight shows no remorse / And I realize it is my life / But It’s losing all meaning.” Swedish dark music icons Anna von Hausswolff and Henric de la Cour join the chorus as the song cascades towards an ominous horizon.

      The B Side, “Glassy Eyes,” showcases Kite’s mastery of somber, sweeping balladry. Hushed church organ elevates and anchors Stenemo’s devastated confessional, swaying between resilience and defeat. The band describes the song as a reckoning with “the privileged and existential anxiety of drifting through life dispassionately,” contrasted with “the yearning to connect profoundly with

      others and a desire for experiences that stir the soul before facing one’s final moments.” Like a hymn, the emotion thickens as it deepens, approaching both darkness and divinity: “Deep as I go, nothing to find / Oh catatonia, I won’t cry / Nothing can grow, everything dies / Behind my glassy eyes.”

      TRACK LISTING

      A SIDE:
      Losing (feat. Anna Von Hausswolff & Henric De La Cour)

      B SIDE:
      Glassy Eyes

      Coil

      Moon's Milk - 2024 Reissue

        First compiled as a double CD in 2002, Moon’s Milk (in Four Phases) is a suite of four EPs that Coil released seasonally via their in-house Eskaton imprint across 1998. The line-up for these sessions were John Balance, Peter "Sleazy" Christopherson, Drew McDowall, and William Breeze. Recorded primarily at their home studio in Chiswick, London on the eve of a permanent relocation to the small seaside town of Weston-Super-Mare, the collection has long loomed as a pivotal and pinnacle work in the group's discography, but has never been officially reissued, or repressed on vinyl. Time has only ripened its tapestry of regal strangeness.

        Arranged sequentially in tribute to the equinoxes and solstices, Moon's Milk captures Coil at a revelatory crossroads, leaning deeper into improvisation, spontaneity, and sound design. "Moon's Milk or Under an Unquiet Skull" initiates the proceedings on Spring Equinox, a two-part netherworld organ séance woven from vocal drones, cathedral keys, seasick strings, and opiated undertow. From there, Summer Solstice skews lighter but no less incantational, with Balance embracing his voice-as-instrument across lucid dream torch songs ("Bee Stings"), purgatorial spoken word ("Glowworms/Waveforms"), sultry chamber pieces ("Summer Substructures"), and falsetto ravings ("A Warning From The Sun (For Fritz)").

        Autumn Equinox exudes more of a pensive and twilit mood, from the Rose McDowall-sung folk ballad "Rosa Decidua" ("I hear your voice sing near to me / I've put away the poisoned chalice (for now) / And lie down amongst the flowerbeds") to hall-of-lords hallucination "The Auto-Asphyxiating Hierophant” to the liminal string-plucked classic "Amethyst Deceivers," featuring excellent alien guitar by Breeze layered with Balance’s oft-quoted couplet: "Pay your respects to the vultures / For they are your future."

        The album’s final chapter, Winter Solstice, is its most swooning, remote, and ceremonial. Opener "A White Rainbow" stirs strings, layered choral vocals, and shivering rhythm into an imploding burial hymn. "North" oscillates bleakly, a ghost in the machine murmuring opaque prophecy ("This black dog has no owner / This black dog has no odour"), while "Magnetic North" is its inverse, a guided meditation of gently flickering software and surreal chakra poetics ("Red rose filling the skull / Yellow cube in the lower pelvis / Silver moon crescent below the navel"). The suite fades to grey with a traditional English carol ("Christmas Is Now Drawing Near"), rendered like an executioner's song by Rose McDowall’s doomed, beautiful voice.

        The Dais box set includes the entirety of the rare Moon's Milk Bonus Disc CD-R / 2019 Threshold Archives Copal CD, which includes three collaborations with Thighpaulsandra. This material is as rich and intoxicating as the previous four phases, ranging from electro-acoustic singing bowl rituals ("Copal") to dissonant electronic recitations of visionary Angus MacLise poetry ("The Coppice Meat") to ominous classical melancholia ("Bankside"). Once again, Coil confirm the vastness of their confounding, infinite alchemy, explored and refined across decades of experimentation – both sonic and bodily. From postindustrial to post-everything, theirs is an art untethered, in the wilds of its own design.


        TRACK LISTING

        LP 1 - SIDE A:
        Moon's Milk Or Under An Unquiet
        Skull (Part 1)
        Moon's Milk Or Under An Unquiet
        Skull (Part 2)
        Bee Stings

        LP 1 - SIDE B:
        Glowworms / Waveforms
        Summer Substructures
        A Warning From The Sun (For Fritz)

        LP 2 - SIDE C:
        Regel
        Rosa Decidua
        Switches
        The Auto-Asphyxiating Hierophant
        Amethyst Deceivers

        LP 2 - SIDE D:
        A White Rainbow
        North
        Magnetic North
        Christmas Is Now Drawing Near

        LP 3 - SIDE E:
        Copal
        Bankside

        LP 3 - SIDE F:
        The Coppice Meat
        Ü Pel (Incense Offering)

        KITE

        Don’t Take The Light Away / Remember Me.

          Since founding Swedish synthpop duo KITE in 2008, singer Nicklas Stenemo and keyboardist Christian Hutchinson Berg’s brooding fusion of cinematic electronics and anthemic pop has steadily elevated into a spectacle of passion, atmosphere, and communion. Their debut double-A vinyl single for Dais Records, Don't take the light away / Remember me captures KITE at their most urgent, thrilling and apocalyptic.

          "Don't take the light away" is a song about “the war between energies, ”with singer Stenemo’s wounded croon leading a rising tide of stabbing strings, pulsing percussion, and looming bass orchestrated by keyboardist Hutchinson Berg, surging to a mass-chanted chorus both desperate and triumphant (“dance, let them dance into me / people versus people can’t see / hands should be holding hands”). "Remember me" was written following the band's 2017 US tour, capturing the intense feelings of burnout and exhaustion. "Remember me, Won't you remember me, Promise you'll remember me.

          "Words only tell half of the story; smoke spills across the stage, and the melodies become a battle cry. Our worst fears eventually boil over, turning into hope and resilience. Like the best of KITE’s music, "Don't take the light away" and "Remember me" fuse theater and catharsis into anthems of universal yearning, born of “the struggle to keep a flickering candle lit in a very dark space.”

          TRACK LISTING

          1. Don't Take The Light Away
          2. Remember Me

          Drab Majesty

          An Object In Motion

            The latest EP from Drab Majesty marks the start of a stirring new chapter in the band’s majestic legacy. Written during a 2021 retreat to the remote coastal Oregon town of Yachats, Deb Demureleaned into the neo-psychedelic resonance of a uniquely bowl-shaped 12-string Ovation acoustic/electric guitar. After early morning hikes in the rain, Deb would record ambient guitar experiments the rest of the day, tapping into “flow states,” letting the sound lead the way. These sessions were then refined or recreated, and later elevated further with key collaborations by Rachel Goswell(Slowdive), Justin Meldal-Johnson(Beck, M83, Air), and Ben Greenberg (Uniform, Circular Ruin Studio). An Object In Motionis true to its title, capturing the chrysalis moment of an artist evolving, reborn and untethered, silhouetted against an open horizon.

            “Cape Perpetua” kicks off the collection’s divergent palette: sparkling acoustic finger-picking refracted through delay, equal parts raga and reverie. Melodies and moods congeal and dissipate, at the threshold of rustic American primitivism, brooding neo-folk, and pastoral melancholia. “The Skin And The Glove” deploys jangle to different effect –baggy, soaring, grey-skied kaleidoscopic pop in the spirit of Stone Roses, Primal Scream, and The Glove. Rachel Goswell lends her iconic freefall voice to The Cure-esque ballad, “Vanity,” infusing poetic gravity to the doomed refrain: “If the valve breaks / then the earth quakes / and history finds a way / to put you in your place.”

            “Yield To Force”, the closing track of the EP, may be the most anomalous offering of the set. A 15-minute instrumental odyssey of cyclical strings, ominous slide guitar, and simmering synthesizer, the piece sways and spirals like a long zoom into distant storm clouds. Demure finesses the guitar with a restless but regal grandeur, unfolding a panorama of peaks, shadows, and plateaus. It’s music both intuitive and prophetic, tracing the slow swing of pendulums across an endless plain. Taken as a whole, An Object In Motionpresents a showcase of potential futures from Drab’s evolving domain, their sound poised to bloom at the precipice of transformation.

            TRACK LISTING

            1. Vanity (feat. Rachel Goswell)
            2. Cape Perpetua
            3. The Skin And The Glove
            4. Yield To Force 

            William S. Burroughs

            Nothing Here Now But The Recordings - 2023 Reissue

              In 1980, Genesis P-Orridge and Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson of (then-)Throbbing Gristle travelled to New York City to meet up at the fortified apartment, known as The Bunker, of famed beat writer and cultural pioneer William S. Burroughs and his executor James Grauerholz. Genesis and Sleazy started the daunting task of compiling the experimental sound works of Burroughs, which, up until that point, had never been widely heard.

              During those visits, Burroughs would play back his tape recorder experiments featuring his spoken word “cut-ups”, collaged field recordings from his travels and his flirtations with EVP recording techniques, pioneered by Latvian intellectual Konstantins Raudive. Over the following year, P-Orridge, Christopherson and Grauerholz spent countless hours compiling various edits, each collection showcasing Burroughs sensitive ear and experimental prowess for audio anomaly within technical limitations. In early 1981, Burroughs had relocated to Lawrence, KS to escape the violence and manias of New York City life. There, P-Orridge and Christopherson put the finishing touches on the record that would be known as Nothing Here Now but the Recordings.

              Released in Spring 1981, the album would end up as the final release on Industrial Records, brought about by the dissolution of Throbbing Gristle. It was quietly out of print until 1998, when John Giorno and the Giorno Poetry Systems included the album on a retrospective CD box set, which compiled the majority of Burroughs's seminal recordings. In 2015, Dais Records worked closely with the Estate of William S. Burroughs to finally re-release, for the first time in 36 years, a proper vinyl reissue of William S. Burroughs Nothing Here Now but the Recordings to celebrate the centennial anniversary of William S. Burroughs.

              TRACK LISTING

              Side A:
              1. Captain Clark Welcomes You Aboard
              2. The Saints Go Marching Through All The Popular Tunes
              3. Summer Will
              4. Outside The Pier Prowed Like Electric Turtles
              5. The Total Taste Is Here - News Cut-up
              6. Choral Section, Backwards
              7. We See The Future Through The Binoculars Of The People
              8. Just Checking Your Summer Recordings

              Side B:
              1. Creepy Letter - Cut-up At The Beat Hotel In Paris
              2. Inching - "Is This Machine Recording?
              3. Handkerchief Masks - News Cut- Up
              4. Word Falling – Photo Falling
              5. Throat Microphone Experiment
              6. It’s About Time To Identify Open Area
              5. Last Words Of Hassan Sabbah

              William S. Burroughs

              Break Through In Grey Room - 2023 Reissue

                Inspired by the original Industrial Records release of William S. Burroughs’s Nothing Here Now but the Recordings, Belgian record label Sub Rosa worked with Burroughs to release another album: Break Through In Grey Room. Originally compiled in 1986 by producer Bill Rich, the album features Burroughs's experimental recordings from 1961 to 1976, featuring field recordings by Burroughs of the Master Musicians of Jajouka, experimental collaborations with mathematician Ian Sommerville and painter/cut-up originator Brion Gysin.

                Break Through In Grey Room documents William S. Burroughs during his time in Europe and England, working with Ian Sommerville on recording with the 'cut-up' technique. Sommerville's technical background enabled him to contribute to the early development of sound-and-light shows in London, leading to work with gear provided by Paul McCartney in an apartment owned by Ringo Starr. Experimental in nature, the record is as much an exhibition of studio and composition technique as it is a document of underground culture at that time.

                TRACK LISTING

                Side A:
                1. K-9 Was In Combat With The Alien Mind-screens
                2. Origin And Theory Of The Tape Cut- Ups
                3. Recalling All Active Agents
                4. Silver Smoke Of Dreams

                Side B:
                1. Junky Relations
                2. Joujouka, Pt. 1
                3. Curse Go Back
                4. Present Time Exercises
                5. Joujouka, Pt. 2
                6. Working With The Popular Forces
                7. Interview With Mr. Martin
                8. Joujouka, Pt. 3
                9. Sound Piece
                10. Joujouka, Pt. 4
                11. Burroughs Called The Law

                Coil

                Queens Of The Circulating Library

                  Queens Of The Circulating Library stands alongside Time Machines and Nurse With Wound’s Soliloquy For Lilith as a post-industrial pinnacle of sensory-warping long-form drone. Crafted by the distilled duo of Thighpaulsandra and John Balance, the 49-minute piece unfurls in swirling, cyclical waves, tidal as much as textural, channeling the spirit of levitational minimalism pioneered by La Monte Young. Touted as the first part in "a continually mutating series of circulating musickal compositions” upon its initial release in 2000, the album remains a compelling case study in Coil’s exceptional capacity for mutation and extremes.

                  The theatrical introductory monologue delivered by Thighpaulsandra’s mother – a career opera singer, in her 80’s at the time of recording – sets the stage for a grandiose ascension. Written by Balance, the text is declamatory but dreamlike, refracted through megaphone echo: “Return the book of knowledge / Return the marble index / File under "Paradox" / The forest is a college, each tree a university.” As her voice fades, the lulling synthetic infinity deepens, congealing into transient crests of volume and haze, like slow-motion surf misting in moonlight. Thighpaulsandra describes their aesthetic intention as a “bliss out,” static but shape-shifting, an amniotic drift towards an eternal vanishing point. A supreme sonic embodiment of the slogan on the sleeve of Time Machines, two years prior: "Persistence is all."

                  TRACK LISTING

                  Side A
                  Queens Of The Circulating Library
                  Side B
                  Queens Of The Circulating Library

                  SoiSong

                  QXn948s

                    SoiSong is the stunning but short-lived partnership of Coil co-founder Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson and veteran Russian electronic experimentalist Ivan Pavlov. Though friends since 1997, the project birthed roughly a decade later in Bangkok, where Christopherson relocated following the death of his Coil collaborator John Balance in 2004. Named after the Thai word for ‘two’ along with a notorious red-light district street nearby, the duo dialed into a cryptic language of lurching synthetics, Eastern minimalism, and interdimensional glitch, oscillating between elegance and mayhem. qXn948s collects some of their earliest recordings, and remains as transgressive and transcendent a listen now as it was upon its release a decade and a half ago.

                    Pavlov characterizes SoiSong as less a musical group than a “utopian, semi-alien platform for collaboration, devoid of pronounced personality or centralized authority... more like a message from elsewhere that anyone is welcome to participate in and spread.” Every facet of the project was disruptive and oblique: self-released CDs packaged in elaborate origami that had to be destroyed to be accessed; a website with password protected sections, where different passwords were provided for different events, objects or releases; performance merchandise of headphones and a Walkman melted shut so the music can only be heard as long as the set of batteries last. Theirs was a muse as unprecedented as it was uncompromising, equal parts pranks and profundity.

                    qXn948s began with samples and software composed intuitively in tandem before a large monitor, then progressively processed and scrambled into bewildering arrangements of digital frequencies, alternately spartan and claustrophobic, uneasy and uncanny. Vignettes of small melody emerge and are obliterated; gamelan-esque tones spiral above cybernetic pulse programming and funereal didgeridoo; skeletal piano meanders in the distance while flickering circuitry pummels patterns of white noise. Pavlov describes his and Christopherson’s chemistry as “unspoken and sincere, and very efficient.” That music this aggressively disorienting and complex congealed in a smoothly organic fashion is testament to the rare vision of its creators.

                    TRACK LISTING

                    Side A:
                    Kabuki-Chop
                    Soijin No Hi

                    Side B:
                    Koi Ru
                    Jam Talay Sai

                    Coil

                    Constant Shallowness Leads To Evil

                      The turn of the millennium ushered in an apex visionary phase for English esoteric duo Coil. Relocating from the city to the coastal quiet of Westonsuper-Mare freed them to follow even more fringe obsessions, fully untethered from peer influence. During a single six-month stretch in 2000 they released the devious underworld sequel to Music To Play In The Dark, arcane drone summit Queens Of The Circulating Library, and a malevolent hour-long synthesizer exorcism prophetically titled Constant Shallowness Leads To Evil. This latter work remains one of the group’s most miasmic and mind-expanding creations, on par with Time Machines – a sustained divination of shuddering, psychoactive noise, rippling with the motion sickness of an all-seeing eye.

                      Thighpaulsandra characterizes the album as “an exercise in brutality,” born from a thorny patch of his Serge modular unit that Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson found entrancing. Processing this sliver of electronics into a ravaged labyrinth was a trial and error process, aided by Christopherson’s visual sense of sound, stretching and manipulating it for maximum spatial disorientating. Frequencies nauseously crawl across the stereo field, burrowing into the ear like a sinister brainwashing experiment. An outlier / centerpiece is the 13-minute alien tribalist sea shanty, “I Am The Green Child,” guided by John Balance’s sung-spoken free verse concerning vengeance, oblivion, and insanity, culminating in the memorable refrain, “We're swimming in a sea of occidental vomit.” But the rest of the record seethes in unhinged instrumental chaos, divided into 18 micro-movements of a composition called “Tunnel Of Goats.” Intended to scramble the functionality of a CD player’s shuffle mode, the piece throbs, thrashes, and flatlines in compressed frenzies of twisted synthesis, at the threshold of some bottomless purgatory, forbidding and unknown.

                      TRACK LISTING

                      SIDE A:
                      Higher Beings Command
                      I Am The Green Child
                      SIDE B:
                      Beige
                      Lowest Common Abominator
                      Free Base Chakra
                      SIDE C:
                      Tunnel Of Goats
                      SIDE D:
                      Tunnel Of Goats

                      Stephen Mallinder

                      Tick Tick Tick

                        Cabaret Voltaire co-founder Stephen Mallinder’s second solo outing for Dais further distills his signature fusion of minimal synth, oblique wordplay, and “wonky disco” into a riveting rhythm suite ripe for our age of escalation: tick tick tick. Channeling the temporal malaise of lockdown through a lusher palette of modular electronics and stereo strings, the songs embrace ambiguity and plasticity, loose systems of percolating circuitry and airless funk. Recorded across a handful of sessions at MemeTune Studios in Cornwall with frequent collaborator Benge (aka Ben Edwards), Mallinder cites no guiding aesthetic premise for the collection beyond “cowbell on every track, and entirely no reverb.”

                        From the first coiled cybernetic groove of opener “Contact,” the album’s spatial dynamics are disorienting and asymmetrical, alternately cold and sensual, opiated and claustrophobic. But, throughout, “rhythm is the default, the bedrock, the building block – even the melodies are rhythmic.” Across 40-plus years of electronic musicianship, Mallinder’s sense of timing and tempo has honed into a rare tier of mastery, limber and fluid but knotted with strange frictions. Shades of Detroit technoid industrial (“ringdropp,” “Shock to the Body”) crossfade into no wavy punkfunk (“Guernica Gallery,” “Galaxy,” “The Trial”), bad trip IDM (“Wasteland”), and jittery vapor house (“Hush”), at the threshold of modes both familiar and foreign.

                        Lyrically the record is equally evasive, rich with allusions and associative linguistics, surveying liquid notions of societal noise, ecological ruin, art world pretension, and the trials of daily life. But the lack of fixed meaning remains Mallinder’s main muse: “Music should draw you in; lyrics should make you think. Most interpretation is misinterpretation.” This is music of countdowns and comedowns, fleeting pleasures and opaque futures, observing the great decline while dancing on its ashes. Flux is deathless and forever; the rest, illusion: “I will be a constant figure / Flickering a moving picture / Turning in your head forever / Split apart but held together.”


                        TRACK LISTING

                        SIDE A:
                        A1. Contact
                        A2. Ringdropp
                        A3. Galaxy
                        A4. Wasteland

                        SIDE B:
                        B1. Hush
                        B2. Shock To The Body
                        B3. Guernica Gallery *
                        B4. The Trial
                        B5. Tick Tick Tick

                        * CD Bonus Track

                        Coil

                        Musick To Play In The Dark² - 2022 Reissue

                          After leaving London in 1999 for the sleepy seaside retiree town of Weston-super-Mare, Coil co-founders John Balance and Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson set up shop in a palatial eight-bedroom estate to pursue the outer reaches of the group’s heightening cabalistic chemistry. Among the staggering string of late-era masterpieces they produced is lunar opus Musick To Play In The Dark, widely hailed as an artistic zenith upon its release. The sessions that birthed it were in fact so fruitful that a second LP took shape during the creation of the first one.

                          Aided by the recent addition of Welsh multi-instrumentalist engineer Thighpaulsandra, Coil mined further into the recesses of surrealist eldritch electronica Balance termed “moon music” – post-industrial spellcasting at the axis of narcotic and nocturnal energies. Musick To Play In The Dark² spans a full witching hour of bad acid sound design, synthesizer voyaging, opiated balladry, Luciferian glitch, and subliminal hymnals, alternately ominous, oracular, and absurd. Scottish gothic icon Rose McDowall guests on vocals for two tracks but otherwise the album is a hermetic affair, tapping into the group’s limitless insular synergy.

                          Opener “Something” is stark and incantational, a spoken word experiment for windswept voids. “Tiny Golden Books” unspools an aerial whirlpool of cosmic synth, both whispery and widescreen. “Ether” is an exercise in funeral procession piano and intoxicated wordplay (“It's either ether or the other”), while “Where Are You?” and “Batwings – A Liminal Hymn” lurk like liturgical murmurings heard on one’s death bed, framed in granular FX and flickering candlelight.

                          As a whole the collection skews more muted and remote than its predecessor, as if having grown accustomed to the nether regions of these darkening seances. But music box hallucination “Paranoid Inlay” captures the group’s oblique comedic side, always glimmering beneath: over a warped, wobbly beat Balance intones an opaque narrative of serenity, Saint Peter, and suicidal vegetables, accompanied by spiraling harpsichord and stuttering squelches of electronics. “It seems concussion suits you,” he repeats twice, like a macabre pickup line, before dictating a dear diary entry about risks and failures, finally concluding with as close to a self-portrait as Coil ever came: “On a clear day I can see forever / that the underworld is my oyster.”

                          TRACK LISTING

                          A1. Something
                          A2. Tiny Golden Books
                          B1. Ether
                          B2. Paranoid Inlay
                          C1. An Emergency
                          C2. Where Are You?
                          C3. Batwings (A Limnal Hymn)

                          Tempers

                          New Meaning

                            The New York City duo of Jasmine Golestaneh and Eddie Cooper aka Tempers specialize in a sleek strain of low-lit poetic synth-pop, the latest statement of which feels like the peak fruition of their elusive alchemy. With New Meaning, Tempers present an album about navigating the unknown, coping mechanisms and exploring the nature of choice. Its ten songs reflect on the creation of meaning as an access to freedom and purpose in times of transition and loss. Speculating on the transformative potential that exists alongside the grief of living in a world that is in an ongoing state of crisis.

                            This is distinctly nocturnal music, elegantly introspective and quietly intense, born of “living in a society that is still a dream of itself.” Tracks like “Unfamiliar,” “Here Nor There,” and “Song Behind A Wall” distill the Tempers template to icy pop perfection, drum machinery framed in shivering reverb, Golestaneh’s voice both ethereal and towering, simultaneously within and above. On other cuts, Golestaneh and Cooper’s production skews more evocatively greyscale, from new wave shadowplay (“Carried Away”) to depressive disco (“In And Out Of Hand”) to an elegy of hopeful resignation (“Secrets And Lies”). Cooper speaks of production ideas regarding “human architecture,” breathing life into the precision of electronics, and of melodic intervals “on the exact edge between major and minor, severe and sweet.”

                            New Meaning is a document of forking paths and fleeting transcendence, the liberation of instability and impermanence, of embracing “a constant state of becoming.” Ten anthems for a derailed age, fugitive and sympathetic, nightwalking through an “anguished city” towards a nameless future, poised for rebirth: transcendent state, as if having finally glimpsed beyond the pale: “When I have / when I have no name / my joy is blinding.”


                            TRACK LISTING

                            A1. Nightwalking
                            A2. Unfamiliar
                            A3. Multitudes
                            A4. In And Out Of Hand
                            A5. It Falls Into You
                            B1. Secrets And Lies
                            B2. Here Nor There
                            B3. Song Behind A Wall
                            B4. Carried Away
                            B5. Sightseeing

                            VR Sex

                            Rough Dimension

                              The latest by Andrew Clinco’s acid punk alias VR SEX takes its title from an architectural phrase but more importantly refers to the warped, wicked underworld the songs both chronicle and condemn. Donning the moniker Noel Skum – an acerbic anagram of Elon Musk – Clinco vents his scorn for and fascination with the seedy, surreal margins of low-life Los Angeles, doomed to dead ends of vanity, lust, and technology. Although initially launched as an outlet for “heavier sounds” beyond Clinco’s duties in new wave fantasists Drab Majesty, the project has ripened into a compelling exercise in world building, weaving themes of gritty city neofuturist sleaze within a framework of driving, distorted guitars and cathode-blasted synths. Echoes of Chrome, Wire, Minimal Man, and Sisters Of Mercy ripple through the collection but ultimately Rough Dimension charts its own twisted vision of “our unforgiving reality.”

                              Written and demoed across two weeks alone in a Marseille flat using his prized 1980’s Gibson “Invader” and a laptop, Clinco then took the tracks to Strange Weather studios in Brooklyn to record with Ben Greenberg (Uniform, The Men) who helmed 2019’s debut, Human Traffic Jam. The results are notably ripping, refined, and riveting. Riffs in alternate tunings chug and churn over mid-tempo drums punctuated by spikes of sci-fi electronics while the vocals swagger and spit venom (“where we walk is also where we shit / but if we bark at our reflections are we hypocrites? / impulses bleed right into our seed / where hate culminates the apple rotted on the tree”). It’s a bristling mix of the melodic and the macabre, absurdist observations of fast living and desperate measures, the clock of youth ticking towards midnight as dreams unravel in Babylon.

                              VR SEX’s specialty is making these cautionary tales of psychic decay and tainted love a thrill rather than a drag. There’s a sunglasses at night glamor to Clinco’s choruses and solos, a wit to his black leather judgements (“what is the answer / to cancerous people / walking in my line of sight?”). The music’s milieu tends towards parasites and predators but its mood skews refreshingly accelerated and amused, cruising the strip with a cigarette, watching goths and limousines crawl in gridlock beneath digital billboards. The Rough Dimension may be a cesspool, but it’s home. 

                              TRACK LISTING

                              SIDE A:
                              Victim Or Vixen
                              Glutton For Love
                              Cyber Crimes Live (In A Dream)
                              SIDE B:
                              The Walk Of Shame
                              Crisis Stage
                              Taste Of Hate
                              Snake Water
                              End Vision 

                              Adult.

                              Becoming Undone

                                After a quarter century of nearly nonstop activity, dystopian Detroit synth-punk institution ADULT. have perfected a strain of stylistic cohesion in the album format, “but for this we wanted something that’s falling apart.”

                                Becoming Undone, the 9th official full-length by co-founders Nicola Kuperus and Adam Lee Miller, explicitly succeeds in this aim, simultaneously rejecting and reflecting the planetary discord that inspired it. Begun in the latter half of 2020 against a backdrop of unprecedented flux and seismic isolation, the duo kickstarted their muse by sourcing fresh additions to the rig: a vocal loop pedal for Kuperus and Roland percussion pads for Miller. Reconnecting with legacy influences like the politicized industrial percussion of Test Department and the queasy miscreant synthetics of TG’s 20 Jazz Funk Greats sparked a series of fruitfully frenetic sessions, centered on themes of impermanence and dissonance. Miller’s rationale is blunt: “We weren’t interested in melody or harmony since we didn’t see the world having that.”

                                From the tense technoid blitz of “Undoing / Undone” to the twitchy EBM of “Fools (We Are…)” and “I Am Nothing,” the sides bristle with strident acidic revolt and black leather sequential circuits, unhinged and unforgiving. Elsewhere, slower tempos of purgatorial unravelling (“Normative Sludge,” “She’s Nice Looking”) showcase a breadth of vocal FX, Kuperus sounding alternately indignant and possessed, decrying the crimes, fears, and failings of a deluded world. Throughout, the band’s chemistry crackles with revulsion and strobe-lit dissent, equal parts exorcism and denunciation. “Humans have always been pretty terrible,” Kuperus explains. “But every year the compromises of culture just accelerate.”

                                Becoming Undone is also freighted with a more personal pain, as Kuperus’ father passed away during the height of the pandemic, just before the album took root. As his hospice caretakers, she and Miller faced the banality of finality, surrounded by objects drained of meaning, “the joy of having a body, but also the drudgery of having one.” The record’s bewitching closing track, “Teeth Out Pt. II” – which happens to be the first ADULT. song in the group’s history without drums – speaks to this sense of doomed corporeal mass and the looming, lightless unknown that binds us all. A seasick haze swells and subsides in slow, low waves, flickering with ring modulation, above which Kuperus sings in a dazed, brooding, transcendent state, as if having finally glimpsed beyond the pale: “Some day / some day I will be silent and free / of this relentless gravity.”

                                TRACK LISTING

                                SIDE A:
                                A1. Undoing / Undone
                                A2. Our Bodies Weren’t Wrong
                                A3. Fools (We Are…)
                                A4. Normative Sludge

                                SIDE B:
                                B1. I Am Nothing
                                B2. She’s Nice Looking
                                B3. I, Obedient
                                B4. Teeth Out Pt. II

                                Manchester’s Space Afrika make music of overlapping moments - oblique mosaics of dialogue, rhythm, texture and shadow, half-heard through a bus window on a rainy night. "Honest Labour", the group's first full-length since 2020's landmark "hybtwibt?" (have you been through what i’ve been through?) mixtape, expands the project's palette with classical strings, shimmering guitar and visionary vocal cameos, leaning further into their enigmatic fusion of ambient unrest and cosmic downtempo. It's a sound both fogged and fragmented, at the axis of song craft and sound design, born from and for the yearning solitudes of life under lockdown.

                                The album title is tiered, alluding to a legendary patriarch from co-founder Joshua Inyang's Nigerian family tree (who was lovingly called Honest Labour for his loyalty and resilience) as well as the nature of self-designated work, such as Space Afrika's music – a labor of love in its truest sense. With fellow co-founder Joshua Reid recently relocated to Berlin, the pair began sharing files last Autumn, piecing together poetic vignettes of looping haze and found sound, inspired by the notion of 'records that leave an impression, and help the listener deal with their life.' As the isolation of Covid compounded with the worsening Winter, the songs skewed increasingly introspective and emotive, reflecting a mood of dissipating futures and the infinite nocturnal unknown.

                                The artists cite two core motivations for "Honest Labour": to transcend the sum of their influences, and 'to show what we're capable of.' Both ambitions are entirely realized. The collection's 19 tracks flow with a synergy and sophistication as rare as they are radical, untethered to the dusty dub-techno templates of Space Afrika's early years. These are interstitial anthems, expressionistic and open-ended, delirious but deliberate, attuned to the drift and dreamstate of the present moment: ‘Ultimately this is an homage to U.K. energy, and an album about love and loss.’

                                Conjuring up similar, claustrophobic internal release and emotions such as Burial’s “Untrue” and Hype Williams’ “Find Out What Happens When People Stop Being Polite…”; and even the brand new Joy O LP (“Still Slipping Vol. 1”), “Honest Labour” is the most intimate electronic conversation you’re going to get out of your headphones all year.

                                STAFF COMMENTS

                                Barry says: Honest Labour is an absolute masterclass in electronic atmospheres and melodic restraint, treading a fine line between ambient stillness and rich, textural sonics. A shadowy, stunningly effective distillation of all of Space Afrika's experience so far, and a brilliantly immersive listen.

                                TRACK LISTING

                                LP SIDE A
                                A1 Yyyyyy2222
                                A2 Indigo Grit Ft. Guest
                                A3 Lose You Beau
                                A4 Solemn
                                A5 LV
                                A6 Preparing The Perfect Response ~
                                A7 Ny Interlude
                                A8 Rings Ft. Guest
                                A9 Noise Sweet
                                A10 B£E Ft. Blackhaine

                                LP SIDE B
                                B1 Like Orchids
                                B2 Meet Me At Sachas
                                B3 U Ft. KinseyLloyd
                                B4 <>
                                B5 Girl Scout Cookies Ft. Bianca Scout
                                B6 Ladybird Drone
                                B7 With Your Touch
                                B8 Strength Ft. LA Timpa
                                B9 Honest Labour Ft. HforSpirit

                                Coil

                                Musick To Play In The Dark

                                  Few groups in recent history forged as confounding and alchemical a body of work as Coil, the partnership of Peter 'Sleazy' Christopherson and John Balance. From album to album and phase to phase their recordings spelunk perplexing depths of esoteric industrial, occult electronics, and drugged poetry, both embodying and alienating parallel currents of their peers. The late 1990's in particular were a fertile era for the duo, embracing chance, chaos, and collaboration, enhanced by recent advancements in synthesis and sampling. Fittingly, at the summit of the decade's long, intoxicated arc, their divergent strains of interstitial ritual congealed into one of Coil's most celebrated and hallucinatory creations: Musick To Play In The Dark.

                                  Convening at Balance and Christopherson's vast Victorian house / studio in the coastal town of Weston-super-Mare, they began a series of ambitious sessions aided by inner circle associates Thighpaulsandra and Drew McDowall. Although the creative process was admittedly “iterative” and “a bit of a drug blur,” the results are astoundingly inventive and well realized, winding through shades of divination dirge, wormhole kosmische, noir lounge, ominous humor, and black mass downtempo, guided by Balance's cryptic lunar muse, which he announces on the opening track: “This is moon musick / in the light of the moon.”

                                  What's most remarkable about the album 20 years after its release is how brazen, insular, and unpredictable it still feels. The songs follow an allusive, altered state logic all their own, warping from microscopic ripples of glitch and breath to widescreen warlock psychedelia and back again, as much hyper-sensory as interdimensional. Even within a catalog as eclectic as Coil's, Musick is a mystifying collection, oneiric evocations of desire, decadence, dinner jazz, and dietary advice, far beyond the pale of whatever gothic industrial ambiguity birthed such a journey. The record closes with a slow, starlit shuffle, bathed in seething sweeps of spectral texture and high cathedral keys, like approaching the altar of some arcane temple. As the trance thickens Balance's voice rises, processed into an increasingly eerie, gaseous haze, but he resists these unseen forces, intent on delivering a final sermon: “Through hissy mists of history / the dreamer is still dreaming / the dreamer is still dreaming.”

                                  TRACK LISTING

                                  1. Are You Shivering?
                                  2. Red Birds Will Fly Out Of The
                                  3. And Destroy Paris In A
                                  4. Night
                                  5. Red Queen
                                  6. Broccoli
                                  7. Strange Birds The
                                  8. Dreamer Is Still Asleep

                                  Stephen Mallinder

                                  Um Dada

                                    Stephen Mallinder, co founder and frontman of the iconic Cabaret Voltaire, has returned with his first solo album in over 35 years: Um Dada. Laced with leftfield house and cut up sound collages, Um Dada is a melding of energies that are an exercise in simplicity and motion. Sincere, playful realism that beckons your body to move, always reminding you to never take yourself too seriously without forfeiting your agency.

                                    While steering Cabaret Voltaire through the 1980’s, Mallinder was already busy piecing together his first solo album entitled “Pow Wow”, which would help define Mallinder’s interest in the more leftfield electro sounds shaping England at the time. It was this diverse and abstract hybrid that helped inspire generations of artists and musicians through steeping raw machine funk within the whimsical and absurdist ideology.

                                    Since the release of “Pow Wow” in 1982, Mallinder continued his pioneering work with Cabaret Voltaire, as well as recording and touring with his electro projects Wrangler, Creep Show, Hey Rube, Kula, and Cobby & Mallinder. In addition to his non stop schedule in electronic music, his professional life as a journalist, broadcaster, producer and now a professor of Digital Music & Sound Art at the University of Brighton, has lead Mallinder to a unique point in his career. Most in his position would be caught up in rosy retrospection, but Mallinder himself says, “There’s too much digital finger licking right now; every thought and desire at the turn of a dial... well a click of the mouse. And there’s a giddy, false nostalgia about the analogue past. Sorry to burst your bubble but the truth of history is more mundane: practical, pragmatic...Um Dada is about ‘play’ cut and paste, lost words, twisted presets, voice collage, simple sounds things that have been lost to technology’s current determinism. Let the machines talk to each other, let them dance .. they lead, we follow.”

                                    Um Dada opens up with the exact machine led surrealism that Mallinder recommends in “Working (You Are)”. A thick, stripped back dance floor groove provides the ideal foundation for Mallinder’s eccentric vocal cuts. The frisky chops present an almost twisted irony, subtly bringing to mind the role we’re all forced to play as just another cog in the ever grinding capitalist machine of life. Yet, somehow, the listener is left feeling optimistic. A prime example of simplicity at work. Tracks such as “Satellite” give a skillful illustration of Mallinder’s adeptness with his musical expertise while preserving his core historical context as only simple reference. The underlying bassline and percussion, coupled with the floating melodies and airy vocal refrain disclose the vulnerabilities of love and loss without a hint of irony or nostalgia.

                                    Um Dada is mischievously idealist, however never loses touch with reality. Offering structure while simultaneously dismantling any and all preconceptions. The spirit of sincerity that sustained Cabaret Voltaire’s lengthy career is abundantly present within founder Stephen Mallinder’s journey through his own whimsical utopian consciousness and staking claim to an identity that is solely his own.

                                    STAFF COMMENTS

                                    Barry says: One of the most singular voices in English electronica returns for his first solo album in over 30 years. 'Um Dada' encompasses everything we love about Mallinder and while his most recent collabs (Creep Show with shop favourite John Grant was a particular highlight) clearly showed his influence, it's great to hear his own sound, undiluted and unadorned, and switching effortlessly between a huge range of influences and sounds.

                                    TRACK LISTING

                                    CD
                                    1. Working (You Are)
                                    2. Prefix Repeat Rewind
                                    3. It’s Not Me
                                    4. Um Dada
                                    5. Satellite
                                    6. Colour
                                    7. Flashback
                                    8. Robber*
                                    9. Hollow*

                                    *Bonus Tracks

                                    LP
                                    A1. Working (You Are)
                                    A2. Prefix Repeat Rewind
                                    A3. It’s Not Me
                                    A4. Um Dada
                                    B1. Satellite
                                    B2. Colour
                                    B3. Flashback

                                    Body Of Light

                                    Time To Kill

                                      Birthed from Arizona’s regaled Ascetic House collective, Body of Light is a dark synth-pop outfit comprised of young brothers Andrew and Alexander Jarson. What began as a vehicle for their exploration of noise and sound during their early teens has evolved into an established production over the last decade, as Body of Light continues to carve out their own style of complex, structured, and moving dancefloor electronics. Their music is not only individually personal, but drawn from experiences shared between the two brothers – and calls on elements of new wave, freestyle, goth, and techno to create timeless and singular tracks without fear of trend or passing fashion.

                                      On their third album Time to Kill, Body of Light refines their brand of cold and driving synth pop with a bold pallet of sounds and a focus on uncharted technique and purpose. Like the pale digital stare of the modern devices surrounding our daily lives, the album weaves stories of love and obsession in an era of technical bondage and fleeting exhilaration. Written over a period of intense and profound change, Time to Kill stands as a startling reminder of how important our existence truly is. Haunting keys, swelling pads, and punching rhythms score their work as Alex Jarson presents an alluring and romantic dialogue with confident projection. The title single “Time to Kill” kicks off the album with a merciless signature beat, complimented by distorted sample patterns against an infectious, moving bass groove that invites you to “let the memories fade.” The follow up single “Don’t Pretend” invokes sparkling nostalgia and innocence over a dark and driving beat paired with vintage electronic movements. The haunting “Dangerous”, slows the pace with its pendulum-like rhythm and ominous intonation, falling between a hopeful synth pop ballad and shadowy dirge – a slow dance for the sunrise set.

                                      Produced by Matia Simovich at Infinite Power Studios in Los Angeles and mastered by Josh Bonati, Time to Kill shines with new direction and new intention through lustrous production and innovative songwriting. 


                                      TRACK LISTING

                                      SIDE A
                                      1. Time To Kill
                                      2. Heart Of Shame
                                      3. Don’t Pretend
                                      4. Fever Freak
                                      SIDE B
                                      1. Fear
                                      2. Dangerous
                                      3. Violent Days
                                      4. Stormy
                                      5. Under The Dome


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